film of 'yacoubian building' at ica in london

When I came out of the press screening of the Egyptian film “The Yacoubian Building” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in central London last Wednesday afternoon, I felt momentarily disoriented. The long feature film, running for nearly three hours, had taken me so powerfully into Cairo and the lives of its characters that for a time it seemed more real than the traffic-congested streets around Trafalgar Square. The interlocking dramas of the vivid personalities played by riveting actors including Adel Imam, Hend Sabri, Yusra and Nour El Sherif, replayed in my mind on the bus ride home.

The title of the novel and film of “The Yacoubian Building” comes from a 1930s apartment block in Cairo within which the lives of characters intersect in multiple narratives, which tackle some highly sensitive subjects. On the roof of the building are small rooms where poor families live. The block represents a microcosm of Egypt in around 1995. The sweeping cinematography encompasses the vast city with its teeming life, and also focuses on the intimacies of life within apartments.

“The Yacoubian Building” might be over-melodramatic in places, and the volume of the soaring music score by Khalid Hammad occasionally too insistent, but it is a major cinematic achievement. And yet it is only the second film to be directed by Marwan Hamed, who was 27 at the time. (His first film, a short, was based on the novel “Lily”.)

The film’s budget of more than 20 million Egyptian pounds (around 3.5 million US dollars) was the biggest of any Egyptian film to date. The film’s production company, Good News Group, assembled the largest cast of stars to appear in one Egyptian film. The script was adapted by veteran scriptwriter Waheed Hamed, Marwan’s father, from Cairo dentist Alaa Al-Aswany’s 2002 novel.

The press screening was part of the build-up to the launch of the film in Britain. The ICA is holding a special preview on August 29 as the prelude to a season of the film to be held in its arthouse cinema from September 14. The film will also be screened in a number of other British cities. At the same time a new paperback English edition of the novel is being published in the UK by Harper Collins, under the Harper Perennial imprint.

The film caused an outcry when it opened in Egypt last year, with 112 MPs calling for scenes to be cut, especially those involving gay newspaper editor Hatem Rashid (Khaled El Sawy). Some newspapers too decried the negative image of Egypt the film supposedly gave. But Culture minister Farouk Hosni rejected the calls for censorship.

In Al-Ahram Weekly, columnist Salama A Salama commented: “Our society is much more mature than some assume. We are mature enough to decide what we want to watch without having to be told...Those who lashed out at the movie made it sound as if the film was degenerate or pornographic, which it wasn’t.” The film broke box office records in Egypt.


The challenges in making the film arose not only from its highly sensitive subject matter. There were also technical feats to be achieved in for example filming a large university demonstration pitting security forces with batons and shields against Islamist demonstrators. One of the film’s most disturbing scenes shows the torture of demonstrator Taha El Shazly (Mohamed Imam). Bloodied from his beatings he is suspended in the air at the police station. His police interrogator then orders a degrading sexual assault on him that leaves Taha determined to seek revenge. As news reports have frequently shown, torture is a not infrequent occurrence in Egypt.

The film highlights the pressures on women. Corrupt businessman Haj Azzam (played by Nour El-Sherif) consults a sheikh when his middle-aged wife is no longer interested in satisfying his conjugal needs. The sheikh encourages him to find a second wife. He proposes marriage to young widow Soad (Somaya El Khashab) from Alexandria. His conditions are harsh. She must leave her small son behind with her relatives, must keep the marriage secret, and must not expect to have another child. When she tells Azzam she has become pregnant he is furious, and in an episode of great cruelty the fetus is forcibly aborted.


Buthayna, played by Tunisian actress Hend Sabry, is Taha’s fiancée and breadwinner for an impoverished family headed by her mother. She has left her job because the boss sexually pressured her, only to find that in her new job in a clothes shop the owner regularly retreats to the storeroom to physically exploit his female employees.

Taha is an academically bright student who wants to enter the police academy, but at his interview he is turned away when he admits his father’s lowly profession as a janitor. At university he is alienated from the spoilt rich fellow students. He falls under the spell of an Islamist student and a sheikh, and finds new meaning in life. After his torture and sexual assault in the police station he trains at a camp for Islamic militants. In a bloody bullet-ridden scene towards the end of the film he assassinates the policeman who had overseen his torture, and is then killed himself.

Taha’s increasing radicalization causes a breach between him and his unveiled fiancée. During his militant training, he undergoes a marriage ceremony with a young woman chosen for him by his leaders.

The central figure in the film, and in the end its warm heart, is Zaki El Dessouki played by Adel Imam, the 65-year-old son of an ex-pacha. Zaki lives with his sister Dawlat (Isaad Younis), but she throws him out after a young bar girl with whom he has had an assignation steals items including Dawlat’s ring. He is forced to live in the apartment he has been using as an office.

Zaki remembers Haj Azzam when he was only a shoeshine boy. Now he owns a string of shops and car dealerships. It emerges that his fortune has been built on drug dealing. Azzam has political ambitions, and is helped to get elected to the People’s Assembly by a corrupt minister, Kamal El Fouly (Khaled Saleh), who says he has important people behind him. El Fouly demands a large bribe and then blackmails Azzam over his drug dealing to demand a major stake in one of his agencies.

Zaki ‘s servant, Fanous (Ahmed Rateb) plots with his tailor brother Malak (Ahmad Bedeir) to cheat Zaki out of his apartment. They persuade Buthayna to go to work as his secretary, and tell her to get him drunk and then to make him sign a document passing his apartment to the two brothers after his death. Dawlat is complicit in the plot, and arranges for her brother to be caught red-handed with Bothayna.

This scheme falls through when a genuine love grows between Zaki and Buthayna. He is unlike other men in treating her with understanding, respect and charm. There is a happy ending to the film in the marriage of this unlikely couple.


Director Marwan Hamad had been apprehensive about the portrayal of Hatem Rashid, the editor of a French newspaper. A resident of the Yacoubian, he is the son of an aristocratic family and a French mother. In a flashback we learn that his homosexuality was caused by his having been abused by a servant as a child.

Some of the most painful scenes in the film involve Hatem’s pursuing of a naïve, handsome soldier Abd Raboh (Bassem Samra), a migrant from Upper Egypt. Adb Raboh is tormented by his sense of shame and of going against his religion when he succumbs to Hatem. In order to keep Abd Raboh in Cairo, Hatem rents a room for him on the roof so he can bring his wife and young son from Upper Egypt. When the son dies Abd Raboh is filled with remorse and leaves with his wife for home. When Hatem subsequently picks up a young man and takes him home, the man robs and murders him.

Marwan Hamad says: “Khaled El Sawy is the most daring actor I have ever seen. He has agreed to perform a very difficult personality and he has performed it with great intelligence and with a high degree of reality. The same applies to Bassem Samra.”
Susannah Tarbush
(original of the article published in Saudi Gazette on August 9 2007)

banipal highlights saudi novelist al-mohaimeed

The latest issue of Banipal, the London-based magazine of Modern Arab Literature, reflects the growing international profile of Saudi novelist Yousef Al-Mohaimeed [pictured left]. The magazine’s fiction section includes three chapters from the English translation of his novel “The Bottle”. And the ‘Books in Brief’ section contains news of the publication of the English version of his novel “Wolves of the Crescent Moon” by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press.

“Wolves of the Crescent Moon” was first published in Arabic in 2003 by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Beirut, under the title “Fikhakh al-Rai’ihah”, meaning “Traps of Scent”. The AUC Press English edition is for the Middle East; internationally, the novel is to be published by Penguin in December. The latest Penguin catalogue has praise for the book from the acclaimed Lebanese novelist Hanan Al-Shaykh, who describes it as “a remarkable, rhythmic, genuine novel throbbing with sensuality and moral courage.” Two months ago a French translation, “Loin de cet Enfer”, was published in France by Acts Sud.

The Arabic original of “The Bottle” was published by the Arabic Culture Center Beirut/Dar Al-Baida in 2004. The English manuscript is with Al-Mohaimeed’s literary agent Thomas Colchie, and seems to have a good chance of being published in the US or Britain. The novel has also been translated into Russian.

“Wolves of the Crescent Moon” and “The Bottle” were translated into English by Anthony Calderbank, the noted scholar and translator of Arabic who lived and taught in Cairo for a number of years and now works for the British Council in Saudi Arabia. Two chapters from the translation of “Wolves of the Crescent Moon” appeared in Banipal’s Summer 2004 issue as part of a special feature, ‘The Novel in Saudi Arabia’. An essay by Saudi literary critic and fiction writer Ali Zalah in that special feature named Al-Mohaimeed as one of the most prominent of those contemporary Saudi novelists whose work portrays the major economic and social changes in Saudi society.

