I Saw Ramallah: Metro's Book of the Month

It may be a London freesheet but Metro has a high-powered book club going on. Mourid Barghouti's memoir I Saw Ramallah (translated by Ahdaf Soueif) follows The Line of Beauty (August) and The White People (July) in what could potentially be the largest virtual book club out there. So if you're commuting in London, look out for Tube neighbours reading a book with this cover:
and say hi to book club members in person, or leave reviews and comments on the site for other readers to share.

I Saw Ramallah reviewed in Daily Star

A feisty and focused review by Shahzad Khan in The Daily Star, Bangladesh's only online newspaper (strapline: "Committed to the People's Right to Know"). Khan concludes her review, which is followed by a long excerpt, with the observation that it is through Mourid Barghouti's

rich mix of concrete detail and metaphorical flight that the book achieves its undoubtedly haunting effect. The tale is told with remarkable simplicity and in a tone that can be universally understood, yet its texture and details, in some case quite unfathomably, remains Arabic, and rooted specifically in the Palestinian earth. One doubts whether anything similar exists in the dishearteningly burgeoning literature of political exile, asylum, and flight.

Barghouti fans can follow news of his publications and events by friending him on Facebook.

Mourid Barghouti in conversation with Ruth Padel, London, June 2009

Thanks to Opus for cutting the video and to Mourid for posting it on his Facebook page!

Mourid Barghouti with Ruth Padel - Revised from Opus Projects on Vimeo.

New Writing from Gaza: A Portfolio

Over the last few weeks, protest songs for Gaza -- by Michael Heart and Invincible, among others -- have been flying around the blogosphere, giving a voice to the anguish and anger of Gazans, who were almost silenced by Israel's media blockade, and by damage to infrastructure. Journalists, bloggers and ordinary citizens, resilient and determined, posted when they could, via SMS to friends if they had to, and have made known the stories that didn't appear on the news.

These observations from the moment, on the ground, are thrilling, moving and necessary. They counter media bias, alert us to action, and give us a glimpse of what it feels like to be in Gaza. How much more so, then, might a poem or story, honed by a brilliant writer until it is dense with image and meaning? As the outpouring of grief at Mahmoud Darwish's death last year showed, literature, and poetry in particular, has a particular place in Palestinian culture -- and has had a particular place in reaching out from Palestine to the rest of the world, from Ghassan Kanafani's "Letter from Gaza" to Mourid Barghouti's Midnight.

But only a few Palestinian writers are being translated. In Palestine, the Khalil Sakakini Centre and the House of Poetry have both fostered new writers and new magazines. In the UK, Banipal and Modern Poetry in Translation have both had special Palestine issues in recent years, which have shown the depth and range of work being produced. Telegram's Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women, edited by Jo Glanville, introduced a number of new voices, such as Adania Shibli.

When I interviewed Adania in early December 2008, she spoke passionately about the writers she knew in Gaza, about the intensity of their work and the way that Palestinian poetry was changing in response to the conditions of siege. That was before the invasion. When the news and images of Gaza (not from Gaza) began to appear, I emailed Adania and offered to host a selection of writing on the blog: her choice of writers, immediate and new voices with essential things to say and powerful styles in which to say them.

Over the next month, we'll be publishing the work that she selected on the blog, as it arrives from Gaza. The first group of writers to arrive is diverse in age, background, experience, and style, but I find all of their voices compelling. On Monday, there will be a selection of short pieces by novelist, playwright and political scientist Atef Abu Saif, who lives and teaches in Gaza.

Following Abu Saif, whose stories will appear over three days, the blog will feature work from:

Soumaya Susi
Khaled Jum'a
Nasr Jamil Shaath
Fatena al-Gharra
Yousef Alqedra
Naser Rabah
Najah Awadallah

posted as it arrives from the Arabic translators have very graciously given time and support to this project, excited by its urgency and by discovering new work. Each writer presents translators with a different challenge and promise, and each will be translated differently. Excitingly, translator Isis Nusair is working on Khaled Jumaa's work with Michael Rosen and Shaun Levin, two anti-Zionist Jewish writers, whose acts of translation demonstrate how literature can build community and solidarity.

Abu Saif's pieces have been translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who also translated Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness, a sequence of prose poems framed by the August 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Abu Saif's pieces - microstories, fragments - are dateless, although filled with precise detail of season and place. Minutely focused on a gesture, a piece of graffiti, on the author's own act of seeing, they are both like news stories - in their brevity, their concrete detail - and utterly unlike anything the media can offer.

In a 2008 Guardian article about the Poetry Translation Centre's ambitious tour and chapbook series, Sarah Maguire, who is translating Faten al-Gharra's work for us, wrote:

Poetry in this country is our favourite minority artform, largely greeted with bafflement, often with dismay. And yet we live alongside people for whom poetry is a central, essential passion. My hope is that by attempting to make their poems at home in our language, we can also translate a little of their enthusiasm. Poetry thrives through translation.

With this selection, we hope to show not only that poetry thrives through translation, but that people thrive through poetry, not only being written but being heard. The act of translation -- whether literally between languages, or metaphorically from the page onto a blog -- is a catalyst, a helping hand, to bring readers to the writing, and through that writing to resonant emotions and truths.

As Adania says: we are "trying to make the words of Gaza louder than those of the bullets and the bombings." Please come back to listen over the next month.

Mourid Barghouti on BBC World Service

An interview at last week's Tate conference was the second item on Monday's The Strand. Lawrence Pollard speaks to Mourid Barghouti about translation and how it can imprison a culture or liberate a writer. Listen here.

Contemporary Art in the Middle East II

Day 2 in the Tate conference, and I decided to focus on the Tradition and Modernity panel, as I thought its insights would be the most cross-applicable to literature and publishing. Another packed house -- so packed that there was an overflow with a live video feed -- rocked up to the Tate (Modern this time) to listen to a wide range of speakers. The panel was not a disappointment: in their reflections on recovering specific histories, redefining the terms of reception and criticism, and refusing to conform to Western expectations the panelists could have been speaking about literary fiction and poetry as much as visual art.

Not least because -- as a questioner from the floor remarked -- the panel was remarkably devoid of visuality. No slides, no PowerPoint. Not even any Turner paintings, unlike the walls that surrounded the speakers on Thursday. But Professor Salah Hassan's textually-driven presentation (a conscious choice he admitted to at the beginning of the paper) drew attention to two crucial points: first, that, as many speakers pointed out, visual art is received in a verbal context, from the political language excoriated by Mourid Barghouti, to the conventions of explanatory panels, catalogue notes and artists' statements. This relation of text and art is itself a key part of the modernism that was under discussion. The second point made by the absence of images was that it blocked the audience's ability to consume, making us reflect on our relationship to art, particularly art objects from outside dominant culture, as being something offered up for our pleasure.

