Fadwa Tuqan - Al Jadid Magazine
Transcription
Fadwa Tuqan - Al Jadid Magazine
ALJADID A Review & Record of Arab Culture and Arts COPYRIGHT 2003 AL JADID VOL. 9 No. 45 FALL 2003 $6.95 T wo Literary Liter ar yLegacies Le gacies Literar ary Leg Two Remember ed: emembered: Remembered: Abd al-Rahman Munif Abd F al-Rahman Munif and ad wa Tuqan Fad adw and Fadwa Tuqan David Cole Speaks on Thr ea ts to Ci vil hrea eats Civil Liber ties Liberties BOOKS UNVEILING THE WEST THROUGH ARTISTS, HISTORIANS, CRITICS By Doris Bittar ART THE ART OF EMNA ZGHAL By Najwa Adra FILM REVIEWS ‘IRAN: VEILED APPEARANCES’ By Afshin Matin-asgari ‘THE TREE THAT REMEMBERS’ By J. Rae Niles ‘THE KITE’ By Elissar Haikal Lebanon in Three Books: Elise Salem’s Century of Lebanese Literature ♦ Samir Khalaf’s ‘Civil and Uncivil Violence’♦ Patricia Ward on Psychological Wounds of War 1 www.ALJADID.com ♦ Poetry: Charbel Dagher’s ‘Thresholds’ Music: Toufic Faroukh’s Saxophone AL JADID FALL 2003 Abd al-Rahman Munif, one of the greatest and most controversial Arab novelists, died of a heart attack January 24 , 2004, in Syria. We salute this special novelist who devoted most of his works to defending the freedom and dignity of the Arab individual, regardless of his/her geographic location. In celebrating his literary legacy, this issue features “Bidding Farewell to Munif: Novelist’s Narrative Bears Witness to Repression, Corruption, Reverence for Common Folk” by Judith Gabriel (p. 4) and “Unpublished Munif Interview: Crisis in the Arab World – Oil, Political Islam, and Dictatorship” by Iskandar Habash (p. 10). In remembering Munif, Simone Fattal put together three collages that appear on pages 2, 5, and 11. 2 www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 CONTEN TS ENT essays & feat ur es ures 4. Arab World Bids Farewell to Munif by Judith Gabriel 6. Fadwa Tuqan: A Romantic Feminist and Reluctant Political Witness by Emaleah Shackleton 7. Fadwa Tuqan: An Arab Electra by Abbas Beydoun 44. War, Peace and Garbage by Hanan Chebib f ilms 34. Tehran Anxiety by Afshin Matin-asgari 36. Life After the Torture Chamber by J. Rae Niles 37. A Twinge, a Smile and a Kite by Elissar W. Haikal art 45. Arab Art: Beyond Dichotomies by Sarah Rogers 46. Hybrid Vigor: The Art of Emna Zghal by Najwa Adra poetry 19. Crossroads by Elissar W. Haikal 21. Thresholds by Charbel Dagher 24. The Weeping Echo by Fadwa Tuqan AL JADID FALL 2003 inter v iews interv books 10. Unpublished Munif Interview: Crisis in the Arab World – Oil, Political Islam and Dictatorship by Iskandar Habash 15. Secular ‘Forgiveness’ in Syrian Novel by Carole Corm 13. Toufic Faroukh on Jazz, Saxophone and Memory by Mai Munasa 19. Our Greatest Weapon: The Rule of Law by Pamela Nice 15. Definitions and Dialects of the Novel: Interview with Myriam Antaki by Carole Corm 22. A Century of Lebanese Literature by Samir Mattar 18. Evaluating Threats at Home and Abroad by Pamela Nice 25. Lebanon: A Focal Point for Unsolved Tensions by Paul Sullivan Al Jadid, A Review of Arab Culture and Arts EDITOR: ELIE CHALALA ASSOCIATE EDITOR: MAUREEN D. TINGLEY ASSISTANT EDITORS: JUDIITH GABRIEL, EMALEAH SHACKLETON EDITORIAL INTERN: SAWSAN MANSOUR ART, WEBSITE & COMPUTER: LAHIRU COLLURE CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: PAMELA NICE, PAULINE HOMSI VINSON PRODUCTION: INTERNATIONAL DESKTOP PUBLISHING Al Jadid (ISSN 1523 - 746X) is published quarterly by Al Jadid Magazine Company, P.O. Box 241342, Los Angeles, CA 900241342,Telephone:(310) 470-6984, E-Mail: aljadid@jovanet.com Web site www.aljadid.com Subscriptions $18.00 (individual); $40.00 (institutional). Add $8 for postage in Canada and $16 in other foreign countries. Reproduction without permission for any use of translations, editorial or pictorial content is prohibited. Translations to English of artistic and cultural titles are those of Al Jadid’s editors and not officially adopted or approved by their own Arab or Mideast authors. Trademark registered. Articles signed represent the opinions of their authors and do not necessarily represent the policy of Al Jadid. Use of any person’s name or description in fiction or humorous features is purely coincidental and not the responsibility of Al Jadid. We encourage the submission of articles in the areas of Arab culture and arts, mainly about books, films, music, fine arts, theater, and science. Al Jadid assumes no responsibility for unsolicited materials. Manuscripts or artwork not accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes will not be returned. Printed in Los Angeles. ON THE COVER COVER:: “The Chair” by Monkith Saaid (height 15.m, iron, voice, wind movement). It was completed in Ehden, Lebanon, 2003. Saaid is an Iraqi sculptor whose passion for art began when he was growing up in Baghdad. In 1978, Saaid left Iraq and arrived in Syria, beginning years of lengthy wandering from one country to the next. He currently lives and works between Syria, Lebanon, and the U.S. He received his M.A. in sculpture in 1993 from the Academy of Arts in Utrecht (the Netherlands) and his advanced studies in sculpture in 1995 from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Saaid designed figures out of clay, and won several prizes. www.ALJADID.com 27. Coming of Age, Exile and War by Pauline Homsi Vinson 28. A Critical Celebration of Novelist Etel Adnan by Susan Muaddi Darraj 29. Confessions of Culture Clash by Elham Gheytanchi 30. A Literary Text of Palestinian Embroidery by Lynne Rogers 31. A Thousand and One Recipes by Wail S. Hassan 32. Unveiling the West Through the Eyes of Artists, Historians and Critics by Doris Bittar 33. Cartoons Tackle Taboos by Doris Bittar memoir 40. Let Them Eat Bread by Fred M. Saidy contributors 17. This issue’s contributors 3 ESSAYS AND FE AT URE S FEA URES Bidding Farewell to Munif: Novelist Bears Witness to Repression, Corruption, Reverence for Common Folk BY JUDITH GABRIEL A rab intellectuals mourned the loss of Abd al-Rahman Munif, Jordanian-born novelist and economist who became one of the greatest and most controversial Arab novelists. Munif died January 24 in Syria of a heart attack after suffering a long illness. He was 71. A large funeral was held in Damascus for him, attended by some officials, such as the Minister of Culture, and with fans coming from Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq to see him off for the last time. A funeral procession moved from the western villa area in Mezze, a suburb of Damascus where he had spent his last days, then to Al Shefaa Hospital, and finally, prayers for him were said in AlThanaa Mosque. “We have lost one of the most courageous and noble writers in the Arab world in more than 30 years,” Jordanian novelist Ibrahim Nasr Allah told Aljazeera.net. “He challenged the political taboos and wrote bravely about the stripping off of human liberty and dignity in the Arab world.” Among the many tributes published in the Arab press in the wake of Munif’s death was this one by Lebanese journalist and author Ibrahim Salemeh, writing in As Safir: “After 100 years, if the Arabs continue to write and document, they will discover that Abd al-Rahman Munif, the Benghali-Saudi-Lebanese-Iraqi-Syrian, was the most important and greatest of those who wrote the Arab novel in the second half of the 20th century.” Munif ’s narratives depict the catastrophic changes in the Arab homeland, and he became known for his scathing parodies of Middle Eastern elites, especially those of Saudi Arabia, a country which banned many of his books; nonetheless, after his death, Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah offered to provide an 4 airplane to transport Munif’s body to be buried in Saudi Arabia, and to give Saudi citizenship to Munif’s children (not his wife, since she holds Syrian citizenship). Munif himself had been stripped of his Saudi nationality in 1963 for his open identification with Marxist thought and for criticizing the regime. But there were gestures of goodwill extended before he died: a high-ranking Saudi personality expressed interest in covering Munif’s medical expenses, whether inside Saudi Arabia or abroad, according to Elaph, an Arabic electronic site. Preferring to receive his medical care closer to his family, Munif sent a letter thanking the Saudi personality for the gesture which purportedly ended the rupture between himself and Saudi Arabia. Munif’s name had been noticeably absent from the Saudi Arab Literature Encyclopedia. Asked about the exclusion by the London-based daily Asharq alAwsat, the editor of the encyclopedia, Mansour al-Hazemi, a professor of literature at the King Saud University who was personally in charge of the novel section, answered: “Yes, it is correct that Abd al-Rahman Munif was a Saudi author, but he was born and grew up outside the kingdom, in Syria, Iraq, Jordan; he produced and wrote in a different environment.” Munif, for the Saudis, is like Gebran for the Lebanese, al-Hazemi explained – an immigrant literary figure. Munif ’s novels are loaded with politics and message, and his work is often long, partly because of its documentary and historical nature. His writing moves at a slower pace, perhaps echoing the rhythm of the desert, gradually building to a sudden burst of activity at the end. He was one of the most prominent Arab novelists to have used modernist narrative techniques, and promoted a new genre of www.ALJADID.com Abd al-Rahman Munif fiction that reflected the social, political and economic realities of modern Arab society. While his works were never particularly successful in the West, they were both critically acclaimed and extremely popular throughout the Middle East. The author of 15 novels, his masterwork is the “Cities of Salt” quintet that follows the evolution of the Arabian peninsula from a land of Bedouin nomads to a rich and powerful oil kingdom. Munif explored the theme that in the Arab oil countries, “Arabs have been the victims of their rulers and the foreigners.” In the most celebrated of his 15 novels, “East Of The Mediterranean” (1975), he graphically condemns prisons, Arab dictatorships and repression. The book was banned by many Arab countries. It was oil that Munif knew so much about that it was to permeate his writing. He used his knowledge of the petroleum industry to criticize the business concerns which ran it and the politicians they served, and how that substance has propelled the region into chaos. Munif once told Paul Schemm of Middle East Times, “I think that oil is a neutral resource – it depends on the way its used. Until now, however, they [the Gulf] have only made use of it in a partial fashion. Most of the profits from oil have not been used in a wise manner and this has to change. It’s AL JADID FALL 2003 been used, generally speaking, in a way that has turned the societies into consumerist ones. There is no real thought about employment or future generations. There is no development of an economic plan for the future – tomorrow it could be over and then the Gulf would be poor again.” Born in Amman, Jordan, in 1933, Munif’s mother was Iraqi, and his father was a caravan merchant from Najd, Saudi Arabia, who plied his wares between Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Palestine and Iraq, with many wives in different countries, according to Al Taher alTawil in Al Quds al-Arabi. Munif’s father died three years after Munif was born. Munif completed his secondary education in Amman. In 1952, while Iraq was in the throes of a turbulent period, he enrolled at the Faculty of Law in Baghdad, and became involved in left-wing political activity, including opposing the pro-Western Baghdad Pact. His politics led to his being deported from Iraq in 1955. He resumed his education in Cairo during the union period (19581961), then headed off to Yugoslavia to earn a doctorate in petroleum economics at the University of Belgrade. After Yugoslovia, he started identifying with the Marxist ideas which formed the basis of his first novel, “Al Ashjar wa-ightiyal Marzuq” (The Trees and the Assasination of Marzouk) in 1973. Palestinian critic Faysal Darraj, writing in the Qatar-based Al Watan newspaper, wrote that the novel “opened fire at the repression which was practiced by regimes against their peoples, through the struggle of Marzouk with the security forces in his country and their constant attempt to crush him.” He became an expert in the oil industry and later returned to Iraq to work in the oil ministry, becoming a member of the Baathist Pan Arab Leadership. His Baathist experience was quite bitter, although short. Munif was against the historical leadership of the Baath Party, that of Michel Aflaq, and later joined the Leftist Baath, between 1963 and 1965. Munif parted with the leftist Baath and AL JADID FALL 2003 joined the revolutionary forces after the 1967 June defeat. He became an Arab Marxist, according to Mohammed Jamal Barout in an article in the Lebanese daily As Safir. When Barout asked Munif to write about his experience in the Baath Party during the 1960s, he replied, “ More than one friend asked me to write about my experience with the party, but I am not enthusiastic about that at all.” Barout wrote in Al Hayat, “I remember his expression, literally and truthfully: ‘a dirty history.’ ” society, starting with the establishment of the Middle Eastern sultanate of Mooran, the thinly veiled Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Here he recounts the destruction of the bedouins’ centuries-old way of life following the discovery of oil on the Arabian Peninsula. The late Edward Said described it as “the only serious work of fiction that tries to show the effect of oil, Americans and the local oligarchy on a Gulf country.” Munif left behind the subject of oil in his three-part narrative, “Ard alSawad,” which can be translated either as the dark or the fertile land, and which is the name the Arabs gave to Iraq when they conquered the country in 651 A.D. The novel looks at Iraq in the early 19th century during the Ottoman period. It is, as Munif described it, his “love-song to Iraq, and although it deals with Mamelukes, walis and other historic figures representing power, it is dedicated to the ordinary Iraqi people.” The book was written in an Iraqi dialect, of which he was very fond, as he was of the people. In a 2000 interview with Moussa Barhouma for the London-based Al Wasat magazine, Munif said, “There is no doubt that the present sufferings of the Iraqi people could move a heart of stone, and that such suffering has created Collage by Simone Fattal deep resentment. It is a suffering that, besides its cruelty and Before long, Munif left his job with injustice, gives an indication of the dark the oil ministry, quit party politics, and ages through which we are living, in moved to Damascus, where he became which one blind superpower attempts to director of planning for the Syrian Oil impose its hegemony over the rest of the Company, but then relocated in Beirut, world. This merits opposition all the world where he worked on the Lebanese over. However, the real aim of the novel, newspaper Al Balagh. Munif was to though it also involves something of this, continue moving around in the next few is not only to expose such suffering. I also years. He returned to Baghdad, where he wanted ‘Ard al-Sawad’ to investigate a edited Al-Naft wal-Tanmiya (Oil and brighter side in the events that move Development) magazine. In 1981 he people to express their will, dreams and moved to France, attempting to make a desires. Thus the novel deals with all that living at writing, but four years later he hinders people from venturing towards returned to Damascus, where he stayed for new horizons and all that forces them to the next 18 years, until the end of his life. accept the unacceptable. In this sense the His most famous work is the quintet novel is as much a contemplation of “Cities of Salt” (Mudun al-Milh), which Continued on page 9 gives a portrait of traditional Bedouin www.ALJADID.com 5 Fadwa Tuqan: A Romantic Feminist Poet and Reluctant Political Witness By EMALEAH SHACKLETON Fadwa Tuqan F adwa Hafez Tuqan is perhaps the most famous and wellloved woman poet in Palestine. Fadwa would have loved to have kept writing poetry about personal and social subjects, but the political earthquakes of 1948 and 1967 turned her away from this course toward politics. Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s most eminent poet, considers the “1967 earthquake” to have made her stray away from her poetic bounds. In his eulogy, “Fadwa,” published in the latest issue of Al Karmel journal, Darwish masterfully captures her predicament of not being fully content with this change: “What does the poet do at the time of catastrophe? Suddenly the poet has to get out of himself to the outside, and poetry is the witness.” He adds, “She visited us in Haifa...a hostage seeking hostages, and read us her first poem about the new ordeal: ‘I will not cry.’ But she was crying like a dove. Love songs ceased to be the answer to hate and inhumanity – 6 to the condition that prevents words from continuing their previous escape from their trap, to preventing the continuing search for ‘pure poetry,’ and to preventing the character from revealing his personality.” Darwish also eulogized her as “our great sister,” writing that “She said farewell to her colleagues from the window of her home in Nablus just as she had said goodbye to dozens of loved ones and martyrs. Were it not for love, that love which is the condition of her life, she would have been Al-Khansa of the Arab-Palestinians in a country where death became the master of writing.” Yassir Arafat considered Fadwa Tuqan “Palestine’s great poetess” as he sent his condolences to her family following her recent death in midDecember. Tuqan is more than a mere national Palestinian symbol. Many scholars and observers find her life much richer, particularly citing her three-fold rebellion against her conservative upbringing, repressive society, and traditional genre in Arabic poetry and autobiography. She wrote and spoke candidly of her own life experiences, was a strong feminist voice in a male-dominated society, and added a humanist dimension to the Palestinian national struggle. Although there are other noteworthy Palestinian women poets, Tuqan was the first to dedicate her life to writing poetry. At a time when only men wrote and read poetry, Fadwa was not just a woman poet but a woman who dared to challenge patriarchal and male dominated society; and at a time when the art of autobiography (or “confessions,” as it translates in Arabic) was non-existent, Fadwa was unique not only in telling the world about herself and her family, but also in doing so as a woman. Modern Arabic literature lacked the daring honesty of her work, which tackled topics such as love and rebellion in a society that demanded obedience, writes Sakr Abou www.ALJADID.com Fakhr in the Lebanese daily As Safir. Abou Fakhr, whose article was titled “The Mother of Palestinian Poetry,” goes on to say that her autobiography is one of the most beautiful books of confession, autobiography and revelation to have appeared in the last two decades of the 20th century; it is only rivaled by Muhammad Chokri’s “The Bare Bread” and Edward Said’s “Out of Place.” Fadwa’s early childhood was a combination of bitterness and tragedy. She was born into an influential Palestinian family in the conservative city of Nablus around 1917, although the exact date of her birth remains unknown. Her autobiography, press reports and interviews reveal that her mother not only did not remember her birth date but did not want her in the first place, and even attempted to abort her. Her mother had very little to do with Fadwa during her early years; the young girl looked forward to colds and the flu because they were the only times her mother would dote on her. Otherwise, Fadwa came to know the “beautiful things” which were considered taboo in her own home through her aunt. “If I became attached to my aunt more than my mother, I became also more attached to my uncle, Al-Haj Hafez, more than my father,” according to her last interview with the London-based Arabic daily, Al Quds al-Arabi. She describes her uncle’s death in 1927 as “the first tragedy of loss I had known.” She went on to describe her uncle’s treatment of the family to be open and simple, saying that “he joked and participated in our childish games.” On the other hand, her father was strikingly different: “My father was cold and did not allow us an opportunity to get close to him.” Her father’s dual personality was perplexing to the young Fadwa, as he was quite open and warm toward her cousins but not to his own children. “He used to refer to me in the formal absent tense even if I was in the room,” she said, “He would say to my mother ‘tell the daughter to do AL JADID FALL 2003 Fadwa Tuqan: An Arab Electra BY ABBAS BEYDOUN Fadwa Tuqan has passed away in her late 80s, but even so we cannot imagine her very old or retired. For many years, Fadwa Tuqan withdrew herself from the literary scene, her absence accentuated by Palestine’s remoteness after 1967. She clung to her home by becoming more Palestinian, as if she returned to Palestine and disappeared beyond the bridge which separates the West Bank from Jordan. But that world beyond the bridge differed sharply from the world on the other side; it was a world of siege, tanks and military operations, constant destruction, death, and every day was unconventional, epic, and tragic. Based in that world, Fadwa Tukan was one of three poets, all scattered in different places, who embraced the modern poem: Nazik al-Mala’ika, aging and bedridden for some time; Fadwa Tuqan who passed away yesterday; and Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyusi, who has managed to produce an encyclopedic work of poetry while living in London. Since these three, women’s share of poetry has declined and men have become overwhelmingly dominant. Fadwa was an original poet in her own right, writing from her own experiences and for her late brothers, Ibrahim Tuqan, the most famous Palestinian poet of the time; and for her second brother, who died in a tragic accident. Fadwa stood up as an Electra in mourning between two dead brothers, shouldering the pain of the family, which this and that.’ ” Fadwa’s childhood outside home was painful as well. She attended school until the age of 13, but when a boy followed her to class and presented her with a flower, her strict father forbade her to return to school and thus Fadwa was cloistered in her home for the next period of her life. She remained functionally illiterate until her brother, the famous poet Ibrahim Tuqan, returned after he completed his studies at the American University in AL JADID FALL 2003 we can easily call Palestine. Poetry came to her in the image of the Palestinian fate; ultimately her choice to write poetry was not as important as her real mission, which fell somewhere between that of Joan of Arc and Al-Khansa.* Despite her mission, Fadwa’s voice was not a fighting one but bereaved, deprived, gentle, and insistent and visceral at times; it was a voice searching for love only to find fate, searching for a song and a flower to find instead the grave and the tank. Fadwa wrote about that orphaned rose, that orphaned love which she encountered in a world filled with mourning and violence. She was a mother before giving birth, and found herself fighting before loving in spite of herself. Her poetry, which by the end of her life had become remote, is the small song of loss, a small elegy for a dead family, a small love for a fallen city. Her poetry struggles to become a song, yet becomes a torrent of tears. Love struggles in order not to shout. The young woman– we do not know how she grew and aged– struggles to remain the youth of Arab poetry, the orphan of Arab poetry, the Electra of Arab AJ poetry.AJ *Al-Khansa is a pre-Islamic poetess who wrote eulogies to her brothers. The Arabic version of this essay appeared in As Safir newspaper. Translated from the Arabic by Elie Chalala Beirut to take a teaching job in Palestine. One of his immediate tasks was to teach his sister at home. Her brother’s return in 1929 filled the emotional vacuum left by the death of her uncle. The first gift Fadwa had ever received was from him, and when he settled in Nablus, a new life began for her. Ibrahim, according to his sister, was aware of Fadwa’s intuitive interest in poetry and thus took it upon himself to guide her, giving her lessons in poetry and literature. www.ALJADID.com She described her brother’s instruction in the Al Quds interview as being like “a return to a lost heaven.” This relationship between Fadwa and Ibrahim prepared her to write the first and the only book on him, according to As Safir daily. As Fadwa’s own poetic voice developed, she began to express her confinement. She addressed the position of women in Palestine in the 1920s and ’30s as well as their lack of educational and cultural opportunities. Her early work often combines elements of captivity and longing with elements from the natural world. She was initially influenced by the Mahjar poets – predominantly Lebanese ex-patriots living in America – and began writing in a romantic style that was personal, and at times, pastoral. In “The Seagull and the Negation of the Negation,” the Seagull arrives at the poet’s window. It knocked at my dark window, and in the gasping silence quivered “Bird, is it good news you bring?” It divulged its secret, yet breathed not a word And the seagull disappeared Yet later in the poem, despite the darkness within her world and the suffocating, stifling atmosphere, the seagull does bring good news. …I know now That during hard times, standing in the tunnel of silence, All things change. The seed sprouts even in the heart of the dead, Morning burst forth from darkness. …the horizon parted, and the house greeted the light of day. The optimism in these lines can be read as describing the poet’s liberation from her restricted life. After her father’s death in 1948, which coincided with the Palestinian Nakba, Fadwa wrote, “When the roof fell on Palestine, the veil fell from the face of the Nablus women.” (Incidentally, Fadwa’s mother was the first woman in Nablus to lift the veil.) All at once, “young and educated women could mix freely with their male counterparts,” wrote Lawrence Joffe in The Guardian. Yet despite her newfound liberty, Fadwa Tuqan did not feel at once entirely free. She described herself as “armless”; facing people outside her home was 7 difficult as she did not feel herself to be experienced and resourceful, according to an Al Quds interview. “Books are not sufficient to know life and human relationships with all their complexities.” Fadwa’s multiple difficulties and the struggle to overcome them was noted by Mahmoud Darwish, who writes that “Fadwa did not live as she desired,” adding that she did not want “everything explicit.” In “ambiguity,” Darwish writes, “there is interpretation. Whenever we met, she said to me: ‘How much I wish to discover my road to certain ambiguity in poetry.’ She sought ambiguity so she could say more than she said, or perhaps express what what was repressed in her heart, for she believed that there is freedom in ambiguity and a poetic license that cannot be Fadwa Tuqan seduced by naming the obvious.” In 1957 Tuqan wrote “I Found It,” a poem that is largely about internal self-discovery: “My soul found/ My soul.” The poem, which is imbued with a clear vision of her destiny, was written when Tuqan was in England, where she would study English literature at Oxford. She traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East and her poetry came to be more visceral, “borrow[ing] motifs from her life in exile and mingling them with daring expressions of untrammeled sensuality,” wrote Joffe in The Guardian. Not only was Fadwa Tuqan’s poetry becoming more experiential, it was also becoming more politicized. Despite the fact that she did not belong to any political party and was initially averse to writing political poems, her writing changed after 1967. Previously her father had tried to persuade her to write political poetry like the rousing call-to-arms style poems of her brother, but in her autobiography, “Mountainous Journey,” Fadwa recalls the resentment and indignation with which she met this encouragement. Having been forcibly left out of political discussion by her parents and thus brought up little acquainted with politics, she felt unable to express the experiences of her land and people. However, by the events of 1967 she was liberated and felt compelled to write about their consequences, Tuqan began a political life. She became a master of free verse, and of interweaving the individual voice with the national identity of Palestine. In “I Found It,” this analogy is implicit; being Palestinian is more than geographical, there is the sense that one carries the land in one’s soul. In “My Sad City” Nablus is personified, holding its breath, choking on the day of Zionist occupation. Yet Fadwa Tuqan does what her late poet brother could not, palpably expressing a maternal sadness for the state of her nation and of humanity at large. In “Eytan in the Steel Trap,” Tuqan speaks of the loss of innocence of a young Israeli child on a kibbutz. Eytan my child, You are the victim, drowning in lies, And like you, Eytan, the harbor is sunk in a sea of lies With the head of a dragon And a thousand arms Alas, alas! If only you could remain the child, the human being! 8 ...Darwish remains unrivaled in capturing the essence of Fadwa’s poetry: “She was a contemporary of the Nakba poets and was not part of them; she was a contemporary of the Arab modernist poets and was not part of them; and she was a contemporary of the resistance poets and was not part of them. She kept up her own poetic identity.” Sadly, the child is born into the “steel trap,” the man-made edifice of thought that will reshape and mutate his innocent human life. Tuqan expands upon this idea in “Song of Becoming,” where young, innocent children play at fighting and sadly grow into their weapons. They’re only boys Who used to frolic and play Launching rainbowed kites Whistling, leaping, Trading easy laughter and jokes Dueling with branches pretending, to be great heroes in history. Now suddenly they’ve grown, grown more than the years of a normal life… They’ve grown to become trees Plunging deep roots into the earth, Stretching high towards the sun… These children eventually “face sullen tanks with streams of stones” becoming “the worshiped and the worshipers” and eventually “their torn limbs merge with the stuff of our earth.” While celebrating sacrifice, the poem also laments the loss of innocence explored in “Eytan” from another perspective. By establishing (here with beautiful arboreal metaphors) links in the common humanity of both peoples, and through associations with living and dead Palestinian poets, we know Fadwa was a champion of peaceful co-existence of the two peoples and was www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 certainly admired by members of both. “Young Arab Americans read her work to rediscover their roots; Israeli and Jewish feminists divined a sympathetic resonance from their sister across the ‘green line,’” wrote Joffe in The Guardian. In remembering Fadwa, Mahmoud Darwish, who knew and visited with her, offers a very perceptive analysis of her poetry, especially dealing with her link between the individual/romantic and the political: “It is true that Fadwa wrote poetry about the Palestinian tragedy, and why would she not! But her subdued voice was different: it was the voice in love, in pain, the contemplative, and the lonely, which does not resemble another voice; she was simultaneously in and out of the group.” Fadwa’s poetry cannot be reduced to politics and agitation, although her poet brother certainly occupied that role. Again, Darwish remains unrivaled in capturing the essence of Fadwa’s poetry: “She was a contemporary of the Nakba poets and was not part of them; she was a contemporary of the Arab modernist poets and was not part of them; and she was a contemporary of the resistance poets and was not part of them. She kept up her own poetic identity. And she also maintained what resembles the ‘constant’ in poetry – that is the romantic tendency. And she also guarded what resembles the ‘constant’ in romanticism – love.” Fadwa Tuqan published eight collections of poems: “My Brother Ibrahim” (1946), “Alone with the Days” (1952), “I Found It” (1958), “Danos Love” (1960), “Before the Closed Door” (1967), “The Night and the Riders” (1969), “Alone on the Summit of the World” (1973), “July and the Other Anthem” (1989) and “The Last Toronda” (2000). She also wrote two books, “Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography” (1990) and “The More Difficult Journey” (1993). Fadwa Tuqan received the International Poetry Prize in Palermo, Italy, as well as awards in Greece and Jordan, the Jerusalem Award for Culture and Arts from the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1990, the United Arab Emirates Award, and the Honorary Palestine Prize for Poetry in 1996. Her AJ work has been translated into English and Farsi.AJ Arab world bids farewell to Munif Continued from page 5 history, and of man and the unequal relations that stand between men, as it is a contribution to the creation of a more progressive consciousness to counteract all that stands in the way of humanity.” In further comments about “Ard al-Sawad” in a letter to the Egyptian literary critic Farouk Ab al-Kader, Munif wrote, “I want to say what this great country means to me, Iraq. I was not concerned with Saddam or the likes of him among the rulers. This country, land and people, is more important to me than any ruler, and what moves me is when they are offended and subjected to harm.” The previously unpublished letter appeared in the Lebanese daily Al Mustaqbal on Jan. 27. Nonetheless, Munif was a fierce critic of Saddam Hussein and his regime, but he was also opposed to the American invasion of Iraq and spent the last two years of his life working on nonfiction projects to oppose what he saw as renewed imperialism. In the wake of the bomb attack on U.S. soldiers in Dhahran in 1996, Munif wrote that “The United States, obsessed with oil AL JADID FALL 2003 fever and the need to control it, has gone much too far in protecting regimes and individuals unworthy of its protection. The Iraqi regime committed one mistake by invading Kuwait, but the U.S. followed this by committing an even graver mistake. Instead of fighting the Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, it sought to subdue the region and make it compliant – bringing shame on every person in it. Those who paid the price of the war weren’t the rulers but the ordinary people.” Munif was not a very public man; he was a man of shadow, shunning the limelight, writing in dimmed rooms, and speaking in the language of ordinary people. “Munif died and his personal archive includes no photograph with Arab rulers, although he has many photos marching in demonstrations, strikes, and his first signature on every protest petition,” wrote Talal Salman, editor-in-chief of the Lebanese daily As Safir. During his lifetime, Munif received a number of awards, the most prestigious of which was the Cairo Award for Creative Narration in 1998. He also received the prestigious Sultan alOweiss Cultural Prize for the Novel in 1989, and was rumored to have been on the short list for the Nobel prize the year that Naguib Mahfouz won. “ . . . the most important and greatest of those who wrote the Arab novel in the second half of the 20th century,”according to Ibrahim Salameh “Although a pan-Arabist, Baathist of sorts, leftist, these factors undoubtedly had influenced his novelist works. But his works transcended narrow parochialism to address Arab man wherever he is; he opened up to the Arab map, Mashreq and Maghreb,” wrote Abdu Wazen, a poet and novelist, in Al Hayat. “Politics and ideological commitments did not dominate his narrative work nor his novels.” Nonetheless, the only completely non-political novel he wrote is “Kisat Hub Majussiya” (A Maginian Love Story) in 1973. Among his other works is a book of criticism, “Author and Exile.” In Iraq Munif had formed a close friendship with the Palestinian litterateur Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, who encouraged Munif in his writing projects, and in 1982 they published “Alam bi-la khara’ it” (World Without Maps). Munif also wrote several other political works, including “The Nationalization of Arab Petroleum” (1976) and “Democracy First...and Democracy Always” (1991). His “Sibak al-Masafaat al-Tawila” (The Race of Long Distances) is an investigation into the interests of Western powers in exploiting Iranian oil after the defeat of Musadeq revolution in the early 1950s in Iran. “The novel for Abd al-Rahman Munif restores respect to the simple people who are the real makers of culture,” observed Hassan Toufic in the Qatar-based Al Raya newspaper. The role of the novel in raising peoples’ awareness was especially important to Munif because he believed that the region was in crisis, writing that “The people are in one world and their leaders are in another... As a result of such factors as the absence of freedom, prisons and censorship, people are forced to be silent. But if there is no justice in dealing with all these issues, a big explosion is going to happen.” AJ www.ALJADID.com 9 IN T ER VIEW S INT ERVIEW VIEWS Unpublished Munif Interview: Crisis in the Arab World – Oil, Political Islam, and Dictatorship BY ISKANDAR HABASH This interview was conducted by the author with Abd al-Rahman Munif for the French magazine, L’Orient Express, in 1999. Due to its length, a shortened text appeared in the French magazine. Following the death of Abd al-Rahman Munif in late January 2004, the Lebanese daily As Safir republished the full Arabic text of the interview for the first time. The English version (translated by Elie Chalala) appears exclusively in Al Jadid. Habash: Those who are familiar with your life note that you started studying economics, and that you received a doctorate in the economics of oil before you moved to literature. How did you come to the novel from “oil”? Munif: My great gamble was in politics, but after I experimented with political activism, it became apparent that the available political methods were insufficient and unsatisfactory. As a result, I started the search for a formula to connect with others and to express their concerns and the concerns of the historical period and the generation. Given my hobby of reading, especially the novel, I thought that my reading and command of expression would enable me to substitute one tool with another. Instead of the political party or direct political action, it was possible for the novel to be a means of expression. This is why I came to the novel. As for economics, especially that of oil, it was useful background for reading societies, mainly the powerful ones, at this current stage. Thus, economics and other sciences could assist the novelist in reading and understanding the factors that shape society. This places the novelist in a better position as far as his narrative tools are concerned. 