libyan fiction writers in the international spotlight

Libyan writers raise their profile
by
Susannah Tarbush
[Saudi Gazette 10 April 2011]

The ongoing crisis in Libya is leading to an upsurge of international interest in various facets of Libya, including its literature. This has prompted the London Book Fair (LBF) which opens tomorrow to add to its program at short notice a seminar entitled The Hidden Face of Libyan Fiction, scheduled for Wednesday afternoon.

The five Libyan writers participating in the seminar will “talk about the unknown Libyan novels, short stories and literary life in Libya, and open a discussion on the ongoing struggle for freedom in their country.” Four of the writers – Ghazi Gheblawi, Hisham Matar, Giuma Bukleb and Mohamed Mesrati – live in the UK. The fifth, Wafa Al-Bueissa, settled in the Netherlands after leaving Libya amidst controversy over her debut novel “Hunger has Other Faces”.

Chair of the seminar is Iraqi writer Samuel Shimon, editor of Banipal, the London-based magazine of modern Arab literature. By what Shimon terms an “amazing coincidence”, at the very time the uprising in Libya is raging Banipal has produced its first-ever special feature on Libyan fiction. The major feature takes up 135 pages of the 224-page 40th issue of Banipal. It showcases fiction by 17 Libyan authors including the five who are taking part in the LBF seminar.

Banipal issue 40 had been planned long before there was a whiff of revolution in the Libyan air. Shimon writes that he met by chance the veteran Libyan writer Ali Mustafa al-Musrati at the Greek Club in Cairo in 2007. Shimon told the writer how saddened he was by the neglect of Libyan literature in the Arab world and in the West. “I promised him that Banipal would publish a special feature on the wonderful literature of Libya. How happy we are to fulfill this promise at this time in particular…”

Banipal 40 includes a profile of al-Musrati (now 85) written by Banipal’s publisher Margaret Obank. Al-Musrati’s stories draw on the oral storytelling tradition, and are characterized by humor and biting satire. A marked vein of humor also runs through a number of the short stories and novel extracts by other authors in Banipal’s Libyan special feature. Satire can be a potent weapon in a culture in which freedom of expression was curbed for much of the periods since the early 20th century by the Italian occupation and then dictatorship.

The special feature has two introductory essays. The first, on the short story, is by Libyan short-story writer and translator Omar Abulqasim Alkikli [pictured]. It is followed by the thoughts of short-story writer and literary editor Ibrahim Ahmidan on the Libyan novel.

Alkikli refers to the toll the Gaddafi regime has taken on writers. The short story has been “the strongest manifestation of the Libyan literary movement”, but in the 1980s “the presence of the short story was greatly reduced as a result of the arrests of young authors and intellectuals that had been taking place since the mid-1970s”.

Three short-story writers were among those detained: Abdelsalam Shihab, who stopped writing during his imprisonment, Giuma Bukleh, who only resumed his literary career some 20 years after his release, and Omar Abulqasim Alkikli himself. Alkikli spent 10 years as a political prisoner before being released in 1988 with other jailed Libyan writers.

A number of other authors, though not imprisoned, stopped writing. The short story was revived in the 1990s with the gradual release of political prisoners, and the provision of the “lowest possible level of freedom of expression”. In addition to Alkikli’s essay, there are two of his short stories in Banipal 40 translated by Elliott Colla, Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University. The fine story “Leap” expresses a longing for freedom as experienced by a fenced-in horse.

Ibrahim Ahmidan [pictured] observes that with the short story and poetry for long the dominant literary forms in Libya, the Libyan novel took time to emerge. Trailblazers such as Ibrahim al-Koni, Ahmed Fagih and Saleh Snoussi helped develop the Arabic novel. Since the 1990s a stream of novels has appeared, including outstanding contributions from women such as Najwa Binshatwan, Wafa al-Bueissa and Razan Naim Moghrabi. Ahmidan writes: “We seem to be on the verge of a change that will push the novel to the forefront of the Libyan cultural scene…”


The 17 authors in Banipal 40 are varied in terms of their background, age and location. All but one write in Arabic and appear in Banipal in translation. The exception is Hisham Matar who writes in English. Banipal 40 reproduces the first few pages of his much-praised second novel “The Anatomy of a Disappearance”, published in early March by the Penguin imprint Viking.

The Libya special feature has a substantial section on the novelist Ibrahim al-Koni, born in 1948, whose Tuareg background is central to his highly original desert novels. Al-Koni lives in Switzerland and is the author of over 50 works. The extract, “The Winged People”, from his novel “New Waw” is a striking lyrical piece of writing that meditates on bird song and draws parallels between birds and tribes in the desert.

There is a review by Peter Clark of al-Koni’s novel “The Puppet”. In addition, Elliott Colla writes on his experiences of translating al-Koni’s novel “Gold Dust”. Colla writes: “It is hard not to be caught up in the beauty of Ibrahim al-Koni’s writing.”

Al-Koni's works have become increasingly available in English translation in recent years. And as a further sign of the intense interest in his novels, Georgetown's Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies is from 28 to 29 April hosting 'Tents in the Desert: A Colloquium on the Literary Imagination of Ibrahim al-Koni'. The symposium includes public readings by al-Koni himself, and presentations by translators and critics from the Arab world, Europe and North American.

Ahmed Fagih is represented in Banipal 40 through his vividly-realized short story “Lobsters” subtitled “In praise of lobsters and in mockery of men”. The story is rooted in an incident in which Jean-Paul Sartre took the hallucinogenic drug mescaline and suffered waking nightmares of crustaceans. In Fagih’s story a solemn Beirut philosophy teacher who wants to be like Sartre in every way tries but fails through the use of mescaline to replicate Sartre’s experience of crustacean hallucinations. Ultimately he succeeds all too well and is driven mad by battalions of lobsters.

Some of the 17 writers achieved recognition in the first decade of this century. Razan Naim Moghrabi is a prolific writer of short stories and novels, and nine of her works have been published since 2000. Her novel “Women of the Wind” was longlisted for the 2011 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF).

In the extract from “Women of the Wind” the Moroccan central character Bahija, who works in Tripoli, is hoping to arrange her passage to Europe through people smugglers. She talks to an Iraqi woman friend to find out all she can about the people-smuggling business.

Najwa Binshatwan [pictured], a lecturer at Garyounis University, is a poet, dramatist, novelist and short story writer. She was one of the Beirut39 authors chosen from across the Arab world by a panel of judges, whose work is compiled in the anthology “Beirut39”.

Binshatwan’s satirical short story “His Excellency the Eminence of the Void” takes aim at the regime’s system of patronage through a retired colonel. He dictates via his wife’s niece a petition to the Commander-in-Chief and Supreme Leader complaining that he has not been rewarded with the privileges of his former military colleagues.

In the extract from Wafa al-Bueissa’s debut novel “Hunger has Other Faces” a girl who is 15 but pretends to be older, falls in with a Turkish Cypriot man in Alexandria and embarks on “a phase of enjoyable delinquency”. In Azza Kamil al-Maghour’s story “The Bicycle” young girls liberate themselves by learning to ride bikes like boys.

Some of the authors write from the perspective of Libyans living in Europe. The youngest of the 17 writers Mohammed Mesrati [pictured], who is 21 this year, is represented through an extract from his novel-in-progress “Mama Pizza”. Mesrati gives an energetic, amusing account of a Libyan door-to-door menu delivery man in the English town of Runcorn, and his bearded, expansive mentor Ali Guevara.

The writer and award-winning blogger Ghazi Gheblawi [pictured] works as a medical doctor in London. In 2006 he founded the Arabic Imtidad Cultural Podcast. His short story “A Rosy Dream” is narrated in a direct, informal style by a young Libyan man travelling back to Libya from Paris via Malta in the days when travel restrictions on Libya were still in force. The story has a melancholy humor.

Two short stories by Giuma Bukleb are set in London, where Bukleb has lived since 1988. He brings a touch of exoticism to the city with “Tarzan of Palmers Green” and “The Good Woman of Turnpike Lane”.