Hassan explicitly geared his talk towards theoretical concerns that needs to be fleshed out before images could be viewed contextually. He arguing that in exhibition contexts, it’s rare to find the term modernity defined outside Western narratives, in which non-Western modernities are cast as belated and derivative. This exclusionary narrative of modernism was the focus of his talk, modified by the facts that modernity occurs across the Middle East unevenly, given that the area is both a diverse historical entity, and also political construct coloured by imperialism and Orientalism, complicated by neo-con project of “democratising” the Middle East. He repeated his idea from Friday’s panel that the neo-con with us/against us binary has produced a seemingly paradoxical response of museums and galleries apparently countering this with an eagerness to exhibit, but actually seeking to define and present “good” Muslim and Arab artists, and treating the Middle East as the “new frontier to be conquered” by collectors.

He pointed to a recent essay by Barry Flood (NYU) that draws parallels between the dominant discourse on Middle Eastern art and of the war on terror, both of which seek to reconcile universalist assumptions about humanity with a desire to build bridges that demands the “other” culture must be conceived as different. Hassan quoted Flood to the effect that

What is new and particularly disturbing is the way that the object of Islam is increasingly co-opted into a model of peaceful existence, but would like to provide a model for Islamic life itself.

Hassan quoted another critic, Ramdani, who commented that culture or modernity is now said to be the dividing line between those who favour a civic existence and those who favour terror, rather than the market or democracy). In the dichotomy, Islam has no agency; it erases Muslims’ agency, subjectivity, and the spectrum of identities. It also glosses over the colonial struggle (in which West could be seen as bad guys), and the post-colonial democratic struggles for civil and human rights in individual countries. This approach extends to the field of art history and Islamic art (which is the reference point even today in the Arab world), which covers over complex history of secularist and modernist movements in the Arab world.

It also glosses over – Hassan’s main point – the constant struggle in Arab culture between conformity and creativity – from the religious to political, from ideological to artistic aspect. There has been a modernistic trend in every generation towards new forms of literary expression, through a process of self-critique and reinvestigation of traditions. The focus from West has been on/to cast Arab culture as static and traditional. This is a commonality between Muslim fundamentalists and Western Islamicists – they both use textual orthodoxy as a reference point, refusing to look at adaptive pragmatic and empirical experiences in living societies. As the panel chair later pointed out, Islam conceived of itself -- and can be conceived of -- as a modernising project from its initiation.

To support his implied sympathy with the reconcilers, who reach into tradition to find ways to create change, Hassan quoted the Syrian poet Adonis insists that modernity is borne out of the struggle between the static religious order and the dynamic or desire to change the static order. This trend, combined with maintaining opennss to other cultures and modernity, the integration of rationality, an incorporation of Arab heritage, move towards diffusion of cultural values among masses, and desire to improve human life as a whole is visible in Arab art from 19th century.

Modernity and modernism have been contested terms in Europe since their first use, complicated by the acknowledgement of non-European modernities. Postcolonial theory offers a powerful critique of modernity by shoing how terms of the debate are inevitably Eurocentric, characterising artistic developments in other regions as necessarily belated and secondary. But, said Hassan, this narrative has been erased in two ways: it's been said to mirror the development of European modernity (belated and secondary); and, in turn, the idea of belatedness obscures European modernity's dependence on other cultures, from the effects of Orientalism to Picasso's use of African art.

Gwendolyn Wright has pointed out that

modernism came into being in a world framed by colonialism, where visions for improvement and innovation in imperialism and in cultural practices often overlapped and caused brutal destruction. Likewise, resistance to these forces has always been a part of modern life.

This complicates things, because anti-colonialism can be anti-modernist, or can incorporate modernism while being anti-Western.

Edward Said points out that it has taken a long time and a remarkable shift of perspective to take account of anti-colonialist writing as modernist, and as what Hassan calls the "darker side of modernity." WTJ Mitchell has suggested that translation is key in this process, arguing that we attend to the staging of the modern, through successive acts of translation. This stabilises the definition of modernism, but simultaneously undermines it as it becomes plural.

To demonstrate how modernism played out, Hassan looked at the particular example of the Lettrist movement in Iraq. Panelist Wassan al-Khudairi later described how Iraqi artists educated in Europe returned home and looked within their culture for inspiration (unlike Western artists who looked outside). Hassan described their work as situated within what they perceived as authentic, and within what they saw as contemporary; they adopted abstraction as meditative and spiritual, but others took it to secular extremes. These artists also wrote manifestoes, disproving claims about a lack of discursive literature in Middle Eastern visual arts.

This specific case could have been analysed further in its particular relation to conceptions of nationalism, relationships to colonial power and regional traditions, but it made the point that the concept of universalist and static Islamic art remains specific to the West, an Orientalist perception that delegitimises the art. For Hassan, what is most vital is the shift to relocate Islamic tradition as living tradition.

He ended with a hopeful view from Stuart Hall:

The world is moving towards and can no longer be structured in terms of centre/periphery relations. It has to be defined in terms of a series of interesting centres in relation to one another… the most interesting artists are those who live in centre and periphery. We are moving into a hundred ideas of the modern.

The chair, curator Vasif Kortun, asked the panelists to reflect on the recovery of tradition Hassan had mooted, as well as the way they were approached and seen by the West in the present moment. The most interesting of the responses came from Dina Ramadan, currently completing a Ph.D. looking at archival sources on how modernity and modernism were conceived and implemented in Egypt (Ph.D.). She criticised the discourse of lack that posits that there’s no art history in Arab world, that we need to find a language with which to talk about modern art, which assumes there were no discussions happening from late C19th. By looking at letters, documents, journals, magazines and other textual sources, Ramadan is considering how questions of aesthetics were addressed; how audiences were imagined and created; and looking at the role institutions played. Visual arts appear as a site where conversations overlap with larger intellectual discourses of the period, and the historicisation of discourse helps us to understand what continuities add to the present scene, where the discourse of lack drives an urgency to produce, so that the Middle East is not "lacking" in a Western context. Ramadan said that she's interested in how the scene narrates itself, something that blogging is contributing to in the literary world.