In “The Bottle”, Al-Mohaimeed shows a striking degree of empathy with women and sensitivity to the difficulties they face. His central character is a woman, Munira Al-Sahi. The extract published in Banipal opens in Riyadh in February 1991, soon after Operation Desert Storm. Military vehicles and troop carriers still patrol the streets at night. There is a description of Riyadh, with its different nationalities, coming to life on a cold morning. Munira, an unmarried woman in her early thirties, has spent a sleepless and tearful night after the discovery of her lover’s deception.

“Why had he deceived her so much, let the pretence go on for all these months? How had he managed to work his way into her life with his false name and his made-up job, and character and family and friends; a whole sinister world of deception?” Her father is particularly afflicted by the disaster. “The commander of the Mother of all Battles in Baghdad could not have felt more defeated and shamed as his armies withdrew from Kuwait than Hamad Al-Sahi had felt the previous night when the treachery of his favourite daughter’s fiancé was finally revealed.”

The city is full of Munira’s memories of her fiancé and the places where they would snatch time together. Her oppressive brother, who had spent time in Afghanistan, has forced her to give up her job as a journalist, and insists on escorting her to and from her work at the Young Women’s Remand Centre. Munira’s only comfort is writing on pieces of paper, rolling them up and putting them into an old bottle decorated with faded Indian designs in silver.

The narrative then travels back to Munira’s childhood, when her grandmother would reward Munira and her sisters with presents when they told sad stories. The grandmother gave Munira the bottle, which had colored sweets in it, and told her to keep it. Munira fills the bottle with her secrets and tells it all her troubles. Al-Mohaimeed has a rich, poetic narrative style and the extract from “The Bottle leaves the reader wanting to know more of the mysteries that lie within the bottle.

In addition to the extract from “The Bottle”, the latest issue of Banipal showcases exciting examples of Arab literature from across the Arab world and beyond. Lebanon is represented through an extract from a novel by Lebanese writer Hassan Daoud, “Year of the Revolutionary New Bread-making Machine”, translated by the US-based fiction writer and translator Randa Jarrar and to be published shortly by Telegram Books of London. Banipal also features the English translation, by Max Weiss, of the novel “Tahleel Dumm” (“Blood Test”) by the Lebanese poet Abbas Beydoun, who is cultural editor of As-Safir newspaper.

There is a special feature on the Iraqi novelist Ghaib Tu’ma Farman who was born in Baghdad in 1920 and died in Moscow in 1990. As well as an appreciation of Farman by Iraqi Professor Salih J Altoma, of Indiana University, the special feature includes two chapters from probably the best-known of Farman’s eight novels, “Five Voices”, translated by Issa J Boullata. There is also an extract from Farman’s novella “Mr Ma’ruf’s Woes” translated by William M Hutchins.

Another Iraqi novelist with work in the new issue of Banipal is Duna Ghali, who was born in Iraq in 1963 and lives in Denmark. The extract from her novel “’Indama Tastayqudh al-Ra’iha” (“When the Scent Awakens”) is translated by William M Hutchins.

Banipal’s book publishing arm will in October publish the English translation of the novel “Al-‘Ateeli” (“The Cripple”) by the painter, political cartoonist and author Nabil Abu Hamad who was born in Palestine, grew up in Lebanon and lives in London. The current issue of Banipal carries an extract from the novel, translated by Suhail Shehade, which is set among Palestinians who fled Haifa for Lebanon in 1948.

The “literary influences” section of the magazine is contributed by the Palestinian writer, literary critic and translator Issa J Boullata who grew up in Jerusalem. As well as providing a lively account of his childhood reading, he gives a portrait of the Palestinian educator, scholar and poet Khalil Sakakini. Sakakini inspired Boullata to become the teacher and educator he would be for 56 years, in Palestine, in the USA and then at McGill University, Montreal.

Another in-depth encounter with a writer is the perceptive interview with the Moroccan writer poet and literary critic, Mohammed Bennis carried out by Camilo Gomez-Rivas, who is writing a doctoral thesis at Yale University on Islamic law and society in the Maghreb. The interview is supplemented by Gomez-Rivas’s translations of poems by Bennis.

Bennis is one of several poets included in the latest issue of Banipal. From America, there are poems from Iraqi-born Sargon Boulus and the distinguished woman poet D H Melhem , born in Brooklyn to Lebanese immigrants. There is Iraqi poet, translator and filmmaker Sinan Antoon’s haunting poem about Baghdad, “Necropolis”, and poems from Iraqi Salah al-Hamdani, and Syrian Amira Abul Husn.

In addition, Banipal carries reviews of a number of novels. Mona Zaki reviews Hamdi Abu Golayyel’s novel “Thieves in Retirement” (Syracuse Univerity Press, translated by Marilyn Booth) set within a building in a newish Cairo neighborhood. Peter Clark considers Jordanian writer Fadia Faqir’s third novel “My Name is Salma” (published in the UK by Doubleday and in the US by Grove Atlantic under the title “The Cry of the Dove”) to be “easily her best”.

Judith Kazantzis reviews “I’jaam – An Iraqi Rhapsody” (published by City Lights) by Sinan Antoon.
Kazantzis writes: “The jerking contrasts between past ‘normality’ and the gathering nightmares of the isolation cell are done with such conviction that I’jaam reads as a miniature of Iraqi suffering from the Baathists to Bush.”

Tarek el-Ariss of New York University praises “The Illusion of Return” by the London-based Palestinian writer Samir el-Youssef as a “fascinating look at the generation of the 1970s and 1980s in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, capturing the ideological mood of the time and exposing its corresponding psychological framework.”

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 30 July 2007

imran ahmad's book 'unimagined'

The cover of Imran Ahmad’s book “Unimagined: A Muslim Boy Meets the West” shows a toddler with a curiously adult face dressed in a suit, white shirt and tie. This is Ahmad in the early 1960s competing in the Karachi ‘Bonnie Baby’ contest.

Ahmed sets the humorous tone of his memoir, published in London by Aurum Press, from the start. “Smartly dressed, suave and handsome, I looked like James Bond, although I was too young to have seen either of his movies,” he writes. “I was also somewhat unsteady on my feet. People were particularly impressed by my light skin.” But he came second when the first prize went to the child of the organiser. “The judges were her friends. This is absolutely typical of third-world, banana republic unfairness. In the West, the organiser’s child would not be allowed to enter the contest. I was denied the title of ‘Karachi’s Bonniest Baby’ by blatant nepotism. I began my lifelong struggle against corruption and injustice.”

Ahmad’s memoir covers the first 25 years of his life, although it adds a brief epilogue set in 1999-2000 when he is 37. The book gives a refreshing insight into the texture of life for a bright Pakistani boy who was two years old when his parents emigrated to Britain in 1964.

The memoir is written as a series of vignettes written in the present tense, which gives a sense of immediacy. Although Ahmad is a highly intelligent, bookish boy he is sometimes naïve and finds it hard to decipher codes of behavior. He does not always realize the significance of what he describes, which is amusingly evident to the reader

Relations with the opposite sex are a constant source of puzzlement. From the age of nine, Ahmad feels he has a special connection with certain girls. At Stirling University, Scotland, he falls for fellow student Janice and is convinced for years he will eventually marry her, despite all the evidence to the contrary. His obsessive attentions can make females uncomfortable. And yet he underestimates his ability to forge genuine friendships with them.

Ahmad has a rich fantasy life. At school he dreams of being James Bond or his other fictional hero Simon Templar, the Saint. In the epilogue he returns to London to work for General Electric, for which he has worked for five years in America. As always, one of his priorities is to buy a car, and he manages to find a third-hand Jaguar XJS, the model favored by Simon Templar. His life is punctuated by the various cars he owns, including in his student days the battered old VW Beetle that takes him and his best friend at Stirling on many trips to the lochs, forests and mountains of Scotland.

Racism often rears its ugly head in “Unimagined”. When Ahmad’s parents arrive in England, they find to their dismay that they will not be able to get jobs as professionals, but are expected to be lower-class manual workers. They first rent an unfurnished house in the northern English city of Manchester and buy furniture with the precious money they have brought with them. But after three weeks a lawyer’s letter arrives. It turns out that the family’s landlady was herself a tenant, and was not authorized to rent out the house. The true owners of the house have found it is being rented to Pakistanis and wants them out. The family leave the house, abandoning the furniture they had bought.

The family then lives in a succession of bed-sits, with bathroom and kitchen shared with other tenants. Signs advertising rooms for rent often said “No Irish or Coloureds.” When Ahmad is five, his mother is “highly stressed by the misery, humiliation and poverty of life in England (not to mention the cold and the rain), and is possibly having a nervous breakdown.” She considers moving the family back to Pakistan permanently. But they stay and make a go of life in Britain. Ahmad becomes the first in his school whose family has a VCR recorder, so that his father can watch Indian films, and he is very proud when his father buys a Mercedes car.

As a teenager, “racism takes me by surprise sometimes. Living in an affluent suburb, going to a posh school, sometimes it’s easy to think that it has gone away forever, that I am now immune, but occasionally its malice disturbs the tranquility, the calm optimism of life.”