The poet and short-story writer Omar el-Kiddi lives in the Netherlands. His warm, funny, well-constructed short story “The wonderful short life of the dog Ramadan” tells of a Libyan dog adopted by a Dutch woman and is taken to the Netherlands. From writer and painter Redwan Abushwesha there are five short tales, Borgesian in character, set in different countries and dedicated to different friends.

Some of the pieces in the Libyan special feature are set in the Libyan countryside. From Mohammed al-Asfar there is the delicately-written short story “The Hoopoe”, actually a chapter of his novel “Sharmoulah”. Mohammed al-Arishiya’s story “The Snake Catcher” resembles a folk tale.

Banipal will continue with the theme of Libyan literature in its next issue when it publishes work by Libyan poets including Salem al-Okaly, Abdelwahab Gringo and Sakeh Qaderbouh. The fate of the Libyan revolution is still uncertain, but whatever its outcome it looks as if 2011 will be a year in which the country’s literature comes out of the shadows in terms of international exposure.

khaled mattawa's new poem for libya: 'now that we have tasted hope'

This terrific new poem by Libyan-American writer, translator, scholar Khaled Mattawa was electrifyingly performed by the author on BBC Radio's The World Today on 19 March 2011, from 38.09 mins within interview with writer Hisham Matar which starts at 27.15 mins















NOW THAT WE HAVE TASTED HOPE

Now that we have tasted hope
Now that we have come out of hiding,
Why would we live again in the tombs we’d made out of our souls?

And the sundered bodies that we’ve reassembled with prayers and consolations,
What would their torn parts be other than flesh?

Now that we have tasted hope
And dressed each other’s wounds with the legends of our oneness
Would we not prefer to close our mouths forever shut on the wine
That swilled inside them?

Having dreamed the same dream,
Having found the water that gushed behind a thousand mirages,
Why would we hide from the sun again
Or fear the night sky after we’ve reached the ends of darkness,
Live in death again after all the life our dead have given us?

Listen to me Zow'ya, Beida, Ajdabya, Tobruk, Nalut, Derna, Musrata, Benghazi, Zintan,
Listen to me houses, alleys, courtyards, and streets that throng my veins,
Some day soon
In your freed light and in the shade of your proud trees,
Your excavated heroes will return to their thrones in your martyrs’ squares,
Lovers will hold each other’s hands.

I need not look far to imagine the nerves dying rejecting the life that blood sends them.
I need not look deep into my past to seek a thousand hopeless vistas.
But now that I have tasted hope
I have fallen into the embrace of my own rugged innocence.

How long were my ancient days?
I no longer care to count.
How high were the mountains in my ocean’s fathoms?
I no longer care to measure.
How bitter was the bread of bitterness?
I no longer care to recall.

Now that we have tasted hope,
Now that we have lived on this hard-earned crust,
We would sooner die than seek any other taste to life,
Any other way of being human.

Khaled Mattawa

libyan writer hisham matar's extraordinary times

Novelist Hisham Matar illuminates Libyan realities

These are extraordinary times for the Libyan novelist Hisham Matar, a long-time resident of London. The publication this month in the UK of his second novel “Anatomy of a Disappearance” had aroused much anticipation among critics and readers. What could not have been predicted was that publication of the novel would coincide with an uprising in Libya that offered the tantalizing prospect of an end to the 42-year-rule of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Matar’s novel has had an overwhelmingly positive reception and has received a slew of favorable reviews. In the past four weeks the author has been extensively interviewed in the media on the situation in Libya and on his fiction. He has also written a number of articles for the international media, calling in a New York Times Op-Ed for the international community to impose a no-fly zone over Libya and to provide food and medical supplies to rebel-held areas.

Matar’s describes his apartment in London as a news hub. He has been making up to 50 phone calls a day to doctors, relatives and others in Libyan cities and towns in an effort to gather and circulate accurate information.

Matar says that as a novelist he feels useless in the current uprising: “I don’t think I’m nearly as useful as a baker in Benghazi right now, or a doctor, or a nurse.” But there is no doubt that at a time of national crisis people look to writers to provide a different perspective and inner knowledge. Even if Matar’s novels are not strictly autobiographical or political, they illuminate realities of Libya.

Matar emerged as a major new literary talent in 2006 with his debut novel “In the Country of Men”. The novel was shortlisted for Britain’s premier literary award the Man Booker Prize, and for the Guardian First Book Award, and won several international literary prizes. Written in English, it has been translated into 28 languages including Arabic.


“In the Country of Men” is set in Tripoli in 1979. Its main protagonist is nine-year-old Suleiman whose father is involved in an underground pro-democracy movement. The boy tries to make sense of the events he observes around him, including the capture and torture of his father. The novel lays bare the corrosive effects of dictatorship on social and family relations.

In his second novel Matar explores the repercussions of the “disappearing” of an Arab political dissident. The man is kidnapped in Geneva, Switzerland, presumably by elements working for the regime of his home country. As in his first novel, the father-son relationship is central.

The “disappearing” of a dissident father is something Matar has lived through himself. He was born in 1970 in New York where his father Jaballa was a diplomat, and spent his childhood in Libya. But in 1979, after his father fell out with the Libyan regime, the family left for exile in Egypt. In 1990 Jaballa Matar was “disappeared” from Cairo.

The family heard nothing from Jaballa until two letters from him, written in Libya’s Abu Salim prison, were smuggled to them in 1992 and 1995. In the letters he revealed that he had been seized initially by Egyptian agents and handed over to the Libyan authorities. Nothing further has been heard from him, and his family feared he might have been killed in the massacre of 1,200 prisoners at Abu Salim prison in 1996. But last year Hisham disclosed that the family’s hopes had been raised by someone who had said he had seen Jaballa in a secret political prison in Tripoli in 2002.

From the first sentence of “Anatomy of a Disappearance” we feel the impact on Nuri of the vanishing of his father in 1972 when Nuri was 14: “There are times when my father’s absence is as heavy as a child sitting on my chest.”

Matar’s prose is spare and suggestive and his novel is a compelling read. He builds up an atmosphere of unease and tension as Nuri tries to piece together the secrets of his family through clues and half-remembered whispers that make sense only years later. One mystery is why his father was in the bedroom of a woman when he was seized.

The home country of Nuri’s wealthy father Kamal Pasha el-Alfi is never identified, although Matar drops several hints. Nuri reads in books that his father had been a close adviser to “the young king”, and was an aristocrat who after the revolution moved “gradually but with radical effect” to the left.

The details of Kamal’s back story are not the important thing: Matar set out in his novel to meditate on a state of unresolved grief and asks how well we know our fathers. Nuri feels that even before his disappearance, his father lacked “a kind of emotional eloquence and ease” towards him. Following the death of his mother when he is 10, he receives affection from the devoted servant Naim who has been with the family since her early teens.

When Nuri is 12 he and his father spend the summer at a hotel in Alexandria where they meet a half-Egyptian, half-English young woman named Mona. Matar brilliantly conveys Nuri’s confusing adolescent passion for Mona and his pain as he observes the growing closeness between her and his father. After Mona and Kamal marry, Nuri is packed off to boarding school in England but his obsession with Mona persists. Nuri comes across as a lonely, defensive individual, locked in his past and suffering the continuing pain of his father’s absence without knowing his fate.

Matar was invited to the Mosaic Rooms at the A M Qattan Foundation, central London, a few days ago for a discussion with filmmaker and Foundation trustee Omar Qattan. Mary Mount, Matar’s editor at Penguin Viking, introduced the packed-out event. She said: “It is extremely rare these days to find a writer who seems both timeless and yet able to shed a light on the very specific times in which we live. ‘Anatomy of a Disappearance’ is a novel that is extraordinarily controlled, beautifully written, and haunts the reader at the deepest possible level.”


Asked about his approach to writing, Matar said: “I don’t know the whole story when I start.” In the case of his new novel, he had started with a powerful feeling for the character of Nuri. “I thought he was sitting just out of view, and could almost sense his presence. I was motivated by that curiosity ... at some stage in the writing what becomes exciting is not just knowing him but testing him.”

