rachel corrie's writings published

Five years ago, 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) bulldozer in Rafah, Gaza, as she tried to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home. She was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a non-violent group that supports the Palestinians through direct action in Gaza and the West Bank. Corrie’s horrific death on March 16 2003 sent shock waves around the world, and drew attention to the desperate situation faced daily by the Palestinians in Gaza, and to the highly questionable actions of the IDF.

Since Rachel’s death her memory has been kept alive through the Rachel Corrie Foundation, set up by her parents. In addition, Rachel’s own words and views have been brought to the public through the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” based on her e-mails and journal. The play was first staged to acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in London in April 2005, and has since then been performed in various venues around the world.

Now, to mark the fifth anniversary of Rachel’s death, the book “Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie” is being published simultaneously in the US by W W Norton and in the UK by Granta. To publicize the book, Rachel’s parents Craig and Cindy are to embark on an eight-city book tour of the USA in April, attending book readings, signings, and question and answer sessions. The tour will take in San Francisco, Seattle, Olympia (the Corries’ home town in Washington State), Portland, Washington DC, New York, Iowa City and Minneapolis.

“Let Me Stand Alone” presents Rachel’s essays, poetry and drawings from the age of 10 to the last days of her life. Endlessly self-questioning, Rachel had decided while at school to become an artist and a writer. Her writings express her preoccupation from an early age with major questions of existence, as well as reflecting the more personal concerns experienced by a young girl growing up.

The book builds up a portrait of a remarkable young woman who combined a zest for living and a mischievous sense of humor with an unusual degree of awareness. In autumn 2002, reflecting on feelings of being alone, she wrote: “What if our aloneness isn’t a tragedy? Tragic passing of love affairs and causes and communities and peer groups. What if our aloneness is what allows us to speak the truth without being afraid? What if our aloneness is what allows us to adventure – to experience the world as a dynamic presence – as a changeable, interactive thing?”

From Rafah, she sent an e-mail to her mother a few days before her death describing how she had spent ten hours with a Palestinian family living on the front line. “When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter or direct action-resister,” Rachel wrote.

“They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them (and may ultimately get them) on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity – laughter, generosity, family time – against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death.”

The Corrie family’s home town of Olympia lies not far from Seattle. Rachel’s father Craig worked for many years as an insurance executive and her mother Cindy is a musician and teacher. But since Rachel’s death her parents and her sister Sarah have not returned to their previous jobs. Craig and Cindy set up the Rachel Corrie Foundation in their daughter’s memory to promote peace and justice in the Middle East and are constantly on the move, addressing schools and giving media interviews. They highlight human rights abuses suffered by Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and lobby to have Rachel’s death properly investigated. They are also trying to realize Rachel’s wish for Rafah to be twinned with Olympia, and have visited Rafah twice.

The fifth anniversary of Rachel’s death is being marked not only by publication of “Let Me Stand Alone”, but also by new productions of “My Name is Rachel Corrie”. The play is currently being produced in Israel for the first time, in Arabic translation. After its Haifa premier the play will tour a number of places in Israel and the West Bank.

The New England premier of the play was held a few days ago at the New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Massachusetts. It is a sign of the sensitivities surrounding this dramatization of the words of a young woman who was an ardent supporter of the Palestinians that the theatre felt it necessary to “balance” it with a play on Israel.

The theatre originally intended to pair the play with the one-act play “To Pay the Price”, about the late Yonatan Netanyahu (brother of former Israeli prime minister Binyamin), regarded in Israel as a war hero, but the Netanyahu family vetoed the idea. So the Corrie play was instead paired with the solo show “Pieces” written and performed by Israeli-American Zohar Tirosh, and based on her experiences of serving in the Israeli military in the mid-1990s. The staging of the two plays was accompanied by relevant panel discussions, films and readings.

The theatre critic of the Boston Herald, Jenna Scherer, protested at this attempted balancing act. She wrote: “Art shouldn’t require even-handedness...Issues don’t get more hot-button than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a subject on which you’d be hard-pressed to find an objective account. But shouldn’t that be all the more reason to allow an individual voice to ring clear without apology? Isn’t theatre supposed to incite people to think and react?” She praised the Corrie play as “a superlative work, here in a superlative production by director David R Gammons and actor Stacy Fischer.”

“My Name is Rachel Corrie” had its genesis in the moving e-mails Rachel had sent from Gaza, published by the London-based Guardian newspaper some days after her death. The e-mails, and Rachel’s journal, were edited into a play by the well-known actor Alan Rickman, who also directed the play, and by journalist Katharine Viner.

The production at the Royal Court Theatre in 2005 won the Theatregoer’s Choice Awards for best director and best new play, as well as the best solo performance for actress Megan Dodds. The Guardian’s critic Michael Billington described it as “a stunning account of one woman’s passionate response to a particular situation. And the passion comes blazing through in Corrie’s eloquent reaction to their father’s enquiries about Palestinian violence. As she says, if we lived where tanks and soldiers and bulldozers could destroy our homes at any moment and where our lives were completely strangled, wouldn’t we defend ourselves as best we could?”

The play was to have been transferred to the New York Theatre Workshop in March 2006, but the theatre decided to indefinitely postpone the play out of fear of the reaction of certain Jewish and pro-Israeli groups. Rickman and Viner denounced the decision, and withdrew the play, declaring: “This is censorship born out of fear, and the New York Theatre Workshop, the Royal Court, New York audiences – all of us are the losers.” There were also protests from such theatre luminaries as actress Vanessa Redgrave and playwrights Harold Pinter and Tony Kushner. The play was eventually staged off-Broadway in autumn 2006.

The continuing difficulty over the staging of the play in the USA - as shown by the recent controversy over the production in Watertown - shows how some quarters are alarmed at the continuing power of Rachel’s eloquent words five years after her death. Critics of Corrie and of the ISM allege that she was militantly pro-Palestinian, and naïve to go to Gaza, and they dispute the circumstances of her death and the claimed culpability of the IDF bulldozer operator. But as Corrie’s testimony shows, she was no hot-headed, blinkered fanatic, but a highly-intelligent, sensitive young person who felt she could not just stand by in the face of Palestinian suffering. And in these days of an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza, her message still rings out loud and clear.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette March 17 2008

Book of Palestinian embroidery motifs

The embroidery with which Palestinian women have traditionally decorated their dresses is one of the most characteristic elements of Palestinian material culture. In her recent book Palestinian Embroidery Motifs: A Treasury of Stitches 1850-1950 - published jointly by Melisende Publishing of London and Rimal Publications of Nicosia - Margarita Skinner focuses on the motifs used in embroidery. They include the Tall Palm motif (also known as Ears of Wheat) of the Ramallah area, Scissors and Roses from Gaza, the Key of the Heart from Bethlehem and the Cypress Tree motifs found all over Palestine.

Skinner writes: “The embroidered dresses of the Palestinian women are very much like Persian carpets. They are not only unusually beautiful. They also tell stories.” In the Negev, unmarried Bedouin girls and widows wear dresses with blue embroidery. Once a widow remarries, red or pink embroidery is added.

Skinner wrote the book in association with her friend of 40 years Widad Kamel Kawar, the legendary Amman-based collector of Palestinian costume. Skinner documents more than 200 motifs, giving their names in Arabic and English and identifying the areas of Palestine from which they come. Falak Shawwa’s photographs capture the artistry and vibrant colours of the motifs, and the splendour of festive dresses. There are also diagrams of each motif.

Assembling information on the motifs was not easy. The names of motifs change from area to area, and often from one generation to another. “What is a Moon in Ramallah is a Star in Hebron. What is an Orange Branch to a grandmother is a Rose Branch to the granddaughter,” says Kawar.It is not known exactly when women in Palestine started to put thousands of stitches on dresses, coats, jackets, veils and cushions. Research on Palestine embroidery has found no examples earlier than the 19th century.