10 Habash: Why did you find the political means non-democratic? Are you not also concerned that the novel would develop into a political more than a literary discourse? Munif: Concerning the first question, we as a generation can possibly be called a “...the intellectual can neither be a substitute for the political party nor its mouthpiece. Henceforth, he must have a critical position, a different one, but this requires a democratic principle and a plurality of viewpoints and opinions.” transitional generation; we were burdened with an immense load of dreams and desires for change and at the same time a group of political parties presented themselves as a vehicle to bring about change. But, in fact, our dreams were greater than our resources. The political parties which existed, and whose remnants still exist to date, were too weak and not able to instigate the process of change. They were primitive in their ideas and means. They were not connected with the movement within society, and subsequently what they presented were mere slogans rather than political programs. When these parties faced the real test, their weaknesses and failures became apparent, and this explains their decline, as well as that of the individual. www.ALJADID.com This individual had a sort of dream to become a part of the movement of history, only to discover that these parties are not the appropriate medium for this mission. As far as the second question, it is natural that instead of the novelist being disappointed outside the political party, he will move toward society through a political vision. But with the passage of time and increased experiments, he discovers society to be richer and more diverse than the political discourse. Thus the novel evolves into reading society and giving expression to its concerns and dreams, and becomes more than mere political discourse. As you indicated in the previous question, other sciences like history, economics, and sociology facilitate the reading of the movement of society and its conflicts, both collectively and individually, and this is what the novel attempts to express constantly through general and diverse writing. Habash: Whoever reads your novels no doubt will discover something constant– that is the image of the tormented intellectual. Why? What do you suggest the role of the intellectual in the Third World is today? Munif: In the beginning of the 20th century and before political parties were formed, there was a presupposed role of the intellectual, whether intellectuals acted on their own or had the role delegated to them by society. Thus the Arab renaissance at the end of the 19th century and the onset of the 20th can be considered as a movement of intellectuals in the first degree. We can cite in this context a large number of intellectuals who express this phenomenon. At a relatively later time, political movements represented by parties and social forces appeared and found it necessary to have their intellectual voices expressing their concern, just as had been the case for the tribe and its poet. In another period, when these parties became ideological, if we can use that expression, they started to demand that their intellectuals become political advocates involved in political mobilization and incitement. When these political parties AL JADID FALL 2003 retreated, they rationalized their failure by the failure of the intellectuals and their inability to perform the necessary and enlightening role. At the same time, the intellectuals assumed that it was possible that they could become a substitute for the political party; thus, there was, from a very early period, confusion about the position of the intellectuals and their role and relationship with the political party. In my first novels, I attempted to portray the breakdown and defeat of the intellectual. In a subsequent period, I discovered that the intellectual is not everything in the novel and life. Life is richer and broader than this category, for even if the role of the intellectual retreated before other sectors in society, such a role resembles a multi-dimensional mirror; even if one or two sides go dark, the intellectual is still able to see the concerns of the period and its possibilities through the remaining parts. As for the present role of the intellectual in the Third World, undoubtedly this is an important question that needs to be discussed carefully. I am convinced that the intellectual is a fundamental partner in the process of change and enlightenment, and while he must have a critical position, he should abandon the position of incitement or propaganda, and instead should engage in a broad dialogue – whether with himself and his ideas or with the ideas of others – in order to define the proper strategies. In other words, the intellectual can neither be a substitute for the political party nor its mouthpiece. Henceforth, he must have a critical position, a different one, but this requires a democratic principle and a plurality of viewpoints and opinions. Habash: You mention in the dedication to your novel “When We Left the Bridge,” “The memory of many failures past and others that are on the way.” That was in the beginning of 1976. Today, after more than 20 years, do you still have this position? What has changed? Munif: I said that the “seven drought years” were still going on and would AL JADID FALL 2003 continue until the end of the century [20th] or even afterwards. It is possible that there will be major shocks, especially in stagnant societies, such as Saudi Arabia or the like. Civil wars are likely to be a feature of this next era. Poverty will increase and there could be starvation revolts, as happened in the 1970s and 1980s. Political conflict will continue, although in my estimation, the fundamentalist trend has already reached you think you will re-examine this issue in a new novel? Munif: When I wrote “The Eastern Mediterranean” I hadn’t published any other novel, thus I was my own censor, a role that prevented me from saying everything in the first novel and subsequently led me to write the second one “Now Here…” in order to settle my scores with the political prison. “Cities of Salt,” for example, covers a period of history of the region, a phase extending to the changes in oil prices, which ushered in a new phase that someone else could cover. But on the whole, there are many issues, whether political, social, or human, which form important material for novel writing. Now I am in the midst of another novel, but I do not rule out that in the future; if necessary, I could go back to the “Cities of Salt,” although I empathize with the people whose time limitations prevent them from reading new parts of the same novel. Though the author can follow a different approach by focusing on the essence and the tensions caused by the dominance of oil, it remains difficult to return to “Cities of Salt” one more time. Collage by Simone Fattal its peak and is bound to retreat. The major problem is that there are no alternatives, no forces or programs that could comprehend today’s situation and rationalize it and give it a positive dimension. This means we will continue to see confusion and search for the form of relationships in society which could pave the way for the establishment of civil society and the beginning of pluralist democracy. Habash: You wrote “The Eastern Mediterranean” in the 70s, wherein you dealt with a wide range of issues to which you returned in the early 90s in the novel, “Now Here, or the Eastern Mediterranean One More Time.” Why this return? Do Habash: Do you still think that our real problem lies in oil? Munif: Our crisis is a trilogy: oil, political Islam, and dictatorship. This trilogy is the factor that led to the collapse, confusion, and consequently to the suffering lived by Arab societies in their search for the road to modernity. Oil joined and embraced political Islam, providing it with the much needed power, and what we witnessed in Afghanistan offers the most important example. At the same time, oil enabled dictatorial regimes to continue practicing the cruelest forms of repression. The increase in oil and wealth coincided with an increase in reaction and dictatorship which spread throughout the region, mainly due to the Continued on next page www.ALJADID.com 11 inability of other political forces to stand up to the challenges. Habash: Place is nowhere to be found in your novels, and to be exact, it remains ambiguous. What explains this ambiguity? Munif: As far as the exact definition of the place, this doesn’t mean much to me for one major reason – the difference between one place and another is relative, marginal, and insignificant. If, for another, but the Bedouin oil blessing, which at one time was confined to the desert, had moved to all Arab cities and it had become the force defining not only politics but culture, ways of life, and the human concerns in this region. Habash: In your book about Amman, you seem predisposed toward writing the “autobiography of a city,” but this story is discussed within a particular history, from the 1940s until the Palestinian and so the level of desires and dreams. I believe, however, autobiography can be a basic obstacle in novel writing. As far as other writings are concerned, and precisely “Sirat Madina” (The Autobiography of a City), “Urwat alZamman al-Bahi” (The Bond of the Beautiful Time), and to a lesser extent, “Rahlat al-Fan wa al-Hayat” (The Journey of Art and Life) on Marwan Qassab Bashi, were documentation of a certain period, precisely defined through places “Oil joined and embraced political Islam, providing it with the much needed power, and what we witnessed in Afghanistan offers the most important example. At the same time, oil enabled dictatorial regimes to continue practicing the cruelest forms of repression.” example, we discuss the political prison in a confined place such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia, it seems as if I am exonerating other places or as if the political prison does not exist in these places, especially when we know the political prison exists from the Atlantic to the Gulf to be exact, whether in terms of its environment, means, or concerns. Thus, I consider the generalization of this subject is the ultimate specificity because everyone is responsible and everyone suffers from the same problem. This is a special reading of society influenced by the nature of my life and movements, an experience that had given me a clear idea about the nature of these societies, the common denominator which unites them, and which in turn led me to discover no essential difference between one place and another, especially in the negative aspect of it. Habash: What about Beirut: does it not constitute a difference from this dominant society? Munif: Perhaps reading the civil war, which lasted from 1975 to the early 1990s, offers the true meaning of the level of modernization this society reached and its relationship with time. In other words, excluding the external shell layer, Lebanon also remained a hotbed of backwardness and divisions which are related to old and primitive societies. Perhaps there is a difference in form and appearance between one place and 12 migration. Why this autobiography? Why did you frame the discussion within this history? Do you find Palestinian migration to Amman a reason for its economic and architectural birth? Habash: It is a multi-dimensional question. First, I do not find much writing about cities in our modern literature, and much of the life features associated with these cities would start to disappear unless documented through means which could keep them alive in memory. My writing the autobiography of the city aims at urging many authors to write about two important things: cities and childhoods. Habash: To what extent does autobiography play a role in your novels? Munif: It is possible to distinguish between two things: the novel and other writings. In the novel, there is a role or impact, albeit a small one. But as far as the subject of the novel, its characters, and life story, I am convinced that every author has some of himself in what he writes, and this is distributed in varying degrees and forms among the characters. The character of the intellectual in some of the novels, for example, does not necessarily mean the life story of the writer. Just the opposite – there are certain characters where the author aims at criticizing them. Certain uneducated characters, according to common definitions, could represent in part some of the author’s life story. The level of fiction in the novel is abounding www.ALJADID.com and names which point at issues of relationship to the journey of the author and his human relations and political direction. I said once that if an author decided to rely on autobiography in his writing, it is possible to write only one novel, but it can be an important and exciting one, given the intimacy that characterizes autobiography. Habash: What about your writing on Marwan Qassab Bashi [a Syrian artist]? Munif: There is more than one reason: First, I like fine art and thus it is natural to share this appreciation with the public. Second, there are precedents of authors and poets who “read” and wrote about the works of artists. Third, there is a rupture between the arts, especially in the Arab world, where each art grows separately from the others, a condition that weakens art in general. However, at a time when the novel is becoming capable of building bridges between these arts, offering insight into each other, the novelist is establishing relationships with the novel as well as with theater and film. AJ This interview is adapted from a slightly longer Arabic version, which appeared in the Cultural Section of the Lebanese daily As Safir. The translation is by permission. Translated from the Arabic by Elie Chalala. Translation Copyright © by Al Jadid (2003) AL JADID FALL 2003 Toufic Faroukh on Jazz, Saxophone and Memory BY MAI MUNASA Music is the language composers know how to speak. Their world is synonyms, senses, and specifications from the heart of the tune and the core of the instrument in which they are immersed. Thus, I felt many times, while I was awaiting an answer to a question from Toufic Faroukh, that I was intruding upon this mysterious world which often cannot be expressed in words. The saxophone is the gamble this young man took, immersing himself in the music of the land to which he belongs, and letting the music of the Other world infiltrate the natural tradition. Faroukh’s voice is neither defined by geography nor language: “I do not find it necessary to define my music and give it an identity; it is the music of this time that takes from this world certain influences and returns them to it through the composer’s comprehensive and vast interpretation. My music carries no title except that of being contemporary.” Munasa: You were born in a country that sings to the rhythm of the flute, the oud, and the drum. How did you reach for the saxophone to connect you with what you are today? Faroukh: My brother was a saxophone player and he’s the one who guided me to this instrument and taught me its ABCs. He was an amateur who instilled in me the love of professionalism. We had discovered the saxophone in the Boy Scouts. The instrument was strange to our environment, so unconventional, and used only for certain occasions. Munasa: But this instrument seems to have entrapped you. Faroukh: Yes, but it took a long time, since the end of the 1970s. A good friend, Issam Hage Ali, and I did pretty good work on this instrument and through it, the bond of our friendship strengthened and we became more like brothers. Music was our solace during the bloody events. It was a real flight from the horrors of the time. AL JADID FALL 2003 Toufic Faroukh Munasa: When did you leave Beirut? Faroukh: I got ready to leave in 1984 but before that, I spent 10 years searching for my musical identity. It was then that I was hit by the saxophone “virus.” By great coincidence, I met Ziad Rahbani as well as the late great artist Joseph Sakr, who greatly influenced me. I had an early first experience with Ziad as a player in the play “Binisba Lebookra Shoo” (What is about Tomorrow). I then participated in recording an album “Abu Ali” and joined as an actor in two of Ziad’s plays, “Film Ameriki Tawil” (Long American Film) and “Shi Fashel” (Something Failed). In these two works, I explored my theatrical abilities and became interested in this world until one day I realized that music alone could help build my life. to accompany her artistically in her 1982 American tour during which the saxophone was my constant partner. Munasa: At what level of the musical scale is your instrument? Faroukh: Yesterday I was in love with the alto saxophone, playing melodies. I always found at this level what I seriously search for in modern music. In my compositions and in every project, some type of saxophone is required. But what I prefer and have become comfortable with is the soprano saxophone, which I find soft and delicate and quite close to my voice. I also like it the same way I like Miles Davis, the trumpet player. Davis’ voice through his instrument comes back to me while I play the soprano saxophone. Munasa: How did working with Ziad Rahbani influence you? Munasa: What do you mean by modern music? What are its characteristics? Is it the modern classical music? Faroukh: Ziad offered me the opportunity of expression and Fairuz made it possible Faroukh: When I moved to Paris, where I www.ALJADID.com 13 later, in 1998, I produced my second album, “Asrar Saghirat” (Small Secrets). It’s a musical, redolent with a taste of the East and its colors/types; and then another one called “Drabzine” (Banisters). In it, there is a mixture of traditional music. Detail from Faroukh’s CD, “Small Secrets” studied music in the conservatory and in the Advanced College of Music, saxophone was my first goal. My familiarity with it emerged through modern music, particularly the alto saxophone. As for the modern classical music, except Ravel and the French composer Claude Debussy, who introduced the saxophone in some of their rare works, this instrument was not used by classical musical orchestras. When we say modern music, I presuppose the music that was written in the 20th century for a saxophone and orchestra or saxophone and piano. After the 1950s, writing for the saxophone increased significantly. Munasa: When you say the saxophone, jazz comes to mind. Faroukh: In fact, I did not study jazz and its roots at all, nor played jazz on the saxophone. Despite what I learned from the musical institutions in Paris, I am still a self-made musician, who learned and composes by himself. I went searching with this instrument and found that the love I have for it brings out dormant obsessions in me. None of the other musicians were able to help me express them as I wished. Since then, I started writing my music. Munasa: What did you learn from these experiments? Faroukh: My first album was “Ali on Broadway.” It was received positively by the specialized musical press. Four years 14 Munasa: It appears that your pre-1990s musical experiments left no effect upon you. Faroukh: Rather, they inspired my talent to write. My experience with Ziad and Fairuz, especially working with them, and recording in the studio, led me to the peak of my pleasure and to a great sense of difficult responsibilities. This experiment taught me and helped refine my abilities, particularly through the work Ziad assigned to his father, Asi, where my instrument accompanied every rhythm. Munasa: Then there was your second period in Paris. Faroukh: Radwan Hatit, a musician friend living in Paris, encouraged me financially and morally to record what I was writing in that period. He is the one who produced my three works. My meeting with him was a miracle, for it relieved me of my financial burden. Munasa: Did you introduce different types of instruments right from the beginning? Faroukh: In all of my projects, there are 20 to 24 players, and I was often forced to divide the recording into a group playing in the West and another playing in Lebanon. After that I used to construct the exact mixture. I believe the oud of Charbel Rouhana is unparalleled, as well as the percussions of Ali al-Khatib’s flute and qanun. memories? Faroukh: No. I am not a nostalgic man, but I do have a long-range memory. At times my topics come from sitting on the street. The road has an echo of freedom regardless of how crowded