A question from the floor alluded to a new book by artist Kamal Bulatta, Palestinian Art, 1850-Present, whose account weaves modernity and tradition, including pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, tradition of textiles, mid-1800s influence of Russian and Armenian churches into his description of Palestinian art's modernity. She referred to Said's term “contrapuntal” as a model for thinking about the relation between modernity and tradition. Alluding to a different rhythm, David Elliott pointed out that the Middle East traditionally looked at the West as belated; as far back as the 6-8th century, there was a dynamism picking up off the ancient worlds (Egypt, Greece) and creating socially dynamic and tolerant society. Only recently does the ME “slip behind”, towards the end of 18th century under the force of colonialism. But the notion of a great culture of the region is still expressed in how nationalisms in the region present a sense of a very long tradition in which the West appears backward. Hassan concluded by agreeing with both of these points, and arguing for a re-reading of Western modernism through its dependence on other contributions and cultures, including the context of colonialism and technological advantages that depended on slavery and the colonies.

Infrastructure and Ideas: Contemporary Art in the Middle East

In Gallery 9, surrounded by Turner's pictures of naval battles, the great and good, the provocative and perceptive, of the Middle Eastern/Arab/Islamic art world gathered for the Tate and Nafas-sponsored conference, Infrastructures and Ideas: Contemporary Art in the Middle East -- not least to discuss the problematic geographical terms and visualisations of the area. Derek Gregory's keynote talk about mapping drew attention to the manipulation of national and political identity in the maps used by the media (for example, maps showing areas in Baghdad as "targets" versus showing them as populated neighbourhoods).

The subsequent discussion extends outwards towards the mapping done by the terms "Middle East," "Arab" and "Islamic," with the panel concluding that Middle East as a “convenient” term, one with a heritage but that is problematic. The panel chair David Elliott describes the speakers moving in their definitions from biopolitical power to the fuzzy power of culture, “which is very much where we stand,” which I thought was a somewhat naïve discounting of the imbrication of biopower and culture, as biopower delimits and defines culture from large-scale politics (wars, national boundaries, genocide) through pragmatics (money, publishing, censorship) to unconscious ideologies and artists’ identities.

The next speaker, Mourid Barghouti, addressed *exactly* this imbrication in his superlative discussion of the impossibility of translation without contextualisation, and the political pollution of poetic language. The session was introduced as concerning a complex mesh of ideas around translation: the act of translating visual arts into descriptive and/or critical language; the act of linguistic translation; and the processes of cultural translation, asking "what slips and is lost, what is enriched by that process."

In his talk, Barghouti started from, encircled, investigated and dismantled an essay by Linda Sue Grimes that appeared on Suite101.com on 1 January, 2009. Entitled "Barghouti's 'It's also Fine' But Martyrdom is Better, the essay reads Barghouti's poem "It's Also Fine" against itself. While Suite101.com is manifestly not a recognised literary critical publication, it claims 12 million readers per month, so articles on the site could, and do, reach many readers.

Barghouti read the poem

It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.

It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests
empty and pale
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
and no petitions.

It’s fine to have an undustful death,
no holes in our shirts,
and no evidence in our ribs.

It’s fine to die
with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheeks,
our hands resting in those of our loved ones
surrounded by desperate doctors and nurses,
with nothing left but a graceful farewell,
paying no attention to history,
leaving this world as it is,
hoping that, someday, someone else
will change it.

and then the first paragraph of Grimes' essay:

“It’s also Fine” seems to suggest that not all deaths need to be violent. Barghouti’s poem features four verse paragraphs, each apparently dramatizing opposition to Islamofascism’s glorification of violent jihad for the institution of a world-wide caliphate and the production of martyrs. But the speaker never quite closes the door on that jihadist impulse.

Grimes' concluding paragraph continues the rhetoric: B

ut then the speaker adds a jab at his own idea and leaves his claims to be interpreted ironically by the youthful jihadist whose brain has been carefully laundered by power-grabbing, Islamofascist madrasa instructors.

This is where Barghouti began his intervention: madrasah, he pointed out, simply is school in Arabic; it can be used to indicate a school of ballet, of literature, of mathematics, high school.

From the careful reading - as a poet - of this word, he demonstrated that Grimes' reading is to her -- and a more generalised --

ignorance of Palestinian and Arab history, and a blindness to the cultural substance which gives the poem's images meaning. It’s fine to die in our beds because for generations the Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians and Syrians have struggled to end the occupation of their lands, the breaking of bones, the demolition of houses and uprooting of orchards. In such a context, to pass away from age or illness becomes a kind of privilege.

Barghouti quoted Edward Said's description of Arab literature as "embargoed literature" in the West (in The Nation in 1990); this embargo means that Western readers have little access, so Ms Grimes projects onto the text her own perceptions of Islam and Muslims: to her, a poem written by a Palesitnian should ineveitably be written by a jihadist, to a jihadist, glorifying jihad. [See, by contrast, Guy Mannes-Abbott's nuanced and contextualised discussion of Barghouti's work, which appeared on the blog in December].

Barghouti then asked whether a work of art face down the mentality created by the media and dominant culture in Europe and the West, as

those who don’t know the history and the colonial wound would not get to know them from a translated poem and a novel. When we read European literature translated into Arabic, we do it through the knowledge eof Euro civilisation, fed to us through university curricula and Coca-Cola. In Europe what is missing more than the nuances of the language, or the translator’s lack of command of the target language, is the absence of translated books of Arab history and the Arabic canon.

He suggested that the revision of an outlook that refuses non-Western thought and literature its hearing unless it conforms to Western norms, is the necessary preliminary to begin to receive translation. Translation from Arabic into English is in real trouble for several reasons, the most significant of which comes from outside the field of translation: victimisation of Arabis in media by stereotypes and generalisations, demonisation or romantic and Orientalist glorification. So it's naïve, Barghouti said, to expect a novel or collection of poems translated from Arabic to find public or publisher; "the small exceptions do not change the chilling facts."

"I often think there are whole groups who face the traumatic experience of a blocked scream," he said, of this enforced silencing by the dominant culture. He concluded that

Literature-with-a-capital-L controls the diversity of literatures, because of the Western concept of universality that no Western writer questions; African, Asian, Arab writers are epect to become universal through translation which is extended as a badge, a prize. Western culture is the main obstacle to intercultural dialogue with non Western cultures, with the idea of translation is all about.

Salah Hassan, the panel chair, commented that Barghouti's talk highlighted that translation always involves two cultures and two languages; but it’s always the West and the rest. But he pointed out that many of the conference speakers work between cultures and cross borders, and he asked the panelists to reflect on being caught in this bind as cultural brokers.