In the 1930s, the French company Dollfus, Mieg & Co (DMC) distributed pattern books that introduced foreign motifs. Before long, these appeared alongside traditional motifs on women’s costume. DMC also introduced perle cotton thread. Previously, women had used lustrous floss silk thread from Syria.

In Palestinian villages, the tending of chickens and selling of eggs was the domain of women, who used this source of income to buy thread and fabric. Girls grew up watching their mothers embroidering, and learnt the skill from the age of about ten.

The main stitches used in Palestinian embroidery are cross-stitch and couching. In couching a thick thread is positioned on top of the fabric, and a thinner thread is stitched over it to keep it in place. This gives a curving design, of which there are many examples in Palestinian Embroidery Motifs.
Each area of Palestine had characteristic embroidery. Ramallah, together with Bethlehem and Beit Dajan, was well known for its lavish embroidery. The embroidery on a festive dress could have 200,000 cross-stitches. Bethlehem’s skill in the art of couching made it “the Paris of Palestinian village fashion”.

The book organises the motifs within six sections. The first consists of border motifs, while the others sections are based on the sources of inspiration: daily life, fauna, the garden and fields, nature and the environment, and trees.

From the mid-20th century Palestinian embroidery started to decline. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom ended in up refugee camps. “With their own local culture dispersed, they lost parts of their village identity and the embroidered motifs of certain areas became mixed with others in names and motif arrangements,” Kawar notes.


A style referred to as The New Dress developed in refugee camps. This dress tells us only that the wearer is Palestinian, and indicates little about its origins. Some organizations now run modern embroidery projects, helping to keep skills alive.

Skinner hopes that her book will help to preserve and revive the heritage of Palestinian embroidery. “Let the stitches speak to us again,” she says.

Susannah Tarbush

original of article published by qantara.de

David Hare's The Vertical Hour

At long last theatre goers in London have had the chance to see the UK premiere of the celebrated British playwright Sir David Hare’s latest play “The Vertical Hour”, at the Royal Court Theatre. Seats sold out early, with the play selling faster than any new play in the history of the theatre. “The Vertical Hour” is Hare’s second Iraq-related play. The first, “Stuff Happens”, took its title from the phrase uttered by the then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in shrugging off the looting of Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.

There was shock in 2006 when Hare decided not to stage the premier of “The Vertical Hour” at the National Theatre in London, where 13 of his previous works had premiered. Instead, he took the play straight to New York where it was directed on Broadway by the British director Sam Mendes with a cast including Hollywood star Julianne Moore and British actor Bill Nighy.

Hare explained that the reason for his decision was his frustration over the way the National Theatre had handled “Stuff Happens” two years earlier when far more people wanted to see the play than could get tickets. In Hare’s view, the National closed the production of that play too early.

“The Vertical Hour” deals with the Iraq war in a more oblique manner than “Stuff Happens”. It explores the attitudes of individuals towards the war, and the interweaving of political arguments and private lives. Hare has a gift for making compelling theatre from political discussions between his characters. “The Vertical Hour” has virtually no action, but the characters are far from being mere mouthpieces articulating opposing positions on Iraq and so-called liberal interventionism. For a play with a serious theme, there were plenty of jokes and laughs over the ironies of politics and the Iraq war, and over the deceptions and delusions of personal behavior.


The play revolves around a visit by US academic Nadia Blye (Indira Varma), and her British boyfriend Philip (Tom Riley) to a house in a remote corner of England where Nadia meets for the first time Philip’s doctor father Oliver (Anton Lesser).

The part of Nadia is a plum role for British actress Varma (34), who was born in the city of Bath in south-west England to an Indian father and Swiss mother. Since making her acting debut in Mira Nair’s film “Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love” in 1996, Varma has tackled a wide variety of roles in film, theatre and TV. Nadia is her biggest theatre role to date.

Nadia is a former foreign correspondent who is now a professor of international relations at Yale University, appearing frequently on TV and at think tanks. Slender in build, with fine facial bone structure, Varma portrays the lively Nadia as strong but with an underlying fragility.

Anton Lesser, who plays Oliver, is a leading British classical actor. He is shorter than Varma, and has a lightweight physique compared with his physical therapist son. And yet something in him draws Nadia. Oliver is witty, waspish and enjoys playing psychological games. It is not altogether clear whether his aim is to undermine his son, and influence Nadia. He quotes to Nadia the definition of a doctor as “someone who tells you the truth and stays with you until the end.”


Oliver has retreated from life for a reason that is at first a secret, and is now living in a virtually unpopulated part of Shropshire, on the English-Welsh border. He was once a highly-regarded kidney specialist but is now a general practitioner.

Nadia supported the invasion of Iraq, whereas Oliver was opposed to it, and from the start he engages her in verbal sparring. Nadia had been invited to the White House to advise George W Bush on Iraq. She was in favor of what she insists on calling “the liberation...I don’t think the president would have asked me if I wasn’t.” She believes strongly that the invasion of Iraq was justified to end the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. This belief in “humane intervention” is partly rooted in her experiences as a foreign correspondent in the Balkans where the West did nothing to alleviate the suffering and 300,000 people were killed. She says of Iraq: “I don’t think the mess that’s followed invalidates the original decision.”

Oliver uses a medical analogy to explain his opposition to the invasion. “I knew who the surgeon was going to be, so I had a fair idea of what the operation would look like.” He argues that “the West’s been using Islam as a useful enemy for as long as anyone can remember. ‘Shall we go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard? Shall we not?’ It’s from Henry V.”

There are unresolved undercurrents between the three characters. Philip has a lot of suppressed rage towards his father for what he sees as his cruel philandering while married to Philip’s mother. Oliver prefers to explain it to Nadia as an “open marriage”. Oliver advises Philip not to show self doubt in Nadia’s presence, and says she picked Philip out because he appeared to be strong. Philip suspects Oliver of having an intention to try to seduce Nadia away from him,

It is only in the course of a long discussion with Oliver during a sleepless night that Nadia admits that in Iraq “we certainly made a mess of it didn’t we?” She is upset, and momentarily she and Oliver hold hands. She tells him of her love affair with a danger-loving Polish reporter she was with in the Balkans and then met again in Iraq. After the trauma of the love affair she went back to America and met Philip, but the visit to Oliver has shaken up her ease in the safety of her relationship with Philip.

Oliver confesses the secret of why he retreated to Shropshire. He had given a lift in a car to a woman he had been having an affair with and the car crashed, killing the woman as well as an old man in another car. The woman turned out to be married, and her husband had threatened to sue him.

The play is framed by first and last scenes in which Nadia is in tutor mode with a student. The first is a young man who declares he is love with her, despite having a fiancée. The final scene is with a black female student, Terri, who has decided to leave Yale after a painful breakup with her boyfriend. At the end of their discussion Nadia says to her: “I used to be a war correspondent. Recently I’ve noticed I miss it. I’m going back to Iraq”. Philip has already told the audience that after Nadia and Philip returned to America he heard nothing from them for some time. “In fact, next time I read Nadia’s name it was in another context entirely. When I saw what it was, forgive me, it made me smile.”

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, March 3 2008

credit for photos: Keith Pattison

Omar Sabbagh's poetry published by 'The Reader'

The latest issue of The Reader magazine features poetry from Omar Sabbagh, the London-based Lebanese poet who has been steadily making his mark on the British literary scene. This isn't the first time Sabbagh's poetry has been published in the magazine: 'Editor's Pick' in the Liverpool-based publication's issue 29, dedicated to "voices that should be heard", describes him as "one of The Reader's favourite new poets".

When The Reader published poetry by Sabbagh in issue 27, it said: "We have great new poetry by Omar Sabbagh, a poet (The Reader says) to look out for in the future. He’s got a strong voice, a decisive standpoint which makes you aware of his presence in the poems and which makes the sheer delicacy of his observations a surprise as well as a pleasure. More than anything when you read his poems, you are aware of the solidity and lightness of life."