When asked if he is hopeful about Libya, Matar said: “Hope is usually spoken about as a positive thing: I actually propose hope as a negative thing. Hope has a weight to it, a burden to it. Living in hope seems to me a kind of tragic condition.” The exciting thing about Libya is that while there is hope, “there is more importantly a sense of possibility that did not exist before – it’s as if the horizon just went much further than before.”

He continued: “Suddenly people are speaking about what sort of society we want – and speaking about it not in an abstract sense but in a very real sense. Democracy is not a hypothetical notion any more, it’s a reality, a necessity.”

He acknowledged that new technologies such as Facebook and Twitter have helped the pro-democracy movement. But he thought that what is missing in some explanations of recent events in Libya is the “rediscovery of the old myths... Suddenly you realize that you can’t have a country without mythology, and that in times like these people need to lean on those old myths.”

The rediscovery of Libyan national identity includes the sense that “we have been fighting fascism for the last 100 years.” Young Libyans facing Gaddafi’s tanks shout a battle cry that translates as “welcome to paradise, there she comes”. Matar pointed out that these are the same words that members of the Libyan resistance against Mussolini would shout when confronting Italian tanks and pointing their Ottoman guns at them.
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 20 March 2011
Author pic below by Diana Matar

Ilan Pappe's book on the Husaynis 1700-1948

Ilan Pappé’s book on the Palestinian Al-Husayni dynasty
by
Susannah Tarbush
A version of this article appeared in Arabic translation in Al-Hayat on 16 March 2011

When Israeli bulldozers began in January to demolish the Shepherd Hotel in the Sheikh Jarrah area of East Jerusalem in preparation for the building of apartments for Jewish settlers, this was in defiance of strong criticism from world leaders. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the demolition was “a disturbing development that undermines peace efforts to achieve the two-state solution.”
There were also objections from members of the al-Husayni family, which was for a long period of history the most powerful family in Palestinian politics. The historic Shepherd Hotel (which has no connection with the famous Shepheard Hotel in Cairo) was originally built as a villa in the 1930s for Al-Hajj Amin Al-Husayni (1895-1974), Grand Mufti of Jerusalem from 1921 to 1948.

The building was confiscated by Israel after the 1967 war and in 1985 it came into the ownership of Irving Moskowitz, the US Jewish billionaire who funds much Israeli Jewish settlement activity.

Abdel-Qadir al-Husayni, head of the Faisal al-Husayni Foundation told a press conference, at the time Israeli destruction of the hotel started, that there never was, and never would be, a deal between the al-Husayni family and the occupation government on the sale of the Shepherd Hotel compound.

Abdel-Qadir al-Husayni told Al-Hayat from Jerusalem in mid-February that the family is continuing to pursue the Shepherd Hotel issue through the courts and through diplomacy. He said so far it is the annexes to the original building that have been destroyed, and that the original villa is still standing. But he is worried that in the future most of the villa will also be demolished, leaving only its façade standing.

Abdel-Qadir al-Husayni is the son of the late politician Faisal al-Husayni, and the grandson of the great Palestinian fighter Abdel-Qadir al-Husayni who was killed in the Battle of Kastel west of Jerusalem on 8 April 1948. The warrior Abdel-Qadir was the son of Musa Kazim al-Husayni (1850-1934), who held several senior posts in Ottoman times, and was appointed mayor of Jerusalem in 1918, but was dismissed by the British for taking part in the 1920 Palestine riots. According to the dissident Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappé [pictured], Musa Kazim was, “the most highly respected of the al-Husaynis in the 20th century.”

Pappé is the author of a book on the history of the Al-Husayni family over a period of two and a half centuries, entitled “The Rise and Fall of a Palestinian Dynasty: The Husaynis 1700-1948”. Saqi Books of London recently published the book in a translation by Yael Lotan from Hebrew to English. The US edition is published by the University of California Press.

Pappé provides a richly detailed, complex and engaging narrative, packed with historical facts, incidents, anecdotes and character sketches. The book is a major contribution to the literature on Palestinian history, and the history of the wider Middle East. Inevitably, a considerable part of the book examines the life and role of Al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni who remains a highly controversial figure due to his pro-German, pro-Italian and anti-Jewish position in the Second World War. These days, supporters of Israel often refer to him as proof of Palestinian and Arab anti-Semitism, and some claim to see him as a kind of godfather of the Islamist terror of the present day.

Pappé provides an overview of al-Hajj Amin’s life, from his youth when he studied at Al Azhar in Cairo. The first British High Commissioner in Palestine Herbert Samuel, a Jew who was very sympathetic to Zionism, chose al-Hajj Amin as Mufti in 1921 because he thought he would use his and his family’s influence to calm the country after the violent events of April 1920. Al-Hajj Amin had to navigate a path between the Zionists, determined to implement the Balfour declaration and establish a national home in Palestine, and the British mandatory authorities, during the tumultuous times. Al-Hajj Amin fled Palestine in 1937 going first to Lebanon. The headquarters of the Palestinian uprising was established in Damascus and members of the al-Husayni family in exile, particularly al-hajj Amin and Jamal, were the uprising’s “foreign ministers”.


In 1939 he moved to Iraq where he became a significant political player. He supported Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and the other three officers in the “Golden Square” who carried out a coup in April 1941 that restored al-Gaylani to power. When the coup was crushed by the British, al-Hajj Amin blamed the Jews and this helped trigger the Farhud against the Iraqi Jews in June 1941 in which 179 Jews were killed and many shops and houses pillaged.

From Iraq al-Hajj Amin went to Iran, and then escaped to Italy where he met Mussolini. He then went to Germany to meet Hitler. He initiated the idea of an Arab division to fight alongside the Axis powers, and he often took part in propaganda broadcasts from Rome and Berlin which included hateful statements against Jews.

Pappé sees Al-Hajj Amin’s courting of Hitler and Mussolini as showing his “transformation from a bright, sensible leader of a movement into a hallucinatory figure losing touch with reality and assuming roles and capabilities far beyond those he actually possessed”.

Pappé thinks it is worth remembering how badly the British treated al-Hajj when he made a secret visit to London in 1931. “At every point during his visit, his British hosts made him feel that he was not the equal of the Zionist leaders and that in their eyes he was a primitive colonial native who should be impressed by crystal chandeliers and thrilled by a lively dance floor.”

Al-Hajj Amin had hoped for British understanding and support, but instead he was shown “superciliousness and disdain”. In contrast, when he visited Mussolini and Hitler he was treated respectfully and ceremoniously as a national leader. “This may help to explain why he chose to associate himself with those who would become the enemies of humanity.”

Ilan Pappé was born in Haifa in 1954 to parents who were refugees from Nazi Germany. The radical Australian journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger describes him as “Israel’s bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.”

Pappé’s books include “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” (2006) in which he aimed to show that the 1948 war involved a planned ethnic cleansing of Palestine as a Zionist objective. Pappé’s stand against Zionism put him on a collision course with the mainstream of Israeli academic life, and made him a figure of hate to many.

Pappé wrote about this experience in his memoir “Out of the Frame: The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel” published recently by Pluto Press of London. The campaign against him included death threats, denunciations by the Knesset and calls for him to be sacked from his post at Haifa University. He now teaches at Exeter University in the south west of England where he is the director of the European Centre for Palestinian Studies, within the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies. He is also the co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies.

The back cover of Pappé’s book on the al-Husaynis carries high praise for the book from four prominent scholars: the British-Israeli academic Avi Shlaim, Professor of International Relations at St Antony’s College, Oxford University; the Palestinian sociologist Salim Tamari (author of Mountain Against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture); Philip S Khoury, Ford International Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Mahmoud Yazbak of the University of Haifa.

One reason for the praise is Pappé’s use of the widest possible range of sources. Avi Shlaim writes that as well as being a highly original and important contribution to the existing literature, the book is “a work of synthesis and reinterpretation which makes available to the English reader little known scholarship in Arabic, Hebrew, French, and German.”