At the age of 12 there are a “few racist lowlife” in his school who are racially abusive and bullying towards him for being a “Paki”, the only one in the school at that time. Their racism is fuelled by talk in the media and gutter press about immigrants who come to Britain to take people’s jobs, or get unemployment benefits, or both. “The funny thing is, I can understand their point of view. From their perspective why wouldn’t they resent immigrants? They even have their own political party, the National Front, whose key policy is that all coloured immigrants should be repatriated, sent back home”. Ahmad is very concerned about the possibility of having to live in Pakistan.

Before she won the 1979 general election, Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher warned of people being “rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture.” Yet the young Ahmad thought it would be amazing if Mrs Thatcher became Britain’s first female prime minister, because “women are more compassionate and peace- loving than men.”

Ahmad’s own story is interwoven with the international events of the time. When he is eight years old, he is very aware of the 1971 India-Pakistan war, which reverberates through the Indian and Pakistani communities in Britain. His parents had previously been friendly with a couple from East Pakistan, but after the war they never speak to them again.

When the Falklands War breaks out in 1982, Ahmad’s Britishness is put under severe strain especially after the Argentine ship the General Belgrano is sunk by the Royal Navy with the death of hundreds of Argentine sailors. Ahmad asks himself whether he should cave in and jeer at the deaths of ‘Argies’ to show how British he is, or whether he should express disquiet at the loss of ‘enemy’ human life and thus show himself to be a foreigner after all, not really committed to Britain.

At school and university, Ahmad is the focus of attention and sometimes Islamophobia from assertive evangelical fundamentalist Christians. At Stirling one fellow student is particularly persistent, and Ahmad finds much later that he had “been on an American course in converting Muslims and has selected me as his field project.” Ahmad becomes very wary of evangelical or “American style” Christians, and prefers what he calls lukewarm or “British-style” Christians. He spends much time at university discussing religious matters with Muslims and others he encounters.

Ahmad does not complete his Chemistry PhD at Stirling because he has lost interest in the subject, and dreams of being out in the world and doing something. He succeeds in winning a place on the Unilever Companies Management Development Scheme. But although he is proud of being awarded a place, he does not feel completely at ease with the crowd he works with. He is very uncomfortable with the alcohol, cigarettes and lewd jokes culture of his colleagues and dislikes having to socialize with people he has been working with all week, when he would prefer to relax at home. Even after spending almost all his life in Britain, Ahmad is still in his mid-20s negotiating a path so as to reconcile his faith and value system with societal norms and peer expectations.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, July 23 2007

monica arac de nyeko wins the caine prize

African literature is on something of a roll these days. When the Ugandan writer Monica Arac de Nyeko was awarded the $20,000 Caine Prize for African Writing a week ago at a celebratory dinner in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, this was the third occasion within a few weeks on which a major literary award had been made in Britain to an African writer. On June 28, also at a ceremony in Oxford, the 76-year-old Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe had been awarded the £60,000 Man Booker International Prize. Earlier that month a Nigerian novelist from the younger generation, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (30), had won the £30,000 women-only Orange Broadband Prize for her novel “Half of a Yellow Sun”.

In his speech at the Caine dinner, the chairman of the judges, Sudanese novelist Jamal Mahjoub, said: “The writing that is coming out of Africa today is hugely interesting. It is coming into a new age, a new phase, with some very young writers who are writing in different ways, and tackling subjects in ways that haven’t been done before perhaps, and reaching a wider audience.”
Twenty-eight-year-old Arac de Nyeko is the first Ugandan to win the Caine Prize, now in its eighth year. In her acceptance speech she said: “It is a very exciting time for Ugandan fiction.” The prize, set up in memory of businessman Sir Michael Caine, is awarded for the best published short story by an African writer. Arac de Nyeko’s winning story, “Jambula Tree”, was published in “African Love Stories”, an anthology of stories by African women edited by Ghanaian author Ama Ata Aidoo and published by Ayebia Clarke Publishing.
Mahjoub described “Jambula Tree” as “a witty, mischievous story about a love between two people and the effects of this relationship on the community in which they live. It’s got a very lively, very mischievous tone, it’s funny, and it doesn’t follow a straight-through narrative line but weaves around, bringing you slowly into the center of the narrator’s thoughts.”

The shortlist included three Nigerian writers: Uwem Akpan for the story “My Parents’ Bedroom”, E C Osondu for “Jimmy Carter’s Eyes” and Ada Udechukwu for “The Night Bus.” Also shortlisted was South African Henrietta Rose-Innes, recent winner of the SA PEN Literary Award, for “Bad Places”. In addition, the judges highly commended Kenyan Billy Kahora’s story “Treadmill Love”.

“Jambula Tree” revolves around two girls who have been close friends throughout childhood, their fascination with each other as they enter adolescence, and the shame that follows discovery. The story is told in the first person by one of the girls and is addressed to her friend, who is about to return from a long exile in London. The story is set in Kampala’s Nakawa Housing Estates, where Arac de Nyeko grew up. It has an intimacy and richness of texture and is full of vitality and acute observation of character. In an interview with Saudi Gazette, Arac de Nyeko said: “It is a story about love, very innocent, very pure. You may think it’s sad, but I think it comes out in the end like a triumph; in the way she narrates it you get a sense that it’s OK.”

From this year, the Caine Prize winner receives not only the cash prize, but is also granted a month’s writer-in-residence period at Georgetown University, Washington DC, with all expenses paid. The chairman of the Caine Prize Council Jonathan Taylor said: “This will bring an important US-North American dimension to the Caine prize”. Arac de Nyeko thinks the residency is “a great thing”, and will give her additional time for writing.

Arac de Nyeko is an Acoli, originally from the Kitgum district of northern Uganda. The region has been torn apart by conflict since 1986, and thousands of children have been abducted, abused and forced to become soldiers. Although Arac de Nyeko spent much of her childhood in Kampala, she attended Gulu High School in the north for several years. She remembers gunshots ringing out and children having to run for safety.

Arac de Nyeko’s experiences of northern Uganda have had a profound effect on her writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Some of her fiction is located in the north, including her short story “Strange Fruit” which was shortlisted for the Caine Prize in 2004. All her writing has a marked sensitivity, warmth and humanity. At the same time her concern for those, especially children, affected by war and other hazards has led her to work in the humanitarian and developmental field.

After obtaining a degree in Education from Makerere University, Arac de Nyeko taught literature and English language at a boys’ school, St Mary’s College, Kisubi (SMACK), for two years. She then completed an MA in Humanitarian Assistance at Groningen University in the Netherlands, and now works in development for an international organization in the Kenyan capital Nairobi.

Arac de Nyeko’s winning of the Caine Prize is an indication of the growing literary presence of Ugandan woman. “We are writing: we are not silent anymore,” she says. Among the Ugandan women to have won international literary prizes in recent times are Doreen Baingana (twice shortlisted for the Caine Prize), Glaydah Namukasa and Jackee B Batanda.

Arac de Nyeko says there had been a “missing gap” in Ugandan fiction, and particularly women’s fiction, because of “the very difficult time in Uganda’s history when art became very secondary.” At the height of conflict “archives were destroyed and, for example during the Amin era, artists were deliberately targeted.”

As she puts it: “We haven’t quite captured our history; the story has not all been told, there are still so many stories, so many viewpoints, so many discussions, so many emotions, that have to be captured in fiction.”

Arac de Nyeko has won considerable acclaim for her writing. Her first published work was a poem in a Berlin poetry anthology, and her writing has appeared in a number of anthologies, periodicals and magazines;. She won first prize in the Women’s World Voices in War Zones competition with the 2003 personal essay “In the Stars”. Her first internationally published short story, “October Sunrise”, was part of the 2003 anthology “Memories of Sun: Stories of Africa and America” edited by Jane Kurtz. Arac de Nyeko was chosen for the British Council writers’ scheme Crossing Borders which, in collaboration with Lancaster University, has linked writers in Africa with UK counterparts.

Arac de Nyeko read voraciously as a child, and says she began writing “very informally”, starting with a mystery story. She praises FEMRITE (Uganda Women Writers Association), founded in 1996, for its role in developing women’s writing. The association holds weekly Monday sessions at which those present critique one another’s writing. The identity of the writer of a piece of work is kept anonymous until the end of the session. The work of some who have gone on to become successful writers has been “torn apart” during these sessions. Arac de Nyeko is in favor of such frank criticism, and thinks it is more useful to writers than merely “patting them on the back and saying ‘what you’ve written is splendid’.”

More stories by Arac de Nyeko are in the pipeline. A story is to appear in “Dreams, Miracles and jazz”, an anthology of new African writing edited by a former Caine Prize winner, Nigerian Helon Habila, and the literary activist of Sierra Leonean descent Kadija Sesay. The anthology is published this year by Picador Africa. She also has a story in the anthology “City Link and Other Stories”.