Sabbagh is finishing an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. His poetry has appeared in Poetry Review, Agenda Online Broadsheet, Stand and The Warwick Review, and Stand will be publishing further poems from him.

Sabbagh's fellow contributors in issue 29 include poets David Constantine, John Kinsella, Kenneth Steven, Jeffrey Wainwright and Penny Fearn, as well as the novelist and critic A S Byatt (examining the ways that "novelists have taken up the slack after the absconding of God", Jewish novelist and essayist Howard Jacobson (taking apart Richard Dawkins), an "unusual" interview with Mark Rylance (actor and theatre director, starring in the new Hollywood release 'The Other Boleyn Girl'). Novelist Joanna Trollope is among those participating in a roundtable on William Wordsworth.

The Reader was launched in 1997 by three teachers from Liverpool University's Continuing Education department. "We are still providing a platform for personal and passionate responses to books, as well as identifying new and exciting writers."

Anissa Helou's book on Savory Baking of the Med

In the 14 years since her first cookery book “Lebanese Cuisine” was published, the Lebanese-Syrian cookery writer Anissa Helou has established herself as one of the world’s foremost and most prolific authors on Middle Eastern and Mediterranean food.

In her latest, and sixth, book “Savory Baking from the Mediterranean: Focaccias, Flatbreads, Rusks, Tarts, and other Breads”, she reveals the amazing variety of tempting goodies that are produced around the Mediterranean from bread doughs and pastry.

“All the peoples of the Mediterranean believe that no meal is complete without bread,” Helou points out. Her recipes range from simple breads that accompany main courses to more complex filled breads and pastries which are meals in themselves. Occupying the middle ground are the many savory baked items to be eaten as meze, hors d’oeuvres, snacks, and other little bites, some traditionally made by home cooks, others by street vendors or small family-run bakeries.

“Savory Baking”, published in New York by the HarperCollins imprint William Morrow, comes with glowing reviews on its back cover from the likes of the veteran Middle East food writer Claudia Roden, Mark H Furstenberg - founder of Marvelous Market and The BreadLiine and co-owner of Ma-Mi Bistro and Bakery - and Carol Field, author of “The Italian Baker”, “Celebrating Italy”, and “Italy in Small Bites”.

As with previous volumes in the Helou oeuvre, “Savory Baking” is as much a culinary travel work as a cookery book and is a highly enjoyable read. Helou revels in travel and culinary observation, and while preparing the book she stayed with friends in a number of Mediterranean countries. They introduced her to local experts in preparing breads and other savory baked items.

Among the many places she visited was a bakery in Kfar Rumman, south Lebanon, where she learnt from “a wonderful old-fashioned baker”, Jawad Yussef Daher, how to make the Mishtah Bread which is unique to that area. The ingredients include whole wheat flour, cracked wheat (jreesh), spices, and mahlep – the tiny dried nut found in the kernel of the sour cherry, which is ground into a fragrant powder.

On the Greek island of Kassos Helou watched a woman make Artos, a bread with subtle sweet and spicy flavors which is baked on various saints’ days. In Marrakesh her friend Mortada Chami, owner of the Stylia restaurant, organized a demonstration of the special skills involved in making the leaf-thin pastry known as warqa.

Scattered through the book’s 339 pages are black and white photographs taken by Helou, which have a timeless quality. As Helou says: “I try in the text that introduces the recipes to give a sense of the depth of tradition – in techniques, in ingredients and in the origins of specific recipes – that underlies contemporary Mediterranean savory baking.”


Historically, bread and baking first began in the Fertile Crescent, and Helou’s own engagement with Mediterranean baking began on the edge of the Crescent. The daughter of a Syrian father and Lebanese mother she grew up in Beirut, but as a child she used to spend the summer at her aunt’s house in the Syrian village of Meshta el-Helou.

At that time the village had no electricity, running water or store, and Helou’s aunt made everything at home including bread cooked in a tannour pit oven. Helou vividly recalls her aunt inserting her arm deep into the tannour to slap circles of dough against its walls, peeling the cooked loaves off a few seconds later. Helou has remained an enthusiastic student of Mediterranean baking ever since.

In the introduction to her book, Helou provides useful tips for the home baker, but her attitude is relaxed and she says: “In fact, part of the fun of home baking is the somewhat unpredictable nature of it. One day, your bread will rise perfectly and the slashes will open up beautifully. Another day, the results will not be so perfect, though they will still be good.” She explains how to shape dough into loaves, which she considers the most difficult part of baking.

There are interesting links between bakery products in different Mediterranean countries. The family of Italian flatbreads known as Focaccia, of which Helou gives examples from different parts of Italy (featuring ingredients such as cheese, potato or walnut), is equivalent to Fougasse in the south of France and Fouace in the north.

Crunchy breadsticks coated with sesame seeds are called Grissini in Sicily, and Ka’k in Lebanon and Syria. Helou used to think that the practice of sprinkling sesame seeds on bread in Sicily dated back to the Arab occupation, but she then found it mentioned in the writings of the Greek physician Dioscorides in the first century AD. It thus predates the Arab invasion by several centuries.


There are two basic types of Mediterranean bread: flat and raised. Flatbreads are found in various shapes and forms throughout the region, although one-layered varieties are mostly found in the western Mediterranean and two- or multi-layered ones in the eastern part. Raised breads are mainly produced in the western region. Raised loaves may be divided according to whether they are leavened naturally, using sourdough, or artificially, using fresh or dried yeast.

Bread doughs are also used to make many types of savory pastries. In the western Mediterranean the dough or pastry casing is thick or thin, and made in one or several layers, while in the Eastern and southern parts the casing is generally thin and often made in several layers. Savory pastries are useful for two main purposes: to recycle leftovers, and to serve as portable meals that can be taken to work or on journeys.

Among the Pizza-type recipes in the book is one for the famous Lebanese flatbread Manaqish bil-Za’tar, translated as “Thyme Pizza”, which is served plain or with strained yoghurt (labneh). Its sister product, Manaqish bil-Kishk, is topped with the dried bulghur and yoghurt powder that is a vital foodstuff for inhabitants of the Lebanese mountains. Alongside recipes for Italian Pizzas and the French Pissaladiere, there is one for Turkish Eggplant Pide topped with red peppers, eggplant and tomatoes.

Medfouna is a Moroccan flatbread stuffed with meat, which Helou titles “Berber Hamburger All- in One”. Sometimes flatbreads are crispy, such as Sardinian crackers (Pane Carasau), very thin circles of dough baked until they harden . Khobz Ramadan are date-filled breads found in the souqs of Tripoli, Lebanon and Damascus and Aleppo during the Holy Month of Ramadan. Tunisian Spicy Breads (Touarits) are made from two circles of semolina flour dough sealed around a filling including chilies and red peppers. They are related to the Moroccan multilayered breads known as R’ghayef , and the M’hajjib bread of Algeria.

Many of the savory pastries featured in the book are from Middle Eastern countries, such as Turkish Meat Boreks, Moroccan Triangles with Chicken or Minced Meat, Lebanese Cheese or Strained Yoghurt Triangles and Lebanese Square Meat Pies (known as Sreyjatt or Sfiha). From Syria there are Cheese Fatayer, and from Tunisia Meat Crescents.

Helou’s book is likely to delight all who read it – except perhaps those on Atkins-style low-carbohydrate diets. And even they may find their willpower wilting in the face of her mouth-watering descriptions of Mediterranean baked specialties.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette February 18 2008

Kaveh Golestan's life and work celebrated in new book

When in 2003 the Iranian photojournalist and documentary filmmaker Kaveh Golestan stepped on a landmine in northern Iraq and was instantly killed, the Middle East lost one of its greatest recorders of the tumultuous events in the region. And beyond his skills as a photographer and filmmaker, his companions and colleagues in Iran and in the world of international photojournalism lost a precious friend and mentor who is still deeply missed.

