zeid hamdan makes mark in london

Zeid Hamdan: Lebanon's underground maestro
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 22 July 2010

A throng of young people, many of them Lebanese, crowded into the basement of the Hoxton Gallery in East London a few nights ago for an eagerly-awaited performance by the legendary pioneer of Lebanese underground music Zeid Hamdan and his new band Zeid and the Wings.
Hamdan was born in Beirut in 1976, a year after the outbreak of the 15-year civil war. He is a pivotal figure in the development of alternative or underground music in Lebanon both as a performer and as a producer.
In an interview with Saudi Gazette, Hamdan said: “I grew up in a region where there is not an alternative movement for music. You have classical stars, and then the pop mainstream”. The mainstream pop scene has become dominated by Arabic video clips and “doesn’t have a beautiful vibration.”
Hamdan wanted “to give the Beirut youth a new model, a new way of considering Arabic music.” The Lebanese younger generation “has been traveling and learning abroad and coming back to the country with ideas.” The underground developed as a musical expression of this generation hungry for social and political change.
Hamdan and his band had been invited to London by the cutting edge Monocle magazine/website to record a show for Monocle’s Summer Series. Hamdan also took the opportunity to appear with his musicians at the concert arranged in the trendy area of Hoxton famed for its art galleries and restaurants.
The other acts booked for the concert included local bands Franco and Second Head and the Lebanese electro musician Charif-Pierre Megarbane, founder of Cosmic Analog Ensemble and of Heroes and Villains.
During the event, the performance of Zeid and the Wings could not quite go according to plan, with the visas of three members of the band not coming through in time for them to travel. The final line-up in the Hoxton Gallery consisted of Zeid with two members of Wings – keyboardist Rita Okais, and nay and bass clarinet player Bechir Saade – plus backing vocalist Reine Kabban, Charif-Pierre Megarbane on bass and local drummer Oscar Challenger.
Hamdan has his own special brand of on-stage charisma, and sang a selection of his songs in Arabic and English in his distinctive tender and soulful voice which in its upper reaches has an otherworldly quality. He was ably backed by the attractively-voiced Reine Kabban. Zeid and the group received an enthusiastic response to numbers including “Chouei”, “Castle of Sand” and “Ocean”, with “Sah al-Naum” as an encore.
Earlier in the day Monocle had recorded a Summer Series show with Zeid and his musicians in the Hospital Club in Covent Garden. Monocle will release the Zeid show as a podcast in mid-August. Producer Alex Mills said the “absolutely amazing” recording “went so well”.
Hamdan has come a long way since, as a young boy living in Paris, he first picked up a guitar and found himself spontaneously composing a song. His family moved to France for six years in 1986 when Zeid was ten.
While living in Paris he got to know the music of Western performers such as the Doors, David Bowie, French hip hop artists and above all the Beatles. “My band The New Government is very influenced by the Beatles” he says.
Hamdan typically has several music projects on the go. His solo vehicle is ShiftZ, into which “I throw all my experimentation. It can be a reggae song, it can be Arabic electronics. Shift Z is my playground, my space for myself.”

He has founded several bands over the years. After he returned to live in Lebanon in 1992 his first band was Lombrix, which released the hit EP “Lucy” in 1994. It was a time of optimism and stability and the press was interested “that a young Lebanese band made an EP after the war which had a mixture of Western and Eastern influences.” The Lombrix line-up included singer Yasmine Hamdan (no relation to Zeid), possessor of a beautiful sultry voice.
After other members left the group, Zeid and Yasmine formed Soapkills. Why this name? Hamdan explains: “I wrote a song called Soapkills, and it talked about erasing all remains of the war, cleaning up the town – like killing the memory, killing the truth, through the action of washing up.”
Soapkills drew both on classical Arabic song and on electronics. Zeid and Yasmine first wrote songs in English, but then the artists Rabih Mroue and Walid Sadek joined the group and worked with them on Arabic lyrics. Soapkills gained much from this input “because their writing in Arabic was so rich and funny, and because Rabih is an incredible flute player and Walid is a trumpet player.”

After Mroue and Sadek left the group Zeid and Yasmine continued as a duo and enjoyed considerable success in Lebanon and beyond. But the parting of ways came at the end of 2005 when Yasmine saw her music future as being in Europe and moved to Paris while Zeid wanted to develop the local Lebanese music scene.
Soapkills remains influential, and six of its albums are still on sale.
Hamdan was involved with several other acts on the burgeoning Lebanese underground scene, such as Scrambled Eggs. In 2006, he met Katibe 5, a hip hop group of five young Palestinians from the Bourj Al-Barajneh refugee camp. He got them signed to the Lebanese label Incognito and co-produced their 2008 CD “Ahla Bil Fik Moukhayyamat”.
In November 2004 Hamdan formed The Government. The name was changed to The New Government the following year after Lebanon was plunged into a period of assassinations and political instability. The New Government’s first CD was released in 2006.
The band had five members, of whom three now remain: Hamdan and French brothers Timothée and Jérémie Regnier. Although the Regnier brothers live in France, they regularly perform and tour with Hamdan.
On June 7 last year, the day of Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, The New Government released five free downloadable tracks to “voters” who cast a vote for the band on its website. Hamdan sums up the band’s indie rock style as “a blend of the Pixies tendency with the Beatles, Beach Boys and Franz Ferdinand.”
Hamdan’s African project Kanjha Kora-ShiftZ began in December 2006 when he was brought together with Kandia Kouyate, a 17-year-old singer and kora player from Guinea. The duo’s collaboration produced a highly appealing mixture of “reggae, hip hop, Guinean music and electro.”
Hamdan says The New Government and Kanjha Kora have signed publishing agreements with Moka Music, a subdivision of Chrysalis, and should be developing their new albums by the end of this year.
Hamdan has also worked to develop the singing career of Syrian singer Hiba El-Mansouri, who was last December signed by Jihad Al-Murr of Murr TV (MTV). Hamdan produced and directed Hiba’s first video, “Ahwak”, released in January this year. MTV recently released a video of Hiba’s rendition of “Fog el Nakhl” directed by Pedros Temizian with music produced by Hamdan. MTV is soon to produce a third video, the song “Suleyma” written by Nawaz Charif and originally sung by Zakia Hamdan.
Hamdan has written music for several films, and is currently scoring the music for the latest movie by controversial Lebanese director Danielle Arbid, due for release in spring 2011. He has also licensed seven tracks to Shankaboot, the Arab world’s first Arabic webdrama, which is produced by Batoota Films in association with the BBC World Service Trust. A Shankaboot launch concert took place in Beirut on June 12 with performers including Zeid and the Wings.
Hamdan is negotiating a CD release for Zeid and the Wings with the independent Beirut record label Forward Music,. “If we agree, a CD should be ready by the end of the year,” he says.
He has also produced with Wings, “with a special boost from Marc Codsi”, a song for the Nat Geo Music Channel series “Making Tracks.” On July 30, Zeid and the Wings are to perform at the Batroun International Festival in Lebanon, in an event entitled the Electro-Acoustic Waveform.
As ShiftZ, Hamdan is due to perform with the Syrian singer Dima Orsho in Damascus, Friday. “We’ll be creating an hour of live music in a workshop taking place from July 20 to 23. The concept is to create music for the live digital performance of a young genius visual artist called Mohamad Ali.”
As if all these activities weren’t enough, Hamdan is also playing guitar with Ziad Saad’s electro band Pop Will Save Us. “I think this band has a unique style and I am curious to push this project that has been on hold for too long,” he says.

below: Hoxton Gallery gig

BQFP signs up Ahmed Khaled Taufiq's dystopian novel 'utopia'

Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing announced today that it has signed up the Arab world's most prolific horror and science fiction writer, Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq, to publish his bestselling Arabic novel Utopia in English translation in autumn 2011. (The author has copious internet references with his surname transliterated as Tawfik; BQFP transliterates it more accurately as Taufiq).