Arac de Nyeko’s skills in building narrative and creating characters, and her arresting use of language and her breadth of vision, suggest she has the makings of a great novelist. She is frequently asked when she is going to write a novel, and is currently working on a piece that is longer than her stories. But beyond confirming that the new work is set in Uganda, she declines to give details at this stage.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette July 16 2007

sarah maguire's 'the pomegranates of kandahar'

Guests at the launch of British poet Sarah Maguire’s latest collection “The Pomegranates of Kandahar”, at Daunt’s Books, West London, were treated to a bilingual reading of the title poem by Maguire and the renowned Iraqi poet Saadi Yousef. Saadi read his own Arabic translation of the poem, which appears in his collection of translations of Maguire’s poems published in Damascus. The title of the Arabic collection is “Haleeb Muraq”, the title of one of Maguire’s best known poems, “Spilt Milk”. Maguire is said to be the only living English-language poet with a book in print in Arabic.

One of those attending the launch said that 73-year-old Saadi’s moving reading of the poem in Arabic made him think not only of Afghanistan but also of the bloodshed in Saadi’s native country. This is just one example of Maguire’s ability as a poet to cross national boundaries and address questions of universal concern.

The powerful title poem moves between the famed pomegranates of Kandahar and the deadly legacy of landmines in Afghanistan. The collection’s cover illustration is of a cluster not of fruit but of landmines, and of a pair of vulnerable bare feet. The picture is a reminder of the many Afghans, especially children, who have been injured by land mines. The poem ends by telling the reader to open a pomegranate with a knife and tease each “jellied cell” from its white fur of membrane “till a city explodes in your mouth / Harvest of goodness, / harvest of blood.”

Maguire has dedicated the new collection, published by Chatto & Windus, to Saadi Yousef who has lived in exile from Iraq since 1979 and has resided in London since the late 1990s. Maguire has written that he is “widely acknowledged as having had the deepest impact on poets now writing in Arabic today.” He is the most significant translator of poetry into Arabic, and his translations “have transformed the way in which poetry is written.”

Maguire is one of the most highly-regarded poets writing in English today. In recognition of the high caliber of “The Pomegranates of Kandahar”, the Poetry Book Society has chosen the volume as its Summer 2007 choice. As the poems in the collection confirm, Maguire is truly a poet of our times, in language that is at once precise and charged with mystery.

Maguire’s concerns range across the world, particularly the Middle East. She was the first writer sent by the British Council to Palestine (in 1996) and Yemen (1998). She has taken a particular interest in the work of Palestinian poets, working on translations of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, Zakariya Mohammed and Ghassan Zaqtan.

In 2004 Maguire founded, and became director of, the Poetry Translation Centre at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. The centre’s collaborations between British poets and linguists have resulted in top-quality translations of work by poets from countries including Sudan, Somaliland, Mexico, India, South Korea and Peru.

Maguire has also jointly translated with the Afghan Yama Yari the novel “A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear” by Afghan writer Atiq Rahimi. The poem “Almost the Equinox” in her new collection is dedicated to Yama. In it she writes of sharing a walk in London with an Afghan friend. The “huge nave” of St Paul’s cathedral reminds her companion of the Great Mosque in Kabul, “sunlight falling on pillars of stone, the hushed intentness / of prayer. Shattered, war-torn, it’s still standing, /somehow, next to the river by the Bridge of Bricks, /just as Wren’s great dome once soared above the Blitz, / intact.” The poem’s lines “the constant pull of elsewhere / mooring us outside ourselves” have echoes elsewhere in the collection.

Maguire wrote “From Dublin to Ramallah” for Ghassan Zaqtan, at a time when the situation in the West Bank prevented him from travelling from Ramallah to Dublin for a poetry event. The defiant poem plays with images of water, which knows no boundaries. “And instead of a postcard, I post you a poem of water. / Subterranean subterfuge, / an indolent element that slides across borders, / as boundaries are eroded by the fluency of tongues.”

The plight of migrants caught up in the international tides of human traffic is the subject of “Passages”, which was shortlisted in the best single poem category of the Forward prize in 2005. The stimulus for the poem was a news report of a stowaway falling to his death from an aircraft which was coming in to land at Heathrow.

In the poem“Europe”, young men on the coast of Tangier at night, lured by the prospects in Europe, “climb these crumbling ramparts // and face north / like true believers, while the lighthouse of Tarifa blinks // and beckons, / unrolling its brilliant pavement across the pitiless Straits.”

Maguire’s poetry is deeply informed by her passion for, and expertise in, plants and gardening. Born in West London, Maguire trained as a gardener after leaving school, before going to university and later becoming a poet and broadcaster. She has been Poet in Residence at Chelsea Physic Garden in London, and at Hungercombe Place Young Offenders’ Institution.

Maguire’s first collection “Spilt Milk”, published in 1991, was followed by “The Invisible Mender” in 1997. Her 2001 collection “The Florist’s at Midnight” comprises poems about flowers and gardens. She has edited two plant-related anthologies: “A Green Thought in a Green Shade: Poetry in the Garden” (2000) and “Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse” (2001).

Some of the poems in “The Pomegranates of Kandahar” are directly related to botany, and imagery from the plant world is threaded throughout her work. “The Grass Church at Dilston Grove” was inspired by the work of two artists who sowed grass seeds all over the walls of a deconsecrated church. “Glaucium flavum” focuses on the adaptation of the yellow horned-poppy to the harsh saline environment of the coast near Sizewell nuclear power station.

Throughout her career as a poet Maguire has written compelling love poetry, and there are several memorable examples in her new collection, which portray the difficulties of love in these times of dislocation, separation and unease. The lover seizes moments of intense joy amidst periods of waiting and yearning, and the poems have an elegiac tenderness. “Vigil” begins: “Late June, the night air stitched with the scent of lime-blossoms./When you left, these trees were bare.” Later, the poet writes: “I measure out the cloth to sew a new cover for our bed:/ the warp and weft of fabric, its journeys, the places we will meet.” In “A Bowl of Transvaal Daisies”, the wilting over time of a bunch of these flowers, also known as gerberas, parallels the painful decline of a love affair.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette July 2 2007

reem kelani and houria niati sing at leighton house

It is difficult to think of a more fitting venue for a festival of Muslim Cultures in London than Leighton House Museum near Holland Park in the west of the city. Leighton House was designed by the architect George Aitchison in the 19th century for one of the greatest-ever British lovers of Arab visual arts - the painter Frederic, Lord Leighton (1839-1896). The building is especially famed for the exquisitely-decorated Arab Hall (pictured) with its domed ceiling, marble-clad walls, mosaic floor, columns, fountain and more than 1,000 decorative tiles, most of them brought from Damascus.

The one-month festival was held at Leighton House throughout June. It started with a full-day conference on the theme Islam Today: Rich Past, Progressive Future. The topics included Islamic Art and Architecture; Science, Philosophy and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition; Educating for Inclusive Citizenship, and Islam Today. Among the speakers were Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Dr Nader El-Bizri, Dr Dina Kiwan and Professor Mona Siddiqui. Another major event during the festival was an afternoon on Iraqi Art Today addressed by two leading Iraqi artists, Baghdad-based Hana Mal Allah and Rashad Salim who lives in London.

For those with an interest in Arab music, the Afternoon of Middle Eastern Music was a particularly memorable part of the festival. The afternoon featured two London-based women singers from different parts of the Arab world. Houria Niati was born in Algeria, while Palestinian Reem Kelani was born in Manchester, England, to a mother from Nazareth and a father from the village of Ya’bad near Jenin, and grew up in Kuwait.

The singers performed in the first floor music room which has a gilt dome over the performance stage. The room is an intimate space that was Leighton’s studio, and where he held his famed musical evenings. The terracotta-colored walls are hung with paintings by Leighton himself and by contemporaries from his artistic circle which included Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, George Frederick Watts and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema. A plaster cast of the Parthenon frieze runs along the upper section of one wall.

In Niati’s recital of Arab-Andalusian songs she was accompanied by the Spanish guitarist Miguel Moreno, who has studied under the legendary flamenco guitarists Geraldo Nunez and Eduardo Rebollar. Niati and Moreno often perform as a duo, under the name Habiboun. After the interval Kelani performed with the talented jazz pianist David Beebee whose inspiration lies in classical music, world music and modern jazz.

When Niati was growing up in Algeria her father was a music lover with a substantial collection of recordings of singers. “They were the top names of that time, but all have now passed away,” Niati said. “The women singers were like my heroines”. Niati trained in Arab-Andalusian singing in Algeria. She then studied art in London, at Croydon College of Art and Design and surprised her fellow students one day by breaking into an acapella (unaccompanied) rendering of a song from her native country.

Niati is now an installation artist, who combines painting, drawing and digital art, and her singing is an integral part of her art installations. She has exhibited her work in the US, Jordan, North Africa, the UAE, the UK and several other West European countries.