Negar Azimi, the editor of Bidoun, described the genesis of the magazine in 2004, in response to interesting expression happening in Arab capitals, that needed a repository for debate and critique. She described the "paranoia and sensitivity about representing the Middle East, which cuts across our editorial roles as cultural brokers." Bidoun's solution is to publish a mandate in the front, which, Azimi commented, "sounds like UN document, a humanitarian gesture." Four years later, Bidoun has evolved in line with the art scene, towards more sophisticated discussions, in which there’s less essentialism. She remarked that:

Translation to me implies there’s a problem in communication, need for mediators. We’ve always felt that responsibility – there wasn’t a Bidoun, although there have been many exciting magazines in middle East. But we’re losing that mandate, want to rearticulate our relationship to the Middle East.

Other magazines have been founded since Bidoun (Canvas, Brown Book, good cultural supplements in Arabic newspapers) – taken pressure of us to be privileged cultural arbiters, but they are still working with a diverse range of writers around the world to translate and connect East and West.

Gerhard Haupt, the editor of Universes in Universe agreed that translation was a practice of mediation, and said he started his site because in 1997 the internet was dominated byEnglish language, UScentric culture. UinU extended its project with an online magazine project, Nafas, to represent and support what Haupt referred to as the “so-called Islamic world,” after 9/11. They saw it as a tool to destroy preconceptions, and to represent the diversity of individual artists. Making the site multilingual has been very difficult practically and technically, but in 2006, they launched an Arabic version, and at that moment, the magazine became a tool in classrooms in Arab world, reaching a much broader audience. Haupt recently presented Nafas in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore, where the cultural translation was between (in his words) “East and more East.” The communication took place through images, which proverbially say more than words for intercultural understanding, so that it would be possible to destroy conception of homogenous Islamic world by collating images from different countries.

Art historian Nada Shabout had

problems with the historical proverb that images are worth a thousand words. Actually, they’re problematic and very constructed. In the art world, there’s the same problem Mourid talked about – the contextualisation is completely lacking.

As an example, she pointed to the Western journalists who "stumbled upon Iraqi contemporary art," in 2003, and wrote "that the oppression of Saddam forced artists into abstraction." In 2006, they discovered a surrealist artist who was sanctioned by Saddam but produced figurative works, but had no idea how to approach this because as far as the West is concerned Iraq is arrested in modernism. Shabout also pointed out that curators, art historians and scholars are not really talking to each other, so research is not being collated, and that a more thorough discussion of methodologies is needed. She described her own struggle to see outside or beyong her Western training, conditioned by Orientalism or neo-Orientalism.

Bahraini artist Anas Al-Shaikh countered with pragmatic concerns from the other direction: not the development of an Arabic critical language, but the lack of access to the vast majority of writing about art that is not translated into Arabic. What is translated reached little consensus: there are 7 different terms for "installation art," for example. Artists in Bahrain lack the contextualisation and concepts for what they want to achieve. Bidoun, which is only published in English, sells very few copies in Bahrain. This blocks communication and discussion in international contexts. In response to a later question, Azimi announced that Bidoun is about to publish its first Arabic issue, with articles translated into Arabic and commissioned in Arabic and Farsi. But she commented that it had taken three years to build a group of artists and writers whose thinking was in line with the magazine. Her comments supported Al-Shaikh's counter to Shabout's claim, as he suggested that more artists engage with modernism than contemporary art, because they can appreciate and contextualise it.

Barghouti remarked that issues such as the translation of terms are not "technical, everything is part of the formation of knowledge." He went on to illustrate this powerfully:

The pollution of political language in modern times has reached a level that the name of movements, peoples or countries are polluted. You say for instance war, and you should use just murder. What happened in Gaza is not war, it’s murder. The F16s are moving as if they are Air France or Swissair, unchallenged. No-one would imagine to acquire anti-aircraft missiles; you can’t smuggle it or even think about having it. We have reached a moment in verbal abuse that an honest writer or critic or journalist would really have to rethink language to restore the freshness of political vocabulary. When the fourth-most armed country on earth is destroying buildings day and night, and people are speaking of victory, of winning and losing... And then they will tell you about the “vicious circle of violence.” A circle has no beginning. The most repeated expression in the Middle East conflict is this: this never tells you who started what when, as if people in Ramallah went to Germany or France or the Ukraine to kill the Jews. Such mis-usages can never be technical inaccuracy. Without trying to restore the accuracy of language that you are using as artists and critics, you are getting nowhere with the common understanding that supposedly comes of globalisation – it’s achieving its opposite: war, discrimination, lack of movement, lack of freedom, a killing field. The images are polluted, the words are polluted.

Hassan pointed out that neo-con language, in its perversions, has shaped the art world. Bush's “you are with us, or with the terrorists,” created the categories of good Muslims and bad Muslims; with museums and galleries becoming interested in presenting good Muslims through art, as part of universal humanist mission, creating certain expectations - like an emphasis on women artists. Some artists are complicit in the process, he said, partly because they don’t have the access and want it, but also because they reproduce the images from Arabian Nights that are part of continuation of Orientalist fantasies.

Haupt rejected the idea of the "good Muslim" as a false criterion imposed by Western thought; he argued that holding up the West as arbiter of taste omitted to recognise that modernist and contemporary art from the West had often been misunderstood and maltreated in Western galleries.Shabout pointed out that it took the Tate to arrange the conference; the West remains the power whether we like it or not. The West's obsessions - such as veiling - therefore dictate what art accedes to the global market, which has nothing to do with what appears in local galleries, but it does create a dichotomy. She also dismissed as expedient all rhetoric about art as bridging the gap between cultures, despite the goodwill that wanted to use art to try to humanise the people of Iraq. For Shabout, this still comes from a superior position taken by curators.

A question from the floor asked Shabout if she was interested in creating a terminology to replace the one she was rejecting. She replied that she was, and is, but by historicising the production and reception of Arab art rather than coining a term. The second questioner from the floor wondered whether too much interpretation had been foisted onto Middle Eastern art by Western arbiters using the artworks as "communication." Shabout agreed that too much interpretation actively deprived the viewer from looking, because the framework of the political discourse turned the artwork into an object for political communication only.

Nervously (because public speaking always makes me nervous), I asked whether a poem or novel or artwork could prompt its reader or viewer, through its artistry, cut through received images from the media and prompt research into its context? Perhaps due to my nervousness, the chair thought I was asking whether a novel *should* be working to counter media stereotypes and educate its reader. Barghouti, understandably, responded that:

A novel should be a pleasant work to read, and if this is translated into a better understanding this is a plus. First of all, it has to be good. If this is achieved, anything else is open to the formation of the reader. If you want to reach, write an article or give a speech, don’t write a novel.

It was a necessary comment, a delayed response in a way to Hassan's point about the expectations created by Western publishers and exhibitors looking to use art to meet certain criteria and needs, in response to funders and media interests, rather than researching and contextualising aesthetic practices. That contextualisation is, of course, part of the remit of the Atlas, a way of offering the individual reader a different place to discover literature that moves and excites them than the homogenous and expedient critical discourse of the day.