Pappé intends his book to address a Western audience. He wrote it originally in Hebrew so as to challenge “hegemonic Israeli-Jewish perceptions of the country’s history. In contemporary Israel, pre-1882 Palestine is still commonly viewed as having been an uninhabited land that was developed only when Zionism, and with it Western modernity, reached its shores.” Moreover, Palestinian life after 1918 “has been portrayed in both scholarly and popular literature as that of primitive tribesmen, fanatic Muslims and hateful sheikhs.”

Similar views reign in the West, and particularly in the US, “and thus similar efforts are required to redress a biased and hostile image of Palestine and the Palestinians. This seemed to me an especially urgent task after 11 September 2001 and the second intifada.”
[picture shows Al-Hajj Amin in mid-1920s]
By focusing on the al-Husaynis throughout their transformation from a provincial Ottoman elite into the leadership of a national movement, he hopes his biography of the family is “a constructive way to demonstrate how Palestinian society existed and developed before the Zionist settlement or the British occupation began.”

He also hopes to give a much greater insight into the Palestinian struggle, given the leading role of the Husaynis in the Palestinian national movement from its inception in around 1908 until the end of the British mandate in 1948. A main theme of the book is the politics of nationalism.

He also wants to show that “contrary to a view commonly held in Israel, the history of the conflict is not made up simply of peaceful Jewish proposals met by Palestinian rejection: quite often it was the other way round.”

The al-Husaynis were generally out of touch with the grassroots Palestinian movements that emerged from 1932. Ultimately, they and other families of notables failed, and this failure contributed to the Nakba of 1948.

Palestinian historians have long discussed the failures of the upper class, with the Al-Husaynis at its centre. In his 1969 book “Palestine and Israel: The Lethal Dilemma” Hisham Sharabi wrote that “the urban upper class remained alien to the armed struggle throughout the period of the mandate” and that “this class especially benefited through that period.” The problem of the Al-Husaynis, Sharabi stated, was that they perceived Zionism not as the ultimate danger but as a nuisance, while to the peasants and the workers Zionism was a tangible threat.

Pappé gives a more nuanced account of the family, pointing out the different ways in which various members of the al-Husaynis perceived and reacted to Zionism. At first the Palestinians failed to understand Zionism’s dangerous potential. Time would show that the peasants resisted Zionism fairly stolidly whereas the landowners including some of the Husaynis could not resist the financial inducement to sell land to Zionists.

The first al-Husayni to confront the new phenomenon of Zionism was Al-Hajj Amin’s father, Mufti Tahir the second who was born in 1842. Tahir the second was “like a one-man research institute studying Zionism’s nature, meaning and aims”. It was at his urging that the Istanbul authorities decided in 1889 to limit Jewish immigration and to permit foreign Jews to spend no more than three months in Palestine, and for religious reasons only.

Salim al-Husayni, mayor of Jerusalem on and off between 1879 and 1897 was more ambivalent on Zionism. Like some of his relatives he had enjoyed good economic relations with Jews. In addition Jewish votes were important in municipal elections. However, Salim grew alarmed at the growing Jewish presence in Jerusalem and he and other notables organised a petition to the authorities to forbid the purchase of land by Jews. The Ottoman Sultan issued an order to this effect, but British government pressure made it ineffectual.

Said Al-Husayni, who together with Ruhi al-Khalidi represented Jerusalem in the Ottoman parliament which operated from 1908 to 1912, knew Hebrew and had close Jewish friends from his school days. But he opposed Zionism, and spoke against it in the parliament.

Jamal al-Husayni, who came to prominence in the 1930s and was a member of the Arab Higher Committee, played an active role in the struggle for Palestine. Pappé says that “Jamal was above all a gifted diplomat... the most eloquent spokesman of the Palestinian cause and one of the few who tried to counteract endless streams of reports and articles published by Zionists in the popular and even the academic press from 1929 onwards.” Jamal was also one of the first Palestinians to recapitulate the history of Palestinian nationalism. “He wrote that 1908 was the year when Palestine emerged as a distinct territorial entity in the Ottoman framework and had it not been for the First World War it would have become a democracy and later, like Greece, an independent state”.

Pappé writes that in general the Palestinian leadership failed to realise that the peasants were the driving force of the great revolt in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 and failed to harness this force. An exception was the literary scholar Ishaq Musa al-Husayni , who in Pappé’s view was the only al-Husayni who seemed to be aware of the peasants’ plight and to understand the close connection between it and the national crisis. Ishaq’s book The Memories of a Hen [Mudhakkirat Dajaj], published in the local press in extracts in the 1930s, and as a book in 1943, became a classic of Palestinian literature. It is the history of Palestine from the point of view of a hen. “No other Husayni produced a political document that expressed the sensitivity or insight that informed Ishaq Musa’s book. “”


During the two and a half centuries that Pappé’s book covers, the Al-Husaynis and other notable families in Palestine faced numerous challenges as the region passed through tumultuous times. Much of the family’s high position derived from its holding at various times the three main positions in Jerusalem - mufti, naqib al-ashraf and sheikh al-haram. There was competition between the al-Husaynis and notable families for these positions.
[picture shows Al-Hajj Amin and Musa Kazim at head of 1929 Palestinian delegation to London]
Pappé examines the roots of the al-Husaynis and how in the 18th century the al-Ghudayya clan became the al-Husaynis. A key personality of that time was Abd al-Latif the second, who wrested the niqaba back from the Alami family, and was also sheikh al-haram. One of Abd al-Latif’s four sons, Hassan, became mufti. Hassan was a charismatic man and a great religious scholar whose father had sent him to Al Azhar to study.

After Hassan died in 1775 his nephew Tahir became mufti. Hassan’s other position, sheikh al haram, went to his brother Abdullah’s grandson Umar who was already naqib al-ashraf. There were by now two branches of the family. The Tahiri branch kept the mufti’s post, down to al-Hajj Amin al-Husayni. The ‘Umari branch inherited the post of naqib al-ashraf until the position lost its meaning with the end of Ottoman rule.

Pappé stresses that the al-Husaynis achievements and failures, and those of other notable families, in facing up to Zionism were the achievements and failures of Palestinian society as a whole. Yes, they had their failings. But he stresses they were up against the “ethnic cleansing ideology” of Zionism and “it is very difficult to assess whether an alternative leadership would have fared better in the face of such a calamity.”

peter kosminsky's palestinian-israeli channel 4 drama 'the promise'

above: Eliza (L) and Erin

New TV drama probes human side of Israel-Palestine conflict
by
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 13 February 2011

At the beginning of British TV station Channel 4’s groundbreaking new drama series “The Promise”, 18-year-old Erin accompanies her mother to a hospital ward where Erin’s elderly grandfather Len lies gravely ill. The sulky teenager, played by Claire Foy, has little sympathy for the comatose grandfather she barely knows, and is repulsed by the signs of his physical decline.

After the hospital visit, Erin and her mother go to Len’s house to sort out his things. Erin comes across a diary that her grandfather kept while serving as a soldier in Palestine after the Second World War. Erin knows nothing of her grandfather’s life as a young man. The large diary, its pages covered with his neat handwriting and crammed with photographs, sparks her curiosity.

When shortly afterwards Erin goes to Israel for the first time at the invitation of her best friend Eliza (Perdita Weeks), a dual UK-Israeli national, she takes Len’s diary with her. She retraces her grandfather’s footsteps and comes see him in a radically new and loving light.

The drama is written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, and the screening of its four weekly 110-minute episodes began last week. The series has a dual time frame, switching between Len’s story as a soldier in 1940s Palestine, and Erin’s present-day experiences in Israel and the West Bank. Both Len and Erin learn about love and betrayal during their time in the Middle East. Len becomes involved with Clara, [pictured] a Jewish refugee from Germany; her father has connections with the underground Jewish movement the Irgun and he opposes the relationship.

Kosminsky brings to the making of “The Promise” an outstanding reputation for hard-hitting TV dramas based on real-life conflicts. His subjects have included ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Northern Ireland problem, and Muslim radicalization. He has won a string of British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and other awards.

“The Promise” is ambitious in scope, running for a total of some seven and a half hours . It tackles through its two main storylines the complexities of a situation that is more highly-charged, divisive, and resistant to a solution, than almost any other foreign policy issue.