Five years on from Golestan’s death the German publisher Hatje Cantz, in collaboration with the Prince Claus Fund Library, has produced an enduring tribute to the man and his work in the form of the book, “Kaveh Golestan 1950-2003: Recording the Truth in Iran”. The handsome volume is jointly edited by the journalist and editor Malu Halasa and Golestan’s wife and fellow photographer Hengameh Golestan.

The large format of the 168-page book does justice to the 128 black and white images it features, some of which spread extend over double pages. One of the pictures that stretches across two pages is an emblematic photograph showing Ayatollah Khomeini making his first public appearance at the Alavi School February 4 1979, after his arrival back from exile. In another double-spread image, taken in Mahabad in 1980, Kurdish children rush towards the photographer, their faces full of excitement.

Golestan’s camera takes us not only inside the dramatic political events that engulfed Iran, but also intimately into the lives of individuals. He focused equally on the epoch-defining events, and on forgotten, marginalized people: the poor, prostitutes, the mentally handicapped. Among the upheavals he captured on film were the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf war, the US-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and the invasion and war in Iraq. He was particularly concerned to record the impact of these events on the people who were most immediately affected by them.



The photographs in the book are divided into seven main sections, each introduced by a one-page essay by Golestan. The first section shows prostitutes in the Shahr-e No (New City) area of Tehran in 1975-77. Golestan writes of how the people in this area lived at an “almost subhuman level”. The majority of the prostitutes’ clients were poor rural men, who would transmit sexual diseases back to their wives in their villages.

The laborers portrayed in a series of photographs taken in Tehran in 1977 were rural migrants. They worked in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, enduring excruciating physical labor in dangerous conditions lacking the minimum health and safety protocols. “Due to insufficient wages, they are often hungry and undernourished, forced to live in shoddy shacks with only nylon bags as roofing,” Golestan wrote. He was perturbed to find that many children worked as manual laborers.

Golestan’s photographs of mentally disturbed children were taken in 1977 in the largest mental hospital in Tehran. Pumped full of drugs, the children “survive in a vegetative state similar to the plants grown in the pots placed around the rooms of the hospital”. Staff would chain them to radiators or tie their hands with string, ignoring their suffering.

Golestan’s extensive chronicling of the Iranian Revolution in 1978-80 began when a friend alerted him to demonstrations in Qom. He travelled there, and “with my photos I managed to capture the very first sparks of the Revolution.” He also saw the first bloodshed of the Revolution, when police started throwing tear gas and shooting demonstrators.

One section of the book is devoted to photographs of the uprising in Kurdistan in 1988-89. Golestan covered Kurdish social and political developments in the north of Iraq for more than 10 years, and was only eight miles from Halabja when it was attacked with chemical weapons in 1988. His extraordinary photographs of the Qaderi Dervishes of Kurdistan show groups of long-haired men dancing in ecstasy, their hair flung in the air.

The Iran-Iraq war 1980-88 had a profound impact on Golestan: “I spent eight years looking at death through my camera.” He was amazed at how youngsters were willing to die for their beliefs. “I felt I had to show this through my photos. I was in search of the deep human feelings that were buried within each person.” He became addicted to the chemical rush to the brain during the conflict and often felt like a vulture. “Death had become my companion and I was beginning to have psychological problems.”

When he saw the dismembered bodies of young children in Abadan, “the feelings of shock and violence were so extreme that I felt that it was my duty to let the world know about these horrors, to understand the suffering.” His photographs show in harrowing detail the impact of the ghastly Iran-Iraq war on humans, whether fighters or civilians. One image is of a chador-clad woman atop a tank, wielding a Kalashnikov. The caption says that when this photograph was published in the Guardian newspaper, a reader wrote in to complain about the woman’s mishandling of the weapon.

On one occasion he was forced to take cover in a trench “filled with the bloated and purple corpses of Iraqi soldiers. I was forced to hide in the trench for six hours with them – in the grave, in the world of death, ultimate annihilation.” He writes that after the war ended “I found that it had left me with a constant feeling of anxiety and unease. I do not have much emotion left to give. I have already seen the end.”

Golestan’s work was acclaimed worldwide, and in 1979 he was given a Robert Capa Award for his photographic coverage of the Iranian Revolution, which was the major foreign story of that year. He was present in Iran throughout the tumultuous process by which Iran was transmuted into an Islamic republic, from Ayatollah Khomeini’s ’s return from exile in Paris in 1979 to his funeral ten years later.

Malu Halasa notes that Golestan was the only Iranian photojournalist with a continuing presence in Iran from before the 1979 Revolution until his death in 2003. “He developed a distinct aesthetic long before the Revolution, challenging notions of beauty and honesty in the Shah’s Iran, where the poor and dispossessed were, for the most part, invisible,” she writes. She describes how in 1977 he hid his camera in a bag of fruit and befriended the prostitutes who inhabited dilapidated buildings in Shahr-e No.

Golestan’s work frequently aroused the ire of the authorities. When Britain’s Channel Four TV in 1991 broadcast his film “Recording the Truth”, about journalists in Iran, he was subjected to two years’ house arrest. As well as being stripped of his press card and barred from leaving Tehran, he was made to lecture at the art college at the University of Tehran where, Halasu notes, “he inspired a generation of photojournalists and reporters.”

The essays that comprise the first part of the book include six contributions from people who knew Golestan well. Among them is the veteran BBC journalist Jim Muir who was with Golestan when he was killed. Muir was the BBC correspondent in Iran between 1999 and 2004, and during that time, he and Golestan covered events in many parts of Iran, as well as in neighboring Afghanistan and northern Iraq.

Muir recalls how on what would be the last day of his life, Golestan’s thoughts seemed to be firmly focused on his own identity and how he related to the events he and Muir were covering and anticipating. Although he had by then been a TV cameraman for some years, he still identified himself primarily as a photographer. He suddenly said to Muir: “I am a war photographer... It is in situations like this that I am truly me.’”

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette February 25 2008

IPAF shortlist announced

The judges with Joumana Haddad

Six books shortlisted for Arabic fiction prize

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) attracted worldwide media attention last week when the six judges of the prize, now in its first year, appeared at a press conference in central London to announce the shortlist of six novels for an award worth a total of $60,000 to the winner.

The winner, to be announced at a gala dinner in Abu Dhabi on March 10, will receive a prize of $50,000 as well as the $10,000 that each of the shortlisted authors is automatically awarded. In addition, the winning book is guaranteed translation into English.

In all, 131 novels by authors from 18 Arab countries were submitted for the prize, but Egyptian and Lebanese writers dominate the shortlist. The two Egyptians on the list are Baha Taher with “Sunset Oasis” (published by Al-Shorooq) and Mekkaoui Said with “Swan Song” (Al Dar). Lebanon is represented by Jabbour Douaihy with “June Rain” (Dar An-Nahar) and May Menassa with “Walking in the Dust” (Riad El-Rayess). The other novels in the contest are “The Land of Purgatory” by Jordanian Elias Farkouh (Al Mouassassa Al Arabiya, and Azminah) and “In Praise of Hate” by Syrian Khaled Khalifa (Amisa).

Seventy-eight per cent of the 131 novels submitted were by men, and only 22 per cent by women. By far the largest share of novels, 33, came from Egyptian authors, followed by Syrian writers (16), Lebanese (14) and Tunisian (10). Six books by Saudi writers were entered.

IPAF was officially launched in Abu Dhabi in April 2007, in association with the Booker Prize Foundation of London and with financial and other support from the Emirates Foundation. One of its main aims is “to increase global readership of Arabic literature through the widest possible publication and distribution of contemporary Arabic fiction in translation.”