Tomorrow, sessions on Tradition and Modernity (highly relevant to poetry, fiction and non-fiction writing from the Arabic-speaking world, as it is to visual arts) and on The Politics of Space, which I was hoping would fall under the "Ideas" aspect of the conference, but is very much about infrastructure. Given that it's book fair season, perhaps it's well worth thinking about the physical architectures and infrastructures of publishing in the Middle East...

“In Gaza, we are subject to news but cannot see TVs.”

That's how Ayesha Saldanha titles her round-up of Palestinian bloggers today on Global Voices (who also have fascinating and necessary round ups from Turkey, Lebanon and Syria, as well as round-ups focused on reactions to the Gaza bombings from Chile and Taiwan). Tel Aviv-based blogger Lisa Goldman is using her access to technology to gather voices, events and stories from the "other side," documenting protest marches in Israel, calling friends in Gaza and reporting their stories, and linking to blogs and video from across the web. Saldanha's moving pull-quote attests to two ways in which the internet can offer a space for alternative voices: first of all, it allows those who "cannot see TVs" (and are not often invited to speak on them) to see the news, and moreover to make it; second of all, it builds global community, where those who can see the TVs a) get an alternative perspective that may balance media bias; b) can offer support to those blogging (in various ways, for example Saldanha is posting SMS messages from her friend Hasan in Rafah who has no internet access); and c) can shift perspective from seeing certain populations or individuals as "subject to news" to seeing them as agents, and as full members of the human community.

Blogs, of course, extend what literature has been doing for millennia -- through narratives that touch on commonalities (whether it's the sense that "we're all bloggers -- I could be blogging from Rafah, what would that be like?" or details of daily life lived differently) that can encourage us to walk in another's shoes. Social networking, again like literature, can also be used as propaganda -- bloggers are alternately (cynically) impressed by and outraged at the Israeli government's use of Twitter to hold press conferences and dominate news cycles. Whatever the reaction, it's an example of governments recognising the power of the medium: Anthony Lowenstein of The Blogging Revolution has a great story today about the Iraqi Revolutionary Guards Corp setting up 10, 000 blogs to counter the perceived liberalism of the Iraqi blogosphere.

It's a truism but here goes: the internet moves faster than literature. That's its advantage -- for example, this Gaza care package campaign organised through Facebook -- and its disadvantage, as misinformation spreads wildly and the source with the fastest broadband (or any power and phone lines at all) wins. History has always been written by the victors, but now the victors can write it from their mobile phones in the midst of the battle, shaping global response as well as posterity. So blogs that emerge from communities that have less access to technology (and to power in both the political and electrical senses) stand as an important bulwark against the complete eradication of their side of the story. Sites like Global Voices and toot perform a critical function in gathering these voices into a shout, focused and centralised.

In doing so, they act like old-fashioned publishers, selecting and honing the voices that surround us. Novels and poetry, too, are an important bulwark, a record of diverse voices. Some would argue that they are more accessible (to writers) and influential (to readers) than the internet, as a poem can be passed from hand to hand, and mouth to mouth, a novel smuggled out in sections if it has to be. Books are seen as custoded, collected, polished: a longer-lasting, more penetrating, and more effective representation of a situation, narrative, identity, image. And yet the gatekeepers are many, not least the gatekeeper of translation which means that many voices who are celebrated in their own linguistic culture don't reach ears beyond it. For English-language readers, that makes the value of books such as I Saw Ramallah, The Butterfly's Burden, and the novels of Elias Khoury invaluable, along with the promotion and support offered by PEN's Writers in Translation programme and the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature.

I Saw Ramallah, with its announcement of witnessing as direct action and reclaiming the narrative voice, directly addresses the panic and powerlessness captured in Saldanha's quotation from Professor Said Abdelwahed, as reported in the Moments in Gaza blog. But its author Mourid Barghouti has also recently joined Facebook, posting poems old and new (in Arabic) as well as more diary-like entries that amplify his poetry's connection to, and influence on, his readers.

Digital technology offers dizzying possibilities to move from subject to storyteller, for those who can access them. The waves of rage, love, hate, anguish, activism and emotion pouring forth in the blogosphere can't, and don't aim to, replace poetry, but they uphold the spirit of art: "KEEP MAKING THINGS WITH WHATEVER YOU HAVE."

Contemporary Art in the Middle East: Symposium at the Tate

Fikret Atay
Rebels of the Dance 2002
Tate © Fikret Atay

This two-day symposium looks like a fantastic event for artists, academics, writers, critics, gallery-goers, and anyone interested in arts. It boasts a great balance of academic speakers, curators, journalists and artists -- and there's a specific session on translation:

Session Two: Writing and Translation

How does the interpretation and contextualisation of modern and contemporary art from the Middle East effect its understanding at home and abroad? What is lost in the process of translation and how can it be reclaimed to encourage deeper and more nuanced readings? This session explores writing on art and translation as well as broader issues of access and interpretation.

16:15–-16:45
Keynote Talk: Mourid Barghouti (poet and author, I Saw Ramallah)

16:45–17:30
Panel Discussion with Mourid Barghouti, Negar Azimi (senior editor, Bidoun), Pat Binder (artist, curator, publisher, Nafas Art Magazine), Gerhard Haupt (art-historian, curator and publisher, Nafas Art Magazine), Nada Shabout (Associate Professor Art History, University North Texas), and Anas Al-Shaikh (artist and curator). Chaired by Salah Hassan (Professor, Cornell University and editor, nka)

The event takes place Thursday 22 January 2009, 14.00–18.00 (Tate Britain) and Friday 23 January 2009, 10.30–18.00 (Tate Modern). Tickets are £40 (£30 concessions) and can be booked online.

A History of the Arab Body: The Prophet's Wife, Jasad and Mourid Barghouti Make the News.

The New York Times finally has a review of Sherry Jones' The Jewel of Medina, the historical romance about Ai'sha, the third and youngest wife of the Prophet Mohammed. The novel has been pursued by controversy, including a pre-publication dismissal from a senior American academic, Denise Spellberg, and - more seriously - a firebombing of the novel's British publishers. While Lorraine Adams' review is a considered response, discussing the context and difficult careers of the both the novel and its historical protagonist, and couching the novel's reception by comparison to Salman Rushdie's The Satantic Verses, it ends on an odd note. Granted, as her citations show, the novel's prose as well as its research leave something to be desired, but she claims that the novel's literary failings remove it from protection for freedom of expression.

