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.

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing: Now In Business

Susannah Tarbush was at the BQFP's inaugural event in London for a salon with Ahdaf Soueif, in discussion with Peter Florence of the Hay Festival, at St Barnabas House at 1 Greek Street in the heart of literary London. If you missed the event, don't worry -- the next one will take place on 9 September, in Doha. Bloomsbury’s founder and chief executive Nigel Newton announced "the first BQFP Ramadan Iftar, featuring readings by local poets in Arabic and English” in the BQFP villa at the Qatar Foundation. For news and events, check out the BQFP website, where Arab authors can also submit a book proposal for the foundation's children's publishing program: contact the foundation on bqfp [at][ bloomsbury.com. They have just published their first book -- The Selfish Crocodile by Faustin Charles and Michael Terry -- in both Arabic and English (read more in Tarbush's blog), and theya re looking for further titles which will be launched and distributed in Qatar on World Book Day.

Palfest 09: Culture vs. Power

The Guardian reports today that armed Israeli police last night tried to halt the opening night of the Palestinian Festival of Literature, organised by Ahdaf Soueif, when they ordered a Palestinian theatre in East Jerusalem to close, claiming that the festival - which is funded by the British Council and UNESCO - had received funding from the Palestinian Authority.

Soueif writes on Palfest's author blog (referring to a famous phrase of Edward Said's):

Today, my friends, we saw the clearest example of our mission: to confront the culture of power with the power of culture.

Despite attempts to prevent the sharing and transmission of culture, Palfest is using all the communications tools at its disposal to reach out -- for videos, photos, blogs and other Palfest updates go here. Here's a video from the opening night:

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.

Great Arabic Love Stories

As part of The Guardian's 1000 Novels Everyone Must Read bonanza, Ahdaf Soueif has selected five Arabic novels as part of today's "Love" issue. Soueif's punchy pull-out section is brilliant, claiming that "you could argue that the first narrative to emerge from what has come to be called the Middle East was the first love story of all time: the story of Isis and Osiris" and providing a swift history of writing about love in Arabic: most of it is excluded from the Guardian's selection because "the art form of record for the Arabs has always been poetry, and Arabic love poetry runs in an unbroken tradition from the 7th century until this day." On the other hand, the "novel form entered Arabic in the early 20th century and, as with most western imports of the time, it took root first in Egypt and greater Syria (now Syria, Palestine and Lebanon) - then in the rest of the Arab world," becoming "the art form of choice for depictions and critiques of societal norms and explorations of the great questions of the age."

Romantic love, argues Soueif, resonates in the novels she has chosen as it reveals questions of tradition vs. modernity, gendered and generational conflictions, ethnicity and sexuality, concluding that "the Arab novel is concerned with love, but cannot see it or deal with it independently of society." Her selections bear this out:

Latifa al-Zayyat: al-Bab al-Maftouh (1960)
Naguib Mahfouz: Cairo trilogy (1956-57)
Colette Khoury: Ayyam Ma'ah (1959)
Enayat el-Zayyat: Al-Hubb w'al-Samt (1967)
Layla al-Juhani: Jahiliyya (2006)

Bearing out the confluence of romance and politics, Khoury -- whose breakthrough novel shocked Syrian society with its depiction of female sexuality, in a semi-autobiographical account of her affair with Nizar Qabbani -- was last week announced as Syria's first ambassador to Lebanon, having served for a year as President Assad's literary advisor.

Mahfouz aside, Soueif emphasises the achievements of Arab women writers in using love and the erotic as prisms through which to consider social and political questions, particularly as conceptions of love have direct impact on their lives and imaginative possibilities. The "Love" issue is rich with women writers from around the world; it will be interesting to see if this gender parity is maintained in future issues (including Science Fiction and Fantasy). And The Cairo Trilogy aside, only Al-Bab Al-Maftouh has been translated into English (published by AUC). Al-Zayyat's novel is so influential that it has spurred a "We Are All Laila," a collective blog by young Egyptian feminists still fighting the same battles to open doors that confronted Laila, Al-Zayyat's protagonist, in 1960.

Also striking is that, apart from Amin Maalouf's Samarkand, no Arabic novels make the grade in the wider selection. Will Woman at Point Zero be selected for the "Family & Self" issue? And what Arabic novels do you think the panel could have considered for inclusion in their top 1000?

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.

Best of the Year?

'Tis the season for best-of round-ups: the Literary Saloon have flagged up UK, US, French and German broadsheet lists, of which the most influential (in terms of sales, at least) is probably the New York Times' Holiday Books selection.

Which gave me pause. Remember that debate, earlier this year, about Horace Engdahl's comment that American literature was insular? Well, here are the books in translation on the NYT list, from established favourites Ma Jian, Victor Pelevin, and Roberto Bolaño: Beijing Coma; The Sacred Book of the Werewolf; 2666; Oh, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Good to see that international tensions, fervours, disasters and achievements can all be so neatly summed up by American authors, for the most part the usual suspects (Proulx, Roth, Updike). Non-fiction fares even worse, in a sense, when it comes to opening eyes to the greater world: there are books _about_, say the Middle East, like Robin Wright's Dreams and Shadows and Dexter Filkins' The Forever War , but everything on the list is by American and British writers.

The Guardian's list, which asks authors for their selections, fares little better; but Ahdaf Soueif flags up Raja Shehada's brilliant Palestinian Walks and Chimananda Ngozi Adichie cheers for Rawi Hage's IMPAC-winning De Niro's Game, which is also the only YA book to make the list.

But, they do also have a review of The Earth in the Attic, the first poetry collection from Fady Joudah, who won the Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation earlier this year, for his translation of The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's late work. Joudah is the first Arab-American to win the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets award (he was selected by Louise Glück in 2007), which has been running since 1919. In his review of The Earth, Charles Bainbridge writes that:

Joudah's poetry thrives on dramatic shifts in perspective, on continually challenging received notions.

This suggests the deep influence of Darwish's fluent imagination, and also an implicit manifesto for literature -- and for review pages -- in complex and interconnected times.

In other words, come on, NYT, time for a dramatic shift of perspective -- say, to contemplating books written in places other than New York -- in order to challenge received notions.

A Map of Love: Book Club and Author Event

The Guardian Book Club takes on Ahdaf Soueif's wonderful, award-winning novel over the next four weeks, with essay one, on languages in the novel, appearing today. The Book Club's chair, John Mullan, will host an event with Soueif on November 25th at the Guardian Newsroom in London: tickets available from book [dot] club [at] guardian [dot] co [dot] uk, or on 020 7886 9281.

The PEN Atlas is looking to start an online book club -- nominate your choice of titles here!