BQFP describes Utopia as a grim futuristic account of Egyptian society in 2023 which takes readers on an adventurous journey that ventures out of the gated communities insulating the wealthy from the bleak realities of Egyptian life. "A young man and a young girl break away from the idyllic bubble of affluence they know, and delve into the harsh existence of the impoverished Egyptians that live right outside the fortified gates of their compounds. Utopia’s twists and turns will certainly leave readers in suspense until the very last page."

Since its release in 2008, Tawfiq’s novel has enjoyed wide acclaim and was reprinted three times to fulfill the overwhelming demand of Arab readers. "With over 200 published titles, Tawfiq has perfected the art of horror and science fiction" BQFP says. It cites praise from the famed Egyptian author Alaa Al Aswany who dubs Utopia “a wonderful novel, a real addition to Arab literature.”

Tawfiq was born in 1962 in the city of Tanta, Egypt. In 1985, he graduated from Tanta University's medical school, and later received a PhD in 1997. In January 1993, he published the first installment in his Ma Waraa Al Tabiaa series of novels titled The Vampire and The Legend of the Werewolf.

The signing up of Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq is an interesting development in the publishing of Arabic literature in English translation. Arabic fiction in various genres has been translated, but this may be the first publication in English of an Arab horror/science fiction author. An Egyptian equivalent of Stephen King?

olufemi terry wins caine prize

[picture above: Olufemi Terry with bust of Sir Michael Caine]

First time for Sierra Leonean
By Susannah Tarbush - Saudi Gazette 12 July 2010
Caine Prize 2010 In his story “Stickfighting Days”, which won the Caine Prize for African Writing last week, the Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry references the great British fantasy writer JRR Tolkien whose world of Middle-earth has captivated children around the world for more than 70 years.
The 13-year-old first person narrator Raul lives on a rubbish tip in an unnamed location. He and the other boys living in the dump sniff glue and fight with sticks. The “judge”, who arbitrates between the fights, has told the boys stories from Tolkien and Raul has secretly named his two sticks Mormegil and Orcrist after swords in Tolkien’s oeuvre. The narrator expresses an urge to eliminate his stickfighting rival: “I like Markham, but I’d like to kill him. I dream of doing it in front of a huge pack of boys. Clinically.” The story builds to a shocking end.
Speaking to Saudi Gazette the day after winning the prize, Terry said Tolkien had influenced the first story he ever wrote at an early age when he was at a boarding school in the northern English country of Yorkshire. The rules by which the rubbish tip boys live and fight have echoes of the arcane rituals of boys’ public schools in England.
In “Stickfighting Days” Terry choreographs the fights with such skill, engaging the reader viscerally in every move and reaction of the fighters, that one might assume he draws on minute observation of actual fights. But Terry says: “I made up all the stickfighting. Although stickfighting exists in different parts of Africa I didn’t watch it. But I did observe boys sniffing glue on the streets of Nairobi.”
He says the story “came out of me easily – I can’t say that always happens – and poured out as a torrent over a week or 10 days.” Terry’s story, which first appeared in Chimurenga magazine, was among the 115 entries from 13 African countries for this year’s prize. He won against strong competition from the four other shortlisted writers: Ken Barris and Alex Smith of South Africa, Lily Mabura of Kenya and Namwali Serpell of Zambia.
Terry was born in Sierra Leone and is the first Sierra Leonean to win the Caine Prize. But he left his country of birth at the age of one and has not been back since the mid-1980s. He points out that he also has a Caribbean side: his mother is from the Antilles.
At the Caine prizegiving dinner, held in the medieval Divinity School of Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, the chair of the five judges Fiammetta Rocco said Terry’s story “forces the reader to dwell on the short violent lives of African boys who live on urban garbage dumps sniffing glue and scavenging for food. Not a place many of you would like to visit, but guided by Mr Terry, you go anyway, unable utterly to stop reading.” She revealed that Terry had been “voted for by every single judge.”
Rocco added that the story is “ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative”. It presents “a heroic culture that is Homeric in its scale and conception. The execution of this story is so tight and the presentation so cinematic, it confirms Olufemi Terry as a talent with an enormous future.” The Caine prize, sometimes referred as the African Booker, is Africa’s most prestigious literary award. In addition to the £10,000 prize money the winner has the opportunity to spend a month as a writer in residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
Rocco, a third-generation Kenyan, is the literary editor of the Economist. Her fellow judges were Granta’s deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, the award-winning Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia and Professor Samantha Pinto of Georgetown University.
The prize was founded in 2000 in memory of Sir Michael Caine, who was for nearly 25 years the Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee. The prize is awarded for a short story of between 3,000 and 10,000 words, published in English.
Many previous winners and shortlistees of the Caine Prize are now prominent literary figures. They include Leila Aboulela, Binyavanga Wainaina, Chimanada Ngozi Adichie, Helon Habila, and Chika Unigwe.

Terry hopes that winning the Caine Prize will boost the chances of publication of his first novel, which he started to write in 2000 while living in New York. He also hopes that the prize money will give him space to write.
“Stickfighting Days” and the four other shortlisted stories are published in this year’s Caine anthology “A Life in Full and Other Stories”, newly issued in the UK by New Internationalist, in South Africa by Jacana and in West Africa by Cassava Republic Press.
Terry also had a story, “Digitalis Lust”, published in the 2008 eighth annual collection of Caine Prize writing. As well as organizing the prize itself, the Caine Prize fosters African writing by holding writing workshops in Africa. It was at the Celtel Caine Prize African workshop held in Cape Town in 2008 that Terry wrote “Digitalis Lust”, a haunting tale of an emotionally isolated scientist who offers to help a woman, whom he visits for monthly “massages”, to slowly poison her handicapped sister.
Terry’s father is a distinguished plant expert and administrator who has held key posts at international agricultural research and development institutions in various countries. Terry grew up in Nigeria, the UK and Ivory Coast. He graduated from New York University in 1994 with a BA in Political Science, and from 1995 to 1998 he held several editing positions at the Wall Street Journal.
Terry also has a 2002 Master of Professional Studies in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University’s Tisch School. He has worked for a host of international organizations, including publications in the Economist group, researching, editing and writing reports on mainly African issues.
For the past three and a half years Terry has been living in Cape Town, where in 2008 he completed an MA at the University of Cape Town’s renowned center for creative writing. His MA thesis was the novel he has been working on over the past decade, “The Sum of All Losses.” This coming of age diasporic novel, set mainly in New York City, focuses on two Africans in their early twenties with very different backgrounds and experiences.
One of the young men is a Cameroonian who has been living in the US for around four years. The other is a Nigerian who lived in the UK before going to the US and who feels alienated from Nigeria, England and the US. “One of them does not survive the novel,” Terry says.
The novel has been through four or five drafts, and Terry is currently tweaking the final version. He hopes to have a publisher by the end of the year. Cape Town has an active publishing scene. But Terry says Cape Town publishers are most interested in novels which, unlike his, are by South African novelists or are set in South Africa. He thinks it is possible the novel will be published in Nigeria. However, with his literary star in the ascendant as a result of winning the Caine Prize, the novel would seem to have a good chance of being taken on by a UK or US publisher.
Asked about his favorite authors, Terry names Americans James Salter and Ernest Hemingway; the South Africans J. M. Coetzee and Damon Galgut (author of “The Good Doctor”) and Erich Maria Remarque (the Franco-German author of “All Quiet on the Western Front”). As regards British writers, he is partial to the work of Will Self.
Terry is also interested in reading authors of mixed heritage, such as the Anglo-Nigerian Diana Evans and Anglo-Sudanese Jamal Mahjoub. In particular he mentions Mahjoub’s novel “Travelling with Djinns”.
below: Baroness Emma Nicholson, president of the Caine Council, in Oxford with the shortlisted writers

elias khoury writes novel 'requestioning' Bab El Shams (Gate of the Sun)