it is. On it, I feel loneliness. The road is not my inspiration, but the freedom given to me by the road is my path to the idea–the idea loaded with transitory images, transitory scents. Munasa: How do you embody the fragrance of your music? The saxophone is the gamble this young man took, immersing himself in the music of the land to which he belongs, and letting the music of the Other world infiltrate the natural tradition. Faroukh’s voice is defined by neither geography nor language. Faroukh: Oh, what a wonderful idea! It enters the senses in an individual chemistry and from there transforms into a rhythm. Though I avoid sinking into poetics, I feel at the same time that I assume the responsibility of my poetic senses without being caught up in it. It is from the archives of my memory, which I cannot run away from or deny. AJ Translated from the Arabic by Elie Chalala The Arabic version of this interview appeared in the Beirut-based An Nahar. The author granted Al Jadid the exclusive right to translate and publish. Munasa: Where do you find your inspiration to compose? Is it from your www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 Definitions and Dialects of the Novel Interview with Myriam Antaki BY CAROLE CORM In “Verses of Forgiveness” reconciliation is made possible because I took the side of each symbolic character, the Jew, the Christian, the Muslim; I reached to the very end of their fears, their hate, their desperation... Corm: Why in French? mother tongue and the learnt language imposes itself. To be an Arab citizen loyal to her own culture or use a language of elsewhere? Why did I choose to talk of the millenary Orient in someone else’s language? Here, I must express my deep attachment to my country, to my roots and to this true anchorage which pushed me to render the civilization of the Orient in a more international language that would open the doors to the West. I chose French without ever wanting to desacralize Arabic, whose richness, subtlety and power of expression I recognize. For me, there is no problem of identity in this choice but rather a reconciliation between two cultures, the story and the emotion of one, and the nurturing language of the other, at the end, a universal message. Antaki: When writing becomes an urgency, then the choice between the Corm: According to you, what is the place of the novel in the Arab world? Corm: How did you start writing novels? Antaki: I don’t really know what is a novel. What counts in writing is the liberty attached to it. One should not belong to past generations. In the story of a life, to suddenly start writing a novel is a difficult but unavoidable passage. It’s a decision made to render the fabulous, the marvellous, the dreamed, the true, the felt, what exists around us. There is a call which we believe to come from the outside but which comes from within us. At the beginning, at the end, it is a solitude which we keep, which we take with us, which we express for it not to become banal. Antaki: The Arab world suffers from a lack of creativity. The novel is born through a dream yet it has the color of streets, images, memories; of faces destroyed by empty looks or enchanted smiles of innocent children: the Arab novel exists. It can grow and blossom from the world that surrounds it. Literary creation, the blood of reflection never loses itself. The novel could be a social or a political satire, an evolution, revolution, utopia. To create is the cosmos of the future. Corm: Your novel “Verses of Forgiveness” stirred strong reactions in the Middle East. Do you think an American audience will understand it? Continued on next page Secular ‘Forgiveness’ in Syrian Novel BY CAROLE CORM Verses of Forgiveness By Myriam Antaki New York, Other Press LLC, 2003. F irst published in French in 1999, Myriam Antaki’s novel “Verses of Forgiveness” was translated into English in December 2002. Antaki, an acclaimed francophone Syrian novelist living in Aleppo, managed a tour de force in this relatively short novel. The author presents the reader with the actors who shaped the recent history of what is today Israel, from the death camps of World War AL JADID FALL 2003 II in Europe and the influx of Jews in Palestine, to the last days of British colonial presence, to the ensuing battles between Jews and Palestinians for the same piece of land. Through three symbolic characters, each representing one of the monotheistic religions, Antaki describes the destiny of the people regrouped by the vastness of history into one land. Each story, with its own point of view, carves its path in a poetical style. Antaki’s success lies in the Continued on next page www.ALJADID.com 15 ‘Forgiveness’ in Syrian Novel Continued from previous page ability to make the reader accept the contradictions of each narrative without taking an immediate stance for or against the characters and the political ideas they represent. The novel opens in a brothel in Baalbeck. Ahmed, a Palestinian terrorist, meets his mother, Marie, a Palestinian Christian, for the first time. After a life of e x i l e , separated from those she loves, M a r i e presents her son with two written narratives. First, a diary, that of A h m e d ’s fa t h e r, David, a Jew from France w h o managed to escape the death camps, reach Palestine and ultimately join the terrorist group of the Irgun. The other memorabilia is a long letter written by Marie during her exile in Lebanon to her lost love David. As Antaki writes, “the uprooted do not like to go through life in silence”; in this instance, they have left written testimonies. Through David’s diary, the reader is led to better understand what it might have been like to have survived the Holocaust in Europe, reach Palestine clandestinely, end up in a British detention center there and ultimately join the Irgun, a secret terrorist organization. Through Marie’s letter, the reader feels the bitterness and helplessness of the Palestinians who are constrained to an exile they never imagined. Forced to flee, they give up their sweet lives in Jaffa or Jerusalem, for the misery of refugee camps in neighboring countries. As the generous character Sheik al-Tahi explains to David while in the British prison of Athlit: “David, my son, we will pay. For the injustice of the West toward you, we will ...one comes to wonder whether personal accounts and oral histories are not the only possible way to see through the history of this tormented land in the last century. 16 pay with our land, with our dead youth, with our disemboweled women and our blinded children. We shall suffer until the dream has been forgotten.” Through these two personal narratives, Ahmed, the son abandoned at birth on the steps of a mosque near a refugee camp in North Lebanon, is put face to face with his identity, his roots. Yet these are far from simple. Ahmed, who has turned into a terrorist for the Palestinian cause as a way to define himself, discovers his parents’ past. Antaki has tread on explosive ground yet because she wisely chose to write her epic through the fictional voices of a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim, she avoids any parti pris or untactful opinions. The story of the Holocaust is told through the eyes of a Jew; the story of the Palestinian exodus is told through a Christian Palestinian obliged to leave everything after the horror of Deir Yassin; and finally, the story of a Palestinian terrorist is seen through the eyes of Ahmed, a disposed orphan of history, who can only claim what he is by what he is not. As he explains, and this could also go for his father, David, the Jewish Irgun terrorist: “I am a terrorist, a dreamer. I have removed my mask of bliss for that of fear and sweat. I have lost. Some call me a hero, others curse me, but I have chosen my own image, my own identity, for I was soft wax that had to harden inexorably.” The end of the novel leaves us with a sum of incommensurable suffering. Yet Ahmed has grown; he has penetrated the minds and thoughts of his “enemies” to ultimately understand and ideally forgive. As Antaki explains in an article published in La Pensee du Midi, she has tried to go beyond the suffering by working on the notion of forgiveness in a secular way, “…mourning tragedies is a slow process, years are needed for one to forget and for history to be buried. Forgiveness – which should not be confused with renouncement – is a decision, a voluntary action which enables us to act on the present in order to face the future.” There is much to be forgiven, and this will not be easy, yet the many references in the novel to inter-religious understanding and friendship from one individual to another proves that there is room for verses of a different kind than war and hatred. www.ALJADID.com Antaki’s novel is not to be underestimated. She has chosen what seems to be the only formal style possible when writing a novel about Palestine/ Israel. With the growing number of personal histories being published, especially from Palestinians now in exile, and the increasing reliance of historians on such testimonies, one comes to wonder whether personal accounts and oral histories are not the only possible way to see through the history of this tormented land in the last century. Myriam Antaki, as a true artist, has led the way, giving us a lyrical and poetic approach to the process of memory, understanding and ultimately forgiveness. AJ Dialects of the Novel Continued from previous page Antaki: The American public is very diverse, of multiple origins, a true mixture of ancient cultures with a mentality extracted from a new world. I did not write this novel thinking of a specific nationality, a particular ethnic group, or a unique religious group. I wrote this book for Man, for it is the human who is concerned in emotion and wounds. In “Verses of Forgiveness” reconciliation is made possible because I took the side of each symbolic character, the Jew, the Christian, the Muslim; I reached to the very end of their fears, their hate, their desperation, their abyssal descent from which finally emerges love and forgiveness. I hope the American public will be sensitive to this call, this common burden, for words of hope exist in every language of the world. Corm: Can you speak a little bit about your latest novel “Souviens-toi de Palmyre” (Remember Palmyra), which revolves around the character of Zenobia? Antaki: Zenobia is a Syrian queen of the third century who rebelled against the Roman Empire to stretch her empire from the sources of the Nile to the Bosporus. I chose this historical character for a single reason: to carry to the Arab woman, who hesitates or despairs of tearing her veil, a message of liberty. A liberty which does not come from elsewhere but emerges deep within the Orient, from the desert’s sap, from a noble melting pot of cultures, from a positive identity. AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 contributors Najwa Adra (“Hybrid Vigor: The Art of Emna Zghal,” p. 46) is a New York-based cultural anthropologist with a specialization in the arts of the Middle East. Her latest project has been a pilot of a literacy program for women in Yemen in which they learn reading and writing skills by using their own oral poetry as text. Abbas Beydoun (“Fadwa Tuqan: An Arab Electra,” p. 7) is a poet, novelist, critic and the editor of the cultural supplement of the Beirut daily As Safir. Doris Bittar (“Unveiling the West Through the Eyes of Artists, Historians and Critics,” p. 32 and “Cartoons Tackle Taboos,” p. 33) is a San Diego artist, academic and critic. Hanan Chebib (“War, Peace and Garbage,” p. 44) is an Arab-Canadian fine arts photographer of five years with a strong emphasis on cultural subjects. Her work of photography about Western media portrayal of the Middle East and Lebanon has been exhibited at the Little AL JADID FALL 2003 Gallery, University of Calgary, and the PhotoSpace Gallery in Calgary, Alberta. Carole Corm (“Definitions and Dialects of the Novel: Interview with Myriam Antaki,” p. 15 and “Secular ‘Foregiveness’ in Syrian Novel,” p. 15) is a Paris-based author, critic and journalist. Charbel Dagher (“Thresholds,” p. 21) is professor at the Balamand University in Lebanon. He is a poet, critic, and author of many books on Islamic arts. Susan Muaddi Darraj (“A Critical Celebration of Novelist Etel Adnan,” p. 28) is an author and editor, whose essays, book reviews, and fiction have appeared in The Monthly Review, Baltimore Magazine, Al Jadid, and others. Simone Fattal (“Collage,” pp. 2, 4, 11) is an artist, translator and author. Fattal is the owner of the Post-Apollo Press. Her latest release was “Vampires” by Jalal Toufic and “”In/somnia” by Etel Adnan. Elham Gheytanchi (“Confessions of Culture Clash,” p. 29) is a sociologist and www.ALJADID.com freelance journalist. She teaches at Santa Monica College and Loyola Marymount University. Her scholarly and journalistic articles on Iranian-Americans, feminist activism, and Persian literature have been published in various scholarly journals and newspapers as well as in Persianlanguage publications. Iskandar Habash (“Unpublished Munif Interview: Crisis in the Arab World - Oil Political Islam and Dictatorship,” p. 10) is a Lebanese poet, critic and a cultural editor at the Lebanese daily As Safir. Elissar Haikal (“Crossroads,” a poem, p. 19, “A Twinge, a Smile and a Kite,” p. 37, and translated Fadwa Tuqan’s poem “The Weeping Echo,” p. 24) is a Beirut-based poet and critic. Wail S. Hassan (“Abu-Jaber’s Second Novel: A Thousand and One Recipes,” p. 31) is an assistant professor of English at Illinois State University and the Sawyer fellow in World English at the University of Virginia (2003-04). He is the author of Continued on page 42 17 Evaluating Threats at Home and Abroad A Conversation with David Cole BY P AMELA NICE PAMELA Pamela Nice interviewed David Cole in Washington, D.C. in November about his book, “Enemy Aliens,” and his views on the situation for Arabs and Muslims caught in the war on terrorism. They began by discussing Cole’s evaluation of U.S. national security today. Cole: On September 12, we had the world’s sympathy. Today, two years later, I think there appears to be a higher degree of anti-Americanism around the world than ever before in the history of this country, and for me, that’s the greatest national security threat that we face. You ask, well, what created that level of antiAmericanism since September 12? I think two things contributed: the unilateral way in which we pursue our foreign policy – insisting that we don’t have to play by the rules – and then the flip side of that, having double standards at home. I think we have made ourselves less safe in large part because of these double standards. Nice: In the book “Enemy Aliens” you talk a lot about preventive measures [in the fight against terrorism]. Don’t you think that’s also tied to our foreign policy? I think that’s creating enemies – this preemptive policy. Cole: Right. I wrote a piece for The American Prospect that compared Ashcroft’s paradigm of prevention on the domestic side of the war on terror to the national security strategy on foreign wars. Both of them share a whole range of common attributes, including the lines on secrecy, short-circuiting of processes, and broad-based assertions of power. 18 David Cole “Many Arabs and Muslims are first generation here and less likely to be integrated into the networks; but it’s important to realize that there are networks out there that are speaking out in defense of the rights of Arabs and Muslims today.” Ultimately, both the pre-emptive national security strategy and the preventive domestic strategy challenge the rule of law. And we sort of feel like we can get away with challenging the rule of law because we’re the most powerful country in the world. But in fact we can’t, because you gain a lot of legitimacy by adhering to and reinforcing the rule of law; and that legitimacy is a much more powerful means of protecting us than our weapons are. Nice: Why aren’t Americans more upset by this? Why isn’t the press more critical? Cole: It depends on what press you’re talking about; certainly the print press has been, I think, quite critical, particularly if you compare this to almost any prior crisis. There’s a lot of criticism on editorial pages – the New York Times has been very strong. . . . But I think it’s hard for the press to tell stories because so much of what goes on is secret, and www.ALJADID.com people are afraid to come forward. It’s a hard story to tell. My sense, going around the country, is that people are concerned, but they’re mostly concerned about those measures that might actually affect them. In some respects, I’ve had very different experiences speaking to white audiences and to Arab and Muslim audiences. To white audiences, the message of my book is that you shouldn’t believe the promises that the government makes that your rights aren’t going to be infringed on by these [immigration] measures…your interest is at stake here; this will eventually affect you, so you should care about it. Whereas to the Arab and Muslim community – it’s already affecting them, and the message that it will be extended to citizens in some sense ought to be reassuring. Because when it gets extended to citizens, history suggests that the citizens will at some point say we don’t want this – it’s wrong – and it will be cut back. AL JADID FALL 2003 I also think in the last year there has been tremendous movement in the consciousness about civil liberties in the war on terror. I cited in the book an NPR poll that showed seven percent of Americans one year after the attacks didn’t think they lost any significant civil liberties in the war on terror. But CBS did a poll in September of this year – one year after the NPR poll –asking a very similar question, and found that 52 percent of Americans are concerned that this administration is violating civil liberties. From seven percent to 52 percent – I think that’s reflective of a broader shift. It’s also reflected in things like the fact that every Democratic presidential candidate attacks Ashcroft and the Patriot Act. When the Patriot Act was enacted, only one senator voted against it. Today, it’s a dirty word to a wide segment of society: Al Gore has called for its repeal; Newt Gingrich has called for its amendment; [former House Majority Leader] Dick Armey, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark are all criticizing it. Nice: What should Arabs and Muslims who live in the U.S. do now? descent. But citizens should support groups such as ADC, CAIR, the Arab American Institute, and MPAC. These groups are speaking out on behalf of Arab and Muslim populations. Supporting these groups will not target you because the government doesn’t consider them subversive. They are working within the American democratic process. Nice: These groups are encouraging Arabs and Muslims to participate more in our democratic process. Cole: And I think it’s important to get involved not only with Arab- or Muslimidentified groups, but with the broader civil rights groups – the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch. Many Arabs and Muslims are first generation here and less likely to be integrated into the networks; but it’s important to realize that there are networks out there that are speaking out in defense of the rights of Arabs and Muslims today. It’s important for Arab and Muslim communities to work with those organizations, not only on their own Cole: I think it’s complicated if you’re a foreign national of Arab or Muslim Crossroads BY ELISSAR HAIKAL Crossroads are not legible like red on a painter’s mind. Far is earth from here Blood, sand, horizons Sleeping in the heat of our trenches Or the cold of ideology Moralistic or wholesale. Sandpipers lost the way back. Name address travel documents to trick fate To trust their right to choose Between exile and exile. This way the frontier. Where a dead rose survives In a Gilgamesh prophecy In a poem by al-Mutannabi burnt On the gates of the Orient. In a living roll. A camera Lost in the confusion of streets With no signboards. Only smoke and memoirs Live like vagabonds. Continued on page 20 Our Greatest Weapon: The Rule of Law BY P AMELA NICE PAMELA Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terrorism By David Cole The New Press, 2003. 