Literature Without Borders

A few news items on the free movement and translation of literature across borders:

Iraqi novelist Fadhil al-Azzawi's novel The Last of the Angels is published has been translation by The Free Press [US], and the first review is out in the Quarterly Conversation.

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Knesset Member Yuli Tamir has proposed a draft bill that would challenge the Israeli embargo on books published in Syria or Lebanon, making books in Arabic more available in Israel. Yuval Azoulay's article in Ha'aretz looks at the challenges facing readers coming through Israeli customs or looking to obtain books in Israel, with an update on the campaign against the embargo launched by Adalah, as the Atlas reported in February.

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Emirati newspaper The National offers a global overview of its summer reading recommendations with a nifty hotspotted map. Recs include Rawi Hage's De Niro's Game and Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis. Chad at Three Percent suggests turning this format into a social networking app like Cities I've Visited on Facebook...

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And Three Percent also put up this short video of the Big Think's interview with Alane Salierno Mason, founder of the brilliant Words Without Borders, discussing literature in translation. In other videos (the Big Think seems to work on one idea per short film), Alane discusses the continuing fortunes of publishers of translation, the guiding impulse for WWB and her thoughts on the power of Oprah.

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:

Reading Arabic in Israel...

as difficult as reading Lolita in Tehran, as this blogpost from the LA Times' Babylon and Beyond series reveals. It follows up the story of Arabic-language Israeli bookstore Kull Shay, which had its permit to import books withdrawn. Saleh Abbasi, the bookstore's founder and manager, had been ordering his books from Egypt and Jordan, countries with agreements with Israel (and still having to submit his lists to the Israeli censors) -- but because many of the books that he orders, from contemporary Arabic novels to Arabic translations of English-language classics and blockbusters (Harry Potter as the inevitable example), are published in Syria or Lebanon, the Israeli government censured him under the 1939 Trade with the Enemy Ordinance, which Babylon and Beyond's Batsheva Solomon calls "one of several legal anachronisms inherited from the British Mandate in Palestine and still in use."

Mr. Abbasi petitioned the Supreme Court on 28 January 2009 with the support of Adalah, the Legal Centre for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Their petition points out that the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor - who issued the import ban on Kull Shay in August 2008 - have not previously interfered with the bookstore, which has been running since 1974. The bookstore supplies universities and businesses with Arabic dictionaries and technical books, as well as supplying more literary texts to individuals and institutions, and as such plays a key role in business communication in Israel. Furthermore, as (according to the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network) Adalah point out:

the ban violates the rights of all Arabic speakers and readers, and students of Arabic and Middle East studies to freedom of information, culture, education and academic freedom. These rights are constitutional rights. The violation of these rights is a characteristic of anti-democratic regimes, the petition contended.

According to Solomon, "the authorities relented and issued another temporary permit that may be extended at the end of the year," allowing Mr. Abbasi to order books during book fair season -- but it's been issued under the Trade with the Enemy Act.

According to Solomon,

Adalah is now pressing for the import be continued under regular trade agreements. "All informational and cultural materials should be exempt from the Trade with the Enemy Ordinance entirely," says Haneen Naamnih, a legal intern at Adalah.

This seems particularly pressing, as the Literary Saloon picks up, given that there are no Israeli presses translating Hebrew authors such as Amos Oz into Arabic.

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.

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.

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.