Just to clarify the statement in the June 20 posting below that Elias Khoury is currently working on a sequel to his Palestinian novel Gate of the Sun, "sequel" was used in a loose sense. This is a raw transcript of the relevant portion of his discussion with Jeremy Harding:

Jeremy Harding: Could I ask you a last question about what you’re working on at the moment – you’re doing something that’s a kind of sequel isn’t it to Gate of the Sun?... a kind of evolution of Gate of the Sun – Bab El Shams
Elias Khoury: Actually I’ve finished a novel which is nothing to do with Bab El Shams, it ‘s coming out in December I hope. So it’s finished.
And then my new project which I began working on since five years is – because you know Bab El Shams finishes with Khaleel saying “and I walk and I walk and I walk” and there is no full stop. And I insisted upon my publisher that there must not be a full stop because this is not the end of the novel. So my new novel is not a continuation, it is a requestioning of Bab El Shams itself
Jeremy Harding: a rephrasing?
Elias Khoury: No - a total requestioning of the Bab El Shams approach, and it is from the approach of the Palestinians who stayed behind, the Palestinians who stayed in Israel and their experience and then their experience mingled with the experience of the West Bank...
It’s an attempt not only to read the Palestinian daily life and everydayness – which I think is very important – and an attempt not only to read what we can call the necropolitics of occupation – there are major issues about occupation, where you can bury and you cannot bury and it is one of the major things that the Palestinians in the West Bank are facing and nobody speaks about it – but also it’s a questioning of the literature related to the question of Palestine – that is a requestioning of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Emile Habibi’s Pessoptimist, and requestioning the literature of our Israeli cousins where the Palestinian character is a shadow and trying to put these elements together in the real experience of the Palestinians...

london review bookshop's world literature weekend

World Literature Weekend
by
Susannah Tarbush

During the three-day World Literature Weekend organized by the London Review Bookshop in the Bloomsbury area of central London, writers from more than 15 countries took part in nine events on the overarching theme: language and exile.

The bookshop’s director of bookselling Andrew Stilwell said the focus was “writers who have changed their country or their language or both, whether through choice or compulsion. We want to hear how they have made their experiences heard across frontiers and how they have used the language and literature of one country to understand and contribute to that of another.”

The Middle East and North Africa region was well represented in the program. On the evening of the first day there was a discussion at the London Review Bookshop between the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury and British writer Jeremy Harding, a contributing editor at the London Review of Books.

Elias Khoury

Harding described Khoury as “a man of many attributes”. In addition to his fiction writing Khoury edits the weekly cultural supplement of An Nahar, and he has been involved in Palestinian activism for more than 40 years. He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and has taught at universities in Lebanon and the US.

Harding recalled that Khoury’s famous novel on the Palestinians, “Gate of the Sun”, had made such a “huge difference” to Harding’s way of seeing things that in 2006 he wrote to Khoury and arranged to visit him in Beirut. The late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said described Khoury as giving “voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages.”

Harding and Khoury talked about Khoury’s 1981 novel “White Masks”, which was recently published by Archipelago Books of New York in an English translation by Maia Tabet.

Elias Khoury and Jeremy Harding

The novel starts with the discovery of the corpse of a disappeared civil servant in a garbage dump. The narrator tries to piece together the story of the dead man from the voices of some of those who knew him. Khoury said: “The job of literature is not to tell us what happened, but to question our knowledge and way of seeing. There are different possibilities and versions, the many versions of reality.”

Multiple versions are central in the novel “Yalo”, the central figure of which is a young man detained during the civil war on charges of robbery and rape. His interrogators force to write the story of his life. Khoury’s latest novel is due to be published in Arabic in December, and he is now working on a sequel to “Gate of the Sun”.

Another session during the weekend took the form of a discussion between two Arab novelists who write in English and are long-time residents of London – Egyptian Ahdaf Soueif and Libyan Hisham Matar. The intention was to explore the way in which living in one language and writing in another “can create a space for languages and cultures to meet.”

Ahdaf Soueif

The two authors read excerpts from their latest fiction works to an appreciative audience. It is 11 years since a book of fiction by Soueif was published. Her 1999 second novel “The Map of Love” was short-listed for Britain’s leading literary prize, the Man Booker, but since then her writing energies have been diverted into essays and reportage. In 2004 Bloomsbury published a collection of her essays, “Mezzaterra: Fragments of the Common Ground”. She launched in 2008 the annual Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest). The novel on which Soueif is now working moves between present-day and ancient Egypt.

Hisham Matar’s fiction has echoes of the extraordinary circumstances of his own life, as the son of Libyan opposition activist Jaballa Matar who was kidnapped in Cairo in 1990 and imprisoned in Libya. Nothing has been heard from him since the early years of his incarceration, but at the beginning of this year Hisham received news that his father had been seen in a prison in 2002.

Hisham Matar

Matar’s debut novel “In the Country of Men”, published by the Penguin imprint Viking, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2006. His second novel, due to be published next spring, is about a man who is haunted by the absence of his father. Matar described it as being concerned with “the existential reality of living with inconclusive loss”.

L to R: Atiq Rahimi; interpreter Carine Kennedy; Tahar Ben Jelloun; Adam Shatz; Eli Amir

Another session, which carried a ‘Recommended by PEN’ slogan, featured Moroccan-born Tahar Ben Jelloun and Afghan Atiq Rahimi, both of whom write in French and have won France’s highest literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Ben Jelloun won the prize in 1987 for “The Sacred Night” and Rahimi won it in 2008 for his latest novel “The Patience Stone”.

Ben Jelloun said his exile is a linguistic exile, and that “my writing in another language allowed me to say all kinds of things that I wouldn’t necessarily have said if I had been writing in Arabic.” His parents did not speak a word of French and “I was writing in a language they couldn’t understand. I wrote things they would not have liked to have heard, especially with regard to the condition of women”.

Ben Jelloun added that exile is “something that preoccupies me every single day. I write a lot about immigration and about those who are exiled. Even when I am back in my country Morocco I still feel in exile.” His latest novel to appear in English translation is “Leaving Tangier”.

Atiq Rahimi, who lives in Paris, wrote his first books in Afghan Persian, starting with the 2000 novella “Earth and Ashes”, followed by “A Thousand Rooms of Dreams and Fear”.

Atiq said that after visiting Afghanistan in 2002 for the first time in 18 years, “I suddenly realized that I could no longer write in my mother tongue, and so when I wrote ‘The Patience Stone’ I wrote it in French.” Polly McLean’s English translation is published by Other Press in the US and Chatto & Windus in the UK.

Atiq said: “I would never have written ‘The Patience Stone’ in my mother tongue. I might have written about women who are victims, or who have to wear the veil, and talked about their social conditions, but I would never have written something that was provocative. I would never have written about sexuality in the way that I write about it in that particular book.”

Appearing alongside Ben Jelloun and Rahimi was the Iraqi-born Jewish writer Eli Amir, who left Baghdad for Israel in 1950 at the age of 13 and has never returned. Amir said: “We felt we were in exile when we were in Iraq, and when we came to Israel we again felt we were in exile.” In Israel the Iraqi Jews were newcomers encountering an entirely different culture with a different language and which knew “almost nothing about Arab culture and Arab countries.”

It took him more than 20 years to start writing books, and his first novel, “Scapegoat”, was about the ordeal of changing identity in a new society. It was with his second novel “The Dove Flyer” (also known as “Farewell Baghdad”) that he drew on his memories of Iraq. “Every time I want to remember Baghdad I read a chapter of my book.” Halban of London recently published the English translation from Hebrew, by Hillel Halkin, of the novel which is set in Baghdad in 1950, a time of increasing difficulty for Iraqi Jews.