315 pp. Why should those of us who are American citizens, and not of Arab or Muslim identity, be concerned by the Bush administration’s policies toward non-citizens after 9/11? This is the question Georgetown University law professor David Cole addresses in “Enemy Aliens.” The result is a cautionary tale about our nation in times of crisis: for almost a century, we have responded to national security threats with domestic policies that show a double standard toward citizens and non-citizens. AL JADID FALL 2003 To Cole, that response has not only been counterproductive for national security, but morally and constitutionally wrong. “The rights of all of us are in the balance when the government selectively sacrifices foreign nationals’ liberties.” And if the ethical argument is unpersuasive, history has another lesson. Previous experience has shown that citizens are eventually targeted by the same measures originally applied only to non-citizens. This book is an exceptionally clear and compelling read. It’s free of legal jargon, full of instructive examples from U.S. history, and pulls from a wide variety of sources – Congressional records, judicial proceedings, the U.S. www.ALJADID.com Constitution, and newspapers, as well as from Cole’s own legal experience representing Arab and Muslim defendants, such as the LA 8. Cole’s primary point is that in the struggle for security against an Continued on next page 19 elusive enemy, the legitimacy we establish through the rule of law is our greatest weapon. The book is divided into four parts. The first recounts the administrative policies, judicial rulings and Congressional legislation, such as the Patriot Act, that followed the terrorist attacks on September 11. Cole exposes the underlying racism against Arabs and Muslims in the policies of mass preventive detention and selective antiimmigration enforcement. The second explores instances in U.S. history since 1798 when non-citizens have been targeted and why. He also shows how measures directed against non-citizens can eventually threaten citizens, demonstrated in cases of guilt by association applied to support for political organizations. The third part examines more specifically the issue of U.S. security in the war on terror. In Cole’s critique of current administration strategies, Attorney General John Ashcroft’s policy of mass preventive detention comes in for particular criticism. “Ashcroft’s dragnet approach has targeted tens of thousands of Arabs and Muslims for registration, interviews, mass arrests, deportation, and automatic detention, effectively treating an entire, overwhelmingly law-abiding community as suspect.” Cole faults preventive detention as short-circuiting the fact-finding phase of criminal investigation: if you arrest someone prematurely – without even probable cause – you are less likely to discover if there are in fact probable causes. In addition, of the more than 5,000 people Cole estimates have so far been detained under Ashcroft’s dragnet, only a handful have actually been charged with a terrorist-related crime, and even fewer convicted. In several cases, the charges were dropped. So what is the point of this tactic in terms of national security – or the national expense for such a mass detention? Ethnic profiling of Arab and Muslim communities also alienates the communities that law enforcement should be working with, while deflecting attention from behaviors of the nonprofiled which might indeed be dangerous to national security. Cole gives the telling example of the Washington D.C. snipers 20 of fall 2002 who escaped detection for so long because law enforcement had assumed the perpetrator was a lone white male. Cole offers many suggestions for more effective tactics to prevent terrorist attacks within our borders. To begin with, improve our intelligence gathering. Streamline the FBI bureaucracy; create better information sharing among the national security intelligence entities such as the FBI, CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Those agencies should hire more Arabic speakers and improve relations with the Arab and Muslim communities. Much of what we have learned since 9/11 points to faulty intelligence as the greatest weakness in our defense. The U.S. might also take measures to limit access to the information about weapons of mass destruction that is now publicly available, and to protect sites most vulnerable to attack, such as water and electricity plants and communication networks. We should also examine how our foreign policy might contribute to the root causes of terrorism worldwide, especially in relation to Israel’s occupation of Palestine, U.S. troops in Arab countries, globalization policies that increase the gulf between the haves and have-nots of the world, and “American www.ALJADID.com exceptionalism,” with which we seek to avoid adherence to international treaties. In the fourth part, Cole examines the U.S. Constitution as a human rights document and makes the moral argument for giving non-citizens the basic rights of privacy, freedom of speech and of political association, and due process in our court system. He also points out the fact that the Constitution explicitly says little about the rights of non-citizens – only that they don’t have the right to vote or run for federal elective office. This is a book that not only speaks to a broad American audience; it would also make a strong text for courses on human rights, U.S. history, politics, constitutional law, or sociology. It would be an excellent resource, as well, for foreign nationals seeking to understand the civil liberties that are a fundamental, defining framework of U.S. democracy. AJ A Conversation With David Cole Continued from page 19 issues, but on broader issues – to develop ties, to work together. The broader point is, it’s not the courts, the Congress or the executive that have protected Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. It’s the people supporting these civil society organizations that have really been quite effective in shifting American attitudes. So I think there is a positive story here. . . AJ Progress can be made.AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 PO ET RY POET ETR Thresholds BY CHARBEL DAGHER Are these borders and my double fences ghosts at home in the interstices of the walls? Are these doubles and my breath wrestles stagnant wind above the still beds? Are these steps calling or repulsing attracting me or weighing me down? These steps are a crowd and I, like a traveler in front of a policeman wait for my turn, wait for another to let me in my house. Who will name me my papers or my beard? Who will admit me the officer’s stamp or my neighbor’s gaze? This is my neighbor at her window weighing with her eyes what falls between each step and her needle is quick to attach every thread of news. How can I be naked in my house without her catching cold how can I shake like a djinn without her denouncing me to the lament of the candles? Here is my patron-saint over the altar and in the roadside shrine and in the holy water over the curtains and the souls year after year chasing my obsessions How can I not be that thief stealing a forbidden glance to the forbidden place of my birth? AL JADID FALL 2003 The steps wait for me a reader reciting the secrets behind the trespassers and the anguish of the waiting. These steps have cracks as numerous as volumes how can I not catch the rush of words within me? Oblivious, someone else carries me to where I am expecting myself I am incensed by the tap on my shoulder and when someone interrupts me An adolescent in the form of an old man staring at me with his eyes shut reading the tales of our ancestors told by eyewitnesses about the other side of the sky. On my steps are dry flowers and grandfather’s moustache hanging on a cane, and my mother’s rosary where I found the thorns she wanted hidden from me. and her dresses dissolved under my hands. On my steps I unleash my anger in a bolt I forbid the angels from flying I sit in the vessel of expectation. I free myself from the glances glued to my coat from the rumors which reached me in the alley I forget the color of the curtain I ignore the knocking of the rain on the window I make sure that my tongue is my ink and my hands the pages of a book. These steps narrate my letters to the wind places the obsession between my fingers It avoided me, did not invite me to wipe the www.ALJADID.com stains on the pictures and from the chairs tranquil in my memory. The trees grow leaves the balconies cannot hold Are you going to mark my body it will dissolve at first contact As long as we are writing with the same letters joined, dispersed, a compendium, our breath cannot contain. The waiting has crumbled the paper it glows like a book just off the press Thus love elevates us precedes us we aspire toward it He is within our reach like an open letter deciphered before its author. We chatter to disperse the ghosts roaming above our chairs laying down words like bread or a cushion we will share under this solitary roof. Translated from the Arabic by Simone Fattal with the gentle help of Stacy Doris and Sarah Rigg From Charbel Dagher’s “Ghayri Bisifat Kawni” (Cairo: Dar Shaqiyyat, 2003) 21 BOO K REVIEW S BOOK REVIEWS A Century of Lebanese Literature: A Culture Viewed Through its Narratives BY S AMIR MA TT AR SAMIR MATT TTAR Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives By Elise Salem The University Press of Florida , 2003 Every society needs an authentic sense of its history, its mythologies, its complex reality, and its cultural identity to survive and function effectively. Images of the past rule us – icons that are often as highly structured and selective as myths; impressions that also serve as symbolic constructs imprinted on our awareness almost in the manner of genetic information. These images integrate a people’s ethos: their feeling of identity, their portrait of reality; their world view, their comprehensive sense of order. They quintessentially capture the tenor, nuances, and quality of the society’s life with its moral and aesthetic style and mood. In every age, each society tests its sense of identity against history, the mythologies of its past, trying to determine the reach, the logic, and the authority of its voice through the echoes of gone by eras. The mechanisms are complex and rooted in the diffuse but real and vital need for survival, continuity, and community. In Lebanese culture, our experience of the present has, more often than not, been negative. Our feelings of disarray; our regress into violence and moral obtuseness; our ready impression of a central failure of our selves, our values, our personal and social mores; our fears of a new “dark age” in which our cultures and identities may disappear, are ominous. These fears, so explicitly and widely advertised as to be a dominant cliché of the contemporary mood among Lebanese, derive their force from political, cultural, and confessional developments in Lebanon’s turbulent 22 recent history. Elise Salem in her book “Constructing Lebanon: A Century of Literary Narratives” presents us with a provocative, scholarly, and thoroughly well-researched case for the range, the reach, the value, and the merit of a century Her aim, throughout, is to inform while delighting. Horace would have been very proud of her efforts. She combines vitality with order as she enlightens. Her purpose in writing the book is “to extend and to enrich thinking on Lebanon...” I cannot think of a better medium for exploring the Lebanese identity than to delve into its literary past and, there, to survey its achievements and possibilities – both real and fictional. Clearly, she has a solid grasp of her subject – or rather many subjects. Words come to her easily, gracefully… convincingly molding the familiar with the new – such neologisms as “dialogic” and “binaric” notwithstanding. The current Lebanese reality offers writers a surfeit of reasons to be rebellious and discontented, to reveal facts, expose fictions, divulge dreams, uncover testimonies, clarify visions of reality, and express the need for change. Salem contends that, in the Lebanese context, “The role of literature in inventing – and constructing – a nation stems from the necessity to dream our world. Literature is useful to society when it contributes to human improvement while preventing spiritual atrophy, By Monkith Saaid (2003) complacency, stagnation, and intellectual or moral decline. Its of Lebanese literature aimed at those who mission is to arouse, to disturb, to alarm, are constructing Lebanon today. She to keep people in a constant state of attempts not to “present definitive answers discontent with themselves. Its function on the relationship between nation and is to stimulate – without respite – a craving culture, but rather suggestive theories on for change and improvement. It is how a nation is interpreted through its essential, therefore, that we understand, narratives.” It is a veritable tour de force, once and for all, that the more critical the a truly perceptive, inspired, and brave writings of an author against his or her book. It is an axis of many connections, country, the more intense will be the weaving a web of appealing and erudite passions that bind. insights. For me, the principal features of the Early in the book, Salem engages her Lebanese cultural landscape are reader in a dialogue; her voice is unmistakable: a promising literacy; a confident, and her metaphors ring true. flawed yet emerging rule of law; an www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 imperfect application of representative forms of government; a reluctant recognition of the civilizing role of the arts, the sciences, and technology; a dynamic but regulated interplay between social mobility and stable forces of tradition. Lebanon offers cautionary examples of a society where injustices, inequalities, ignorance, poverty, and moral alienation exist. One could go on and on. The point is that Lebanon harbors fertile – and controlling – symbolic structures that press unrelentingly on our current conditions and feelings. Depending on our milieu and our experience, we Lebanese carry with us different bits and pieces of this complex whole that is Lebanon. Each one of us, whether born and bred in Lebanon – or anywhere in the worldwide Lebanese diaspora – can summon up an appropriate vignette, or a special feeling, or a responsive echo of this nation – or more affectionately, “the old country.” Reviewing “Constructing Lebanon” brought to mind Horace’s metaphor “of an ox plowing the field, back and forth, from one direction to the other.” I read many passages and sections more than once – at first with pleasure; then for instruction, as one consults a work of reference; and invariably also for the sheer delight of revisiting cherished niches. Salem demonstrates clearly connections in which literature is a source of national identity that serves as an ongoing commentary on unsettling national events. Her book meets all the tests of a major critical work: it is provocative, intriguing, complex, and rewarding. It provokes the reader to delve more deeply and carefully. It presents an interesting and unique contribution to critical theory – a comprehensive survey of the literary output of a nation. It is a pioneering attempt to propel the study of Lebanese nationalism beyond the confines of ideology and political parties. It offers a novel understanding and interpretation of many writers and their writings. It sharpens our understanding of Lebanon, from its early inception and development through its destruction and then to its current reconstruction. Salem heralds a fertile field of study for future researchers, providing a formidable benchmark against which to measure the success of similar future ventures, answering many questions yet opening up many more avenues for further exploration. She has indeed started a tradition. Salem’s penchant for Gramsci is catching: truly “each individual is … a précis of the past.” We cannot escape our history; nor can we hide from the time in which we live. We must not hide from what has happened and is happening to us. When it comes to Lebanon’s history, there appears to be little agreement among its historians and writers. Whether treating its cultural identity or its recent history, their perspectives have not always been helpful: their emphases have often been misplaced on false or even sterile issues. Many authors have despaired of this nation’s experience. Others have doubted the importance of its past or present reality, while many are betting on its future. My starting point with Lebanon is very simple. For me, what is real does not need to be justified – since it “is”; while what only exists in the mind may require proof and arguments, and may even be wishful simplicity of the Lebanese idea surprises us that Lebanese nationalism emanated from a “reality”: the organic status of Mount Lebanon in the 19th century as guaranteed by the European powers. France’s proclamation of Greater Lebanon on September 1, 1920, provided Lebanon with an international status and an ample geographical framework. The “reality” existed and it was working – despite the shadow cast by increasing emigration from Lebanon. The proclamation also gave Lebanon juridical depth, extended the geographical scope of Mount Lebanon, granting it an indispensable agricultural base, maritime harbors, and complete independence – Greater Lebanon. Charles Malik would later affirm that, for him, Lebanon was “a real entity, established, defined, stable, independent, selfperpetuating and wanting to be so, and recognized by the world as having the right to exist and to persevere.” I have always found it useful to ground my ideas in Lebanon’s distinctive geological history – a simple yet powerful image. Wandering in the subterranean corridors of the Geology Department in the American University of Beirut some 30 years ago, I remember, in a dusty showcase, a faint geological map entitled “Lebanon – A Country Controlled by Faults of Every Scale,” a reference, no doubt, to the surfeit of black lines on the map. But, what an apt précis of this country’s history and development! Lebanon’s high mountains and inaccessible valleys have long made it an excellent refuge for minorities, leading to isolationism, reinforcing clan systems, and making a centralized state difficult. Lebanon is truly a nation of associated communities. To grasp the meaning of Lebanon’s experiences, we have to rediscover its contours, trace its heritage, illuminate its history, and identify its protagonists. The “un”civil war in Lebanon has had horrid effects, but we are beginning to see a silver lining in the dark clouds that still loom over Lebanon: the sectarian stronghold is loosening its noose, and the prospects for the arts – the novel, the theater, language, painting, sculpture, The point is that Lebanon harbors fertile – and controlling – symbolic structures that press unrelentingly on our current conditions and feelings.. AL JADID FALL 2003 thinking. Very simply, then, for me, Lebanon is; it exists, it is real, it is steeped in history. Quoting Michel Chiha, “...forty centuries of Phoenicia attest to it, nineteen centuries since the coming of Christ confirm it, and some thirteen centuries since Islam... the character of Lebanon is such that all past history has recorded it. It has recorded it since the inception of writing and language...” Lebanon has survived many upheavals. It will continue to thrive in one form or