Kosminsky faced the challenge of trying to present the stories as fairly and credibly as possible, while making his characters believable rather than mere ciphers mouthing different positions. Those interviewed during seven years of research included more than 70 former servicemen who had served in Palestine. It is to the credit of Kosminsky and his production team and actors that the series works so well and is utterly gripping.

The characters are three-dimensional and convincing. Kosminsky stresses: “there are no caricatures – all the characters are based on people we met, read about or interviewed.” He adds: “It would do an immense disservice to a complex situation to attempt to over-simplify it.”

Kosminsky insisted on making “The Promise” on location in Israel, despite the difficulties in doing so. By making the film in Israel, “you have the real physical elements –the terrifying wall for example, the white stone, the Bauhaus architecture – and you have the invisible elements, the relationships between Israeli Jews and Arabs in the cast.”

The two leads are established stars of British TV. Claire Foy (26) was the heroine of the series “Little Dorritt” and was in the recent remake of “Upstairs, Downstairs”. She also stars alongside Nicolas Cage in the Hollywood medieval blockbuster “Season of the Witch”.
Foy portrays Erin as a moody vulnerable young woman who is a naïve observer of the Palestine-Israel conflict. She is pale and in fragile health, suffering from epilepsy.

Len is played by Christian Cooke, a 23-year-old actor with a decade of TV roles behind him. Originally from a mining community in the North of England, Len is a thoughtful, decent young man full of humanity.

The reason Eliza goes to Israel is to begin two years of national service. Her well-off parents live there in a villa with a pool near the sea. Her father Max (Ben Miles) is a well-known liberal and ex-general.

Eliza’s brother Paul is played by the well-known Israeli film and stage actor Itay Tiran, who starred in “Lebanon” (2009). Paul derides his father’s “cozy, liberal opposition”, asserting that it actually perpetuates the occupation. Max claims that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East: Paul says it is a military dictatorship.

Eliza explains to Erin that Paul had at one time been pro-military, but after serving as a soldier in the West Bank town of Hebron he has become a “super hardline anti-Zionist” who volunteers for “weird ex-military pressure groups”.

One such group is Combatants for Peace, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian former fighters. Paul takes Erin to a meeting of the group in Nablus addressed by Omar Habash, a former member of the Al Aqsa Brigades who has renounced violence. Omar lives on the Israeli side of the wall, and Paul and Erin give him a lift in Paul’s car. But Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint treat Omar in a most humiliating way and he tells Paul and Erin to drive on without him.

On the way home Paul takes Erin to a café. After they leave he realizes he left his wallet on the table and goes back to retrieve it. The first episode ends with the café exploding in a ball of flame, presumably caused by a suicide bomber.

Omar [pictured] is portrayed by American actor of Lebanese origin, Haaz Sleiman, star of the 2008 film “The Visitor”. Nazareth-born Ali Suliman, star of “Paradise Now” {2005) plays Mohammed Abu-Hassan, with whom Len becomes friendly. Another Palestinian character is Jawda, who is played in old age by Hiam Abbass and as a young woman by Maria Zreik.

Most reviewers in the British media have greeted the series with enthusiasm and high praise. There are predictions that it will win BAFTAs. But comments posted in online editions of newspapers, and in the social media, show that some supporters of Israel are trying to portray the makers of “The Promise” as having an anti-Israel agenda.

And yet Kosminsky has made every effort to put events in 1940s Palestine in the context of Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis. Before being posted as a sergeant to Palestine, Len had taken part in the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp. Erin is reduced to tears when she reads in his diary of the horrors he saw. The series also includes archive footage from the camp.

When Len first arrives in Palestine he is overwhelmingly sympathetic to Jews who are fleeing to Palestine by ship, arriving in a desperate state. He writes in his diary that had he suffered like them he too would want a homeland. But as a result of what he experiences over time, including attacks by Irgun, and his encounters with Palestinian Arabs, he develops a more nuanced attitude.

Kosminsky is highly critical of Britain’s historical role in Palestine. “We were the colonial power. It was for us to leave Palestine in good order.” But Britain “found a quick fix and left. Those who live there are still, daily, dealing with the consequences.”

The director notes certain parallels between the historical and current day situations. For example the British forces blew up certain Jewish houses; today the Israeli Army demolishes Palestinian homes.
below: Omar at Israeli checkpoint

judges of the caine prize for african writing are announced

Caine Prize 2011 judging panel announced [update added]

The award-winning Libyan novelist Hisham Matar has been appointed as chair of the panel of judges for this year's Caine Prize for African Writing, it was anounced today. Joining him are Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, Georgetown University Professor of English literature Henry Schwarz, publisher, film and travel writer Vicky Unwin, and the award-winning author Aminatta Forna. Update: On 11 February it was announced that David Gewanter - Georgetown University Professor and poet - was joining in the panel. He replaces Henry Schwarz.

Matar was previously a judge of the prize in 2008. He was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel In the Country of Men (2006), which won several literary prizes. His second novel Anatomy of a Disappearance is to be published by Penguin imprint Viking in the UK on 3 March.

This year 126 qualifying stories have been submitted to the judges from 17 African countries. The judges will meet in early May to decide on the shortlisted stories, which will be announced shortly thereafter. The winning story will be announced at a dinner at the Bodleian Library in Oxford on Monday 11 July.

Last year the Caine Prize, described as Africa’s leading literary award, was won by Sierra Leonean writer Olufemi Terry , pictured below at the Caine Prize award ceremony held in the Bodleian Library's Divinity School, Oxford University. Chair of judges Fiammetta Rocco said at the time “ambitious, brave and hugely imaginative, Olufemi Terry’s ‘Stickfighting Days’ 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, awarded annually for African creative writing, is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English (indicative length 3,000 to 10,000 words). An “African writer” is normally taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African, and whose work has reflected that cultural background.

The African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee, are Patrons of The Caine Prize, as is Chinua Achebe, winner of the Man Booker International Prize. Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne is President of the Council and Jonathan Taylor is the Chairman.

saif ghobash-banipal translation prize awarded in london

Cairo events meant winning translator and author were absent from London ceremonies
by
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 6 February 2011

The Cairo-based British translator Humphrey Davies was due in London last Monday to receive in person the 2010 Saif Ghobash -Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation at the annual Translation Prizes awards ceremony. A panel of four judges had unanimously chosen him as winner of the £3,000-Sterling prize for his translation of Lebanese writer Elias Khoury’s novel “Yalo”, published in the UK by the Quercus imprint MacLehose Press.

But as the day of Davies’s planned departure for London drew near the streets and squares around his apartment in downtown Cairo, where he has lived for many years, erupted in dramatic protests, violence and flames.

Humphrey’s brother Hugh Davies, a violinist with English National Opera, explained that Humphrey could have tried to take a taxi to the airport and to leave for London. But although he had very much wanted to be in London, Humphrey had told his brother in a telephone conversation that he did not want to leave his adopted country of Egypt. “He says it’s a very historic time, he feels tectonic plates are shifting. And he wants to be there.”

Hugh Davies picked up the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize on Humphrey’s behalf on Monday night from the guest presenter at the Translation Prizes Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Stothard quoted a judge of the prize, novelist Margaret Drabble, as saying “Yalo” is “a tour de force for both author and translator... an important and complex book which brings the history of Lebanon vividly, painfully and colorfully to life.”

In all, six literary translation prizes administered by the Society of Authors, with support from Arts Council, England, were awarded during the ceremony at Kings Place. The winners of prizes for translation from French, German, Spanish, Hebrew and Italian read selections from their translations. In Davies’s absence an extract from “Yalo” was read by the awards secretary of the Society of Authors Paula Johnson.

The prize-givings were followed by the annual Sebald Lecture, delivered by fiction writer Ali Smith. The lecture is named in honor of the late German writer and academic W G Sebald, founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. In her inspiring lecture Smith explored many aspects of literary translation, with particular reference to Sebald’s works.

Elias Khoury had been due to travel to London to accompany Davies to the Translation Prizes and to a reception organized by Banipal at the AM Qattan Foundation's Mosaic Rooms on Tuesday evening in celebration both of Davies’s win and of the fifth anniversary of the Banipal Prize. But in a public statement Khoury said he had dropped his plan to travel to London from Berlin as “a sign of friendship” towards Humphrey Davies.