Amir noted that three or four writers from Arab countries have become famous in Israel – and his writing is part of the school curriculum – but he complained that in bookshops their works are not considered part of mainstream literary culture but are consigned to shelves for Arab, “Oriental” or “ethnic” writers.

Eli Amir

number of elected representatives of mideast origin increases in britain

Mixed results in the British general and local elections for candidates of Middle Eastern origin
by
Susannah Tarbush
[original of article that appeared in Arabic in Al-Hayat 17 June 2010]

When the first weekly “questions to the prime minister” session of the new British parliament was held in the House of Commons on 2 June, among the few MPs chosen to ask a question was the new Conservative MP for Stratford-upon-Avon, Nadhim Zahawi [pictured top].

Zahawi (43), who was born in Iraq in 1967, made history in the general election of May 6 by becoming the first person born in an Arab League country, and the first Kurd, to be elected as an MP.

Zahawi asked the new Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron: “Was the prime minister surprised that so many people in the public sector earn more than he does?”

Zahawi was referring to the new coalition government’s publication of public sector salaries, as part of its policy of transparency. The figures showed that as many as 172 top civil servants each earns more, in some cases much more, than the £ 142,000 annual salary of the Prime Minister.

Cameron replied that the publication of the figures is good for democracy and accountability and will help to control public spending. “There will be pressure to keep top pay levels down,” Cameron said. He added it is possible that the new government will restrict the salary of those at the top of a public sector organisation to a multiple of no more than 20 times as much as the salary of those at the bottom of the organisation.

Zahawi’s constituency of Stratford-upon-Avon is the English town in which the great playwright and poet William Shakespeare was born in 1564. The seat is a safe Conservative seat, and the Conservative share of the vote rose in the election to 51.6 per cent, from 49.2 per cent in the 2005 election.

Before the election, Zahawi was best known as the co-founder in 2000 of the highly successful market research and opinion poll company YouGov in 2000, whose operations now extend from Britain to Middle East, Scandinavia, Central Europe and the USA.

Zahawi was one of a number of candidates with roots in the Middle East or North Africa who stood in the general elections of May 6 or in the local elections held on the same day in London and many other places in England.

One of the Arab candidates who was elected as a councillor in the local elections, Algerian Mouna Hamitouche, has since then been elected by her fellow councillors to serve as the Mayor of the North London borough of Islington for 2010/11. She is the first Arab woman, and the first Algerian, to be a mayor in the UK.

“Being the first Arab woman to hold the office of Councillor and now Mayor makes me hugely proud of the values we hold here in the UK for tolerance, respect and equality,” Hamitouche [pictured in her mayoral robes] told Al-Hayat.

Hamitouche first became a councillor in the 2006 local elections when she was elected for Labour in the Barnsbury “ward” (ie electoral district) in the borough of Islington. At that time she had the distinction of being the first Algerian, and the first Arab woman, to be elected as a councillor in the UK.

Several candidates with roots in an Arab League member country stood as parliamentary candidates in the general election. They included Labour politician Mark Hendrick (52), who was re-elected as Labour MP for the northern English constituency of Preston. Hendrick, who was born in northern England, is half-Somali and served as a member of the European Parliament before first being elected for Preston in a by-election in 2000.

Beirut-born Bassam Mahfouz (30), who stood for Labour in the newly-created West London constituency of Ealing Central and Acton, had a good chance of being elected as an MP. The constituency was regarded as one of the closest three-way marginals in the country, in which the three main parties were very close. After a vigorous election campaign he was in the end beaten into second place by the Conservative candidate Angie Bray. She got 38 per cent of the vote, while Mahfouz got 30.1 per cent, pushing the Liberal Democrat candidate John Ball into third place.

Bassam’s journalist father Hafez Mahfouz is originally from the town of Marjayoun in southern Lebanon. The family moved to London when Bassam was four years old and he joined the Labour Party at the age of 17. He has for a number of years been a councillor on the council of the borough of Ealing.

As well as standing in the general election on May 6 Mahfouz [pictured] stood in the local elections, and was re-elected as a councillor in the Northolt West End ward of Ealing. Labour did well in the local elections in Ealing, and seized control of the council from the Conservatives. Mahfouz is now a member of the Ealing Council Cabinet, in which he has responsibility for Transport and Environment.

Two women with Arab roots stood as parliamentary candidates for the Liberal Democrats. Anood Al-Samerai , the daughter of an Iraqi father and British mother, stood for the party in the constituency of Ilford South in north-east London which is traditionally a safe Labour seat. Al-Samerai came third, but she also stood in the local elections in which she was
re-elected as a councillor in the Riverside ward of Southwark, where she has already been a councillor for some years. More than that, Al-Samerai was chosen as leader of the Liberal Democrats group of 25 councillors on Southwark council.

Layla Moran [pictured], the daughter of a Palestinian mother and English father, stood for the Liberal Democrats in Battersea, London, at the age of only 27. Like Al-Samerai, she came third.

Even though Mahfouz, Al-Samerai and Moran were not elected, it is encouraging that young British Arabs are now being selected as parliamentary candidates for the main British political parties. Their experience gained through being candidates will be invaluable to their political futures – and it should anyway be remembered many of the biggest names in British politics lost in at least one general election early in their parliamentary careers.

In the local elections, there was a marked increase in the number of elected councillors with roots in Arab League countries, even if the number is still modest. Most of the Arab candidates in the local elections stood for Labour, although there were some exceptions.

In contrast to its performance in the general election, Labour did well in the local elections in London, increasing the number of boroughs it controls by eight, to a total of 17 boroughs. The Conservatives control 11 boroughs and the Liberal Democrats two, while two boroughs are not under the control of any one party.

The chairman and founder of the British Arabs Association [Rabita Al-Arab Al-Britianiyeen] Atallah Said [pictured], who was born in Palestine in 1947, was for the first time elected as a Labour councillor in the May 6 elections, in the East Actor ward of Ealing. He notes that Ealing Council now has three Arab councillors, all of them from Labour – him, Bassam Mahfouz, and the Somali councillor Abdullah Ahmed Gulaid who represents Acton Central ward.

Atallah joined the Labour Party in 1997 and in 2000 founded the Arab Labour Group. Despite the defeat of the Labour government in the general election, Atallah remains an optimist about the party’s future, and declares: “Well be back!”

He chairs the Arab Labour Group, and Mahfouz is the secretary. The vice chairman is Abdessalem El Idrissi El Amrani (known as “Skip Amrani”) who is of Moroccan origin and who was elected on May 6 as a Labour councillor in Catford South ward of the borough of Lewisham in south-east London. El-Amrani is the director of trade services at the Arab-British Chamber of Commerce. He first served as a councillor from 1998, but lost his seat in the 2006 local elections.

Last year Atallah founded the British Arabs Association as “a forum for British Arabs to promote integration and promote domestic issues which are of wide concern to the community.” The Association was launched at a reception [pictured] at which the guest of honour was the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband.


The British Arabs Association is to hold a reception on 8 July to celebrate its first anniversary, at which Miliband, who is now the front runner in the contest to become new Labour leader, will again be the main guest. The other guests will include Arab councillors elected last month.

Among the new Arab councillors is energetic Egyptian lawyer Ahmed Gharib Abdel-Hamid, who is thought to Britain’s first-ever Egyptian councillor. He was elected for Labour in the Church Street ward of the borough of Westminster. The Church Street ward is located around Edgware Road, the street in central London famed for its many Arab restaurants, cafes, newspaper shops, apartments and small businesses.

Abdel-Hamid has lived in Britain since 1973 and is the founder and chair of the Anglo Egyptian Society, a charity based in Harrow Road which gives legal and other services to the local community, whether Arabic speaking or not.