another, hopefully, long into the future. Is the present form of the Lebanese state due to historical junctures – whether in 1861 or 1920 – rather than to an unavoidable historical necessity? When we examine the many ideologies – political literature all – formulated at the turn of the 20th century in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the www.ALJADID.com 23 music, are continuing to flower. The war may have shattered much of the fabric of Lebanese society, but the cauldron of the war destroyed hindrances such as confessional hierarchies, prejudices, idols, and ossified traditions. The challenges facing Lebanon continue to be the evolution – albeit slowly – of a strong, united, and enduring Lebanese state, and solutions to the peoples’ political, security, social, and cultural concerns. Sectarian affiliations still dominate the daily life of the Lebanese: citizens live and die according to sectarian stipulations in a country that has no civil code for personal matters. Each religion has its own set of “personal status” laws and regulations that encompass such matters as engagements, marriages, dowries, annulments of marriage, divorces, adoptions, and inheritance. These laws, binding on individuals whether practicing members of a religion or not, strengthen the role of communal religious leaders, promote sectarianism – and impede the evolution of an integrated Lebanese nation. Success for Lebanon involves reform and national reconciliation. It requires a slow-but-sure silencing of our bigoted confessional obsessions. It involves getting used to seeing the boundaries of our separate communities not as fences but as openings; not as places to settle but as thoroughfares; not as prisons but as calls to freedom. Will the hideous memories of the civil war play themselves out as a crucible for a better Lebanon? Can we exorcise the ghosts of war that haunt us still – by listening to each other, becoming more open, more tolerant and more luminous to the various communities that make Lebanon unique? Can we learn to live, transcending not only our diversities, but uniting our several harmonies at once? The Lebanese have to learn the lessons of their history or else they will validate Hegel’s assertion that the first lesson of history is that “peoples have never learned the lessons of their history.” What are the prospects for Lebanon, 130 years after the autonomy of Mount Lebanon, 80 years after the establishment of Greater Lebanon, and half a century after independence? My bet for Lebanon is that the social contract between its many different communities, implicit in its 24 nationhood, will be renewed and will transcend the obsolete confessional structures stifling the state and its citizens. My wager is that this will be done in spite of the existence of very real difficulties and, hopefully, without renouncing freedoms that are being undermined; and to do so even amid the rise in fundamentalisms in much of the world. Salem’s contribution to the history of Lebanon’s literary development over the past century attests – in the words of the Lebanese themselves – a valid and valuable effort in the process of “constructing Lebanon.” There are many different approaches to the study and understanding of literature. Each method is valid for the Continued on page 39 The Weeping Echo BY FFADW ADW A TUQAN ADWA My poet, be not harsh in your blame, wrong not my loyalty Enough the harshness of life, the hardship of destiny O if only you knew of my pains, tragedy of my youth Your heart would weep and shudder for my gloom and agony I never forgot a passion that gushed my melodies and poetry I never forgot a passion that in it fluttered the days of my being I forget? How? No, dream of my heart, redeemer of me, No, vowing to He who unified our souls in love, its purity. Solicit the conscience of night, did you in it confide the secrets of my love Did you sing the praises of your poetry in the loneliness of my heart? This night enfolds the utter mysteries of my life The temple of my dreams it is, refuge of my memories Your reproving poetry, how it gushed my tears, how it grieved me And the distilled profound entreaty, how it trembled my humanity If you watch me, how love howls in my captive soul And I chant your verses in the vastness of the night You, a spirit airborne … singing on every branch Are quenched by love’s wine, and the fountain of charms And I, a spirit imprisoned, life slashed my wings My tunes expose me, the abyss of my wounds! Mercy, my poet, behold the echoes of my soul They are in my weeping poetry the pleas of the slain They are, my poet, the groans of a fugitive, abused They are the chokes of one strangled by iron chains Whenever the night’s embrace holds you in stillness and grief And your heart, overcome, asks about me … Be wary, you’ll find my soul stricken, humbled in ache: Pray, wrong not my loyalty! – Translated from the Arabic by Elissar Haikal “The Weeping Echo” is from “Complete Poetic Works: Fadwa Tuqan” (in Arabic), Beirut, Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 1993, pp. 62-64. www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 Lebanon: A Focal Point for Unsolved Tensions BY P AUL SULLIV AN PA SULLIVAN Lebanon still has a chance to be a functioning democracy made up of many religious and ethnic groups, but it also has a chance of heading back into calamity. Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict By Samir Khalaf Columbia University Press, 2002 This book could be of great use to Lebanese intellectuals and to scholars of the history of violence and war. Diplomats and military strategists would find it insightful, as well as anyone interested in trying to figure out why civil and uncivil violence begins, what fuels it, and what may stop it. Samir Khalaf ’s “Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon” will enlighten those who think that it is possible to easily piece a country back together again after it has experienced extreme violence, severe ethnic tensions, and horrific communal violence. One can readily call to mind other such sorry countries when reading through this book. But, as the author states so often, Lebanon is different. It is almost sui generis because it is a multiethnic state that, for much of its history, has survived with many disparate communities getting along in a somewhat peaceful and civil manner. It is also, as the author astutely points out, somewhat of an ideological Samir threat to Lebanon’s neighboring states that are mostly of one religion and are far from democratic. It has also been a country that has been a proxy battlefield for powers great and small for hundreds of years. Moreover, Lebanon has been a focal point for its region’s chronically unsolved conflicts and tensions, leading to some AL JADID FALL 2003 pathological psychologies. Lebanon also distinguishes itself with historical and religious weights that few small countries have. Lebanon still has a chance to be a functioning democracy made up of many religious and ethnic groups, but it also Khalaf (Courtesy of Columbia University Press) has a chance of heading back into calamity. During the civil war of 1975-1991, possibly more than 170,000 people were killed, 340,000 injured, and about twothirds of the population was displaced in some way. Billions of dollars of assets www.ALJADID.com were lost, which Khalaf cites as an example of uncivil violence. Many might argue that all violence is uncivil. Khalaf tries to present the differences between uncivil and civil violence in a logical, academic, yet practical way. Essentially, he sees a continuum that stretches from strikes, walkouts, and controlled violence rooted in economics and politics (such as income inequalities, wealth inequalities, and some social conflicts) to atavistic, primitive, illogical “ultra” violence which is based, somewhat paradoxically, on factors such as religion and communal loyalties or “mythologies” derived from those. He gives examples of times when perpetrators would make sure people were not in the buildings to be bombed, or when they would make sure to not disrupt the daily schedules of their villages and towns too much. These may be seen as, ironically, the “good old days” of violence in Lebanon. He also gives examples of the nightmarish civil war during which irrational, misdirected, animalistic violence became normal, even a part of the everyday routines of Lebanese. He also describes some of the short and long term psychological, economic, social, and political effects of such a “normalization” of primitive uncivil violence. He points out that certain types of violence take on a life of their own; the original reasons for it are often lost, the original targets are sometimes forgotten, 25 and new and easier targets are chosen to vent frustrated violence. It is very difficult to stop such violence once it gets started. Revenge and counter-revenge can lead to unstoppable cycles of violence and loss: “an eye for an eye” made Lebanon blind. Khalaf has embedded a brilliant, encyclopedic history of Lebanon in this fascinating book. “Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon” can be seen as a study of behavioral history with some predictions and hopes for the future, but this book is much more. Khalaf sounds out many factors that explain changes in group behaviors of Lebanese over time. He focuses on internal factors, such as the Lebanese economy, commodity prices, labor issues, government structure and power, culture clashes, and main events – like the “Sarajevos” of Lebanon that include assassinations of famous journalists and politicians. He also focuses on external factors, especially the use of Lebanon for proxy wars during the 19th and 20th centuries by the “Great Powers” and others for their own national interests. His interpretations of the Marine incursions of 1958 and in the early 1980s are riveting reading. Khalaf is convincing in his interpretation that the incursion in 1958 made more sense and was done in a better manner than the sad disaster of the 1980s. He also looks deeply into the effects Israel has had on Lebanon from its inception in 1948. Lebanon is a tough teacher, and a very complex country. Lebanon could be seen as a canonical example of how foreign policies of certain nations should be developed with a very deep understanding of the countries that are affected. Without that deep understanding, the unintended, unexpected, and the unknowns could multiply. Khalaf does an excellent job of explaining many of the events that have shaped Lebanon without becoming sensational. 26 Interestingly, Khalaf has very little positive to say about the Palestinians’ effects on Lebanon. He blames the Palestinians for much of the violence heading toward and escalating the civil war. He sees “Black September” in Jordan, after which the PLO was tossed out and fled in large numbers to Lebanon, to be a major turning point. He makes a negative assessment of the “Cairo Accords,” which gave the Palestinian camps almost complete autonomy. He gives many examples of what he calls Palestinian lawlessness and violence, examples that he believes tipped the already unsteady scales of inter-communal violence toward the uncivil, brutal civil war. Lebanon’s history with the Palestinians fits with Khalaf’s theoretical stream of ideas related to the importance of the reactions and interactions of the internal-external dialectics. It may seem stunningly obvious that Lebanon, because of its geographically strategic location, its history, and the connections its people have with the outside world through trade, commerce, intellectual life and more, that it would be used as a proxy for battles of the bigger players. Importantly, Khalaf does not absolve the Lebanese from their own guilt. Indeed, external powers and interests have interfered violently and disturbingly in www.ALJADID.com Lebanon, but certain Lebanese have also added to this country’s troubles. He does not pull his punches when he points out who these people have been. The last section of the book looks into the future and has a cautiously optimistic view of what might happen in Lebanon. Khalaf summarizes certain lessons learned throughout the book, and gives us some recommendations for how to stop such uncivil violence in the future. This is a clearly written book. It is structured in a very logical way, both historically and intellectually. The chapters end with a section on “inferences,” helping the reader better understand what was written in the chapter. It is also a book full of nuances and subtleties. It is obvious that the author put massive efforts into this study over a long period of time. There are many sentences in this book that carry the sometimes profoundly useful thoughts of the author in his very carefully crafted phrasing. It is very clear that Khalaf cares deeply for his country, and that he has agonized over its bloody past and worries about its future. It is also very clear that Khalaf’s understanding of Lebanon is shared by few, whether inside or outside AJ the country.AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 Coming of Age, Exile and War BY P AULINE HOMSI VINSON PA The Bullet Collection Patricia Sarrafian Ward St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 2003. “The Bullet Collection” is an excellent first novel by Patricia Sarrafian Ward. With its focus on coming of age, war, and exile, it captures the devastating psychological impact of war on personal lives.The author weaves together autobiographical elements, historical events, and fictional narrative while exploring the role of narration in recovering the past. The story is narrated by Marianna, who, like Patricia Sarrafian Ward, left Lebanon for the United States at age 18 with her family because of the war. Also like Ward, Marianna has an American father and an Armenian mother. These and other autobiographical elements in the novel are interwoven with historical events and fictional narrative. The result is a moving expression of loss occasioned by war and exile – loss of childhood, home and of homeland, people and places. The story concentrates on two sisters: the narrator, Marianna, and her older sister, Alaine. In Lebanon, Alaine experiences a psychological breakdown that mirrors the external, socio-political breakdown caused by the war. Brooding, suicidal, and self-destructive, she collects bullets, pieces of shrapnel, and other war debris, which in turn become hidden tokens of her internal disintegration. Alaine’s dominating and destructive personality is countered by her younger sister’s willed cheerfulness. Always trying AL JADID FALL 2003 to measure up to her older sister, the younger Marianna first takes on a protective, almost maternal tone toward her sister and parents, only eventually to succumb to the same “war sickness” as her sister when she too begins to skip classes at school and becomes obsessed with visiting an injured French soldier of Lebanese origin as he recovers in the hospital. Though she feels that her blonde complexion makes her look like a foreigner in Lebanon, when she arrives in the U.S., her father’s birth country, sounds that come through windows that had to be left open in order to prevent the glass from shattering from the pressure of explosions. The feel of a run-down American apartment, with its wooden structure and private backyard, stands in stark contrast to Marianna’s experience in Lebanon. Even Lebanese home-cooked food in the U.S. cannot capture the same taste it had in Lebanon. This, the novel, suggests, is the taste of exile, a foreignness that pervades every aspect of one’s life. Repeatedly, the book suggests that the past matters, yet none of the adult Patricia Sarrafian Ward (courtesy of Graywolf Press) Marianna feels more alienated than her older sister, whose dark looks Marianna had associated with Lebanon. In a reversal of their previous roles, the older sister begins to make a home for herself in the U.S., fixing up their run-down rental house, painting the walls, and planting flowers in her efforts at renewal and recovery. In contrast, Marianna is unable to adjust to her new life in America, and sinks deeper into despair, succumbing to despondency and suicidal tendencies. In great detail, the novel evokes Marianna’s alienation by contrasting the physical aspects of home in Lebanon and America. Life in Lebanon is expressed through the narrator’s recollections of the feel of the tiled floors and concrete walls, the smell of mosquito repellent and the www.ALJADID.com characters in the novel want to remember it. The memory of the Armenian genocide hovers around the characters from the mother’s side. The American father – ironically a historian whose own brother died in the Korean War – feels disconnected from his own personal history. His American childhood is glimpsed only through his love of peanut butter. When he finally leaves the “land he loves” to return to his native country, he finds himself a stranger. Forced to start over, he gives up his university position and accepts a job as a clerk in the local grocery store. Significantly, much of what is going on around the two young sisters in Lebanon is left unsaid. In the latter half of the novel the older Marianna alludes to 27 Continued from previous page historical events and political groups. She mentions the Palestinians, the Israelis, the Americans, the various Lebanese factions, kidnappings, deaths, and devastation – only as background to the turbulence in the girls’ lives, for whom “normalcy” had become the tension and anxiety created by war. What it means to grow up in a war is sharply contrasted by the narrator’s nostalgia for what she imagines must have been her mother’s more peaceful childhood in Lebanon, a childhood that she would have liked to have had, and feels she should have had, but could not because of the war. The silence regarding political events during the war seems emblematic of several related issues: young children’s incomprehension of what is going on in the world around them; the parents’ ignorance of what is going on their children’s lives; the tendency in Lebanese society not to confront the real problems that exacerbate the war. In their efforts to counteract this willful amnesia, both sisters, at various times, insist on wearing jackets that once belonged to men who were killed in the war, insisting that we somehow carry with us the remnants of our collective and individual past. Ward masterfully recreates the difficulty of delving into the past in narrative form. The novel begins with a recollection of an idyllic childhood that was only possible before the war “was real.” It quickly shifts to the present time of narration, the American home to which the narrator cannot adjust, and then shifts back to recreate in episodic and cryptic moments the confusion and loss of innocence that the war in Lebanon forced upon the two girls, prematurely robbing them of their childhood. In recreating the difficulty of retrieving the past through narrative, the novel also suggests that such narrative recollection may nonetheless be the only possibility for healing and recovery. Patricia Sarrafian Ward has done a superb job of illustrating the destructive reverberations of the war in Lebanon. At the same time, she suggests the possibilities for renewal for her characters, as symbolized by fresh snow as well as Marianna’s image of a winged horse, elevating her spirits and redeeming her memory of a dead horse she once saw lying in the streets of Beirut. AJ 28 A Critical Celebration of Novelist Etel Adnan BY SUSAN MUADDI DARRAJ Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist Edited by Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 2002. Literature that has left its mark upon our way of viewing the world is usually scrutinized. Scholars explore its genius and examine it under the microscope of various critical theories, from postcolonial to feminist to new critical theories, to understand what it reveals