Niati’s repertoire is drawn from the compositions of singing, instrumentation and poetry known as nouba. Her music is indebted to the great ninth-century composer Ziryab (Arabic for ‘blackbird’) Ibn Nafi who was born in Iraq but forced into exile in Spain. The accomplished guitar playing of Moreno blended effectively with Niaiti’s sweet, expressive voice in the fusion of Arab-Andalusian and Spanish music. Niati explained to the audience that Arab-Andalusian music travelled to Algeria with the exile of Muslims and Jews who fled southern Spain during the inquisition.

Reem Kelani’s CD “Sprinting Gazelle” was released in early 2006 to much critical acclaim. The CD comprised traditional Palestinian songs and Kelani’s settings of works by Palestinians poets. In her recital she performed compositions from this CD as well as from her second CD which is dedicated to the work of the great Egyptian musician Sheikh Sayed Darwish of Alexandria. He died in 1923 at the age of only 31.

Kelani began her recital in a whirlwind of clapping, yodeling and foot stamping as she performed a wedding song from the city of Acre. The audience was amused by her comment: “The family of the bridge tells the groom’s family that because you accepted our daughter in marriage, we are going to make you ruler of all Arab tribes. Mind you, if you had rejected her we would have made you clean up after our cattle.”

After this boisterous beginning, David Beebee jangled cow bells from the Khorasan region of Iran in the gentle introduction to a Galilean song, a setting by Kelani of a work by the late Palestinian poet and politician Tawfiq Zayyad. The song tells of the singer’s loved ones moving away. “My heart has never stopped shedding tears for them…if you see the cameleer of the caravan stop him to tell my loved ones in their deserted homes that hardship shall never last for ever.” The song was juxtaposed with a contemporary lullaby and with a 19th century lullaby in which Muslim women in Bethlehem ask the Virgin Mary to protect their babies while they are sleeping.

Niati had performed muwashahat from North Africa in her recital, and Kelani’s recital included a muwashaha from Egypt. Kelani observed that Western music abandoned quarter-tones but that they remain in Arab music. In her arrangement for piano of the muwashaha, “I’d like to pay tribute to the meeting point when quarter tones were still not dropped - and hopefully we’ll put the notion of a clash of civilizations into the dustbin, at least for this afternoon.”

Kelani then moved on to a song by Sheikh Sayed Darwish in a 17/8 rhythmic pattern known in Farsi as “khosh rank”, meaning “beautiful color.” The intricate dynamic rhythm carried the listener along with its syncopations and Spanish-type inflections. She also sang the Darwish composition “The Porters’ Anthem”. Darwish studied Italian opera, and also wrote a song for almost every manual profession in Egypt at the time. In his porters’ anthem he incorporates the porters’ cries of “Hela hela” that he would hear in his area of Alexandria.

Kelani’s next number was a love song she described as “’mellow,’ a sanitized way of saying it’s a wrist-slasher”. It was her setting of the qasida “Yafa!” written by Yafa (Jaffa)-born Mahmoud Salim Al-Hout in 1948 when he lost all his manuscripts while fleeing the city. He compares Yafa to a beautiful woman. David Beebee seemed to utilize the entire length of the piano keyboard in his solo introduction to the piece, which was tinged with sorrow and captured the depth and movement of the sea.

Kelani compared the qasida to Niati’s style of singing which is called in Spanish “canta hondo”, meaning “deep singing.” She observed that the Spanish poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca had written much about canta hondo and had paid tribute to the poets of Seville and Granada at a time when there was not much recognition in Spain of the influence of Arab music and Andalusian culture. Kelani said that Lorca had influenced many Palestinian poets after 1948 and that Samih Al-Qassem and Tawfiq Zayyad had dedicated poems to him.

Niati joined Kelani on stage for a rousing rendering of one of Darwish’s most famous songs “Zourouni kull sana marra” or “Visit me once a year”. As an encore Kelani performed Palestinian poet Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s translation into English of Love Poem by Samih Qassim.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette June 25 2007

gordon brown an enigma on middle east

“Gordon Brown sets out plan for the Middle East”. This was a typical headline in the British media after the Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who takes over as prime Minister from Tony Blair on 27 June, spoke a few days ago of the importance of tackling poverty in the Palestinian territories and called for “an economic road map”. Brown pointed out that the average annual income per head in Gaza is 800 US dollars while in Israel it is $20,000. He confirmed that he still believes in a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

In reality there was nothing new in Brown’s comments, made after Hamas’s seizure of power in Gaza. He has called for a Middle East economic road map before. It is still not known how he will try as Prime Minister to deal with the Middle East crisis, and whether he still stick as closely to US policy as Blair has. Anger within the Labour Party over Blair’s refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire during the Lebanon war last summer, and his perceived consistently pro-Israeli stance while Prime Minister, put pressure on him from within the party to hasten his departure. It was a major reason for his announcement last September that he would leave his position within a year. And it is still not known how Brown will deal with other issues related to the Middle East, particularly any US plan to attack Iran militarily.

Statements made in Iraq by Brown on his recent visit there were a clear indication of his wish to put a distance between him and the Blair era. Whereas Blair continues to defiantly defend all the decisions he took over Iraq, Brown admitted during his recent surprise visit to Baghdad that mistakes had been made and that he would “learn the lessons”.

One of the main reasons for the sharp drop in the public’s trust and confidence in Tony Blair and his government since 2003 has been the exaggerated and faulty intelligence on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction that the government presented in its dossier of September 2002. The dossier claimed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes.

During his visit to Iraq Brown said that he has asked the cabinet secretary, Sir Gus O’Donnell, to ensure that in future any intelligence material released to the public is “properly verified and validated”, and that “all security and intelligence analysis is independent of the political process.”

Sources close to Brown said that his visit had confirmed his view that there should not be any hasty changes to the timetable for eventual British withdrawal. However there has been some speeding up, and defence secretary Des Browne told journalists that from next month British troops in Basra will be confined to a single base at the airport. At the same time the British forces will be cut by 500 to 5,000. It is planned that most British troops should have left Iraq within the next 12 months.

The period since 17 May, when it became clear that Gordon Brown would be the sole candidate leader of the Labour Party, and thus Prime Minister, has been a strange time in British politics. There have in effect been two prime ministers. Blair has been on his world farewell tour, trying to polish his political legacy despite the deep stain of Iraq. Meanwhile Gordon Brown has been travelling around Britain carrying out visits in preparation for the day he takes over from Blair.

Brown brings to his new job ten years of experience in government, but he also brings the heavy baggage of the Blair premiership which will be hard to shake off. He faces the challenge of rebuilding confidence in the government and attracting back voters who have deserted Labour, so as to secure for the party its fourth term in office in the general election of 2009 or 2010. He needs to counter the rise of the Conservatives’ leader David Cameron, who is only 40 while Brown is 56.

Although there has been no contest for the Labour leadership, there has been a lively electoral campaign among the six candidates standing for the deputy leadership to replace John Prescott. Prescott is also deputy prime minister, but it will be for Gordon Brown to decide whether the next deputy party leader should also be deputy prime minister.

The six candidates have felt liberated by the imminent departure of Blair to criticise aspects of his premiership. The secretary of state for Northern Ireland and Wales Peter Hain wrote in an article in the New Statesman that whether on Iraq, the reorganisation of the health service, the reform of schools, or civil liberties, “the relationship between Labour and millions of progressive voters has become sour and distrustful.” All six candidates have to varying degrees expressed opinions somewhat to the left of Blair, which has not pleased Blair.

Brown himself remains an enigma. As Chris Doyle, director of the Council for Arab-British understanding (CAABU), told Al Hayat: “there is an acute degree of uncertainty even within the ranks of the Labour Party. Although Gordon Brown has been a hugely powerful Chancellor of the Exchequer, with a firm control over British domestic policies for the last ten years, few people are really clear what Gordon Brown the prime Minister will do.”

Doyle adds: “In the foreign affairs field this is even tougher to anticipate. In the carve up of British politics it was Blair who had control over Britain’s international relations and Brown stayed out, hence his low profile on issues such as Iraq and Lebanon. The reality may well be that even Brown is not sure what his foreign policy will be as he, like so many in New Labour, has precious little understanding of international relations albeit outside the economic field.”

Doyle notes that Brown has been busy doing the groundwork for his premiership in the last few years, with his first visit to Africa, Indian Israel and the occupied territories. “Brown may well want to concentrate on domestic issues, conscious of the widespread criticism of Blair’s internationalism and tendency to intervene militarily. However, Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be ignored and there will be acute and sustained pressure on him to steer a different course.”

Nevertheless, one should not expect anything too drastic here. “Brown has a consistent record of interest in US politics and has close relations with the administration. He is thought to be more Euro sceptic than Blair.”