At least seven Somalis have been elected as councillors. The upheavals in Somalia have led to a large influx of Somalis into Britain in recent years, many of them as refugees. It is striking that they are keen to participate in local politics, and it was estimated that around 17 Somali candidates stood in the latest local elections.

The newly-elected Somalis almost all stood for Labour in London boroughs. As well as Abdullah Ahmed Gulaid in Ealing, they include Abdifatah Aden in the borough of Brent, Adbul Mohamed in Southwark and Ahmed Adam Omer in Tower Hamlets. Outside London, Asad Osman is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Ardwick ward, Manchester.

Awale Olad [pictured below] has been elected as a Labour councillor in the Holborn and Covent Garden ward of the borough of Camden at the age of only 25. Born in Mogadishu, he came to England in 1992 at the age of seven. He lives in Holborn, where he went to a local school.

Camden is an area of high Somali concentration. Olad estimates there are between 4,000 and 6,000 Somalis in Camden, although “you can never be sure without a proper census” , of whom 2.500 are registered to vote.

But Olad makes it clear that he wants to help all communities in his ward, and not particularly the Somali one. For example he is currently a volunteer football coach to the 8th Holborn Scouts. “Not a single Somali in sight – but I hope to inspire the kids who turn up every Thursday evening to be good citizens, show kindness, respect, and give up their free time for charitable causes. Charity is very important for me.”

He has been chairman of the Somali Youth Development Resource Centre which started in 2000, and for which he first started to do volunteer work with young people after he had finished university.

A major reason he has always supported Labour is the benefits it has provided to those who are less well off. This includes the Education Maintenance Allowance “which took huge financial burdens off my mother and helped me greatly at school. It may have even saved my education.” He says the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would not dream of giving such incentives.

He joined the Labour Party in 2005 but did not become a party activist until after the 2006 local elections when Labour lost control of Camden Council to a Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition which “deployed the worst assault on public services, housing, education and the third sector [ie non- governmental organisations], that this borough has ever seen. It mobilised me – it made me want to stand up and fight back – it made me a Labour councillor. And their temporary stewardship came to a swift end.” (Labour regained control of the council in the May elections).

Asked about the fact that there are now at least seven Somali councillors in Britain, and about the apparent keenness of Somalis to get involved in British politics, Olad says:
“I never stood to just be part of a small contingent of Somali councillors. I stood because I felt the injustice locally and wanted to fight for what I believe in. But if seven councillors of Somali origin will inspire the Somali community to engage with local and national politics, even though I sincerely do believe that Somalis, like other communities, are politically active and aware of current affairs; then that can only be a good thing. But do it for the right reasons – do it because you want to represent everyone and not just a minority of people, and have a vision.”

'raising dust' with the politics of palestinian dance

Exploring the politics of Palestinian dance
by Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette June 10 2010

Nicholas Rowe [pictured below] is a graduate of the Australian Ballet School and has worked as a choreographer and dancer with major dance companies in several countries including Finland, the Philippines, New Zealand and Turkey. But it was a trip to the Occupied Palestinian territories in 1998 that changed his life.
He decided to move to the West Bank, and lived in Ramallah from 2000 to 2008 working with young dancers on various projects. “Curiosity brought me to the West Bank, but love made me stay,” Rowe writes in his book “Raising Dust: A Cultural History of Dance in Palestine”, newly published by IB Tauris of London and New York. On his first trip to the West Bank he had met a beautiful and creative dancer, Maysoun Rafeedie. The two eventually married, and they are the parents of two young daughters.

Rowe is now an Associate Dean at the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His book is based on a PhD thesis he completed through London Contemporary Dance School.
Rowe was recently in London for the launch of his book at the Mosaic Rooms, part of the A. M. Qattan Foundation, and for the screening at the Palestinian Film Festival of his 2009 film “The Secret World” made with Ramallah schoolchildren. At the launch he spoke with insight and humor about his experiences of working with Palestinians in dance workshops and training them to run workshops themselves.
Rowe’s account of the circumstances around his first visit to the West Bank shows the extent to which culture can be a minefield in the Israel-Palestine context. He had gone to Israel at the invitation of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to write a critique of “Curtain Up – Zionist Movement”, the annual showcase of Israeli contemporary dance. A few months earlier some artists in Cairo had given him dance contacts in the West Bank, and he decided to combine his visit to Israel with a one-week dance workshop at the Popular Arts Center in Ramallah.
Rowe was struck by the contrast between the dance workshop, which was not very different from dance workshops he had taught in other places around the world, and the conditions the Palestinians had to endure. Each day on leaving the studio he would step “into a world so shaped by military oppression that the very thought of dancing seemed bizarre.”
At the workshop the young West Bankers had used movement to try to tell their stories in ways that might interest and inspire others in the community. In his published review of “Curtain Up” Rowe commented on how peculiar it was that none of these stories from the West Bank could be found in the tales of personal angst performed at the comparatively lavish contemporary Israeli dance festival just an hour’s drive away in Tel Aviv.
The Israeli Ministry of Culture never invited him to write about Israeli dance again. “’Why did you have to go and get political?” the Israeli cultural attaché in London bellowed at him down the phone. “We sent you to write an article on dance!”
In his book Rowe traces the numerous interrelationships between Palestinian dance and politics. The history of Palestine has been a highly contentious area of study, resulting in radically polarized versions of events. Israeli school textbooks for example, have largely ignored the pre-Zionist existence of a local Palestinian population, and the traumatic impact of Zionist colonization and nation building on that population.
“A presentation of local dance history that first recognizes the existence of a substantial local population in the region prior to Zionist colonization and then examines the collective trauma experienced by that population is therefore bound to provoke contention,” Rowe says.
His thorough and lucid study covers dance in Palestine from its ancient roots to the present day. The earliest reference he has come across was in a letter written 3,800 years ago by King Zimri-Lim of Mari to his wife Queen Spitu.
The book includes reproductions of a number of remarkable old photographs of dance-related events, some taken 100 or more years ago [picture shows Bethlehem women performing a wedding danceand song in 1940s]. Recent photographs capture the work of leading West Bank dance groups El-Funoun Popular Dance Troupe and the Sareyyet Ramallah Troupe for Music and Dance [pictured bottom].
At the heart of Rowe’s book is a discussion of the dance revival movements that have played a prominent role in battles over cultural ownership between Palestine’s indigenous population and the colonizers. The revival of dances from Palestine’s indigenous population occurred three times in the 20th century, associated with Zionism, pan-Arabism and Palestinian nationalism respectively. Each approached the revival process from different ideological and aesthetic viewpoints.
The Zionist “salvage” amounted to an appropriation of the dance practices of the indigenous Palestinians. The motive was partly a desire to forge a collective Israeli identity and to reestablish cultural links with an ancient Jewish past, of which local traditional dances were claimed to be a legacy.
In the 1930s and 1940s Zionist dancers researched the local Palestinian peasant dabkeh. The steps were re-choreographed into stage presentations of folk dance by Zionist youth. Israeli choreographer Shalom Herman said that the new Israeli dances became “one of the best known ambassadors of the spirit of the new State of Israel and its people.”
Pan-Arabist salvage was seen in the West Bank under Jordanian rule in 1947-67 when the stress was on pan-Arabism rather than Palestinian nationalism. Folkdance productions from Lebanon became particularly influential.
The Palestinian nationalist salvage of dance culture came after the 1967 war. Under the Israeli military occupation, West Bank academics researched folklore and looked to ancient culture to challenge the Zionist narrative and provide unifying symbols of collective Palestinian national identity. “By striving to authenticate a distinctly ‘Palestinian’ dabkeh, Palestinian nationalist folklorists were challenging both Zionist appropriation and pan-Arabist assimilation.”
Rowe terms the 1980-2008 period the “post-salvage paradigm”. This period included the first intifada, the Oslo peace process, and the second intifada. The Palestinian nationalist folklore movement continued to play a prominent part in West Bank dance revival but in the 1990s there was a dramatic increase in cultural encounters between local and foreign artists.
Dance artists were “forced to negotiate with both the ongoing local salvagist ideals of unchanging traditions and foreign definitions of modernism and postmodernism.” This led to disputes over cultural identity and cohesion in the early years of the 21st century, when the West Bank became relatively isolated once more.

marina warner delivers first edward w said london lecture

New lecture series honors memory of Edward Said
by Susannah Tarbush

Nearly seven years after the death of the outstanding Palestinian scholar, author, music lover, and campaigner for Palestinian rights Edward Said, an annual lecture series in his memory has been launched in London with the inaugural lecture delivered by British scholar and author Marina Warner.