An inexperienced, untalented author has naïvely stepped into an intense and deeply sensitive intellectual argument.… Should free-speech advocates champion “The Jewel of Medina”? In the American context, the answer is unclear. The Constitution protects pornography and neo-Nazi T-shirts, but great writers don’t generally applaud them. If Jones’s work doesn’t reach those repugnant extremes, neither does it qualify as art. It is telling that PEN, the international association of writers that works to advance literature and defend free expression, has remained silent on the subject of this novel. Their stance seems just about right.

But English PEN actively supported the publication of the novel as a case of freedom of expression, using their online network to flag up the attack on British publisher Martin Rynja. They also co-ordinated a widely-editorialised petition by leading British writers. In a note on the petition, Hari Kunzru wrote that:

Calling for books such as these to be banned or censored shows a lack of confidence over the subject matter. The only response to freedom of speech is more freedom of speech and the right to criticise and produce better books. Let pen fight with pen. Artistic licence is required to explore perceived wisdoms and ask new questions from different angles to reveal new insights. These insights are stunted if artistic licence is limited by the intimidation of extremists.

Black Iris has a thoughtful response about how this case illuminates the "volatile nature [of freedom of expression]. The unpredictable (and sometimes predictable) nature of where and how a discussion will evolve."

Providing further context and consideration to the charges laid against Jewel comes an excellent interview in The Guardian with Lebanese poet and journalist Joumana Haddad, who has launched Jasad, "a quarterly magazine specialising in the body's arts, sciences, and literatures."



On sale in Lebanon in sealed plastic envelopes (and by couriered subscription elsewhere), Jasad is, as Haddad points out, a continuation of a rich tradition in Arabic literature; she tells Ian Black,

"I'm not trying to introduce something alien. We have wonderful erotic texts in Arabic like the Scented Garden or the non-censored texts of a Thousand and One Nights. These are all part of our heritage and we have come to deny it."

The first issue has a plethora of contributors, whom Haddad insists write under their given names. They are a distinguished bunch, including French writer Catherine Millet (whose memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M. caused shockwaves), prize-winning novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, Egyptian poet Emad Fouad, and Abbas Beydoun, who is the Cultural Editor of Lebanese newspaper As-Safir as well as a novelist and poet.

There's an essay on lesbian life in Syria and France by Kurdish-Syrian journalist Maha Hassan, author of the excellent article "Female Arabic Writers: Neither Mannish nor Scheherazadian." She critiques Moroccan novelist Said Benkrad's assertion, made in August 2008, in Damascus (the 2008 Capital of Arabic culture), during a debate about female writing,

that the female Arab novel carried within itself only the body and temptation and that female writers put their desires above their words. He thus made a very clear distinction between novels written by men and those that are written by women.

As the erotic writing by Ben Jelloun, Fouad and Beydoun included in Jasad shows, the erotic body is not the provenance of women writers -- but nor are they excluded from writing about it. Cannily, the magazine's website has a forum where issues of gender, sexuality, censorship, cultural heritage and so on can be discussed by readers and browsers, as the magazine provides a forum for writers to present their intellectual and erotic fantasies. The magazine is currently only available in Arabic, and in print, but excerpts are readable online, in English and Arabic.

It's great to see a full-page article about Arabic literature in the Saturday Guardian (dominated by a picture of the very beautiful Haddad and featuring a box entitled "World of Contradictions" summarising the double standards around the erotic in the Arab world), but appearing on the same day as the NYT Jewel review, it makes me wonder whether it's not so much about Arabic literature as the still-tantalising Orientalist myth of the erotic East, at once sternly veiled and sybaritically laid bare. While Jasad itself explores sensually, sparkily and thoughtfully a diverse world of sexuality, including cannibalism, fetishism, cinematic voyeurism, gender difference and body theory, the article presents it simply as a controversial "culture clash" of Western values (its "articles and illustrations are of a quality that would not be out of place in Paris, New York or London") and Arabic social mores. Jewel is being read through a similar narrow focus. But each carries with it, for Western readers and editors, a whiff of Burtonesque jasmine, a seduction -- into easy arguments as well as erotic reveries.

Haddad is a bold and talented writer and editor, and her magazine showcases a selection of the most exciting writers and artists from the region. But is this really all the coverage the Guardian can afford to the Beirut Book Fair and to Arabic literature? In fairness, the Review section's "A Life In Writing" interview this week is with Mourid Barghouti.



It's a detailed and considerable piece, and (after looking at the Jasad article) what springs out for me are Barghouti's bodily metaphors for his writing process: he describes the protagonist of his 2005 long poem Midnight as

"left with this attack of time on his heart and mind and solitary body… I find I always imagine myself in the place of the victim," he says. "When the twin towers were hit, I felt I was thrown from windows, running from the fire - I lived it. In Abu Ghraib I was the hooded prisoner with electrodes on his fingers."

Interviewer Maya Jaggi quotes Zuhair Abu Shayeb, a poet and editor at the Arab Institute for Research and Publishing in Amman, who says Barghouti "abandoned the heroic tone and slogans that plague modern Arabic poetry. His is a poetry of coughs and headaches - the daily pains of the individual". Barghouti agrees passionately; of his sequel to the memoir I Saw Ramallah, he says:

"It's to make every trivial detail into a chronicle of history. Everything starts from the individual - the body's pleasures and pains. If you don't see that, you misunderstand history."

"Give Me the Pavement!" The Bombing and the Brink Part VI

The final part of Guy Mannes-Abbott's conversation with Mourid Barghouti about the "poetry of the pavement," Palestinian writers, and the internationality of literature.

VI. Midnight & Other Poems allows Barghouti to emerge as a “poet of the pavement”; repeatedly banished and permanently looking awry at things. Poems of the Pavement is actually the name of his fifth collection published in 1980. “This is the real start of my voice” he once told me before explaining the context -court poets and political rhetoricians- with figurative argumentation. “So, okay: you occupy the autostrat with your poetry, your bombastic tone, but give me the pavement! Poems of the pavement? I am not in the mainstream -I need the pavement. You take the street -you’ve already taken it, it isn’t mine. I’ll be confined to this. I’m happy with this” -happy enough to produce six further poetry collections, a 700-page Collected Works, the memoir and book-length poem Midnight -published just after his sixtieth birthday.
This selection from those poems, which includes several from the ‘pavement’, also finally allows I Saw Ramallah to be read as the memoir of a great poet. After the jolt of Mahmoud Darwish’s recent death, Mourid wrote of his friend that he “was at the centre of Arab culture in the 20th century because he was a poet, and a Palestinian.” While Darwish was widely considered the greatest living Arab poet, it’s a burdensome mantle that Barghouti will be reluctant to assume.
Once, when talking of his admiration for Darwish, he pointed to a shared creative restlessness. “Do you know what the title of his seventh collection was? - when he was, by now, a legend. Attempt No. 7. Just that,” he chuckled delightedly, “the number 7 not the word. It is the same with me, poetry should be this attempt.”
Meanwhile, nothing should blind us to the depth and range of Palestinian literature, exemplified today in the levity of Randa Jarrar and soul of Adania Shibli. While Jarrar writes in English, Shibli’s work is translated into French and Italian though not yet English -excepting a couple of very fine short stories.
Exactly four years since appearing on the Southbank, Mourid’s first collection of poems in English was published on the day he returned to read at the Poetry International Festival. Finally, readers of his memoir and stunned listeners to his reading were able to pick up his poems too. Each of them knew they were plucking flowers from the brink of being bombed.
---
You can read the complete article in a single document here.