It is expected that in his first 100 days as Prime Minister Brown will announce many new initiatives. He is expected to announce the setting up of a “people’s assembly” to rewrite the constitutional settlement. Brown will also usher in a change in the style of government. There has been much criticism of Blair’s method of government and the way in which he centralised decision making, bypassing the cabinet and parliament. This style of government became known as “sofa” government with important decisions made at informal meetings in Blair’s offices in Downing Street.

One of Brown’s key appointments has been that of former British ambassador to Israel, Simon McDonald, as his chief foreign policy adviser replacing Blair’s adviser Sir Nigel Sheinwald. McDonald (46) was ambassador in Israel from 2003 to 2006 and is currently head of the Iraq desk at the Foreign Officer.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz said that political sources in Jerusalem expressed satisfaction with the appointment of McDonald, a “friend to Israel.” It said the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem “regard McDonald with great esteem”. He is considered one of the most influential foreign envoys posted to Israel, and one well-connected to Israeli decision makers and Israeli political sources said: “It is a signal that Britain will continue its positive policy towards Israel.”

Under Blair’s premiership there has been some resentment within the Foreign Office at the way in which its role was to some extent marginalised by the prime minister and his inner circle. It is said that the Foreign Office greeted Brown’s appointment of McDonald with enthusiasm, as an assurance of the pivotal role of the Foreign Office.

The Jewish community has warmly welcomed Brown’s accession to the premiership. He is close to the chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks and wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of Sacks’ book “The Politics of Hope”. Brown said that the book had had a “profound influence” on his thinking. In February Brown appointed the chief rabbi’s 24-year-old daughter Gilda Sacks as a special adviser. The treasury said Gilda Sacks had been appointed because of her experience in strategic development.

In April Brown addressed the annual lunch of the lobby group Labour Friends of Israel, and was also guest of honour at the annual dinner of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Brown often mentions how he got to know about Israel when he was growing up as a boy because his father, who was a minister in the Church of Scotland, visited Israel twice every year. He told the Board of Deputies of British Jews that he remains “a life-long friend and supporter of Israel... Britain will be a true and constant friend – in good times and bad and we will never compromise our relationship to political expediency.”

The question of boycotts against Israel is currently attracting much controversy in Britain. Brown told the Board of Deputies dinner: “I recoil in revulsion at the prospect of boycotts of Israel and the Israeli academic community.”

Brown is very supportive of the Holocaust Education Trust, and at the Trust’s annual dinner last September he was given a special award. In 2006 he announced a £1.5 million grant to enable the Holocaust Educational Trust to take two students from every UK secondary school and further education college to visit Auschwitz concentration camp.

At the Labour Friends of Israel annual lunch Brown announced that UK Treasury and the Pears Foundation will each contribute £250,000 over three years to the Holocaust Educational Trust for teacher training. He said that “any suggestion the Holocaust will be dropped from the curriculum is nonsense.” He insisted there was a strong and forceful commitment from all parties to fight anti-Semitism.


One of Brown’s closest advisers is Sir Ronald Cohen (left), who was born in Egypt to a family of Jews from Aleppo (his mother, Sonia Doueik, was English). Cohen is known as the “father of British venture capital” and has wealth is estimated at around £250 million. In 2004 he was the fourth largest funder of the Labour Party, and in 2005 he started to fund Gordon Brown’s bid to be the next Labour leader. (Sir Ronald’s third wife, Sharon Harel-Cohen, is the daughter of Yossi Harel, the Haganah member who was commander of the Holocaust survivors’ ship Exodus).

Sir Ronald Cohen is founder and chairman of the Portland Trust, a not-for-profit British foundation that aims to promote Palestinian-Israeli peace through economic development. It works with a range of partners including the British government, EU and World Bank. Brown said at the Board of Deputies dinner: “With others, including the Portland Trust, we are ready to underpin a political road map with an economic road map.”
When Gordon Brown was guest speaker at the Muslim News Awards for Excellence dinner in London in March 2005 he praised the “huge contribution” British Muslims make to Britain’s success. He described British Muslims as “our modern heroes; standing for the highest ideals, bearing burdens, and bringing hope to us all in Britain.”

However, since then life for Muslims in Britain has become much more difficult as a result of the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005 and the uncovering of various terror plots. Brown has constantly stressed the need for Britishness and shared British values, and he can be expected to support and develop policies designed to try to combat extremism by decreasing segregation and increasing social cohesion.

Brown is planning fresh anti-terror measures, and he is to revive proposals to increase the length of time a terror suspect can be held without charge from 28 to 90 days. He will call for a review of the laws under which evidence obtained by phone tapping cannot be used in court. But Brown also stressed the need for civil liberties to be upheld, and says courts and parliament will have greater oversight over the proposed anti-terror measures.

Susannah Tarbush

Al Hayat (in Arabic translation) June 22 2007

anissa helou brings mezze into the 21st century

The food writer Anissa Helou remembers how, when she was a girl in Beirut, her father would celebrate his arrival back from a long business trip by taking the family in his Buick to the town of Zahleh. There they would cross a bridge to one of the riverside mezze restaurants.

Her father would order as many as 20 different mezzes. He did not order from the menu, but quizzed the waiter about what was in season and particularly fresh that day. “The waiters brought tray after tray of small dishes, all cleverly stacked so that the food stayed intact inside,” Helou writes in the introduction to her latest book “Modern Mezze”, published in London by Quadrille.

She describes the gorgeously garnished dishes: “The raw meats with fresh herbs, the dips with sprinklings of brightly coloured spices or pomegranate seeds, the salads with tiny cubes of shiny red tomatoes, the savoury pastries with bright yellow lemon wedges and so on. The feast was as much for the eye as for the appetite.”

Helou’s abiding interest in the visual impact of dishes is much in evidence in “Modern Mezze” with its sensuous photographs by Vanessa Courtier. The cover illustration shows a seductive-looking Turkish dish of grilled red peppers, glistening with a dressing of vinegar and garlic (unusually, no oil is included in the recipe) and scattered with thyme leaves. The pages of the book are bursting with contrasting colors and textures. Even a simple dish of carrots cooked with green lentils looks enormously appealing mounded in a bowl and topped with Greek yoghurt and garlic, and a sprig of dill.

“Modern Mezze” contains more than 100 recipes from Lebanon, Morocco, Turkey and Greece. Helou defines mezze as “leisurely savoring a tremendous selection of small dishes”. While mezze is part of the culinary tradition of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, Helou points out that this is not so in Morocco. There, the nearest equivalent is “salades variees”, a variety of salads present on the table throughout a meal. “These salads are a wonderful if unorthodox addition to a mezze spread.”

It would be impracticable for a home cook, given the pressures of time and space, to attempt to recreate the vast array of dishes one finds in a restaurant mezze. In the home-style mezze presented in Helou’s book there are fewer dishes, served in larger quantities. Helou helpfully suggests 12 mezze menus for when mezze is to be the starter course, and 12 more substantial menus in cases when mezze is a meal in itself. In addition to the prepared mezze dishes, there are various musts for the mezze table: bread of one or more types, crudités, olives , pickles, roasted nuts and seeds, to which can be added cheese, labne balls, thinly sliced pasturma (the only cured meat in the Middle East) and, if you are feeling extravagant, dried mullet’s roe (bottarga). Helou says that sea urchins also make a splendid mezze when they are in season.

“Modern Mezze” is both inspiring and practical. There are step-by step photo sequences of some of the more complicated techniques. These include making and stuffing Lebanese kibbe (minced meat and burghul) balls, and filling and folding filo pastry sheets to make spinach triangles or Turkish borek.

The recipes are divided into seven main sections: dips, salads, pastries and mini wraps, pulses and grains, vegetable dishes, fish and shellfish, and chicken wings, kibbe and other meat. Helou draws on her wide experience to give many useful tips. She also gives advice on the purchase of ingredients. For example the burghul bought in Middle Eastern shops is “far superior” to any found in health food shops and supermarkets.

Some of the dishes in “Modern Mezze” are familiar to diners and supermarket shoppers in the West, such as hommus, baba ghannuge, tabbule, stuffed vine leaves and falafel. Helou adds her expertise and special touches to her recipes for these standards. Many other recipes in her book are for unusual mezzes that Helou has found on her travels. One’s interest is piqued by recipes for dishes such as chilli and herb dip, mackerel and hazelnut dip, white tabbule, beetroot salad decorated with tahini sauce, broad bean risotto, sardines chermula from Morocco and Turkish mussel brochettes. There are recipes for two raw kibbe dishes. One is a spicy Turkish version; the other, from southern Lebanon, includes dried rosebuds and grated citrus zest.

Helou has devised some mezzes. One is a Lebanese version of bruschetta, toasted bread served with various toppings. Rather than top the bread the Italian way, she uses typical Lebanese or Turkish sandwich fillings, such as labne with chopped olives and mint, aubergine salad, feta cheese salad or za’tar (thyme and sesame dip).