The topic of this first Edward W Said London Lecture, held in the British Museum’s BP lecture theatre, was “Oriental Masquerade: Fiction and Fantasy in the Wake of the Arabian Nights.”

Marina Warner is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex and holds positions at several other institutions. She is an intellectual of exceptional originality and breadth and has won numerous distinctions and awards.

Warner first got to know Edward Said in 1993 when he gave that year’s Reith series of BBC lectures. “He was a man of great warmth, and dazzling elegance, and huge presence and when he gave you his interest and his friendship it was a very great thing,” she recalled. He was “a mentor and catalyst to so many”.

The event was introduced by Professor Jacqueline Rose of Queen Mary, London University, and opening remarks were given by the eminent Jamaican-born sociologist cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Professor Rose described Said as “one of the – if not the - most important and influential public intellectual of his time. I know I am not speaking for myself alone when I say that he taught us what being a public intellectual might mean.”

Hall paid tribute to Said’s “capacious capacity for friendship and his deep influence on my thinking and writing.” He outlined some of Said’s hallmark concepts, such as “worldliness” and “contrapuntal reading”, and gave an overview of his books including the enormously influential “Orientalism” (1978).

The work of Said which touched Hall most personally was the memoir of his childhood and youth, “Out of Place”, partly because it carried so many echoes of , and correspondences with, Hall’s own experiences.


The BP Lecture Theatre was packed out for the lecture, which was sponsored by the A M Qattan Foundation and supported by the British Museum, London Review of Books and the Lebanese-British author Hanan Al-Shaykh.

Said’s widow Miriam Said had travelled to London for the event, as had his son Wadie and daughter-in-law Jennifer.

One focus of Warner’s lecture was the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra (WEDO) founded by Said and the Argentine-born Israeli conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim. The orchestra began in 1999 when Said, Barenboim and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma held a workshop in Weimar, Germany, for young musicians aged between 18 and 25 from the Arab world and Israel.

Weimar was European Capital of Culture in that year, which also marked the 250th anniversary of the birth of the great German writer and poet Goethe. Said remembered that it was in Weimar that Goethe had composed the 1819 collection of poems “The West-Eastern Divan”, which was inspired by his enthusiasm for Islam and for Persian poetry.

The orchestra adopted as its name the title of Goethe’s cycle of poems. “The name of the orchestra was born: it wasn’t discussed further and it has remained – resonant, mysterious, a promise of possibility” Warner said.

The establishment of the orchestra was “politically heroic and anachronistic, and it remains so. Its existence brushed against the grain of so much in the region at that time, and its struggle to survive continues even more acutely now (the almost unimaginably deteriorating situation since then is not diminishing the difficulties).”

Warner did not elaborate on the difficulties that have faced the orchestra recently, with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) alleging that WEDO violates the boycott and promotes “normalization”.

Miriam Said refuted the allegations in an article published in March, but in a response PACBI stuck to its previous line. Miriam has played an active role in the orchestra’s activities since Edward’s death and is vice president of the Barenboim Said Foundation. She described in her article how Said had described WEDO as “the most important thing I do in my life”.

Warner said that WEDO’s two founders “markedly rejected interpreting the orchestra as a political enterprise: in his 2006 Reith lectures Barenboim affirmed that the work of the orchestra was musical through and through.”

Warner examined how Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan” poems embody the orchestra’s vision. The Divan became part of what the French literary scholar Raymond Schwab called The Oriental Renaissance in his 1950 study “The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680-1880”.

Schwab’s book excited Said’s enthusiastic endorsement. “It explored how the culture and civilisation of the West was actively shaped by the encounter with Arabic, Middle Eastern and Asian cultures in ways that have not been sufficiently explored or recognised, even when the European debt to Arab science is remembered.”

Oriental Masquerade was the height of fashion in the 18th century in theatre, literature, philosophy and politics – for example in the writings of Montesquieu and Voltaire. Mozart’s opera “Cosi Fan Tutte”, which Said admired, used Oriental impersonation and masquerade.


In the opera Ferrando and Guglielmo appear in their masquerade with Ottoman style moustaches in order to prove the fidelity of their betrothed.

“The Albanian disguises of their fiancés trigger out-of character behaviour in the two young women,” Warner said. “Said chose to see past the light malice of the opera’s ideas about the ways of all women and suggest instead that it offers a deeper insight into human character.”

Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte “project a modern understanding of the self as changeable in relation to others, rather than atomised; identity does not possess fixed integrity, but alters as elective affinities work metamorphoses upon it.

Goethe was in his sixties when he began pouring out the poems of the “West Eastern Divan”. As Edward Said himself grew older, his thoughts turned to the effects of lateness in his essays “On Late Style” posthumously edited by Michael Wood and published in 2006.

Towards the end of her presentation Warner quoted from a lecture Said gave at Berkeley in early 2003, the year of his death in which he spoke of his WEDO project with Barenboim. Said asserted that separation between peoples and ignorance of the other is no solution to the problems dividing people. Cooperation and co-existence of the kind the project had experienced through living, performing and sharing music might be a help.

Warner concluded: “The courage of Said as polemicist developed this late style of furious ‘advocacy’ as well as invective. He never lost his fine fury, but the many antagonists of his insights are blind to the deep humanity of his vision and the possibilities he saw of making culture cross borders and even move them.”

international gallerie issue (no 25) on palestinian culture

Indian arts journal focuses on Palestinian culture
by Susannah Tarbush, Saudi Gazette May 9 2010