“I want once again to insist on the fact that the translator is a partner in the process of creativity,” Khoury’s statement said. “Yalo can now speak English better than me and he began, through the work of Humphrey, a new journey and a new life.”

Davies’s winning of the 2010 Banipal Prize was all the more remarkable for being the second occasion on which he had won the prize for a translation of a Khoury novel. He won the prize in 2006, its inaugural year, for his translation of Khoury’s great Palestinian novel “Gate of the Sun”.

Khoury’s statement said: “This is the second time that I have accompanied Humphrey in this adventure. I want to praise his understanding and creativity that made our work together a real pleasure.”

Khoury ended by saying: “The struggle for democracy and freedom that began in Tunisia and is shaking dictatorship and despotism and corruption in Egypt will open the way for a new Arab world. I am sure that Yalo, in his prison in Beirut, is beginning to feel the impact of the Egyptian freedom and is ready to rewrite the stories of our Arab experience with oppression.”

Margaret Drabble’s fellow judges of the Banipal Prize were the translator and Professor of Comparative Literature at Warwick University Susan Basnett; the translator and Chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies at Georgetown University Elliott Colla, and, on behalf of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature, Yasir Suleiman, Professor of Modern Arabic Studies and Head of the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge.

Davies not only won the 2010 Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize but was also joint runner-up for his translation of “Sunset Oasis” by Egyptian writer Bahaa Taher. The Egyptian-American translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid was the other joint runner-up for his translation of “Cities Without Palms” by the Sudanese writer Tarek Eltayeb, published in the UK by Arabia Books.

The reception in the Mosaic Rooms was compered by Banipal co-founder and publisher Margaret Obank. Translator Peter Clark, a trustee of the Banipal Trust, read an extract from “Yalo”. Hugh Davies [pictured] gave a lively picture of Humphrey’s career since he graduated with a first class degree in Arabic from Jesus College, Cambridge, in the late 1960s.

Humphrey’s CV includes working for Oxford University Press, doing a PhD at Berkeley and working with his tutor Martin Hinds on a dictionary of colloquial Arabic. “I would say the theme of Humphrey’s scholarship, what he put his considerable scholarly abilities to, is the service of demotic Arabic rather than classical Arabic,” Hugh Davies said. Humphrey worked for Save the Children and for the Ford Foundation before deciding to devote himself to literary translation.

Hugh held up one of the three volumes of Humphrey's work related to Yusuf Al-Shirbini's "Kitab Hazz Al-Quhuf Bi-Sharh Qasid Abi Shaduf "17th century text on the Egyptian peasant, (translated as "Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded"). In this project, Humphrey had "somehow put together his scholarship and his interest in local Egyptian language." The volumes include a critical edition of the text, an English translation, and a lexicon of 17th-century Egyptian Arabic, published in the Analecta Orientalia Lovensiana series published by Peeters.

Critic, translator and prizewinning poet André Naffis-Sahely [pictured below] had originally been due to hold a conversation with Davies and Khoury at the Mosaic Rooms. In their absence he gave an eloquent talk encompassing “Yalo” and Khoury’s oeuvre more generally, as well as questions of Arab censorship and the translation of literary Arabic. [a PDF of the talk is posted on the Quercus website]

Naffis-Sehely noted that at Society of Authors Translation Prizes awards the previous evening “it struck me that prizes such as the Scott Moncrieff and the John Florio, for French and Italian respectively, have been running for over forty-five years, whereas the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize only for five.”

At one time translation of Arabic literature was considered peripheral and it was only in the late 1980s with Naguib Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize and the efforts of translators such as Denys Johnson Davies and Paul Theroux that this started to change. “The need to examine the ‘Arab Other’ since 9/11 has propelled Arabic literature beyond its former status as mere exotica,” Naffis-Sahely said. He wondered how long this will last. “In the 1970s and 80s it was a common sight to see anthologies of Hungarian poets and Romanian novelists in prominent shelves in boo shops ...where are they now?”

Christopher MacLehose spoke warmly of Khoury as “a very great writer” with a gift for storytelling, a “deeply learned observer of the Arab world, of the Palestinian world, and Israel’s part in it.” And he said Humhrey's winning of the prize for the second time "may say something to the American publishers that they haven't already grasped: namely that Humphrey Davies is the outstanding translator of Elias Khoury, and of others too, and that this is a noble, heroic and entirely successful publisher!"

In June MacLehose Press is to publish Davies’s translation of a third Khoury novel, “As Though She Were Sleeping”. MacLehose paid tribute to Andrea Belloli, also present at the Mosaic Rooms, the "brilliant line editor" of both "Gate of the Sun" and "Yalo", who has just finished with "As Though She Were Sleeping".

Paul Starkey, Professor of Arabic at Durham University and Chair of the Banipal Trust, reviewed the first five years of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize, which is sponsored by UAE businessman and diplomat Omar Saif Ghobash in memory of his late father and literature lover Saif Ghobash. Starkey said: “We are optimistic that this Arabic translation prize will go from strength to strength in the years that follow.”

leila aboulela's novel 'lyrics alley'

Tracking a Sudanese-Egyptian family saga
by
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 30 January 2011

The title of Egyptian-Sudanese author Leila Aboulela’s novel “Lyrics Alley” refers to the poetry and song lyrics for which the paralyzed Sudanese poet Nur Abuzeid becomes famed, and also to the network of small streets in Umdurman on which he and his relatives live.

Nur’s first cousin and former fiancée Soraya, whose engagement to the poet was broken off by his father after Nur was paralyzed, is consoled by hearing songs with Nur’s lyrics on the radio. “Soraya would walk down the alley and hear snatches of Nur’s lyrics coming from the houses. She would sit up in bed and sing along with the radio. And every time she heard it, the pain decreased and the enjoyment increased.”

Aboulela’s novel was inspired by a real-life character, her uncle Hassan Awad Aboulela (1922-62) who wrote the lyrics for many popular Sudanese songs and was paralyzed in an accident. A similar accident befalls his fictional counterpart Nur Abuzeid, son of one of Sudan’s richest men Mahmoud Abuzeid. Nur, who had just completed his studies at the exclusive Victoria College in Alexandria, is paralyzed when he dives off rocks into the sea and breaks several vertebrae. Prior to that he had been the natural heir to the Abuzeid family business as his elder brother Nassir is an irresponsible wastrel.

In an interview with Saudi Gazette Leila [portrait below by Vaida V Nairn] said that in drawing inspiration from Hassan Awad Aboulela, “I was faithful to the details of his accident and the development of his career as a poet, and I used translations of his poems. However, the other characters and their storylines are fictitious.”

She shifted the timeline somewhat in her novel. “My uncle’s accident took place in 1948 but in the novel I moved the date to 1951 so that it would coincide with the progress of independence in Sudan. I also took many other artistic liberties and the novel should not be read as a true biography of the poet or his family.” She adds: “Of course many people in Sudan and in my family will be intrigued by the blur of reality and fiction and eager to explore how much truth is in the novel.”

Asked how her extended family has reacted to the novel, Aboulela replies: “Members of my family have been really positive and supportive. They’ve helped with sources and many of them shared with me their personal memories of Hassan.”

She did not find it difficult to write the novel. “This is because I was motivated by love for my father, and for my family. At the same time I did not let sentimentality or loyalty prevent me from being frank regarding the treatment of women in 1950s Sudan and the colonial-Egyptian prejudice towards Sudan.”

“Lyrics Alley”, Aboulela’s third novel, is published in London by Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The US edition will be published by Grove Press on 1 March. Aboulela’s earlier novels “The Translator” (1999) and “Minaret” (2005) received considerable critical acclaim. Both were longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. “The Translator” was in addition shortlisted for the Saltire Society Scottish First Book of the Year.

Aboulela’s short stories have also garnered praise. In 2000 she became the first-ever winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “The Museum”. Her 2001 short story collection “Coloured Lights” was shortlisted for the Macmillan Silver PEN Award.