The Booker Prize Foundation administers Britain’s most prestigious literary prize, the £50,000 Man Booker Prize, which this year celebrates its 40th anniversary. Inevitably, the new Arabic prize is widely (if incorrectly) dubbed “the Arabic Booker”. Arabic is only the second language in the world to enjoy a Booker spin-off award: in 1992 a Russian version of the prize was established.

The sense of drama at the press conference, held at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) in Piccadilly, was heightened by the fact that the identity of the judges had until then been kept secret. This was so as “to ensure the independence and integrity of the selection process.” Since last July, the judges had each read their way through almost all the 131 novels in competition (a few novels were disqualified before this stage).

When the judges took their seats on the press conference panel they were revealed to be the Iraqi author and journalist and cofounder of Banipal magazine Samuel Shimon (judges’ chairman); London-based Syrian writer and journalist Ghalia Kabbani; Palestinian author and critic Faissal Darraj; British scholar, author and translator Paul Starkey, who is head of Durham University’s Arabic Department and Co-Director of the Centre for the Advanced Study of the Arab World; and the Moroccan writer and critic Mohammed Berrada and his fellow Moroccan, poet Mohammed Bennis.

The prize is managed by a 12-member independent Board of Trustees from the Arab world and the UK, representing a mix of writers, experts in Arabic literature and translation, and personalities from publishing, the media and academia. Jonathan Taylor, interim chair of the Board of Trustees and chair of the Booker Prize Foundation, told the press conference: “The purpose of the prize is to secure recognition, reward and readership for outstanding Arabic literary fiction of the highest quality, regardless of the nationality, religion, gender or age of the writer.” He announced that the philanthropist, anthropologist and publisher Sigrid Rausing has pledged to fund the translation of the winning work into English.

Maytha Al Habsi [right], director of communications at the Emirates Foundation, said: “As a foundation we hope and expect that the prize will inspire Arab authors, new and established, to apply their minds and spirits to the creation of high-quality literature that touches both our minds and hearts.”
It is also hoped that the prize “will encourage the translation of new Arabic literature into many of the world’s major languages” so that non-Arabs everywhere will have “the opportunity to read and absorb what the finest Arab writers are saying.”

The IPAF administrator, Lebanese poet, translator and journalist Joumana Haddad, believes that literature is the best tool for understanding the world and making it a better place. “Indeed, we have the best tool of intercultural and intercivilizational dialogue in books, provided we know how to choose these books – because a good part of what is being promoted, translated and exported from side to side is unfortunately enhancing the divide and the distorted images instead of breaking the pattern. “

Haddad said that IPAF “aims to be different, and by different we mean independent, transparent, objective, fair, bold and pioneering. It aspires to give the right Arabic books the local and international attention they deserve.”

Samuel Shimon said that the judges had arrived at their shortlist through two closed discussion sessions the previous day. The first session came up with a longlist of 16 titles, which was then whittled down to the final six.

Shimon explained what it was about each of the six novels that had led the judges to put them on the shortlist. For example, in the novel “In Praise of Hate”, Syrian novelist Khalid Khalifa narrates “the experience of oppression under the fundamentalist organizations and from inside a Syrian society deprived of democracy, in a multi-levelled language, and through characters who are torn apart facing an uncertain future.” The Lebanese novelist May Menassa in “Walking in the Dust” praises memory that is “scarred by the horrors of the war and loss in today’s world. The novel is written in a flowing style and rich prose, with a poetic dimension which suits the universal pain it is dealing with.”

Shimon described “Sunset Oasis” by Egyptian Baha Taher as “a fine work of fiction. Depending on the metaphor of the journey that crystallizes the existential crisis of a defeated man, he deals with many broad human questions.”


Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, February 4 2008




above: Joumana Haddad and Mohammed Berrada

Banipal Books' new titles by Mahmoud Shukair and Issa J Boullata

With the simultaneous publication of the short story collections “Mordechai’s Moustache and his Wife’s Cats” by Mahmoud Shukair and “A Retired Gentleman” by Issa J Boullata, Banipal Books of London brings us the work of two accomplished storytellers who were born in Jerusalem. There is a further link between the two writers: Boullata has translated from Arabic the four main short stories, plus 20 “vignettes”, in Shukair’s collection.

Shukair, born in 1941, studied at Damascus University from where he has an MA in Philosophy and Sociology. He worked for many years as a teacher and journalist, was twice imprisoned by the Israelis for a total of nearly two years, and in 1975 was deported to Lebanon. After living in Berlin, Amman and Prague he returned to Jerusalem in 1993, and has been editor in chief of the weekly magazine Al-Talia’a (The Vanguard) and Dafatir Thaqafiya (Cultural File).

Shukair has written 25 books, among them nine short story collections, folktales and books for children. He has also written plays, TV series and numerous articles for the press. He has been writing short stories since 1962, many of which were published in the magazine Al-Ufuq al-Jadid, or New Horizon.

Shukair is a master of the satirical short story that shines a light on quirky angles of the multifaceted experience of the Palestinians, particularly under Israeli occupation. He is also adept at the very short story or vignette, of which more than 40 are included in the collection.

Issa J Boullata took the path of academia in the West, obtaining a PhD in Arabic literature from London University, and then serving as Professor of Arabic Literature at McGill University in Montreal until his retirement in 2004. He is an award-winning translator, and the author of several works including the novel “A’id ila al-Quds” (“Returning to Jerusalem”) and a biography of the Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. His short stories are set mostly among Palestinian, Lebanese and Egyptian immigrants in Canada and the US. The stories are humane and tender, often humorous but also sad.

Growing up in Jerusalem has left an indelible mark on the two writers and their work. Both have written accounts, published in these collections, of how the Jerusalem cultural environment shaped their early literary development. For Shukair, the early 1960s were a time “when Jerusalem celebrated culture and writers had a role in the city, in complete contrast to today”.
In his essays “My journey in writing” and “Hemingway in Jerusalem”, Shukair traces his attachment to the short story to the launch of New Horizon in 1961. “The appearance of the magazine at this time, I believe, played a major role in bringing us into the arena of creative writing, in refining our talents, and in focusing our attention on international literature.” He and his friends were known as the “New Horizon generation”. They bought books translated in Beirut and Cairo, and loved sitting and discussing in Jerusalem coffee shops. When he read the first issue of New Horizon, the short stories it contained, some of which were on the Palestinian naqba (catastrophe) of 1948, “gripped me with a passion such that I started writing stories full of rhetoric and tradition.”

The editor of New Horizon, the poet Amin Shanar, “had the important role of paving the difficult way forward for our generation, which profited so much from his patronage.” Shukair read books by Palestinian and Arab writers, and then moved on to writers in English, translating stories by Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and others. He particularly valued the way in which Hemingway “touches only the tip of the iceberg and leaves the rest buried deep below the ocean’s surface. By leaving his stories open to interpretation in this way, Hemingway lends his stories a lasting and universal significance.”

In his stories, Shukair has an eye for absurdity and the essential role played of fantasy in allowing people to transcend the shackles of their situation. In the story “Shakira’s Picture” the cousin of the first-person narrator has queued fruitlessly several times at the Israeli Ministry of Interior in an effort to get a document to allow him to travel abroad. When a guard asks him his name, and he replies Talha Shakirat, the guard asks him if he knows the singer Shakira, of whom he is a fan. The narrator’s cousin claims she is a member of his family, and this supposed family relationship with Shakira is the edifice upon which the short story is constructed, to amusing effect. The cousin’s father throws himself into the pretence, convinced it will help him get a new identity card which will enable him to go to Spain and on the Haj.

Taxi driver Kadhim Ali, the central character of “Ronaldo’s Seat” claims to be in e-mail contact with the footballer Ronaldo, who has promised to come with his wife and child to spend a month or two as his guest. Kadhim reserves the front seat of his taxi for Ronaldo, and falls under suspicion of saving the seat for women, or of being a collaborator with Israel.