In recent years a growing number of Palestinian artists have come to international attention, including filmmaker and actor Elia Suleiman, visual artist Mona Hatoum and the late poet Mahmoud Darwish. In January the play “I am Yusuf and This is my Brother” was brought to London’s Young Vic Theater by the Palestinian theater company ShiberHur – meaning “an inch of freedom” – and received rave reviews.
The most recent issue of the Mumbai-based publication International Gallerie brings together these and other Palestinian accomplishments in the arts and presents a compelling picture of intense creativity energized by a traumatic history and a defiant response.
The handsome 124-page issue is a valuable record of the work of Palestinian artists in the visual arts, music, reportage, photography, theater and poetry. And tucked away in its pages is a specially compiled CD, “Checkpoint Palestine: Rhythms of Palestine”, featuring artists such as Sabreen, Reem Kelani , Marwan Abado, Suhail Khoury, Khaled Joubran, Ahmad Al-Khatib, Al Bara’em and Ramallah Underground.
International Gallerie was founded in 1997 by the prominent cultural entrepreneur, writer and poet Bina Sarkar Ellias as a journal dedicated to the journey of arts and ideas. Published twice a year, it has won prizes and has established an international reputation, with subscribers including top galleries, museums and universities worldwide.
Ellias is editor, designer and publisher of the journal. In preparation for the Palestine issue she traveled to the West Bank and Jerusalem seeking an answer to the question: “What is the significance of going through a checkpoint in Palestine?” In a hard-hitting editorial she writes: “Artists, writers, thinkers, poets, musicians, dangers, theatre people, photographers and filmmakers, from the homeland and the diaspora, are activists in the truest sense. Their work, a form of resistance, emerges from wounds of loss and displacement.”
There could be no better authority on the Palestinian visual arts, past and present, than the 67-year-old Jerusalem-born artist and writer Kamal Boullata [pictured] who now lives in southern France. His work is held by leading public collections in the Middle East, Europe and the US and he is author of the groundbreaking work “Palestinian Art: From 1850 to the Present” (Saqi, 2009).
In his substantial essay, “From the Crucible of Struggle: Innovation in Art”, he asks: “In the chaotic world of the uprooted, where there is not even such a thing as a written art history or anything close to a tradition of art criticism, how can the issue of innovation in art be investigated?”
His survey begins before the Palestinian ‘nakba’ (catastrophe) of 1948 when the establishment of Israel led to the uprooting of some 800,000 Palestinians. The ‘nakba’ made the pre-1948 pictorial traditions mostly inaccessible. Since 1948, the “cosmopolitan cultural centre” that Jerusalem represented has been demolished and the dispossessed generations of Palestinian artists have grown up in distant regions.
In the first two decades after the nakba Palestinian innovations in visual expression fell within two broad currents. One current was the emergence of artists from the rural population of refugee camps emerged, practicing a populist form of art. The other current was of artists from urban centers, mostly trained in European institutions at home or abroad. Beirut became an important magnet for such artists.
The 1967 war and occupation ushered in a new phase of artistic development. The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and expulsion of the PLO from Beirut, and eruption of the first intifada in 1987, also led to changes on the art scene.
In a profile of leading Palestinian artist 63-year-old Sliman Mansour, Gannit Ankori of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem describes how Mansour’s art “delves into the traumatic experiences of exile and military occupation” which have dominated Palestinian life in the post-nakba period. But Mansour also expresses “the profound beauty of the homeland, the power of native traditions such as olive picking, embroidery and pottery, and the strength and resilience of the people and their desire for liberation and justice.” [pictured: Mansour's iconic image "Camel of Burdens"].
Sharif Waked turns the table on the Israeli humiliation of Palestinians at checkpoints through his video “Chic Point Palestine” juxtaposing a catwalk show of young men modeling “checkpoint chic” with documentary stills showing the reality of checkpoints. The clothes are designed to “preempt those daily imperatives of Israeli soldiers, who order Palestinians to lift their clothes and expose their flesh.”
Gallerie has a double spread of fold out pages of seven images by Palestinian photographer Steve Sabella. Six of the images each show a different young Israeli man dressed only in boxer shorts standing in front of the separation wall. Facing them is a picture of the photographer similarly dressed. Sabella explains: “Getting rid of clothes signals the need to go back to the essence in a hope to reconsider a different way of ‘seeing’, and to be rid of what is currently shaping us.”
The name of the radical cartoonist Naji Al-Ali is particularly associated with the figure of Hanthala – a refugee boy with his back to the viewer – who appears in many of his cartoons. “Hanthala represents Al-Ali himself, as well as all Palestinians,” writes Hani W. El Haddad in his essay on the cartoonist for Gallerie. Al-Ali was assassinated in London in 1987 by an unknown killer.
Dance, and especially dabke, is a vital ingredient in Palestinian popular culture. El-Funoun Palestinian Popular Dance Troupe, founded in 1979, fuses traditional dabke with contemporary dance styles. The troupe’s director Khaled Katamesh (46), who lives and works Al Bireh in the West Bank, writes on dabke in his article “Dance for Freedom”, illustrated by Nida Haj Ali-Qatamesh’s gorgeous photographs of dancers in vivid costumes.
The CD provided by the journal is complemented by an article on music by composer and musician Suhail Khoury, who lives and works in Jerusalem and is director of the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music and a member of the Oriental Music Ensemble. In his overview of music, he observes that it was in the late 20th century that a unique Palestinian musical identity became evident. The Edward Said conservatory and the Palestine Youth Orchestra were subsequently created.
In the realm of the written word, Gallerie has poetry from the late Mahmoud Darwish, in translation from Arabic, and from Nathalie Handal who lives and works in New York, and Jerusalem-born Najwan Darwish.
The journal includes Palestinian reportage on Israel’s Gaza war. There are striking and harrowing photographs from Eman Mohammed. She is probably the only local female photo journalist in Gaza, which she describes as being “a curse and a gift” [picture shows her image of a girl praying in a Gaza mosque]. In “Sorry! We Are From Gaza” text by Fares Akram is married to photos from Hareef Sarhan. In his essay “Encounters with a Renaissance Man”, Art historian Professor Partha Mitter writes on the “pleasant yet distant” friendship he enjoyed with the late Palestinian professor Edward Said whom he first met at Columbia University in 1980. They last met in Calcutta in 1997 when Said was invited to deliver the Nataji Oration. In an aside Said confessed to Mitter with some sadness that he envied him. “I had a home to return to but he had none. For me, this seems to sum up Edward Said’s anger and pain at his complex transcultural background and his feeling as a perpetual exile lacking a homeland that he could call his own.”

rodaan al galidi's 'thirsty river'

Thirsty River
by
Rodaan Al Galidi
translated by Luzette Strauss
Aflame Books, UK; 2009, pbk, 323 pp
ISBN: 978-1-906300-10-4

edited version appears in Banipal 37
by Susannah Tarbush
In this satirical epic, published in translation from Dutch, the Iraqi-born novelist Rodaan Al Galidi gives a sweeping view of Iraqi politics and society through the experiences of four generations of one family.

Al Galidi’s inventive and entertaining prose interweaves the action of the novel with folk tales, myths, secrets, prophecies and dreams, in language ranging from the scatological to the lyrical. Tragedy and horror are juxtaposed with black comedy as the author explores the corrupting effects of dictatorship. Thirsty River has much heart and humanity and makes a powerful emotional impact, while revealing a great deal about Iraq.

The Bird family lives in the town of Boran on the banks of the Thirsty River in southern Iraq, and long ago “lost its reputation and its glory”. The family name had originally been Star, but was changed after family member Dime, a girl living under the strict control of her ten brothers, was driven crazy by frustrated desire and raging hormones. She ran naked through the streets of Boran, screaming to a hunter that her genitals had become a bird, and drowned herself in Thirsty River. From then on the family was known as Bird. Dime’s remains were found by one of her brothers when Thirsty River ran dry, as it does every winter, and he took her bones and hair home in a sack.

The discovery of Dime’s bones has resonances many years later when a member of the Bird family, ex-military man Rizen, devotes himself after the 2003 invasion to excavating mass graves, putting bones and documents in bags to be identified by families.

The family is headed by tough old matriarch Simahen, who never forgave her brother for marrying her off to the “filthy weaver” Nadus. She asserted her dominance from the start, beating her husband on their wedding night rather than sleeping with him. Simahen is a survivor, and in the last year of her life she tells her great grandson that she is “eight wars old.”

Kosjer, the youngest child of Simahen and Nadus, marries Wasile. Every time Wasile gives birth to one of their six children (except for the one daughter) there is a change of power in Baghdad. This is the case on the day in 1979 that Saddam comes to power, and Kosjer and Wasile’s youngest, Adam, is born. But the day proves disastrous for the Birds after Kosjer ties a newly-bought ram to the TV aerial outside a teahouse where the customers are watching Saddam on the small screen. The ram charges at the aerial, disrupting the transmission of Saddam. The secret police detain Kosher and all the men of the family, and they are never seen alive again.

From then on Simahen goes daily to the Ba’ath Party offices to inquire after the family’s menfolk. Among the myriad of characters created by Al Galidi is the local Ba’ath Party bigwig, Hadi the Rocket, who takes full advantage of his position to enrich himself, and take multiple wives.