A Solution of Night and Day: The Bombing and the Brink Part V

V. Four years on from 2004, a first proper collection of Barghouti’s poems is due in English. Midnight & Other Poems includes the first full version of the long title poem, written during 2004 and published in Arabic as the year turned into 2005. It’s a poem about a man in a room with an open window through which visions, stories, memories pour in, refusing him any rest. It’s not just any midnight either, but the very cusp of New Year. Nor is it an English midnight. In Arabic, Mourid tells me, the word means ‘half night’ - a solution of day and night- a much more ambiguous notion than a pivotal or starting moment.
Rooms with windows like this recur in I Saw Ramallah. On his long awaited ‘return’ to Ramallah, Barghouti stays in the home of a family friend. The window in his room opens on the familiar sight of olive groves not seen for exactly thirty years and an Israeli settlement on top of the hill. An insistent rush of memories and “countless questions” deprive him of sleep on his last night there.
Mourid’s Midnight is the product of a world gone mad, thrown headlong into a nightmare of barbaric appetites. Nothing is as it should be or even appears any more. For Palestinians the early 1990 agreements at Oslo offered limited hopes but also made promises and commitments to them. By the Millennium, settlement building on the Occupied ‘West Bank’ had continued at a terrible pace, promises of every sort had been broken, and their own leadership was fatally compromised by strategic errors. Used to chronic injustice and having survived acute injustices they were now thrown into another round of both at the same time, crimes against humanity of a specific unimaginable order.
In I Saw Ramallah Barghouti wrote “I am a child of mountains and stability” who has “tamed” himself “to the feeling that the coffee pot is not mine.” Here, in Midnight, Mourid writes of “hills that follow each other like rhymes/ hills that you shield, instead of being shielded by them” -a grotesque inversion. Certainly this is poetry of human extremity, the world’s madness concentrated in the Palestinians existential torment, further gathered in the ferocious gusts of unending nocturnal distress. It is a day like no other in human history, and just another day in an endless night.
However, whilst Midnight renders the world at an end, the poet also delivers a “message of doubt” for “the victorious”. Every time I read its closing lines I recall Mourid talking of the hope he has found on the ‘West Bank" and Gaza, lessons learnt from '48, '67, '87 and 2000.
“It’s really amazing, little acts of resistance. They demolish the house, and they cut the trees and people stay where they are, in the rubble! A temporary is raised, and the neighbours bring some help and the family life is resumed in some way or another in their place!”
It would be wrong to describe Midnight as a poem of hope, it is not. Not even hope against hope. Instead it expresses the resistance of a people to ongoing attempts to erase them in a work that embodies poetry’s constitutive resistance to closure. It contains a highly potent claim on the future: for new life, here, on this earth, and now, in this same dust.
VI. Midnight & Other Poems allows Barghouti to emerge as a “poet of the pavement”; repeatedly banished and permanently looking awry at things.

The sixth and final part of our exclusive serialisation of Guy Mannes-Abbott's introduction to Mourid Barghouti's Midnight, celebrating the book's publication by Arc, appears tomorrow.

"There Are Many Mohammeds": The Bombing and the Brink Part IV

In which Guy Mannes-Abbott and Mourid Barghouti discuss the implications, ramifications and emotions of Barghouti's poem, "A Night Unlike Others"

IV. Despite being the most declamatory of Barghouti’s poems in translation, there is no accusation, nothing that must be withdrawn under certain circumstances, no contentiousness and, even here, no stage directions. Yet this is a poem written in the wake of the gratuitous killing of a young boy by the Israeli Defence Forces right in front of the world in September 2000. It was followed by Israel reinvading illegally Occupied Territories as the second intifada took off. Mohammed al-Durra became an icon of injustice, a symbol, an idea, wrapped in flourishes of rhetoric -the kind that Mourid refuses.
I asked him about it, knowing that there had been a memorial edition of an occasional publication in Cairo, renamed Durra, to which writers gave work. Something about my question touched him: the fact that I would ask it, that my own son was ‘due’ on the very same day. Perhaps even that his late arrival by two weeks had made for a singularly naked concentration on the human. The point, quickly established, was that yes, it was Mohammed al-Durra, in a sense, but “Mohammed is not a name, even!”
There are many Mohammeds, I suggest.
“Yeh yeh yes.”
He then told me how he’d been invited to go on a kind of memorial tour of north African capitals with the father of this particular Mohammed, whose long face we all saw yanked into animal terror. There were posters everywhere, everyone was saying this, chanting that; “I went on the tour, but I never read this poem!” He said this with pride; proud of a characteristic, principled clarity.
So we have a poem about a grotesque crime, which was a trigger for the slide back into hell for Palestinians, a historically significant moment. The poem does not name, nor does it blame. Even agreeing to a memorial tour in support of the family, the poem that does not name is not read! This, in a heightened way, exemplifies Mourid Barghouti's work. The particular here, unnamed, has graduated to the universal. If this is literature in bondage -as J.M. Coetzee described his own writing during the apartheid era- the bindings are our little humanity, the prison our planetary bauble.
V. Four years on from 2004, a first proper collection of Barghouti’s poems is due in English. Midnight & Other Poems includes the first full version of the long title poem, written during 2004 and published in Arabic as the year turned into 2005.

A Night Unlike Others: The Bombing and the Brink Part III

III. A longish poem called A Night Unlike Others is one notable example of this refusal to nominate, wave banners, or confine the particular within its particularity.
It starts like this;

His finger almost touches the bell,
the door, unbelievably slowly,
opens.

He enters.

He goes to his bedroom.
Here they are:
his picture next to his little bed,
his schoolbag, in the dark,
awake.
He sees himself sleeping
between two dreams, two flags.