While Aboulela’s first two novels were each focused on one female character, “Lyrics Alley” is a family saga, with a large number of characters and shifting points of view. The rich, complex narrative takes us into the characters’ inner lives, with Aboulela’s characteristic eye for detail, and her lyrical touch and atmospheric writing.

Asked why she chose multiple points of view, Aboulela says: “In ‘Lyrics Alley’ I was capturing my late father’s youth, his childhood growing up in Umdurman. My father had four brothers and five sisters. He had countless first and second cousins. All these families lived very close to each other with narrow passages leading from one hoash – open-air courtyard – to the next.”

The families shared meals, slept in adjoining beds, and were often joined by poor relations from the provinces and by servants and guests. The men worked together, and cousins very often married each other. “To reflect this teeming, close-knit populous world I had to have a large canvas,” Aboulela says. “Initially I had envisaged an even bigger cast, more brothers and sisters, more points of view – but to be realistic I narrowed down the list and concentrated on going deep with five characters and their points of view.”


Aboulela was born in Cairo in 1964 to an Egyptian mother and a Sudanese father. At the age of six weeks she moved to Khartoum, where she lived until 1987. She graduated in economics from Khartoum University and then moved to Britain where she gained an MSc and an MPhil in Statistics from the London School of Economics (LSE). In 1990 she moved to Scotland with her oil engineer husband Nadir Mahjoub and her children, and started writing fiction in 1992. Since 2000 she and her family have lived in Jakarta, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Doha. She now divides her time between Aberdeen in Scotland, and Doha.

Through the characters in “Lyrics Alley” Aboulela explores issues such as modernity and tradition. Mahmoud is a visionary businessman, but his brother Idris, a widower, is so conservative that he will not allow his schoolgirl daughter Soraya to read a newspaper or to wear spectacles. It is her fiancé Nur who gives her the spectacles she needs to see clearly.

Mahmoud has two wives. The first is the Sudanese Hajjah Waheeba, mother of Nassir and Nur. The younger wife is the stylish Egyptian Nabilah, by whom Mahmoud has a young daughter Ferial and son Farouk. Aboulela depicts with skill the escalating rivalry between the two wives. Nabilah may be more superficially sophisticated, but Waheeba has a deep claim on Mahmoud who will never divorce her. Nabilah’s feelings of Egyptian superiority over Sudan lead her to feel some revulsion even at her own children’s Sudanese looks. Female circumcision, which Nabilah and Mahmoud oppose, is involved in a shocking plot development.

A key character from outside the family is Ustaz Badr, a devout and wise teacher from Upper Egypt who has been a private tutor to Mahmoud’s children. He lives in cramped conditions with his family and is desperate to lease a flat in Khartoum’s first high-rise building which Mahmoud is planning to build.

Aboulela has been extensively involved in radio drama at the BBC, both in dramatizations of her fiction and in scripting original plays. One could imagine “Lyrics Alley” as an effective radio or TV series or play. Aboulela says: “There are no plans yet, but I would certainly welcome the idea.”

Over the years Aboulela’s work has been translated into 12 languages. So far, the Dutch, Turkish and Polish language rights have been sold for “Lyrics Alley”. Her first two novels are forthcoming in translation into Malayalam, published by Olive Publications of Kerala, and she hopes the same publisher will also translate and publish “Lyrics Alley” in Malayalam.

Aboulela is also keen for “Lyrics Alley” to appear in Arabic. She says: “I am striving towards an Arabic translation, eager to see my uncle’s poems return to their original.”

Asked whether another volume of short stories is in the pipeline, Aboulela says: “I am hoping to publish another story collection. This would include my story ‘Missing Out’ in Granta as well as one that was published in the Virginia Quarterly Review and The National newspaper.”

At the same time, “I am ‘incubating’ a new novel, so I might head in that direction.” She is attracted by writing non-fiction and memoir “but somehow it doesn’t come naturally to me as fiction does – so it tends to take more time.” She adds “there was quite a gap between Minaret and Lyrics Alley and I hope now there won’t be such a gap until my next book is published.”

In addition to her own writing, Abouela has recently been involved in creative writing activities in Doha for Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP). “I taught a “Six Steps to a Story” course over a period of 6 weeks,” she says. “We started off with free-writing exercises designed to tap into the subconscious mind, then we moved on to points of view, building characters and finally to editing ones work and re-writing. I also gave them published short stories to read as I believe that reading is essential to pick up skills and inspiration.

“All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and would welcome the opportunity to do it again. The students were of various abilities but there was a lot of talent and plenty of enthusiasm. I was lucky to have them over a six week period and watch them develop and grow in confidence.”

Aboulela’s increasing prominence over the past decade as a Muslim fiction writer, whose work often explores relations between Muslims and Westerners, has coincided with a fraught time in relations between Muslims and the West. How has this affected her writing, and do people look to her and her writing for explanations and understanding?

“From the beginning of my career I had wanted to write about Islam as a faith and about Muslims who, with varying degrees of success, are engaged with their faith,” says Aboulela. “I have always been keenly aware of the absence of religious observance in Arabic literature and cinema, an absence that doesn’t reflect the reality of most people’s lives. The men who crowd the mosques, the women who go on Hajj, the teenage girls who wear hijab are to a large extent invisible in the Arabic literary scene.”

For literature to be effective and meaningful it has to mirror people’s lives “otherwise it becomes an insubstantial as a dream.” Over the past decade, the interest in Islam has focused on terrorism and the veil. “For me the challenge is to resist explaining, defending or getting pulled into an agenda set by others. I write without looking over my shoulder, focusing on what I intimately know rather than on issues that grab the headlines.”

Leila Aboulela’s website is at www.leila-aboulela.com

josceline dimbleby's food memoir 'orchards in the oasis'

A food odyssey from Damascus to Gujarat
by
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette, 23 January, 2011

At the age of seven the future food writer Josceline Dimbleby travelled with a governess by cargo ship from England to Lebanon and was then driven over the mountains to Syria to join her mother and stepfather. It was 1950 and Dimbleby’s diplomat stepfather had been posted to Damascus.

To the young British girl the ancient city of Damascus “looked like an illustration from a fairy story: encircled by the desert hills, its domes and minarets nestled in an oasis of poplars and fruit orchards, irrigated by sparkling streams fed by a shimmering river, the Barada.”

Dimbleby’s memories of Damascus inspired the title of her latest book “Orchards in the Oasis: Travels, Food and Memories”, published by Quadrille Publishing of London. In Damascus the family was catered for by their Armenian cook, Joseph. Josceline was entranced by the kitchen’s unfamiliar smells of spices and herbs. On one occasion Joseph gave her a crispy honey pastry with a slightly scented taste. “That was the moment, I have always felt, in the distant aromatic kitchen, which awoke my taste buds and kindled my lifelong passion for food and flavor.”

Dimbleby is the prizewinning author of 24 books and was for more than 15 years food columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. She has written for various publications, and has featured in many TV food and travel programs.

“Orchards in the Oasis” is a lively account of Dimbleby’s adventures in travel and food, starting with her childhood in Syria and ending with a trip to Gujarat in 2005. Along the way she takes in Peru, Turkey, Iran, Morocco, the Canary Island of Lanzarote, North America, Burma and Vietnam.

Josceline also writes of food in her native England, from her maternal grandmother’s kitchen in Chelsea, London, to the village of Dittisham in the county of Devon where the Dimbleby family has spent many holidays.

The colorful book is beautifully designed, with photographs on every page. Dimbleby comes across as a warm, inquisitive travel companion, and her reminiscences include many amusing anecdotes and memorable characters. Scattered among the text are 70 recipes, illustrated by the renowned food photographer Jason Lowe. The Syria-related recipes include Damascus garden salad, Bloudan walnut soup, rose petal tart and apricot and pomegranate jelly (pictured at end of article).

Dimbleby’s stepfather Bill was a dominant, eccentric character. He drove the family all over Syria in his German “Nazi” car, a whale-like Horsch he had bought it after seeing it in the backyard of the British embassy in post-Second World War Paris.