Mordechai, in the title story of the collection, is an Israeli reservist with a handlebar moustache. Disliking the views of Israeli leftists, he volunteers to serve at the checkpoint of Qalandiya near Ramallah. This brings him for the first time face to face with Palestinians, and he tries to suppress his feelings of sympathy for them. Then he finds that twirling the ends of his moustache brings forth farting sounds from the mouths of the queuing Palestinians, Even his Israeli colleagues laugh behind his back at this mockery of him.

In “My Cousin Condoleezza” the narrator realizes that his cousin Matheela, divorced from a college friend of his, is like Condoleezza Rice in being a black-haired “shrew”. His mother is pressuring him to take her as a second wife. He protests that he cannot live under the same roof as Condoleezza Rice. He dreams he is marrying Condoleezza, whose father is Rumsfeld.

Issa J Boullata writes in his essay “Books and I” of the joy of reading his first book in Arabic, “The Little Red Hen”, at the age of eight in 1937. He became a great admirer of the renowned Palestinian educator and author Khalil Sakakini. He writes of his subsequent excursions into reading at school, and in his father’s extensive collection of Arabic books, some in translation into French, and at the Jerusalem YMCA.
The first story in Boullata’s collection, “Without a Court Trial” is set under Jordanian rule in 1957. Two friends who have been celebrating at a restaurant the departure of one of them for the US the next day are taken to prison on the whim of the military governor dining in the same restaurant.

In Boullata’s stories past events in the Middle East continue to shape lives. In “Search for Saleema” a man continues for the rest of his life to search for the fiancée from whom he became separated in the 1948 naqba. In “A Retired Gentleman”, retired Montreal multi-millionaire William Shibli has remained a bachelor in the 30 years since his childhood sweetheart from Lebanon, tired of his neglect of her after she came after him to Canada, married someone else. The elderly William strikes up a friendship with a beautiful girl who is researching Arab textile businesses in Montreal. She turns out to be the daughter of his lost love.

“True Love, Mad Love” takes the form of a letter from an obsessed man to Nadia, an Arab-American poet of Palestinian descent. The letter has been found after its writer’s suicide. He had been planning to visit the poet in Boston on his way to Columbia to lecture on Arab-American poetry, but she had told him by e-mail not to come. He is clearly obsessed by a relationship that has been conducted only by e-mail and phone since he met her for a few minutes at an Arab-American poetry reading a year earlier. He declares that his is “a true Arab love that clings and does not let go.”

The collections of stories by Boullata and Shukair are valuable contributions to literature by Palestinians available in English. Written from inside the universe of Palestinian experience they avoid the stereotypical portrayals of characters, and show the power of imagination and humor to cross cultural barriers.

Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette December 3 2007

[the covers of both books are watercolours by Nabil Abu Hamad]

Hisham Matar wins Glen Dimplex award

The Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, a long-time resident of London, has won the fiction category of the Glen Dimplex New Writers Awards for his first novel In the Country of Men. The awards were made at a ceremony in the Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin, on the night of Monday November 26 , by Ireland’s Minister for Arts, Sport and Tourism Seamus Brennan and Martin Naughton, the chairman of the Glen Dimplex Group. The panel of 10 judges for the awards was chaired by David Goodhart, founder and editor of the London-based monthly current affairs magazine Prospect.

The Glen Dimplex Award is the latest in a remarkable list of international awards and honours to have been won by In the Country of Men since it was first published in London by Penguin/Viking in summer 2006. The novel has been published in 22 languages so far including Arabic. It was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize – Britain’s most important literary award - and for the Guardian First Book Award. It has won the 2007 Commonwealth First Book Award (Europe and South Asia), the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, the Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori Prize, the Premio Internazionale Flaiano (Sezione Letteratura) and the Arab American National Museum (AANM) Book Award. The novel is set in the Libyan capital Tripoli in 1979 and sees brutal political events through the eyes of the nine-year old narrator.

Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize awarded

The art of translating Arabic literature into English was in the spotlight in London last week when the Egyptian scholar Farouk Mustafa was awarded the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation. He won the prize for his rendering of Egyptian writer Khairy Shalaby’s novel “Wikalat Atiya”, which earned Shalaby the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 2003. Mustafa’s highly accomplished translation, produced under his pen name of Farouk Abdel Wahab, is published by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press under the title “The Lodging House”.

The prize was awarded on Thursday evening at a ceremony held in the Purcell Room, at the South Bank Centre. During the prizegiving ceremony a total of seven prestigious translation prizes administered by the Society of Authors were presented by Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement. They included the Scott Moncrieff prize for translation from French, the Premio Valle-Inclan for translation from Spanish and the Schlegel-Tieck prize for translation from German. The ceremony was preceded by readings by the translators from their prize-winning translations and by the 2007 Sebald Lecture on the Art of Literary Translation, which was delivered by Marina Warner. The lecture was entitled ‘Stranger Magic: True Stories and Translated Selves’.

Shalaby’s novel tells of the descent into the underworld of a trainee teacher and aspiring author after he is kicked out of a teachers’ training college during the Nasser era for beating up a teacher. The teacher had driven the young man beyond endurance by constantly persecuting him for being one of those “sons of detestable peasants…more like barefoot riffraff than anything else” for whom the coming to power of Nasser had brought new educational opportunities. The novel takes its title from a notorious old Damanhour caravanserai, where the poor and disreputable end up living. The narrator is drawn into the world of the place’s inhabitants and encounters a series of extraordinary characters. He comes to know from the inside the tragedies and turmoil of their lives, and the strategies they adopt in order to survive.

The Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, chair of judges from the Banipal Trust, said: “Khairy Shalaby’s ‘The Lodging House’ is an outspoken message, in defense of the forgotten, the downtrodden and the poorest of the poor. Before Khairy Shalaby nobody dared to give such a statement.” Another judge, the journalist Maya Jaggi, said Shalaby’s novel is “a wise, anarchic, ribald, compassionate compendium of life at its most precarious and most ebullient.”

Mustafa’s translation brings Shalaby’s prose vividly to life in a text that is charged with vitality, tragedy, tenderness, humor and bawdiness. A glossary of terms explains words such as “sabaris” – cigarette butts collected from the streets, the tobacco from which is used by the poor to roll cigarettes.

The presence at the prizegiving ceremony of both Mustafa and Shalaby, who had travelled to London for the occasion, added to the spirit of the event. Mustafa had come from the US, where he is Ibn Rushd Professorial Lecturer in Modern Arabic Language at the University of Chicago’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

Banipal is the London-based magazine of modern Arab literature in translation, which celebrates the 10th anniversary of its foundation this year. Its translation prize is worth a modest £2,000 Sterling, but the prize’s significance is far beyond its monetary value. When Banipal established the prize, which was awarded for the first time last year, it made a major contribution to the presence and appreciation of Arabic literature on the world literary scene.

The prize is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash of the UAE, and his family, in memory of his late father Saif Ghobash. Saif Ghobash was a passionate lover of literature, Arabic and non-Arabic. He built up a remarkable collection of literary works in many languages, which has been passed on to his family. Omar Saif Ghobash said: “A prize for people who are so dedicated to the power of literature and the power of translation seems so clearly something my father would have supported himself. When I spoke with other members of our family, they supported the idea immediately – before I could finish my sentence! It is a small but fitting tribute to my father’s memory.”

Cultural exchanges via the medium of literature are more needed than ever during these troubled times. But as one of the judges of the prize, Roger Allen, commented: “It is not a little ironic that, in an era in which the Western world seems more than ever focused on events taking place in the Middle East and especially the Arabic-speaking world, the opportunities and publication outlets available for making well crafted translations of Arabic literature available are fewer than ever.”