about our world. When the author is a woman, writing work that is revolutionary, new, and different, critical study becomes even more vital. In recent decades, endless volumes of criticism have been published about women writers, from Anne Sexton to Zora Neale Hurston – and now, an ArabAmerican woman writer has also received long overdue critical attention. Etel Adnan, novelist, poet, and painter, has been a creative force in America for decades and represents one of the founding forces of the newly emerging genre of Arab-American literature. In the preface to “Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist,” editors Lisa Suhair Majaj and Amal Amireh note that, in www.ALJADID.com addition to her prolific writing career, “Adnan has helped to link Arab and ArabAmerican artists and writers, and has brought Arab cultural production into the space of American and European literature, philosophy and art.” However, like most Arab writers in the United States, her voice has rarely been embraced or considered worthy of study by America’s literary mainstream. For that reason, the publication of “Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the ArabAmerican Writer and Artist” represents a milestone – the volume is one of the first comprehensive and critical studies of any Arab-American writer. The collection is divided into two parts: Section I examines Adnan’s writing and artwork, and Section II offers essays that explore her major work, the novel “Sitt Marie Rose.” The editors assert the “necessity of granting Arab women’s texts the same level of literary nuance attributed to the work of Western authors”; indeed, the 12 essays in this volume range from post-colonial to feminist to pedagogical approaches to Adnan’s body of work. An introductory essay by Majaj and Amireh offers the reader unfamiliar with Adnan a brief but insightful biographical sketch of the Lebanese writer who came to the United States in the mid-50s. “The daughter of a Christian Greek mother and a Muslim Syrian father (an Ottoman officer),” they emphasize, “she grew up positioned between cultural, religious and linguistic worlds.” Educated in convent schools, she learned French, not Arabic, as her primary language; as an Arab woman, she was alienated from her native tongue and wrote in French and English. These aspects of her history, the editors suggest, pushed her to the margins of French, English, and Arab cultures while simultaneously enhancing her broad, encompassing vision of the Arab world and the political and religious feuds that threatened to tear it apart. One of the essays that explores AL JADID FALL 2003 Adnan’s conflict with language is Caroline Seymour-Jorn’s “The Arab Apocalypse as a Critique of Colonialism and Imperialism.” “The Arab Apocalypse” is a series of 59 poems “that both critiques neo-colonial violence on a global scale and provides a warning of the tragic future that awaits humankind if it continues on its present course.” Regarding the frequent use of symbols and artwork to replace words in Adnan’s poetry, Seymour-Jorn argues that “language, even poetic language, is inadequate to describe the human experience of occupation and war.” Wen-Chin Ouyang’s essay, “From Beirut to Beirut: Exile, Wandering and Homecoming in the Narratives of Etel Adnan,” also considers Adnan’s unusual choice of language, but this time from the perspective of her post-colonial hybridity: writing in French was to write in the language of the colonizer. However, Ouyang states, “For Adnan, to be unable to write in Arabic is to be denied her role in the decolonization process. … Her decision to stop writing in French, and to write instead in English, did not help bring her from the periphery to the center” because English, also a Western language, is considered the language of the British, a former colonizer, and the United States, a neo-colonizer. The feminist aspect of Adnan’s writing is explored in several essays, including “Transgressive Subjects: Gender, War, and Colonialism in Etel Adnan’s ‘Sitt Marie Rose,’” by Sami Ofeish and Sabah Ghandour. Ofeish and Ghandour provide an enlightening discussion of the patriarchy in Adnan’s most famous novel; they comment on how the patriarchal system in Lebanon during the civil war was strengthened by the colonial and nationalist projects. French colonialism over Lebanon, they write, “fortified the patriarchal social structure. By allying with the indigenous male elite and recruiting men, exclusively, as civil servants, the French primarily asserted men’s authority.” Pauline Homsi Vinson further explains why Sitt Marie Rose represented a threat to her pro-Western murderers in her essay, “Voice, Narrative, and Political Critique: Etel Adnan’s ‘Sitt Marie Rose’ and Nawal El Saadawi’s ‘Woman at Point Zero,’” which is a useful comparison of the two novels. Vinson describes Sitt Marie Rose’s AL JADID FALL 2003 Confessions of Culture Clash BY ELHAM GHEY TANCHI A Love Story By Ghazi A. Algosaibi, Translated by Robin Bray Saqi Books, London, 2002. G hazi Algosaibi is a Saudi writer who has served as his country’s ambassador to the United Kingdom in recent years. In addition to his work as a politician, Algosaibi is a poet and novelist. “A Love Story,” a short novel of 110 pages, is written in streams of flashbacks, each carrying the reader into the past and back to the present tense skillfully. “A Love Story” is, on the surface, an account of an old man’s last days in a hospital bed in London, remembering his love affair with a married woman. The underlying message, however, stresses the spirit of love that can draw people to each other despite a clash of societal norms, unique feminism and how it contradicts the patriarchal system: “She is at once maternal, sexual, and independent, as is evidenced by … her refusal to be bound to oppressive social and political codes.” The main character’s “politicization coincides with – indeed seems an integral part of – a personal, feminist, and sexual awakening” that endangers the nationalist project because it requires the silencing of women for its success. This intriguing collection features many other excellent essays, including a www.ALJADID.com age difference or mere social differences. It is the theme that weaves through the fiction, which consists mainly of memories of a playful youth and depicts the daily activities of a young Saudi man. The author candidly reveals the emotions of a well-educated and otherwise reserved Saudi in his love affair with honesty and affection, in a kind of tribute to the power of love. The unveiling of emotions in a forbidden love affair, from the point of view of an old man in a confessional manner, with its condemnation or praise, its risk and pleasure, is the true source of the book’s appeal. Pure love and passion are made into a virtue, a message the author successfully conveys because the main character does not regret his past. Rather, Iryan prides himself on his ability to love despite the mores of his culture. Algosaibi’s main theme, as alluded to in the title of the book, is the love story that remains a mystery as Iryan reflects on his life. Iryan delves into his memories of his love affair with a married woman, Rawda, who we find out is a reserved woman. Iryan suspects that he has a daughter with Rawda, or maybe he was sure at one point but does not remember it now. Recalling one’s memories in the very last days of one’s life could be a very colorful, movie-like and rich experience. However, the author’s monotonous tone does not allow us to see the whole picture. Continued on page 38 reflection on the pedagogical problems of teaching Adnan to Western students (John Champagne’s “Among Good Christian Peoples: Teaching Etel Adnan’s ‘Sitt Marie Rose’”), as well as an enlightening and informative evaluation of Adnan’s varied artistic work (Simone Fattal’s “On Perception: Etel Adnan’s Visual Art”). It can only be hoped that “Etel Adnan” is just the first of many critical works to further examine the literature of Adnan and other worthy Arab-American writers. AJ 29 A Literary Text of Palestinian Embroidery BY LLYNNE YNNE R OGERS ROGERS West Of The Jordan By Laila Halaby Boston: Beacon Press, 2003 “West of the Jordan,” a novel by Laila Halaby, reads like the subtle and gentle shimmering of olive tree leaves. Centered on the interior monologues of four young women, the novel’s wide expanse of stories covers topics such as immigration to the United States, portraying the joys and tragedies of three generations of an extended Palestinian family from Nawara. Part of the growing body of ArabAmerican writing, Halaby’s work entertains the reader with her sympathetic characters and captivating story, while deftly avoiding the pitfall of clichés and prevalent stereotypes. Instead she gives the reader a realistic array of stories from a variety of perspectives: a contemporary “Thousand and One Nights.” These four Scheherazades are so vibrant that the reader is both relieved and disappointed when the novel does not close with the traditional marital happily-ever-after ending. The young cousins, Hala, Mawal, Soraya, and Khadija, represent four familiar types of contemporary Arab and ArabAmerican women. Yet, through their inner 30 monologues, Halaby presents a human dimension which makes all four characters unique individuals. The novel opens with Hala’s return to Palestine to see her dying grandmother. Most Arab Americans will immediately recognize the humorous tensions she experiences on the plane, caught between the solidarity of feeling aligned with other Arabs and their cultural baggage and the embarrassment of wanting to be disassociated from them. The novel takes a refreshing twist when the reader discovers that after Hala’s mother’s death from cancer, her stormy relationship with her father veered from the traditional patriarchal idolatry. As Hala revisits her childhood with her now American consciousness, she shares her hopes, loves, and animosities with the reader. Unlike some Arab-American fiction, Halaby does not use her novel as a political platform. The refreshing voices of these four women never deteriorate into the middle class feminist rant so popular with Western audiences. In its realistic appreciation of the four women, the narrative avoids the worn-out suicide bomber and the dramatic heroics on horseback. While the Israeli presence hovers like a menacing cloud at the checkpoints, the oppressive political tensions are subordinated into the background story. Instead, the characters, like most average Palestinians, try to cope with the enforced travel restrictions and land occupation and somehow still manage to go about daily life, earn a living, and find love. Nevertheless, the novel does document the rippling effects of the physical and economic violence of Israeli occupation on the family unit. Mawal is the only one of the four granddaughters who remains in Palestine. Ostensibly this plump, quiet girl leads the quietest existence, yet she has adopted her mother’s and grandmother’s habit of silence, which allows others to tell her their stories without judgmental interference. Subsequently Mawal, who resists the lure of America to take care of her dying mother, www.ALJADID.com assumes the role of village historian and peaceably accepts “God’s will.” Mawal’s monologues appeal to the reader’s senses as she describes the smells and sights unique to the Palestinian village. Khadija, whose father imposes a conservative lifestyle on her that elicits the pity of her American relatives, finds a mature and understanding sympathy to his hypocritical tyranny. Despite her domestic drudgery and brow beatings, Khadija manages to maintain a humanity and sense of domestic salvation in their adopted homeland. The reader gently moves from sorrow for the underestimated Khadija to admiration for her steadfast commitment to her family. Unlike Khadija, the provocative Soraya ostentatiously attempts to dance her pain and anger away in a public display of her sexuality. Bringing the feminine tradition of holding secrets to America, Soraya, despite her outwardly cavalier attitude, also shows a mature understanding of the plight of her American neighbors and her family, which she generously shares with the reader. As she copes with the failure of old world values and American racism, Soraya, like her cousins, grapples with her own coming of age. All four young women precariously straddle two cultures without idealizing either. The novel’s dual settings provide an accurate historical context of modern Palestine and the painful complications and opportunities of exile. Beyond the genre of immigrant fiction, the novel also speaks to young American girls baffled by the deluge of choices they face at the brink of adulthood. With the current flood of fiction set in the Middle East using the multi-narrative voice, this work is set apart. Halaby’s device of the extended family unifies the structure of the novel and captures both the tragedy and the often hidden joy of contemporary Palestinian life. The craft and authenticity of “West of the Jordan” Continued on page 39 AL JADID FALL 2003 Abu-Jaber’s Second Novel: A Thousand and One Recipes BY WAIL S. HASSAN publication by one-and-a-half years; in hindsight, the novel seems as though it were written post-9/11. By another extraordinary twist of fate, “Crescent,” which opens with a scene depicting the shelling of Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq war, was finally released almost simultaneously with the start of the U.S.- Crescent By Diana Abu-Jaber New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 349 pp. In the sphere of Arab-American literature, Diana Abu-Jaber has explored the vicissitudes of Arab ethnicity more profoundly than any other novelist. Her two novels, “Arabian Jazz” (1993) and “Crescent” (2003) depict secondgeneration, ethnically mixed (Arab and white American) women who struggle to chart a space for themselves at the interface of a multi-ethnic American society in which anti-Arab prejudice is the norm, and a community of immigrants that strives to maintain its ties to their culture of origin. Yet while “Arabian Jazz” prioritizes the struggle of immigrants’ children to integrate in American society (the titular metaphor establishes a clear parallel between Arab Americans and other hyphenated groups, particularly AfricanAmericans), Abu-Jaber’s new novel stages, among other things, the second generation’s effort to rediscover the culture of their parents’ homeland. “Crescent” frames this issue within a broader consideration of the U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the recent history of Iraq, and the tragic predicament of the Iraqi people. In fact, the novel’s publication has had a curious history. Completed before the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001, the novel seems to have anticipated them, so much so that both author and publisher saw fit to delay AL JADID FALL 2003 Diana Abu-Jaber led invasion of Iraq in spring 2003 – unusual circumstances that redouble the urgency of the novel’s political message. It may be difficult to imagine how a novel could treat such thorny issues without getting bogged down with polemics, but nothing is farther from the truth. This is a novel about, of all things, food and storytelling – metaphors for humane community and the richness of Arab culture. “Crescent” consists of two narratives that subtly mirror one another. The main narrative centers on Sirine, a 39-year-old Iraqi-American who lives with her uncle and works as a chef in a Lebanese restaurant in the Iranian quarter of Los Angeles. A gifted and celebrated cook with the soul of a poet, Sirine rediscovers her www.ALJADID.com Arab roots through the culinary arts. She falls in love with an Iraqi refugee called Hanif who, like her uncle, teaches Arabic literature at UCLA. The uncle likes to play Scheherazade: each chapter opens with him recounting an improvised episode of an endless story that is cleverly modeled in form and substance on the tales of “The Thousand and One Nights” – fantastic stories about a Hanif-like character called Abdelrahman Salahadin and his mother, the ever-resourceful Aunt Camille, who knows how to handle jinn, mermaids, the Mother of All Fish, and Orientalist scholar and adventurer Richard Burton, famous for his bawdy translation of the “Thousand and One Nights.” These comedic and romantic storylines are clouded by reports of Saddam Hussein’s torture and execution of political prisoners, rumors of spies, clumsy CIA agents, and a shadowy photographer with a mysterious past and suspicious behavior. In this way, the novel is structured around embedded, selfreflexive narratives that stage and problematize the act of storytelling, mixing history, fantasy, mythology, romance, spy fiction, and medieval Arabic cook books. The novel itself is like a complicated sauce or a recipe in which flavors do not go in the same direction; instead, they pull apart – make it bigger. This is also an educational novel that not only teaches the Western reader about Arab culture, history, and politics, but also stages pedagogic scenes in the classroom (where Hanif discourses on the modern Arabic novel) and the lecture hall (where speakers explain the horrific effects of U.S. sanctions on the Iraqi people and warn that someday, something terrible is going to happen to us). As such, the novel points to the miseducation of America on the subject of Middle Eastern peoples, Continued on page 38 31 Unveiling the West Through the Eyes of Artists, Historians and Critics BY DORIS BITT AR BITTAR Middle Eastern cultures. Thus, an acknowledgment of diversity equals a rejection of the implicit or explicit Western view of a monolithic Islamic or Middle Eastern culture. between the colonial bureaucracy and the Arab elite. We see colonial administrators such as Egypt’s Lord Cromer bent on “liberating” the Arab man by lifting the veil off of his woman. At the same time, Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art Edited by David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2003, 192 pp. Photo Illustrated Let us suppose that the Middle Eastern world was hyper-obsessed with the seemingly ubiquitous Western practice of preparing one’s daughter for a sexual life beginning at the age of 13 or 14. Suppose that this was all that Middle Easterners discussed among themselves and Westerners. Whether the conversation begins with world politics, the price of oil, the Euro, or tennis, the Middle Easterner would predictably drift the discussion back to the question of how Western girls, at tender ages, are equipped with the latest birth control technologies and offered out to the world as sexual beings. The rallying cry to the world would be that “These girls will inevitably be ruined if not saved by the values of Middle Eastern modesty.” A Westerner may laugh at this and want to change the subject, not out of shame but out of a sense of irrelevance and silliness. For Westerners, the veil has become a monolithic symbol for all that is wrong with the East. The Orient, as seen through Occidental eyes, is usually defined as a singular and monolithic threat to “Western values.” This ignores not only the variety and diversity of veiling practices but the entire spectrum of 32 ‘Rapture’ by Shirin Neshat, 1999. Film still, 13 mins. Collections of Eileen and Peter Norton, Santa Monica. “Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art” is based on an exhibition of artists from throughout Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The essays are collaborative efforts between artists, theorists, and critics. They range from providing historical facts and describing artistic practices to asking how images, art, and resistance strategies challenge and/or reinforce Western stereotypes of the “other.” The strands that most engagingly tie these at times disparate and heterogeneous articles together are their tenacious and steady engagements with the