Another of her suggestions is “za’tar bites” in which za’tar is put atop small circles of puff pastry , instead of the usual bread base. When baked, the circles rise like mini-top hats. The same principle can be used to make spicy lamb bites or aubergine mixture bites. She also describes a Lebanese version of sushi made by cutting up a rolled feta cheese, cucumber and mint wrap.

“Modern Mezze” is the fifth cookery book of the prolific Helou, who is also a radio and TV broadcaster and regularly writes for the Saturday edition of the Financial Times. She arrived on the cookery book scene in 1994 with “Lebanese Cuisine”, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Andre Simon award. This was followed by “Street Cafe Morocco”, “Mediterranean Street Food” and “The Fifth Quarter” (named after the French term for offal). “Modern Mezze” is not her only book to appear this year: “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean: Focaccia, Flatbreads, Rusks, Tarts & Other Breads” will be published in New York in August by William Morrow, a HarperCollins imprint.

Before becoming a food writer, Helou enjoyed a career in the world of art and collecting. Born in Beirut to a Syrian father and Lebanese mother, she moved to London at the age of 21 and became the Middle East representative of the London-based auction house Sotheby’s. She also owned and ran an antique shop in Paris. Between 1978 and 1986 she lived in Kuwait advising collectors, including members of the ruling family, on building their holdings of Islamic and other art. At the same time she assembled her own remarkable collection which went under the hammer at London auction house Christie’s in 1999 when she sold her house in Clapham, South London.

She then bought a two-storey warehouse loft in Shoreditch, an area of East London that buzzes with new art galleries and restaurants. Helou has transformed the loft into a minimalist light and airy space with a state-of-the-art kitchen. Here she set up Anissa’s School, where she gives demonstration classes on Mediterranean cookery.

Helou’s entrepreneurial spirit is opening up new horizons. In December she is to conduct her first culinary tour, taking a group of up to 12 travelers to the Moroccan cities of Marrakesh and Essaouria. Next year, culinary trips are planned to Damascus and Aleppo; Palermo and Siracusa; Istanbul, and Fez. She is also planning Anisssa’s Kitchen, a London delicatessen specializing in the foods of the Eastern Mediterranean, and Anissa’s branded food products.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, June 18 2007


Anissa Helou in her kitchen

iraq national library director's online diary

While doing some surfing on the damage to Iraq's heritage recently I came across the diary of Saad Eskander, the director of the Iraq National Library and Archive, via the British Library website.

http://www.bl.uk/iraqdiary.html

Eskandar's diary is a moving chronicle of how he and his staff are trying to revive and reestablish the library and archive, looted and burned after Saddam's overthrow, admidst horrendous circumstances. Some of his staff, and members of their families, have been killed or injured in the period in which he has been writing the diary from last November and there are constantly attacks around and occasionally even on the National Library and Archive. The diary is a mixture of refined culture and barbaric events. Two days ago there still were no entries for June in his diary which was rather worrying, but today it is there up to last Friday. His wife has just given birth to their second child, a daughter Hanas.

row over Israeli architects deepens

The world of international architecture is being rocked to its foundations by a fierce row over a campaign which demands Israeli architects end their complicity in creating “facts on the ground” which exclude and oppress Palestinians and wipe out the possibility of a viable future Palestinian state.

The dispute has engulfed some of the leading figures in British and Israeli architecture. In an interview in the latest issue of the British weekly magazine Building Design, Israel’s most prominent architect, Moshe Safdie, accuses British architects of being “hypocritical, self-serving and hateful” for signing a petition organized by the London-based organization Architects and Planners for Justice in Palestine (APJP).

The temperature was raised further when it emerged that a lobbying group British Architect Friends of Israel and the Simon Wiesenthal Center have written jointly to the Paris-based International Union of Architects (UIA) - the worldwide umbrella of 102 national organizations and 1.3 million architects - calling on it to suspend the membership of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) unless RIBA dissociates itself from the APJP petition. The letter alleges that with its “anti-Israeli focus” the campaign violates EU clauses and definitions on national discrimination and anti-Semitism.

The petition was signed by RIBA’s current president Jack Pringle as well as by former presidents Sir Richard MacCormack, Paul Hyett and George Ferguson, and president-elect Sunand Prasad. Boston-based Safdie lambasted Pringle for signing the petition and suggested he should either have resigned as RIBA president before doing so, or should have sought a decision from the RIBA Council over whether it supported the petition.

The petition, which was published as a half-page advertisement in the Times newspaper of London, was signed by more than 260 architects, planners and others from around the world, among them some of Britain’s most famous architects and a number of Israeli architects and human rights activists. The petition says that the actions of Israeli architects and planners working in conjunction with Israel’s policies building of illegal settlements on Palestinian territory are “unethical and contravene professional codes of conduct and UIA codes.”

The petition argues that it is time to challenge the Israeli Association of United Architects (IAUA) and the Israeli government to end such projects, and says the IAUA should adhere to UIA codes. It calls on the IAUA “to declare their opposition to the inhuman Occupation, and to end the participation of their members and fellow professionals in creating facts on the ground with a demographic intent that excludes and oppresses Palestinians.” APJP has sent copies of the petition with letters to the presidents of the IAUA and the UIA.

The petition has infuriated the Israeli government and its supporters, and readers of Israeli newspaper and TV websites have posted numerous hostile messages, in some cases accusing British architects and the British in general of anti-Semitism. A typical message said that “Israel-bashing” England is on its way to becoming “the first Islamic state in Western Europe”. One reason for the anger aroused by the APJP petition is that it came around the same time as the University and College Union (UCU) voted at its annual meeting to support moves towards an academic boycott of Israel. The boycott issue is now one of the hottest topics in British-Israeli relations, and in the House of Commons Prime Minister Tony Blair called on the UCU to drop the resolution it had adopted. The APJP petition does not specifically call for a boycott, but it is being drawn into the boycott controversy.

Moshe Safdie claims to advocate a two-state solution to the Palestinian conflict and says that “many have objected, as I have, to building in the West Bank. Some have joined groups fighting the construction of the wall, but we are all aware of the complexity of the issues and all of us, collectively, are disappointed and angered by the position of our British colleagues.” Safdie said he was disgusted that British architects, including Will Alsop, Terry Farrell and Richard MacCormac, had singled out Israel when regimes across the world carry out “the most terrible atrocities.”

Jack Pringle robustly rebutted Safdie’s remarks. He told Building Design: “Moshe Safdie is a brilliant architect but it’s not for him to make policy for the RIBA, myself individually or as president.” Pringle “totally accepts” that there are oppressive regimes all over the world, “but to say you can’t criticize one without criticizing them all is extremely naïve”.

In his blog on the RIBA website, Pringle explained that he and his successor, Sunand Prasad, had signed the petition in their own capacities and not as representatives of RIBA, which is a non-political organization. He added that although he is a staunch supporter of a State of Israel, he signed the petition because “I believe, as a citizen and as an engaged observer, that the Israel/Palestinian issue is the most destabilizing and the most important issue in the Middle East and thus in the world today.” Until a lasting and fair peace is established in the region, there can be no prospect of a stable world peace. “To do this both sides must play by the rules with a measure of respect for each other’s rights. These particular petitions relate to Israel’s actions on territory in contravention of many UN resolutions, with the notable involvement of architects and planners.” Pringle also condemned the “many grave, violent and heinous Palestinian misdemeanors in other spheres of the ongoing war, with its attendant terrorism.”

Pringle rejected any charge of anti-Semitism as “very offensive to me and quite absurd as a glance at the petition with its many Jewish co-signatories will show. Indeed, many Jewish agencies support the petition, and its main promoter is Jewish himself.” (The last reference is to the APJP chairman, the architect Abe Hayeem). He was sorry if any RIBA members were offended by his signing the petition, “but I trust they will understand the balance of my opinion – and my right to express it.”

Other signatories to the petition have also publicly defended their stand. The eminent architect, critic and theorist Charles Jencks (pictured below)wrote a letter of protest to Building Design after Michael Peters, who is founder and chairman of the international branding consultancy Identica and has worked extensively with Israeli architects, warned that as a result of the petition “British architects are going to burn their bridges with a number of developers – Israeli, British and European”, Jencks, who has been one of APJP’s most vocal supporters since it was set up in February 2006, described Peters’ warning as being in “the worst tradition of intimidation. Of course, some architects will succumb to such veiled and explicit threats because it sometimes pays to be silent, but the list of signatories – including four RIBA presidents and the next one – shows that, contrary to Peters, many British architects do indeed understand the situation in Israel and that number is growing…One cannot but protest at the destruction of a nation.”

The issuing of the petition coincided with the 40th anniversary of the 1967 war, which has focused world attention on the massive changes that have been wrought by the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. As the APJP petition states, acting against international law Israel continues to build illegal settlements on Palestinian territory, with the help of Israeli architects and planners.