When Bill was posted to the Peruvian capital of Lima, he took the family on marathon drives in a Buick Special, far up into the Andes. Peru is reckoned to be the birthplace of the potato, and countless varieties are grown there. Dimbleby’s Peruvian recipes range from a potato dish, to beef in chili and chocolate sauce, fish with avocado, lime and chili (pictured) and chilled passion fruit snow.

In the early 1960s Josceline studied singing at Guildhall school of music in London and lived in a basement flat. Here she started experiments in cooking. She relied on her memory and imagination rather than on any cookery book. The first dish she cooked was the quintessentially English shepherd’s pie, enlivened Syrian-style with cumin seeds and ground cinnamon.

Dimbleby first encountered Turkish food when the rich father of her friend Elizabeth gave the two girls a month’s holiday there plus first-class tickets from Paris to Istanbul on the Orient Express. Among her Turkish recipes is one for Muhalebi milk dessert with orange blossom syrup.

In 1967 Josceline married the British broadcaster David Dimbleby, who was at the time a CBS TV reporter in New York. Her time in the Big Apple is reflected in such recipes as baked cheesecake with a ginger crust. The couple returned to Britain in grand style, travelling first class on the legendary Queen Mary 1930s liner which was about to be retired from service.

For St Valentine’s Day 1970 Josceline and David went to Marrakech, the source of her recipes for crispy pigeon pie (a version of the Moroccan classic bastilla), meatballs (pictured), and spiced carrot salad with mint. In Marrakech the couple met a famous old soldier, Field Marshall Sir Claude Auchinleck, who was nearing 90. Bizarrely, he entertained them by getting his Moroccan servant Bashir to dress up in masks of Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Winston Churchill and many other figures.


At the end of that year the couple’s Iranian friend Jamshed arranged for them to visit Iran. In his opulent modern house on the mountain above Tehran, Jamshed indulged them with a bowl of Caspian Beluga, the largest most lustrous caviar they had ever seen. The dishes Josceline absorbed from Iran included eggs on crispy saffron rice, marinated kidney kebabs and Yazd honey cakes.

On her first visit to India, Josceline met some men going game shooting. They explained how their wives cooked quail, partridge, duck and other game. Back in England she tried combining game birds with Indian spices. This opened up delicious ways of cooking game, as shown by her recipe for rich red quail curry. (picture shows Calcutta kheer milk pudding) .


Josceline’s 25-year marriage ended painfully in 1992, and she found travel a welcome distraction. In Vietnam she discovered that country’s incredibly sweet and succulent seafood – as well as its French culinary legacy, with baguettes baked freshly in the mornings even in remote villages
Dimbleby’s food odyssey ends in Gujarat. She has visited the state three times, and finds its cuisine particularly delicate. She writes that it is only while travelling that she gets the feeling of simple excitement she used to get as a child. “I hope I can experience a wide variety of places, food, people and surprises for many more years,” she says.

'I Cried on the Mountain Top' - images and poems from Afghanistan

Opening a window on Afghan culture
by
Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 16 Jan 2011

Despite all the Western involvement, military and otherwise, in Afghanistan, the Western public knows all too little of that country’s culture. A book published recently in the UK helps open a window on Afghan culture through poetry and photographs.

The 64-page book, “I Cried on the Mountain Top”, marries selections of traditional Afghan poetry to black-and-white images from the photographic archive (covering 1980-2010) of the independent London-based charity Afghanaid. The poetry is in the form of the ancient and widespread tradition of folk singing known as chaharbeiti. These quatrains (four-line verses) are popular all over Afghanistan and in Iran and Tajikistan.

The images and poetry were selected, and the poetry translated, by Doubleday, who published the book in collaboration with Afghanaid. The charity was founded in 1983 to provide assistance to Afghans in hardship and distress.

The book was launched in an event at the Afghan Embassy in London. The Afghan ambassador Homayoun Tandar is keen to promote Afghan culture in the UK, and he was enthusiastic about the project to prepare the book. He wrote the preface, in the form of a page of poetry on the sufferings and dreams of Afghans: “A dream of love, sweetness, tenderness, happiness, joy – a better life. “

In her introduction Doubleday writes: “With this book I have tried to show how – in the midst of chaos and trauma – Afghan people live, love, work, pray, suffer and enjoy themselves.” Any reader would immediately notice the passionate tone of the verses: “Romantic, sometimes mystical or stoical, and often concerned with sadness at separation from beloved people or places.” Yet at their core is “an inner faith and patient resilience that form a very strong aspect of the Afghan character.”

Doubleday was uniquely well-placed to undertake the project of the book. In the mid-1970s she lived for over two years with her ethnomusicologist husband Dr John Baily in the Western Afghan city of Herat. There she studied women’s music and learned how to perform it. She recorded and memorized many of the chaharbeiti in the dialect of Persian known as dari, one of the two official languages of Afghanistan.

Her research and experiences formed the basis of her book “Three Women of Herat: A Memoir of Life, Love and Friendship in Afghanistan”, published by Jonathan Cape in 1988 and republished by IB Tauris in 2006.

Each left hand page of “I Cried on the Mountain Top” carries a single photograph from the Afghanaid archive. On the facing page is a quatrain, chosen to reflect some aspect of the picture and displayed both in the original Persian –with beautiful calligraphy executed by Afghan calligrapher Parwiz Latifi – and in Doubleday’s English translation. The technique of pairing images and poems works well, and the cumulative effect is very moving. [picture of two young girls was taken by Amanda Curley]
Some of the photographs remind us of the years of destruction. One 1980s image shows an armed resistance fighter atop a crashed Soviet helicopter. The accompanying poem is entitled “Gunshots and Smoke”:
High on the mountain, a pair of leopards –
and the air filled with gunshots and rifle smoke.
Friends, you must appreciate one another,
for in the grave your sole companion is a pillow of stone.

A picture of a war-devastated Kabul alley is partnered by the poem “Alas, sweet Kabul.” Opposite a 1980s picture of migrants wheeling their belongings on a cart in the snow is the poem “Lonely traveller”:
O god! I’ve arrived in this town,
Sad and lonely, with no friends.
Give a traveller a smoke from your pipe!
I’m here tonight – but tomorrow, who knows where?

A portrait of a sad-faced old lady resonates with the poem “If you saw my daughter” in which the mother says: “If she asked how I was, say I’m as thin as a wisp of straw.” Poems with romantic themes are often tinged with sadness, such as “I kiss the earth” in which the poet pining for his sweetheart roams the mountains and deserts “like a sorrowful bird that cannot fly”. The charming “Chains of ringlets” is addressed to a girl whose black locks of hair “twisting like snakes” beautify her shining face. The accompanying photograph is of a seller of chains in Faizabad bazaar.

Some of the photographs show projects that Afghanaid has carried out over the past three decades. One shows workers in 2002 mixing cement for a wall to prevent river flooding, opposite the poem “Your pitcher of water”. A picture [by Howard Lake] of a tailor cutting cloth was taken in 1989 in Peshawar, Pakistan, where Afghanaid set up income-generating projects for refugees in tented refugee camps. The quatrain “The tailor” has as its final two lines: “I cut my garment of sorrow / and no tailor could ever sew it together.”

The availability of Afghan poetry in English translation will widen further in June when London-based Hurst Publishers issues “Poetry of the Taliban” by Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn . The anthology has a foreword by Faisal Devji, Reader in the History of South Asia at St Antony’s College, Oxford University.

The title of the book may raise eyebrows, but Hurst Publishers says that while the Taliban are synonymous with the war in Afghanistan, cultural aspects of their identity, “the Taliban’s other face”, is often overlooked. “Most Taliban fighters are Pushtuns, a people who cherish their vibrant poetic tradition, closely associated with that of song.” Taliban poetry has an appeal that transcends the insurgency. “For the Taliban today, these poems or ghazals, have a resonance back to the 1980s war against the Soviets, when similar rhetorical styles, poetic formulae and tricks with meter inspired mujahideen combatants and non-combatants alike.” The poetry includes “classics” of the genre from the 1980s and 1990s as well as a selection from the odes and ghazals of today’s conflict.

I Cried On the Mountain Top can be ordered from Afghanaid