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.

What Can Literature Do?

Two answers today, with reference to the current situation in Gaza, from the Guardian: Pankaj Mishra, writing in the Review, argues that we should listen to authors when they speak about politics, if they are speaking from within -- and with deep knowledge -- of the situation that they speak about. His examples are Arundhati Roy (which is a little disingenuous, as Roy was a distinguished campaigner before she was a novelist, and said explicitly after publishing The God of Small Things that she would capitalise on her success not with another novel, but by using her sudden fame to bring attention to the plight of India's poor) and the more curious and compelling example of David Grossman, who has been active in using his influence as one of Israel's most highly regarded novelists to plead for peace and dialogue with political leaders. Mishra could go further, and include writers and artists who have formed, one to one or through organisations, the kind of bonds that Grossman asks his government to seek. He could have mentioned Etgar Keret, who co-authored Gaza Blues with Palestinian writer Samir El-Youssef.

Naomi Klein, in an op-ed piece arguing for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, draws attention to such important cross-cultural project in her answer to the counter-charge "Boycotts sever communication; we need more dialogue, not less." She responds with

a personal story. For eight years, my books have been published in Israel by a commercial house called Babel. But when I published The Shock Doctrine, I wanted to respect the boycott. On the advice of BDS activists, including the wonderful writer John Berger, I contacted a small publisher called Andalus. Andalus is an activist press, deeply involved in the anti-occupation movement and the only Israeli publisher devoted exclusively to translating Arabic writing into Hebrew. We drafted a contract that guarantees that all proceeds go to Andalus's work, and none to me. I am boycotting the Israeli economy but not Israelis.

The Andalus website offers astonishing facts about Arabic-Hebrew cultural exchange (or lack thereof): Since the 1930's just over 30 Arabic language fiction titles have been translated into Hebrew, most of them authored by E

gyptians and Palestinians (before Andalus Publishing began operating, not a single Syrian, Iraqi, or North African writer was translated to Hebrew from Arabic - the Moroccan Taher Ben Jaloun was translated from French as were a number of others). Of these, only three are women: the Palestinians Sahar Khalife and Fadwa Tuqan, and the Egyptian Nawal al-Sa'adawi.

Contemporary Arabic writers who have been translated into many languages, and, needless to say, are well known to every literate Arab, remain unknown to the Hebrew reader, save for the Egyptian Nobel laureate Nagib Mahfouz. The names of authors such as the Egyptian Sunallah Ibrahim, the Syrian Zakaria Tamer, the Lebanese Hanan al-Sheikh and Elias Khoury, not to mention the Iraqi Jew Samir Naqqash who writes and publishes in Arabic from his home in Petach Tiqva, Israel are not familiar to the Israeli public, nor is their extensive body of literary work.

Naqqash's neglect in Israel - as one of the few Mizrahi writers to continue using Arabic while living in Israel - points to the profound disconnect that Israel has effected from its Arab eighbourhood and citizens, including its according of lower status to Mizrahis (Jews from the Middle East and Maghreb). Initiatives like Andalus - named for the medieval Islamic state in the Iberian peninsula in which both Muslim and Jewish literature flourished and interconnected - are slowly rectifying this, and working to encourage an exchange of views through literary culture, and to integrate Israel into the geographical and historical Arab community in which it is located.

To date Andalus has published six titles (the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish's Why Have You Left the Horse Alone and State of Siege, the Moroccan Muhammad Choukri's For Bread Alone, the Sudanese Al-Tayyeb Saleh's The Wedding of Zein and the Lebanese Elias Khoury's Bab al-Shams), and a catalog of work by nine Palestinian women artists titled Self Portrait; translated five titles (Mahmoud Darwish, Mural, the Lebanese Hoda Barakat's The Stone of Laughter, Hanan al-Shaykh's The Story of Zahra, Al-Tayyeb Saleh's Bandar Sah, and the Palestinian Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's The First Well); and acquired the rights to translate and publish works by the Palestinian Taha Muhammad `Ali (poetry anthology translated by Anton Shammas), Muhammad Choukri's Streetwise, and more.

Klein found a way for her important book to reach Hebrew readers, and in doing so, to support a publisher committed to dialogue, allowing Andalus to publish further voices and bringing attention to them globally.

Girls of Riyadh Go to Dublin & Samir El-Youssef in Belgium

Susannah Tarbush reports in the Saudi Gazette that Rajaa Alsanea's The Girls of Riyadh has been longlisted for the Dublin/IMPAC award for fiction, which was won last year by Canadian-based Lebanese writer Rawi Hage's YA novel De Niro's Game. Tarbush notes that, along with Alaa Al-Aswany, Alsanea and Hage

have broken through into the Western literary mainstream, which has been a stimulus for Arab literature. Publishers are increasingly interested in publishing translations of Arabic writing, and are on the lookout for new Arab authors who may have mass readership appeal.

She also flags up Saqi's publication of David Tresilian's A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature; her discussion of the book suggests some of the tensions between the EuroWestern emphasis on mass market popular publishing and the current practice and status of literature in the Arabic world, according to Tresilian, who sees:

three main trends on the contemporary Arab literary scene: a weariness with politics, a growth in the number of women writers, and a related emphasis on individual experience at the expense of larger public themes. A further development has been regional writing, as exemplified by Nubian writers and by the Libyan Ibrahim al-Koni whose novels are set among the Tuareg people.

Recently there has been a turning away from European literary models and towards elements from the pre-modern literary heritage and from the oral and popular culture. But ominously there has also been a growing intolerance of literary expression generally, “which has made what was always perhaps a minority activity into one that is now that of a sometimes embattled minority.”

Alsanea's novel, however, points to a fourth trend that mediates between what Tresilian perceives as a turning away from literature as popular expression: as a novel based on, and presented like, an email listserv, Girls of Riyadh is one of a growing number of novels (like Being Abbas El-Abd and The Poison Tree that use the popularity of new media communications as a form and forum for fiction, resulting in popular - and in all three cases, taboo- and genre-busting - novels with both regional and international presence.

Evidence: the IMPAC nomination for Alsanea's novel came, according to Tarbush, from a librarian in Warsaw.

And Tarbush is spot-on in drawing attention to the raised international profile of Arabic literature, although some authors pursue a different tack from Alsanea's gossipy, technologically-astute take on Sex and the City, which explores gendered double standards of life in Saudi Arabia, but also implies a gradual change (seconded, as the NYT reports, by the appearance of the first female Saudi rock band, The Accolade). Over at Words Without Borders, Arnon Grunberg catches London-based Lebanese author Samir El-Youssef in a humorous mood in Antwerp. El-Youssef's second novel A Treaty of Love is bleakly romantic, but in Antwerp he proves adept at turning his mordant view of life to stand-up (or rather, sit-down comedy).