The APJP petition highlights “three typical projects that make Israeli architects, planners and design and construction professionals complicit in social, political and economic oppression, in violation of their professional ethics.” One of the projects is in the village of Silwan near Jerusalem, where 88 Palestinian homes are under threat of demolition as part of a development for ultra-religious Israeli settlers from the El-‘Ad group on illegally annexed Palestinian land. The EU has condemned the development. APJP points out that the Ministry of Housing for the Jerusalem District and Jerusalem Municipality appointed Moshe Safdie’s Jerusalem office to prepare a Master Plan for the southern slopes of the Old City which include the Silwan neighbourhood of Al-Bustan where the 88 threatened houses are located.

The second project is for the conversion of the ruins of the Palestinian village of Lifta , also near Jerusalem, into a development for wealthy American visitors with, APJP says, “the exclusion of the original Palestinian inhabitants, their heritage and memory.” APJP is supporting the campaign to save Lifta which is spearheaded by the Israeli group the Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory (FAST).

The third project is the E1 plan to expand the largest illegal Israeli settlement, Ma’ale Adumim, to link it with metropolitan Jerusalem. This will dissect the northern and southern West Bank, destroying the possibility of a contiguous Palestinian state.

The issuing of the petition raises the question of whether architects should involve themselves in political issues. Former RIBA president Paul Hyett wrote in Building Design that politics has a role to play in architecture. He recalled his past as a member of Architects Against Apartheid, when he played a part in the 1972 decision of RIBA to sever links with the South African Institute of Architects.

On a 2002 visit to South Africa, when he was RIBA president, Hyett apologized to the South African Institute of Architects for any upset caused by the decision to sever links 30 years earlier. However, “many South African architects told me that severance had been a huge boost to morale. They said it had highlighted international support for their own disgust at their government’s actions.”

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette June 11 2007

naim attallah's new memoir

In the first three volumes of his memoirs, published since 2004, the London-based Palestinian publisher Naim Attallah recounted his boyhood in Nazareth, his adventures in Britain after arriving there as a student in 1949, and his experiences of the British and Arab business scenes.

Now in the recently-published fourth volume, “Fulfilment & Betrayal 1975-1995”, he tells of his career as a publisher heading the Namara Group with its main publishing wing Quartet Books and its offshoot The Women’s Press. He also funded several magazines including the Literary Review and The Oldie. In parallel to his work in publishing, he was chief executive of the famous Aspreys luxury-goods group of New Bond Street in London. At the same time he was an impresario, producing and financing a series of film and theatre productions, and an entrepreneur in pursuit of new ventures.

Attallah is a man of colossal energy and drive, an eccentric extrovert of considerable charm, but at the same time a sensitive person susceptible to being wounded. At the age of 76 his activity levels remain high and he has been busy promoting his new book, including holding a launch party attended by some of the many women who in their youth worked at Quartet. The press used to refer to the bevy of lovely creatures at Quartet as Attallah’s “harem”. In a ‘Londoner’s Diary’ that he wrote recently for the Evening Standard weekly magazine, Attallah said it was delightful to see at the launch party these women “assembled in one venue, retaining their original sparkle and having with maturity grown more devastatingly attractive than I would have dared to imagine.”

The names of Attallah’s stable of female former employees read like a roll call of British aristocracy. The Quartet alumni include the actress Helena Bonham-Carter, the biographer Rebecca Fraser, the food writer and TV chef Nigella Lawson, and the heiress and socialite Sabrina Guinness.

Attallah describes in his book how he embarked on a successful long-distance wooing of the Syrian writer Rana Kabbani to come and work for him in London after her second attempt at marriage to the Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish broke down and she returned from Paris to Damascus.

Kabbani is one of the numerous former employees of Attallah who have contributed tributes to him that are published in the book. “It is only now, as I write this twenty years later, that I realize Naim Attallah probably saved my life,” she writes. Kabbani gives a vivid picture of life at Quartet in its ramshackle, Dickensian buildings in a broken-down area off Tottenham Court Road. “Everyone working there looked like a character from a novel – lush, mad, exotic and highly-strung, with a hilarious sense of humor.”

Each volume of Attallah’s memoirs has been longer than its predecessor. The first, “The Old Ladies of Nazareth”, was a slender 71 pages, while the fourth volume runs to nearly 800 pages. Attallah is one of the best-connected people in Britain, and the index of names at the back of “Fulfilment & Betrayal” takes up 19 pages and reads like a ‘who’s who’ of British and Arab culture in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Nor is its vast size the only thing that marks a departure from the previous volumes. Up to now Attallah has written about himself in the third person, which has a distancing effect, but in his new book he uses the more spontaneous and direct first person. He claims this is because “the banker completes his transformation into a man in charge of his own destiny.”

The compendious book is structured chronologically, with Attallah telling us in minute detail, year by year, of his publishing and other activities, sprinkled with entertaining anecdotes and descriptions of people. Attallah is disarmingly frank about the lows as well as the highs, and there are full accounts of the many spats and controversies in which he has been embroiled. He reproduces attacks that have been made on him in articles, reviews or letters, as well as the responses he fired off.

One fiasco was his “grandiose vision” of an Arabian Fantasy show at the Royal Albert Hall. It was to have been “an extravaganza featuring Arabian music and dancing, with all the exotic sights and sounds from the Middle East, from harem girls to real camels.” A lead dancer, Ludmilla Nova, was engaged, the hall was hired and a performance date was set for 2 April 1976. But the show was badly choreographed and insufficiently rehearsed, and it turned out to be a shambles. Attallah was too ashamed to emerge from his box at the interval as he saw members of the audience, which included many celebrities, leaving by the score. He writes: “the night was destined to be the most embarrassing of my entire career”, and he quotes from a scathing review in the Guardian.

“Fulfilment & Betrayal” has attracted much interest from reviewers and interviewers, and even those who poke fun at some of the more flamboyant aspects of Attallah’s behavior admit that he has a record of solid achievements and has contributed much to British publishing. The Jewish Chronicle’s reviewer David Herman observed that the history of British publishing is full of colorful characters, many of them Jewish refugees. “However few are a match for Naim Attallah, the Palestinian self-made millionaire, former chief executive of Aspreys and for 30 years the man behind Quartet and The Literary Review.”

Attallah has also proved generous and willing to dig deeply into his own pockets to support publishing and other ventures. The Literary Review accumulated losses of over two million pounds of his money before it was eventually sold, and Attallah is still keeping The Oldie afloat.

One of Attallah’s main objectives in becoming a publisher was to publish books of Middle Eastern interest. He wanted not only to cover the Palestinian conflict and the sufferings of the Palestinian people, but also to promote the Arab culture that had been so long ignored in the West. He was determined to have Arabic literary output translated into English to stand alongside Quartet’s international list, “which was made up of sometimes obscure or newly discovered talent together with established writers.”

Among the books he commissioned was “The Palestinians”, published in 1979, by the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby with photographs by Donald McCullin. The book gave the Palestinian side of the conflict, which was a breakthrough for those days. As Attallah observes: “There was no shortage of eminent publishers, like George Weidenfeld, to persist in promoting the Israeli side of the picture.” The book caused a stir and was attacked by pro-Zionist sections of the press, but mainstream reviewers thought the true voices of the Palestinians came through in the text.

Several of Attallah’s most fraught times came in relation to the Palestinian issue and he was sometimes accused of being a propagandist for the Palestinians, or of the PLO, and even of being anti-Semitic. In 1983 the writer Roald Dalh wrote a review for the Literary Review of Tony Clifton’s book “God Cried” which is about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. When Attallah read the review he knew its publication “would send the influential pro-Zionist lobby into a frenzy of rage”. The editor of the Literary Review was also taken aback by the piece, and she and Attallah consulted the lawyer of the firm, who happened to be Jewish. To their “utter surprise” he liked, and approved of, the review and after editing out a few of the more intemperate expressions he urged them to publish it.

“The reaction to the review was far more extreme that we had anticipated,” Attallah recalls and there were calls for a boycott of the magazine. The writer Paul Johnson, known for his Zionist sympathies, wrote in the Spectator that Dahl’s review was, in his view, “the most disgraceful item to have appeared in a respectable British publication for a very long time.”

But Attallah writes that his Palestinian sympathies “have never prevented me from highlighting the plight of any other repressed minority or race, the Jews being no exception.” He includes in the book a list of books published by Quartet that are by Jewish authors or on Jewish topics.

Over the years Attallah was caught up in the intrigue and Asprey family feuding over the luxury-goods group. Asprey was sold in November 1995 to Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the brother of the Sultan of Brunei. Attallah asserts that “the glory days of Asprey sadly came to an end with my departure”, and denies that all its problems were due to his expansionist policies while he was its chief executive.

Attallah concludes his book by writing that after his departure from Asprey he refused to be put out to grass. “I set sail to explore fresh seas and my journeys of discovery were to uplift my spirits and lead me intellectually to more fertile lands.” This next phase of Attallah’s life will be the subject of the next volume of his memoirs.
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 4 June 2007

below: Attallah with his mascot 'Kaiser' in 1984