Adam was born sleeping and remains apparently asleep throughout Saddam’s rule. He is neglected by the family, save for his devoted sister Mira, and is left to sleep in the stable. He is the family scapegoat; Wasile has him brutally castrated, and Simahen deploys him as a human scarecrow in the vegetable garden. But the otherworldly Adam has been absorbing all the family’s secrets and conversations, as his young nephew Rasjad finds when he takes the time to communicate with him. After the overthrow of Saddam Adam wakes up properly and says he has “missed four peaces”.

The members of the Bird family, including Rizen’s brothers Sjahid, Joesr and Djazil, live through a gamut of experiences. Sjahid wants to be an artist and works for a time with Naji, a humorous artist who studied in Catalonia but who now spends his time repainting the ubiquitous public murals of Saddam Hussein. He warns Sjahid that his job is very dangerous, and that any mistake in painting Saddam could result in execution.

Images of Saddam in his different guises dominate TV screens and walls during his rule. Saddam regularly appears to the women of the Bird family in their dreams, listening to their complaints and sometimes seeming to foretell the future.

Djazil is a thief and a chaser of girls. One of his ears is cut off by an irate father whose daughter he has been pursuing, and Hadi the Rocket severs the other for the same reason although Joesr sews it back on.

When a local girl Baan is deflowered and impregnated by Djazil, her mother takes her to the Bird family to complain. Djazil evades all responsibility, and although Joesr pledges to marry the girl if Djazil will not, he is too slow to act and her uncle shoots her dead and hangs her severed right hand from a door.


Consumed by guilt, Joesr burns all his possessions, smashes up his room and takes refuge in the cellar until he is found by the secret police, tortured and sent to the army. He manages to get himself smuggled out of the country and trains in Afghanistan. After the 2003 invasion he turns the cellar into a workshop making bombs which he sells to suicide bombers until he can no longer live with himself.

Djazil and his men set up a feared militia, the Army of God militia. Rizen’s brutal son Saddam, who had been a member of Saddam’s commandos before the invasion, also joins and is transformed into Abdullah the Pious. When Djazil is captured by the Americans and photographed in a pyramid of naked bodies in Abu Ghraib, the family recognise him from the eagle tattoo on his buttock. As Rizen’s daughter Shibe puts it: “The arse of my uncle Djazil is now famous all over the world, just like Elvis Presley! We have a world famous member of our family!”

Various members of the family meet a grisly end over the years. One of Rizen’s sons, Edjnaad, is captured by soldiers and buried alive after he comes across them with trucks at night dumping live captives in pits and covering them with earth. Rasjad, pays a people smuggler to get him to Amman in order to follow a girl he has fallen in love with, only to fall victim to a broker of human organs. His heart is transplanted into a woman in Germany.

The novel ends on a few notes of hope. Rizen’s youngest son Tali strikes up an e-mail friendship with an American soldier who has deserted. The Bird family finds that the soil in which the bodies of so many murdered Iraqis lie is ideal for growing sunflowers. The family moves into sunflower farming and the production of sunflower oil.

As highlighted in the special feature ‘Writing in Dutch’ in Banipal 35, Al Galidi is one of an increasing number of writers of Arab origin who live in the Netherlands and are gaining prominence as writers in Dutch.

Al Galidi grew up in a village in southern Iraq and wrote from an early age, although his training was as a civil engineer. After leaving Iraq in the mid-1990s he arrived in 1998 in the Netherlands where he claimed political asylum. He spent eight years in the asylum detention system, and although his asylum application was finally refused he benefited in 2007 from the general pardon given to asylum seekers who had arrived before 2001.

Al Galidi has made his mark on the Dutch literary scene with impressive speed. He started teaching himself Dutch from a dictionary while held in asylum detention, and before long he was writing poetry and had columns published in newspapers. In 2002 he won both the El Hizjra Literature prize and the Phoenix Essay Prize; two years later he was shortlisted for the J C Bloemprijs and the Debut Prize. His poetry collection De herfst van Zorro (The Autumn of Zorro) was shortlisted in 2007 for the prestigious VSB Prize.

Thirsty River was first published in Dutch as Dorstige Rivier by Meulenhoff/Manteau in 2008, to much acclaim. It was in 2009 runner-up for the BNG New Literature Prize, and was also nominated for the Gerard Walschap Prize for Literature.

Thirsty River is Galidi’s third published novel, and last September Meulenhoff/Manteau published the fourth: De Autist en de Postduif (The Autist and the Homing Pigeon).

caine prize shortlist announced

The shortlist for the £10,000 Caine Prize for African Writing, announced today, features two writers from South Africa - Ken Barris and Alex Smith - plus Lily Mabura from Kenya, Namwali Serpel from Zambia and Olufemi Terry from Sierra Leone.

The Caine Prize, now in its 11th year, is often known as the 'African Booker' and is regarded as Africa's leading literary award. Unlike the Man Booker and Arabic Booker (ie International Prize for Arabic Fiction, IPAF) it is open not to novels but to short stories, of 3,000 to 10,000 words.

The shortlist was drawn up from 115 entries from 13 African countries. The winner will be annouced at a celebratory dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, on Monday 5 July. The shortlisted writers will read from their work at the Royal Over-Seas League on Friday 2 July at 7pm, and at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre on Sunday 4 July at 1pm.

Barris is shortlisted for "The Life of Worm" from "New Writing from Africa 2009" (Johnson & King James Books, Cape Town); Mabura for "How Shall We Kill the Bishop?" from Wasafiri No 53, Spring 2008; Serpel for "Muzungu" from "The Best American Short Stories 2009" (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston MA); Smith for "Soulmates" from "New Writing from Africa 2009", and Terry for "Stickfighting Days" from Chimurenga vol 12/13 (Cape Town, 2008).

The panel is judges is chaired by Fiammetta Rocco, literary editor of The Economist. The other judges are Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, Professor Jon Cook of the University of East Anglia and Georgetown University Professor Samantha Pinto.

Once again the winner of the prize will be given the opportunity of spending a month at Georgetown University in Washington DC as 'Caine Prize/Georgetown University Writer-in-Residence', with all travel and living expenses covered.

Last year the prize was won by Nigerian writer EC Osondu for his story "Waiting". Previous winners include Monica Arac de Nyeko for "Jambula Tree" and Zimbabwean Brian Chickwava, whose debut novel "Harare North" was recently published by Jonathan Cape.

professor fred halliday has died

Fred in action at the 'Is Islam a Threat to the West' conference at Chatham House in London in June 2005

The very sad news came today that Professor Fred Halliday had died in hospital in Barcelona.
The founder of OpenDemocracy Anthony Barnett has posted this tribute on the Open Democracy website:

Fred Halliday 1946 – 2010

Anthony Barnett, 26 April 2010

Fred Halliday, great scholar and openDemocracy columnist, has died. We are posting appreciations here
About the author: Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy.net and the editor of its UK section, Our Kingdom.

Fred Halliday died this morning in Barcelona where he had been battling with cancer. His twenty plus books (there are more to come), his compelling lectures, his wide ranging, powerful essays and journalism, provided a constant source of inspiration for many of us around the world. He was a like a one-man international: dedicated and passionate in the cause of justice; hard-headed in insisting upon the obstacles that had to be overcome; scathing about the stupidities of those who proclaimed they were the force of progress; constantly aware of the deeper levels of cultural and religious irrationality and its shaping power – and capable of making astoundingly well-informed judgments about almost anywhere on the planet. His urge to judgment, clarity and laying out a view that was also a challenge, made him an exemplary political intellectual. He investigated on the ground, read widely, learnt fluent Arabic, Farsi, German, French, Russian and Spanish and set out his views in lucid prose. An important contributor to openDemocracy, he saw his columns as a source of renewal. He intended to deepen his writing, to make it more personal and profound, and to take on the prevailing shallowness and loss of a sense of history in current affairs...
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