Palfest 09 Closing Night: Two Poems

Thanks to Marcy Newman at Body on the Line for flagging up and making available these two amazing readings by Palestinian poets Suheir Hammad and Nathalie Handal from the final night of Palfest '09 (which was moved on again by the Israeli authorities). You can read more of Newman's account of the final event here.

Nathalie Handal reads a poem dedicated to Mahmoud Darwish

Suheir Hammad reading a poem that records and collects words and phrases said to her, in Arabic and in English, during her week in Palestine

Festivals: Free the Word, Palestine Festival of Literature

In London today International PEN's Free the Word festival kicks off. Running through the weekend, it boasts a packed calendar of themed events exploring Heaven and Earth -- set off beautifully by the festival's primary location, Shakespeare's Globe. The festival brings together writers from around the world, many of whom make their homes in the UK, including to UK-based Arab writers: Samir El-Youssef will take part in "Beyond Faith and Reason" this evening, while on Sunday Leila Aboulela will join controversial French author Catherine Millet to discuss "Heavenly Pleasures."

Travelling in the opposite direction, 17 international writers head to Palestine for the second Palestine Festival of Literature from 23rd-28th May 2009. Because of the difficulties Palestinians face under military occupation in travelling around their own country, the Festival group of 17 international writers will travel to its audiences in the West Bank. It will tour to Ramallah, to Jenin, to al-Khalil/Hebron and to Bethlehem. To mark Jerusalem’s status as Cultural Capital of the Arab World for 2009, the festival will begin and end in Jerusalem. On the occasion of the first festival, last year, Mahmoud Darwish said:

Thank you, dear friends, for your noble solidarity, thank you for your courageous gesture to break the moral siege inflicted upon us and thank you because you are resisting the invitation to dance on our graves. We are still here. We are still alive.

This year, there are several Arab writers participating: Suad Amiry, Suheir Hammad, Nathalie Handal, Robin Yassin-Kassab, Jamal Mahjoub, Raja Shehadeh, and Ahdaf Soueif. Soueif, chair and Founder of PALFEST, said

We were overwhelmed by the responses of both our audience and our authors last year; so we can't wait to go back. We found that Palestinian cities – even in theextraordinarily cruel circumstances in which they find themselves – manage to produce brilliant art and top class education. PALFEST aims to help them carry on doing that.

The Palestine Festival of Literature was inspired by the call of the late great Palestinian thinker, Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.” PALFEST 09 is organized in co-operation with Yabous Productions, and in partnership with the British Council.

Soumaya Susi: Thoughts in the Dark

Soumaya Susi is a local government researcher in Gaza as well as a striking poet. Her work has been translated into many languages, and appeared in English in Nathalie Handal's The Poetry of Arab Women.

PEN Atlas are proud to present a new poem and two new short stories by Susi on the blog, thanks to our translators Christina Phillips, Sawad Hussain, and S. El Omary.

Thoughts in the Dark

The darkness brings fears and ideas you’d never dare to think in the light of day. You’re good at this game. The daily interruption to the electricity forces you to think in a particular way, according to a completely different logic. You give up your usual rituals and adopt new ones in keeping with the imposed darkness. You contemplate the romantic nature of candles and the night-time voices you’ve forgotten. You count the stars like the ancients did, except stars these days are deceptive; you think you see one but when you look for it the next night it’s changed course in order to carry out another task. You return to the old broadcasts which you assigned to a distant, forgotten past but are now forced to listen to learn about the death, roar and destruction going on around you. You relax a little and wait for morning, when you can listen to everything that happened while the lights were out last night on the radio in the taxi on your way to work. You go to work ready for new thoughts, desperate to find yourself amid the heap of routine. Normal work means perseverance and carrying out daily tasks assigned to you or the area you work in. It means collecting your salary at the end of the month to spend on necessities, though it hardly covers them.

Then your salary suddenly vanishes without any explanation for your children, who are dreaming of new summer clothes, new games, or even just some sweets. It vanishes and thoughts about getting along without it, an advance on your salary or recuperating some of what you’ve earned in the past few months grow. You get a bit of cash from here and there and you take out everything you’ve saved during your working life only to find yourself surrounded by columns of debts that crowd your thoughts whenever you try to sleep.

You keep going. Walking, eating, drinking, going to work every morning, meeting up with your friends, or those of them left. Something appears on the horizon and strikes the electricity station. The debates about how to manage your money are replaced with new worries. Do you have enough candles for tonight? Is there enough gas to light the long evenings? What will you do with all your time without electricity, without television or the computer, even without a fan in a summer whose heat took you by surprise, as though it was joining forces with everything else against you.

What will you do?

Nothing!

You sit in your room and tell yourself that you’re better off without fans and air-conditioners. You smoke a cigarette and discover things around you that you hadn’t noticed before. You recall conversations with your children for the thousandth time. You wait for the current to offer you a window onto the world and take you out of your lonely prison in this stony city.
Your endeavour to live by a different logic, one that befits your new lifestyle and the altered social and economic circumstances, is usually successful. But it leaves scars inside you. It leaves a burning in your soul for the life that is escaping you, the days that are slipping away from you while you are silent and ignorant of what’s going on around you. Perhaps everything around you is ignorant of you too. Forgotten in a remote corner of the world, you’re good at isolation and intentionally drift into it. You hear many melodies but don’t find your own. You read a lot of books and novels. The world goes on around you but there’s no place for you in it. Perhaps in an effort to release you from your addiction to communicating with others over the internet electricity has become your ally, for it prevents you communing with the hypothetical life that you created for yourself and lived happily with in all its details. You’re forced to withdraw, unable to refuse or complain, acquiescing to your options in a stony country on a forgotten shore. What do you think about?

Perhaps of nothing!

Of what will happen.

Of the contradictions around you.

You keep smiling, in an effort to remind yourself that something will change.

Translated by Christina Phillips.

Poets for Palestine: US Anthology

Featuring spoken word, hip-hop, and classical poetry, with contributions from Amiri Baraka and from a 10 year old Muslim girl living in London, Poets for Palestine is a ground-breaking, world-shaking, fund-raising anthology, with all profits going to support initiatives by Arab artists in the US. Work from acclaimed poets Suheir Hammad, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye and Tahani Salah attest to the vibrancy, diversity, and new visibility, of the Palestinian-American literary community.

Aunt Lute Brings Together Arab-American Women Writers

Over at Body on the Line, Marci Newman flags up the new Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, edited by her friend and mentor, which allowed her to suggest, successfully the inclusion

of several Arab American writers: Etel Adnan, Diana Abu-Jaber, Elmaz Abinader, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mohja Kahf, Nathalie Handal, and Suheir Hammad.

The anthology is worth celebrating for many reasons: it draws attention to what Mohja Kahf, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas, points out is

a growing body of Muslim American literature [that] has reached the critical mass where it might be considered its own genre, including works like “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” Khaled Hosseini’s novel “The Kite Runner” and a current best seller, “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid.

The anthology also shows how widely that corpus ranges, across biography and memoir, popular fiction, experimental writing, essays, lyric poetry and spoken word.

And it's very welcome to see that Aunt Lute, a non-profit feminist press committed to publishing women of colour, is still making waves -- and they can ship direct to you internationally from their online store, one example of the amazing impact that the internet has had for small publishers.