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.

Suheir Hammad: Live

Fantastic video of Palestinian-American poet Suheir Hammad reading (in Arabic) in Amman, posted by Black Iris.

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.

World Routes in Nazareth (and a poem)

BBC Radio's World Routes has a fantastic broadcast from Nazareth, with exclusive recordings of a performance by Dalal Abu Amneh at the Jerusalem International Oud Festival. Presenter Moshe Morad travels to the predominantly Arab-Israeli city to speak with innovative oud players Wisam Gibran, Khaled Joubran and Nazir Raduan, and singer Dalal Abu Amneh, about "tradition and the individual talent," as they blend modernity and classical heritage in their music. Gibran describes his oud playing as "cosmopolitan," connecting back through flamenco to the sounds of al-Andalus, Joubran -- whose father is an oud-maker -- talks about the Persian origins of the oud. Abu Amneh gives voice to the differing singing accents of Lebanon, Egypt and the Galilee, and describes how performing internationally allows her at once to make visible in Europe the rich Arab culture that is suppressed in Israel, and to claim her Arab identity in the Arab world, where she feels she has been rendered invisible by staying in her homeland. The organiser of the Jerusalem festival suggests that the oud offers a familiar sound and a rallying point for the commonalities in Palestinian and Mizrahi (North African/Mediterranean) Jewish culture, and that the festival has drawn together the communities. You can listen again to a dazzling and seductive range of music from Nazareth until December 27th.

Speaking of dazzling and seductive, Marci Newman has posted a spine-tingling poem by Palestinian-American writer Suheir Hammad at Body on the Line. Like the Nazarene musicians in conversation with Morad, Hammad balances and interweaves her artistic integrity and heritage with her observation of, and anger at, the political situation in Palestine, asking the reader to

please excuse my state of disappearance

. But the central line of the poem is the single word: heart.

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.

A Rock, a Tree, a Cloud

© Rimi Garbua, "Following the Home," Jaffa Photography Project.

In Carson McCullers' short story of that title, a young girl learns the practice of love: before she can have a pet, she has to bend her emotions and attention to "a rock, a tree, a cloud." In a sense, there is a cultural equivalent: by learning to love a novel, a photograph, a film, even a blog, the reader/viewer can be moved to embrace the detail and magnitude of a person or of a people.

What prompted this wave of humanist fervour? Three online discoveries: a blog, a manifesto and (best of all) a photography exhibition. First up, the Body on the Line blog by radical writer and activist Marcy Newman, which is not only eloquently written, impassioned, thoughtful and intensive, but has one of the most comprehensive Links sections I have ever come across, which led me to discover young Palestinian-American activists and writers like Remi Kanazi, who created Poetic Injustice and poet Suheir Hammad, as well as Mizna, a fantastic journal of Arab-American literature.

As for the manifesto, it could speak directly to and for the creative and political work done by Marci and many of the writers and artists on her links list. Written by cultural researcher/artist Brian Holmes, the Affectivist Manifesto is the culmination of the "Continental Drift" geopoetics seminar and loosely a response to the Yes Men's prankster issue of the New York Times. Responding to the way that art practices have changed, and wondering what it is art can do (and does do) in the face of globalisation and cultural imperialism, Holmes notes:

What we look for in art today is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence.

He discusses the scales of art and of aesthetic experience: from the "thin layer" of the global network, to shared local knowledge, down to

the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people embracing on a street corner or chatting in a sauna or a cafe. It would seem that intimacy, in our time, is weighted down, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks.

So I want to end with an event characterised by the "interplay of scales qualifying each other." Following the Home is an exhibition of photographs by six young women, from underprivileged Arab and Mizrahi Jewish communities in Jaffa, who participated in the Jaffa Photography Project developed and facilitated by Leila Segal, who has charted the process of the project on her blog The Other Side. The exhibition opened in Jaffa in May this year, and is currently on show at Rosie's Cafe in Brixton (which has delicious olive oil & almond cookies).

But back to the "interplay of scales": many of the photographs in the exhibition are intimate. They show the young photographers' families, their neighbourhoods, their friends, their houses. But they also speak of a political urgency that is immediate and intimate: there are photos of demonstrators being arrested, of political graffiti, of crumbling buildings: local, everyday details that register as intimate and local -- but also global. These moving photographs, each accompanied by a story, compress a great weight of feeling (as in Leila's post about Rimi's photographs) but they also expand outwards and outwards: through local politics of class in Jaffa, to national politics of oppression in Israel and Palestine, to the global crises of war and poverty.

The tiny details in these photographs speak out about global power, and about intimacy as a (the only? the most powerful?) resistance to it. In the love with which they are taken -- and often, the love in the eyes of those accepting the camera's gaze -- these photographs are profoundly affecting, as portraits, which unfold intimate landscapes, which in turn unfold intersecting stories, epic in scope, where what often passes us by as ticker-tape on the news channel is present and alive in every pixel of the image. They show a rock, a tree, a cloud, a grandmother, the whole world.
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Updated 1 December 2008:

You can read (and hear) more about the project and about Sama's visit to London on Leila's blog. I was privileged to hear Sama read some of her work and see the photographs -- and listen in on some of the conversations they inspired. Sama said that what had affected her most about the project was the opportunity not only to listen, and to speak out, but to be heard, to feel that people - even and especially people who didn't share her background - who was willing to listen to her stories.