In Allen’s view: “It is almost as though, in an era where we see a plethora of works on Islam, terrorism and Middle Eastern economies, literature is not to be considered as a reflection of a nation’s/culture’s view of the world- indeed, one might suggest, as the most accurate reflection of it.” Allen added that if the Saif Ghobash – Banipal Prize can serve to highlight the excellence and relevance of the literary works that are available to a readership of English-language texts “then it is providing an invaluable service. It deserves the widest possible support.”

The runner-up of the prize was Marilyn Booth, for her translation of Egyptian Hamdi Abu Golayyed’s first novel “Thieves in Retirement” in what Maya Jaggi described as “a supple, subtle English that brilliantly captures the dark ironies and skewering satire of a relatively new voice in Egyptian fiction and Arabic literature. It reads delightfully, as though it were not a translation at all.”A third work, Peter Theroux’s translation of Palestinian Emile Habiby’s “Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter”, won a commendation from the judges of the prize.

Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, November 12 2007

memorial evening for shimon tzabar

Remembering a “Hebrew-speaking Palestinian”

“We don’t have enough people like Shimon Tzabar in the Middle East, in Israel, in Britain, in America, everywhere. If we did, the world would be a better place. It would be a world based on what he believed in, what he fought for – justice, peace, equality, whether equality between people or equality between nations.”

These were the words of the Iraqi writer, journalist and satirist Khalid Kishtainy at a memorial evening held a few days ago at University College, London, to commemorate the life of his old friend, the Israeli dissident Shimon Tzabar [self portrait below]. Tzabar died in March at the age of 81 in London where he had lived since leaving Israel after the 1967 war. He called himself “a Hebrew-speaking Palestinian”.

During his life Tzabar was a man of many parts: activist, fighter, satirist, artist, poet, mycologist, author, children’s writer, journalist, columnist, husband, lover, father. The compere of the evening, Daphna Baram, said he was “an enemy of occupation and oppression in all their forms”. He possessed a gift for friendship, and the evening was attended by many members of his wide circle of friends and admirers.

In a packed lecture theatre, a succession of speakers went to the rostrum to pay tribute to different aspects of Tzabar. His old friend and comrade the mathematician Moshe Machover, emeritus professor of philosophy at King’s College, London, said that the 1967 war had been the turning point in Shimon’s becoming a political activist. The decade before that had been “the most quiescent in the history of the Arab-Israeli problem”. In the 1956 Suez War, Israel “revealed its expansionistic claws - I remember Ben Gurion declaring the third kingdom of Israel.” But the decade that followed “allowed people to forget, and therefore when the 1967 war happened, most people not only in Israel but around the world believed that Israeli was fighting a defensive war against annihilation. Very few people were not fooled, and Shimon was one of them.”

In September 1967 Shimon published an advertisement in Haaretz newspaper in which he and 11 other signatories, including Machover, called for an immediate withdrawal from the occupied territories. The advertisement accurately predicted the course of events over the next 40 years in the absence of a withdrawal. It read: "Our right to defend ourselves from extermination does not give us the right to oppress others. Occupation entails foreign rule. Foreign rule entails resistance. Resistance entails repression. Repression entails terror and counter-terror. The victims of terror are mostly innocent people. Holding on to the occupied territories will turn us into a nation of murderers and murder victims. Let us get out of the occupied territories immediately."
Tzabar then made the momentous decision to take himself into political exile. “He wasn’t running away, and it wasn’t just an expression of disgust,” Machover said. “He understood very clearly that because of the role that Israel was playing internationally, it was, and is, very important to fight not only from inside but outside to make world public opinion aware of the truth of what was going on.” One of the first things he did in exile was to start publishing in London the satirical political magazine Israel Imperial News. The recently revamped website of this publication is at: www.israelimperialnews.org/

One of Tzabar’s sons, the BBC radio producer Rami Tzabar, gave a touching son’s-eye view of Shimon. Being Shimon’s son was like having several fathers: he would teach him how to mix oil paint, and also how to mix cement on a building site, how to turn the coffee grinder exactly thirty times to make a decent cup of coffee, the difference between a real and a false chanterelle, and that Matisse was more interesting than Monet.

Some of the best times had by father and son were summers trundling around Europe in what was known as the “chicken coop”, made when Shimon took a Renault 4, “one of the least valuable cars, and devalued it by cutting the roof off and replacing it with a wooden hut ... it turned the car into a mobile Swedish sauna.” Rami remembered too his father’s “experimental cuisine”.

>During the memorial evening there were readings of several of Shimon’s works. One of his closest friends, Rami Heilbronn, read two of his poems, “Intensive Care” and “In this Moment”, which Rami had translated from Hebrew. Rami’s wife Ruth read from Shimon’s (as yet unpublished) “unauthorized autobiography” a passage on the dire effects of eating a certain hallucinatory mushroom. Liz Nussbaum read a fable from Israel Imperial News.

Khalid Kishtainy first got to know Shimon in 1968 when Shimon contacted him to ask if he could republish in Israel Imperial News an article Kishtainy had written for Peace News. The two became friends. “We were both painters, artists, writers, journalists, and satirists. The only difference between us was that he was a worldwide authority on mushrooms, and I don’t like mushrooms.”

Kishtainy recalled how Shimon had once asked him if he would agree to meet the press attaché at the Israeli Embassy. The press attaché was a friend of Shimon’s but had criticized him for defending the Arabs. He had said: “Shimon how can you defend people who aren’t even prepared to sit with us at the table or talk to us?” He challenged Shimon to “produce for me one Arab willing to sit and talk to me.”

Shimon said he knew one Arab, Khalid Kishtainy. The skeptical Israeli attaché said: “Don’t believe it, he will promise to come and then when the day comes he will not turn up.” Kishtainy accepted the challenge and went to the dinner, but “we sat and we waited and we waited, and the man didn’t turn up. So it was the Israeli who didn’t want to sit with an Arab for dinner.”

Kishtainy added that on a visit to Shimon a few months before his death he had looked rather sad and dejected. “He told me ‘Khalid, I am very disappointed in the Arabs.’ I said to him, ‘Shimon, you are speaking like an Arab. That’s what all Arabs feel now. In Iraq, Palestine, Yemen, Egypt, North Africa, everywhere, they are feeling disappointed in themselves. The failure of the Arabs is the great disappointment of the century’.”

Three years ago Shimon was taken to the High Court in London by the company Michelin for producing a satirical “Michelin Guide to Israeli Prisons, Jails, Concentration camps and Torture Chambers.” The book, with its shiny green cover, resembled a Michelin Guide down to the Michelin man logo. The first half of the book provided details of the system of prisons and interrogation centers in which Palestinians are held. The second half was a translation from Hebrew of “Checkpoint Syndrome” in which former soldier Liran Ron Furer describes in coarse slang the brutal manner in which he and members of his unit treated the Palestinians in Gaza. Michelin sued Tzabar for trademark infringement, but in the end dropped the case on condition that he stopped distributing the publication.

The memorial evening included a screening of the film “Dear Mr Tzabar” made by Christopher Sykes. The diminutive figure of Shimon, clutching has trademark walking stick and wearing his customary cap, was seen emerging from a tube station on his way to the High Court. In the engaging film Shimon talked about his life as an activist.


Tzabar wrote 27 books in Hebrew, including poetry, fiction, children’s stories and travel. His book “The White Flag Principle: How to Lose a War and Why” was first published in English in 1972 and has been translated into nine languages. A second edition was published in February 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows of New York.

The author and former Times newspaper journalist Christopher Walker worked with Shimon in 1969 and 1970 on “The White Flag Principle.” He described the text as being “often clownish and earthy but edged with seriousness. One felt there was some kind of fraternity with ‘The Good Soldier Schweik’ and Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch 22’.”