He knocks on the doors of all the rooms
-he almost knocks. But he does not.
They all wake up:
“He’s back!
By God, he’s back!” they shout,
but their clamour makes no sound.

They stretch their arms to hug Mohammed
but do not reach his shoulders.”

The poem goes on with chatter between the reunited family, who “remain shadows and never meet.” It ends:

They said.
He said.
Without a voice.

The doorbell never rang,
the visitor was not in his little bed,
they have not seen him.

The following morning neighbours whispered:
it was all a delusion.
His schoolbag was here
marked by the bullet holes,
and his stained notebooks.

Those who came to give their condolences
had never left his mother.

Moreover, how could a dead child
come back, like this, to his family,
walking,
calmly
under the shelling
of such a very long
night?”

© Mourid Barghouti translated by Radwa Ashour

IV. Despite being the most declamatory of Barghouti’s poems in translation, there is no accusation, nothing that must be withdrawn. Guy Mannes-Abbott's introduction to Mourid Barghouti's poetry, and to the Arc collection Midnight, continues tomorrow.

The Bombing and the Brink Part II

Continuing our exclusive serialisation of Guy Mannes-Abbott's essay introducing Mourid Barghouti's Midnight:

II. In 2004 I also ‘discovered’ the poetry of Mourid Barghouti, whose classic memoir I Saw Ramallah [1996] I admired already. Barghouti’s account of displacement arrived in English in 2000, through the American University in Cairo Press, whose backlist is now being introduced in Britain by the newly formed Arabia Books. I Saw Ramallah appeared in the UK in April 2004, while in October Barghouti lectured on Arabic poetry, and read his own, at the Southbank Centre in London. I decided to watch, listen and weigh from a distance. A notably dignified figure, Mourid spoke of poetry’s centrality to Arab culture, the great days of rebel poets and golden poems. He read his own in English and without a quip, leaving their blooms to explode in the silent, already stunned, air. The audience realised they were hearing work of lasting rarity; poems that wrestle with the particular and universal in unique ways.
Thus began a quest for every poetic line available. I found some by ‘Mureed Barghouthy’ in Salma Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature, a few more in Banipal magazine and a booklet published by the Aldeburgh Poetry Trust. Twenty six in all. Barghouti’s memoir was an exquisitely exact, occasionally angry account of his double displacement as a Palestinian poet. These poems were different again; written in concrete language without nomination or guaranteed tears, accessible as well as very good. They exhibit an openness which encloses great depths, their lines draw landscapes in your palm, catch the skin with universal truths.
In the spring of 2005 I drove to meet Mourid at a writer’s event at the University of East Anglia. Initially cagey, our conversations grew into a series during a short tour from Norwich, via a performance at Aldeburgh, back to London. There, in a noisy hotel bar, many cigarettes and more words cemented something between us beyond the political or even literary. Something in the realm of spirit. Before returning home to Cairo, Mourid also introduced me to Ahdaf Soueif, the novelist, translator of I Saw Ramallah and author of the essays collected as Mezzaterra.
Barghouti and I stayed in contact through 2005-6. He lit up my day with occasional calls and honoured me with hearty meetings on visits to London. There were more readings and late night conversations peppered with spontaneous translations and scrupulous explanations. Meanwhile, I worked away at an extended essay about his work and life, focusing closely on the poetry. By now I’d realised or uncovered much of what the poems don’t say. I wanted to celebrate, as well as contextualise, the precise not-saying of Mourid’s work; it’s refusal of rhetorical bluster, anthemic claim or accusation, its unimpeachable creative responsibility and ethical clarity. Undoubtedly poetry of the highest aesthetic order, what is not-said and how it’s not-said earns it universal importance.

III. A longish poem called A Night Unlike Others is one notable example of this refusal to nominate, wave banners, or confine the particular within its particularity.

Part III tomorrow...

Mourid Barghouti's Midnight: Exclusive Introduction by Guy Mannes-Abbott

Arc publishes Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti's Midnight today, translated by Radwa Ashour (Egyptian novelist and academic, and Barghouti's wife), with a preface by Ruth Padel and an introduction by Guy Mannes-Abbott.

Over the next six days, the English PEN World Atlas blog will carry an exclusive essay adapted from Mannes-Abbott's introduction, including his unique in-depth interview with Barghouti, who discusses his poetic process.

The Bombing and the Brink
by Guy Mannes-Abbott

2004 feels tumultuously distant already but recent events have reminded me of the bloody brink it represents. At their recent trial, the men accused of plotting to bring down passenger aircraft with ‘liquid bombs’ were linked with those of the 7/7 and 21/7 attacks in London. Prosecutors claimed that members of each group visited Pakistan during 2004, when their righteous anger embraced murderous violence. What kind of year was it, then, that tipped these people over this kind of edge?
It was the year that American-led adventurism in Iraq peaked with attempted map-wipes of Fallujah and Abu Ghraib torture. A year in which the ‘cradle’ of our common humanity was saturated in bloody perversion. Threaded inbetween, Israel committed routine outrages in its occupied territories. Rafah was bulldozed, Sheikh Yassin -and random early-morning neighbours- bombed to pieces, the ‘West Bank’ was walled up, protesters and journalists mowed down. Before years end yet another Palestinian child was married with an IDF bullet inside a UN school. What is there to salvage from such a brink?
I spent most of 2002-3 in Gujarat, India, from where exercises of Western ‘might’ felt different. In 2002 I’d witnessed state-sponsored slaughter of Muslims fuelled by Nationalist visions of an exclusively Hindu holy land. In 2003 I watched the invasion of Iraq from the edge of Gujarat’s Great Rann of Kutch. It was there that I came to understand at gut level that our world divides between the bombing and the bombed - something the bombed need no reminding of. Back home in London, an abysmal 2004 primed me for violent resistance, a step lacking final triggers of a massacred family, a homeland denied me or brutishly overrun. ‘Justice’ didn’t visit me from the sky to force the issue.
Stranded on the cusp, something shifted when I read Ahdaf Soueif’s clear-sighted reports of visits to occupied Palestine and then on its writers. It’s much harder to support bombing people whose interiors -in novels, poems, memoirs- you know something of, isn’t it? Lacking Arabic, I decided to ‘discover’ more of its literature in translation and do whatever I could to champion it and encourage more. Not much, as it turned out: a handful of literary reviews and author interviews. Notice when it was otherwise withheld. Of the little that does make it into the English language from Arabic even less originates in Britain. Amongst that ‘little’ and ‘less’, a rich Palestinian literature has been most wilfully under-represented.

II. In 2004 I also ‘discovered’ the poetry of Mourid Barghouti, whose classic memoir I Saw Ramallah [1996] I admired already....

Part II appears tomorrow.