Walker added: “Shimon not only saw the violence and repression of the occupation, he also highlighted the discriminatory regime against Arabs within the Green Line, pointing out how Israeli Arabs could not get decent jobs or accommodation within Israeli society and that the basis of Arab citizenship within Israel is based on a truly Orwellian concept, that of an Arab being at a certain time in 1948 ‘present absent’. It is worth remembering these points today at a time when British supporters of Israel speak of the country’s ‘culture of equality’.”

Before leaving Israel, Tzabar worked as a cartoonist and columnist for Ha'aretz and the weekly Haolam Hazeh, and was an acclaimed artist. Dr Gila Ballas of Tel Aviv University (wife of the prominent Iraqi-Israeli novelist Shimon Ballas) explained how his activism was expressed through his painting as well as his writing.


Bruce Ing, a professor of mycology, first met Shimon when he started attending fungus forays organized by the British Mycological Society in the late 1970s. “My first impression was that he was undoubtedly a ‘character; he was very keen, and he did not like rules. He could be irascible, and he did not necessarily respect the opinions of the experts.” Shimon made meticulous descriptions, and attractive and accurate paintings of his mushroom material. He also constructed a CD-Rom key for the identification of mushrooms and toadstools, with his own illustrations, which he published, produced and marketed himself “with typical Shimon panache.” [photo shows the mushroom man at work in Spain].

Ing described trips Shimon had made all over Europe on fungal forays and meetings on mushrooms. He went to Siberia, living in primitive conditions, “but his joie de vivre was so infectious that the whole expedition was highly successful socially and scientifically.”

In a tribute to Shimon his partner, the psychologist Judith Druks, said: “We all know he did not compromise politically and morally.” She recalled how he had wanted to live in such a way that he did not have contradictions in his life. She was grateful to Shimon for “showing us how to live well, how to grow old well, and how to die well.”

Susannah Tarbush

October 28 2007

sayed kashua's novel 'let it be morning'

With less than four months to go before the start of a year in which Israel will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of its establishment, the future of the 1.3 million or so Arabs and their descendants who remain within its borders is uncertain. The Arab population, which makes up some 20 per cent of the Israeli population, has been consistently discriminated against and treated as second-class citizens.

Particularly since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, and then during the war with Lebanon last year, the Arab minority has been regarded with growing suspicion. Given the mounting pressures on Israeli Arabs, the publication in Britain of the novel “Let it be Morning” by Galilee-born columnist and author Sayed Kashua, translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger, is most timely. The novel, published by Atlantic Books, explores the ambivalence and contradictions of being an Arab in contemporary Israel.

Kashua, who writes in Hebrew, is currently the most internationally acclaimed Israeli Arab fiction writer. His first book, the short story collection “Dancing Arabs” published in 2002, enjoyed major success. Published when Kashua was only 28, the collection was a best seller in Israel, won Italy’s prestigious Grinzane Cavour Prize for Emerging Writers and was a San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year. It has been translated into eight languages.

“Let It Be Morning” is, like its predecessor, semi-autobiographical. Kashua was born in the village of Tira and first had direct experience of being an Arab in an almost wholly Jewish environment when, at the age of 15, he was admitted to the highly-regarded Israel Arts and Sciences Academy High School in Jerusalem. From there he went to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then became a journalist, but he had some setbacks in his career, apparently partly because of being an Israeli Arab. He contributes a weekly column to Haaretz and lives in Beit Safafa, an Arab village within Jerusalem.

In 2003, Kashua and his young family moved back for several months to his home village of Tira. The first-person nameless narrator of “Let It Be Morning” is similarly a journalist who has moved back to his home village. The reason for the narrator’s move back to his village is that he has found it increasingly difficult to operate as an Arab journalist on an Israeli newspaper, especially after covering the demonstrations and riots of October 2000 in which 13 Arabs were killed by Israeli forces. The stories he filed from then on were subject to particular scrutiny. “I was liable to be seen as a journalist calling for the annihilation of the Zionist state, a fifth column biting the hand that was feeding it and dreaming each night of destroying the Jewish people.”

The narrator has to make efforts to put up with the jokes colleagues make at his expense. By the time he goes to the village with his wife he has become a freelance contributor to the newspaper and gets hardly any commissions, although he continues to go the office every day. He has not told his wife of his reduced role at work.

Life back in his village hardly proves idyllic. The narrator, with his cool detached eye, notes the changes from ten years earlier; for example it is becoming the norm for men to bring young brides from the West Bank as second wives. The villagers are materialistic, gossiping endlessly about new houses and cars. At the same time, there is a rising crime rate. His wife had not wanted to come back to the village and his relationship with her is tense.

Kashua’s precise narrative style, set in the present tense, has a naturalistic, immediate feel. He skillfully builds the tension in the days that follow the sealing off of the village by Israeli forces with tanks, for no apparent reason. The narrator sees the siege as having the potential for a good story, but when he calls the editor-in-chief of his newspaper he is cut off and he finds that his phone, and those of the other villagers, have gone dead.

Kashua lays bare the deleterious effect of the siege on the village and its social relations. The village quickly runs short of essentials, from money in the bank to food in the shops. Power and water supplies are cut off and stinking garbage mounts in the streets. Israeli TV has only said there is a red alert in the Arab villages in the Triangle area, and the narrator assumes a gag order has been put on the media. At the same time, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators are continuing their meetings in Jerusalem.

The village is rife with theories and rumors about what is going on, and political factions and criminal gangs are quick to exploit the situation. When a contractor and two of his workers try to force their way through the Israeli ring around the village they are killed, and the village witnesses its largest-ever funeral, with the dead men declared as “shahids”. The funeral turns into a demonstration, at which the Islamic Movement, Communists and pan-Arabists shout rival slogans.
The narrator claims that in the 1980s and 1990s the Arabs in Israel had started to not just resign themselves to being citizens of Israel, but to like their citizenship, and they were worried it might be taken away from them. “In fact the idea of being part of the Arab world began to frighten them”.

The way in which Israeli Arabs look down on the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza is one of the less palatable aspects of village life. Workers from the West Bank and Gaza become scapegoats, and the heads of families meet with the mayor and decide that they will hand them over to the Israelis, on the assumption that the main concern of the Israeli police is these illegal workers. There are hundreds of such workers in the village, and the narrator recognizes that, to a large extent, they are responsible for its prosperity. “As the condition of people on the West Bank got worse and worse, things were looking up for Israeli Arabs.”

Several hundred young men are recruited to round up the workers and put them on buses, deprived of their clothes except their underpants. When they are forced towards the Israelis, two of them are shot dead. It is only the older women of the village who have some compassion for the workers and try to save them.

After the Israelis are shot at one night, former criminals take credit and become like war heroes. “The village seems to have decided on a new kind of leadership headed by criminals who acquired their weapons for illegal purposes, certainly not nationalistic ones.”

The narrator is most concerned for the welfare of himself and his family, and he stockpiles food and drink from the shops. Water is stolen from the family’s rooftop tanks, and after he refuses to give a neighbor milk for her baby his house is attacked by a mob which takes food provisions. The narrator has, however, secretly hidden food in his parents’ house.

The siege ends as abruptly as it started. Lights and electrical appliances come to life, water pressure builds once more in the taps. On TV news a new peace agreement is announced under which the Palestinian Authority will receive Israeli land, including the narrator’s village, in return for Israel being given sovereignty over the larger West Bank settlements. An Israeli demography professor says: “At long last the Zionist dream is coming true.” The narrator and most of his immediate relatives are apprehensive at the terms of the peace deal, and at the prospect of being under the rule of the Palestinian Authority.

Still, one upside for the narrator is that he is suddenly in demand as an Arab journalist who knows Hebrew. His formerly indifferent editor-in-chief eagerly calls him, wanting him to be “our man in Palestine.” He adds that there might be a problem with the pay because of drastic budget cuts, “but your cost of living is going to be much lower now anyway, isn’t it?”

Susannah Tarbush
Al-Hayat September 17 2007