West’s motivations and role in the region. The authors never address the issues surrounding the veil and its diverse uses in a vacuum. Their discussions are anchored in the regional and local socio-political contexts. Leila Ahmed in “Discourse of the Veil” traces the patterns of intersection www.ALJADID.com Lord Cromer presses for cuts in the education of Arab women and works against the suffragette movement back home in England. One cannot miss the clear link between colonial history and the contemporary Anglo-American pundits who cry for women’s rights in the Arab world as justification for occupation of Iraq, but support cuts in social services to women and children and erosion of reproductive rights back home. As one of the chapters points out, there is no single word for “veil” in the Arabic language. There are many words for various headwear that both men and women use, just as in Western society there are words such as bowler, pillbox hat, bandana, baseball cap, etc. We find that various Middle Eastern headwear are linked to tradition, function, job, ethnicity, religion, fashion, class, and context. AL JADID FALL 2003 Cartoons Tackle Taboos It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It! By Khalil Bendib Elon House Publishing, 2003,160 pages BY DORIS BITT AR BITTAR ‘Untitled’ by Jananne Al-Ani, 1996. Black and white photographs, 180 x 120 cm, courtesy of Essor Gallery. Ironically, the veil becomes an issue for the Middle Easterner only when he/ she perceives that the culture is under attack. If the West uses its opposition to the veil to weaken Middle Eastern societies, then Middle Eastern resistance movements equally use the veil to undermine Western designs. Patterns of transgressions, whether by lifting the veil to symbolically advance the suffragette movement in Egypt in the 1920s or using its anonymity to subvert and confuse the occupiers in Algeria in the 1960s, are given equal importance. Frantz Fanon’s timeless article, “Algeria Unveiled” (first published in 1959) jarringly explicates the tortured perceptions of the veil and its use as a tool for resistance to confuse and defy the colonialists in Algeria. The veil is also a restriction, a symbolic imposition. The bourka endangers women by restricting their sight and thus their safety. Conversely, the veil may be a restriction that produces unexpected creative and expanded career opportunities. For example, in postrevolutionary Iran the modesty codes ironically brought more women not only into the government, but also into the arts. Hamid Naficy dispassionately points out that there is a sort of women’s cinema in Iran that is getting international attention. In fact, pre-revolutionary Iran hardly had any women directors. Veils are also subject to fashion, as Alison Donnell points out. In the near past most women wore scarves or hijab and one could not necessarily tell the AL JADID FALL 2003 difference between a Christian, Muslim, or Jewish woman going to get water from the public well. Aside from historical articles, another central focus of “Veil” is to question disconnects between the art world’s avant-garde rhetoric and results with real life field observations. We are drawn into artistic processes as well. A book steeped in art world rhetoric and conceptual contortions may inconspicuously omit the significance of the religious uses of the veil; this book thinly covers it. However, artist Zineb Sedira, in “Mapping the Illusive,” acknowledges the need for a discussion from a religious perspective disinterested in art or politics to explore the “sacred meaning of the veils.” Some of the images – especially those not discussed in the text – give “Veil” the feeling of a coffee table book. This may be a marketing strategy, but could inadvertently divert attention from the seriousness of the book’s central lessons. Those who are purely tantalized by its cover will be disappointed to find that these articles do not reveal any mysterious secrets of the harem. We can deduce from the essays collected that the history of the so-called veil is really the history of Western imperial perceptions, attitudes, and designs on the region of the Middle East. The editors, artists, and critics leave hardly a stone unturned in their thoughtful Contniued on page 42 www.ALJADID.com “It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It!” is a collection of political cartoons by Khalil Bendib. Bendib skillfully caricatures personalities in circumstances that range from George Bush and Condoleeza Rice lying to Bashar Assad’s dynastic doublespeak, to Ariel Sharon’s vengeance. Bendib’s empathy clearly lies with the oppressed common peoples of the Middle East as well as Middle Eastern Americans who are besieged by their American, European and regional tormentors. Too often Bendib overstates the obvious and unfortunately detracts from the central point of his cartoons. In one series showing the various ways that Muslims may camouflage themselves in the post 9-11 Western culture, a man dyes his beard green in order to pass as a punk rocker. His T-shirt says, “Get down! 5 Times a Day.” This is funny enough except for the thought bubble that states, “Green, the color of Islam.” This joke then begins to implode on itself from overkill. The most refreshing thing about Khalil Bendib’s slightly over-burdened cartoons is his irreverent and unapologetic play with taboo subjects and icons that are rarely tackled in Western culture. He just needs a ruthless editor to pare down each vision in order AJ to save it.AJ 33 FIL M REVIEW S FILM REVIEWS TEHRAN ANXIETY BY AFSHIN MA TINASG ARI ASGARI MATINTIN-ASG Iran: Veiled Appearances Written and Directed by Thierry Michel 58 Minutes, 2002 Icarus Films Despite its cliché title and confused narration, “Iran: Veiled Appearances” is an interesting and noteworthy documentary. Essentially, the film is a series of vignettes from contemporary life in Tehran, each no more than a few minutes long and strung together without apparent rhyme or reason: Appearances by political and cultural figures, dissidents, university students, and Islamic militia members are juxtaposed with glimpses of religious ceremonies and popular pastimes. In terms of social space and class, we remain mostly in the affluent sections of northern Tehran. Still, a good deal of the visuals and some of the dialogue convey the immediacy and vividness of the daily life of at least some of the capital’s population. Thierry Michel, the film’s Belgian writer and director, also provides a voiceover narration describing his goal as visiting Iran on “a voyage of discovery.” Unfortunately, he has embarked on a challenging journey without doing his homework. A few academic experts are named as consultants in the film’s credits. But Michel’s commentary is oblivious to scholarship. He even mispronounces basic terms like “Iran,” “Shi’i” and “imam.” His introductory sequence gives a shallow and stereotypical analysis of the Iranian revolution. We see some familiar archival scenes of 1978-79 street protests, while Michel simply asserts that “sustained by their own faith, the people took to the streets,” overthrew the shah, who was “a corrupt despot,” and then installed Ayatollah Khomeini. The film opens with footage of a Tehran memorial service for Mohammad Mokhtari, a leftist writer assassinated 34 during the 1999 “serial killings” of dissidents by terror squads secretly tied to the government. Here we see Hushang Golshiri, a leading intellectual and writer, But these men presumably will die on the orders of Iran’s supreme religious leader, a goal diametrically opposed to Golshiri’s. Then we see militia boys and chador-clad From ‘Iran: Veiled Appearances’ (Courtesy of Icarus Films) challenge the death squads by declaring his own readiness to die. This recording of the secularist Golshiri’s commitment to “martyrdom” sets the tone for the film’s underlying dramatic tension: the conflict between the “modern” and “Shi’i” components of contemporary Iran’s “hybrid” culture. Tracing this dubious dichotomy, the film inadvertently raises questions like whether the “hybrid” culture it depicts might be largely a pretense in conformity to the “Shi’i” norms imposed by the regime. For example, Michel takes us to a special school where young militia members are being trained in karate and other martial arts. We are informed by the school’s guru-like teacher that he and his students are also preparing for martyrdom. www.ALJADID.com women with machine-guns march to the beat of drums. Are these drills and preparations for “martyrdom” related to “Shi’ism” or to the specifics of Iranian politics? This is the type of question that Michel’s narrative does not ask. Meanwhile we can observe another fascinating drill, this one in a coed class at Tehran University’s drama school: young men and women are wriggling together in exercise moves that look like a cross between sufi dance, ecstatic yoga, and 1980s-style American aerobics. A professor, acting more like a circus ring master, keeps yelling at the students to “let go” and “release” their inner energies and power. Later, three of the young women speak to the camera, complaining of their deep frustration with the limitations and cynicism of the culture at AL JADID FALL 2003 Tracing this dubious dichotomy, the film inadvertently raises questions like whether the “hybrid” culture it depicts might be largely a pretense in conformity to the “Shi’i” norms imposed by the regime. large. One also criticizes her parents’ generation for making a revolution that created the current insurmountable “cultural chasm” between repressive religious dictates and total decadence. In the next scene, the country’s supposedly reformist President Mohammad Khatami is speaking to an extremely enthusiastic audience of Tehran University students. In very general terms, he condemns “despotism” and extols “democracy” and “the rule of law.” As if responding to a movie star, the audience applauds constantly and chants “Khatami, we love you.” This is followed by footage from the massive June 1999 student uprising and its brutal suppression by the police, Islamic militias, and armed vigilantes. We are then inside a university dormitory listening to a student activist tell the story of his arrest and imprisonment. Another university-related ceremony is the “collective wedding” of needy students organized by the ministry of the interior. A cleric presides over the event, with neon lights flashing and a military band playing European army march music. The young couples applaud whenever the prophet’s name is mentioned in the mullah’s joyous sermon. An even more glaring instance of cultural “hybridity” can be seen in a pop music concert, sponsored by and under the close supervision of the ministry of the interior. Such events charge high admission fees and have a select audience. Those seen here are dressed and groomed in the unmistakable style of Tehran’s upper middle classes. Seated together, men and women swing back and forth in wave-like motion to the tune of electronic guitars and synthesizers. The musicians are young men in somewhat “hip” clothing. (Recent pop concerts have allowed young women musicians to play as well.) A bearded man in more conservative attire sings a popular pre-revolutionary song, with a few words changed strategically to turn it into a hymn in praise of Ali, the greatest of all Shi’i religious figures. Nuances such as those mentioned above will regularly be lost to the film’s AL JADID FALL 2003 non-Iranian viewers, since they are missed by Said Hajjarian, the politician-journalist by Michel’s voice-over narrative. who can barely talk after partial recovery However, in a revealing comment, the from an attempt on his life by hard-liner singer explains how music can bring us terror squads. Meanwhile, satirist and excloser to God. Youths, he says, hunger for political prisoner Ebrahim Nabavi “spiritual nourishment.” Obviously, their registers the country’s mood of dark hunger increases when “poisoned food” humor by repeating a popular aphorism: is banned. In such conditions, proper “Surely freedom of expression exists in music can provide both “healthy Iran; the only problem is that you will not nourishment” and “release from anxiety.” be free after expressing yourself.” “Veiled Appearances” ends on the This is the line of the regime’s more high elevations north of Tehran, where an “enlightened” faction, concerned particularly with the young generation’s pent-up frustration and the need for its proper release. In fact, “Veiled Appearances” keeps showing us recurrent patterns of youths being subjected to various types of disciplines, learning to both contain and release “anxiety” under the strict supervision of clerics, politicians, and teachers. An From ‘Iran: Veiled Appearances’ (Courtesy of Icarus Films) outstanding example is the segment on the cultural “war of attrition” waged every Friday between all female team practices hang-gliding. the clerics and their militias on the one The young women, obviously from upper side and thousands of young men and and middle class backgrounds, describe women hiking on the foothills of northern the joyous “lightness” of freely floating Tehran. Passing through checkpoints in the air above the city. Then we hear the manned by armed militias, long rows of disciplinary spin voiced by their trainer: hikers snake their way uphill, as if being “Being air-born feels like getting ever drawn toward the snow-clad peak of closer to God.” Meanwhile a faint Mount Damavand, an age-old symbol of recitation of the Quran can be heard from inaccessibility and defiance. The higher a distant mosque. The film’s credits then one gets, the farther from the reach of roll down as modern pop music returns mullahs and militias, who, as one young with a young singing voice lamenting hiker puts it proudly, “don’t have the much that is forbidden and taboo. Michel’s documentary is potentially breath to climb this high.” On these “semi-liberated” elevations, genders can useful for educational purposes and mingle more freely, head-scarves may be generally good for deconstructing dropped, and young boys and girls dance mainstream media representations of Iran together to live music: another partial and other “Islamic” societies. The film is “postmodern” in its disregard for release, at least for some. The last segments of Michel’s film contextual grounding and narrative feature more appearances by former coherence. Yet, it offers a colorful political prisoners, including pro- assortment of often powerful images, from Khatami figures. Sadly and predictably, which viewers more familiar with Iran will commitment to martyrdom is reiterated glean a lot more than those limited by the film’s own haphazard approach. AJ www.ALJADID.com 35 Life After the Torture Chamber BY J. RAE NILES Raof uses the common language of imagery, photos, sketches, paintings, and historical footage, enabling the viewer to absorb experiences of the survivors and the political climate of the times. The Tree That Remembers Directed by Masoud Raouf Distributed by Bullfrog Films 50 minutes, 2002 In his film “The Tree That Remembers,” director Masoud Raouf delivers a painful and courageous portrayal encompassing the trials and triumphs of the human heart. Bringing a voice to the hundreds of thousands by way of a few, this film offers truths revealed from a world legacy of political prisoners, once adrift in silence, now told by the voices of survivors themselves. Moving across the screen, colors of an artist’s view swirl in flashing movements, accompanied by a voice-over introduction; hands turn the pages of political struggle in search of freedom. Inspired by the suicide of Habib, a former Iranian political prisoner and student who was found hanging from a tree in Canada, Raouf attempts to portray through his animation the visions of terror and suffering permanently entangled in Habib’s memory. It is a death without words; meaning is left to linger on the edge of imagination, while only art and suicide itself can offer Habib’s pain a voice, raising it from the depths of silence and the secrets of a bare tree. The film brings to light the atrocities perpetrated by the Iranian regime of Ayatollah Khomeini upon its own people. Utilizing imagery and the accounts of other victims, Raouf paints a portrait of the human will to survive, and the causes 36 and conditions that brought Habib to end his intolerable suffering. Raouf breathes insight into the inescapable trauma burdening the soul, when the spirit has been almost extinguished by darkness. Raouf uses the common language of imagery, photos, sketches, paintings, and eye; it observes and absorbs the emotion and terror. Even the melodic, musical underscore gets swallowed, not by volume, but by the imagined visual that lies hidden from our view. Considered “the opposition” (a name given by dictatorial regimes against historical footage, enabling the viewer to absorb experiences of the survivors and the political climate of the times. The film traces their suffering from torture and imprisonment, through exile into Canada, and their journey of immense internal challenge, adjusting to freedom and a new society. The testimony given by the survivors is filmed in different settings as they go about their new lives in Canada. Recalling the brutality they endured as political prisoners, the triumph of the human spirit is woven throughout. Raouf invites the viewer to listen and observe through the eyes of survivors the ways they found survival possible. Crossing between various interviews, the camera becomes more than a seeing seekers of justice), these mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, academics and students were thrown into prisons by the government they once hoped would bring the liberation of Iran from authoritarianism. From their struggle against the shah, they had hoped their new leaders would bring forward freedom and democracy, but the reality was drastically different from the dream; a devil was replaced by a greater devil. Speaking of her tortures, Shirin, a young woman, recalls her eight years in an Iranian prison. Her voice is that of the many; it is the voice of those who dared to dream of freedom and a democratic system for their country. She tells of desperately seeking a sense of the living, something beyond her dark torture chambers. Looking for evidence of life, www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 she watches insects to help her recall nature. Reaching for signs of life, she aches to recall its meaning, its face, its very essence – aches to know something beyond 5 by 9 cells and 92 women to a cell, something beyond the coffin she was locked in for four days, something beyond the inhumane insanity she and many others were forced to endure. Her voice echoes mental, spiritual and emotional bankruptcy, but it also echoes courage. When delivery from the depths of inhumanity was realized in 1990, the border was salvation. Leaving behind the immense darkness meant leaving behind everything but body and soul, as she and others fled. Altering appearances became a common practice to maintain anonymity and safety. Arriving at the Canadian airport meant freedom, but freedom is relative when the mind and soul remained chained to a past that strangles the senses. Distance and miles become an illusive concept when fleeing from that from which there is no true flight. Firouzeh and her little boy sit at her kitchen table as he paints a picture. Recalling time in the jails and the murders of innocence she witnessed, she struggles to make sense of the senseless. Reza Ghaffari, a professor of economics who fought against the shah’s regime, finds himself again in the opposition when betrayed by the new regime. Arrested by Hezbollah in 1981 while in Tehran, he was subjected to tortures. It was in the prison after being hung on a wall that he suffers a heart attack; viewing it as coming near death gives him life. Recalling Iranian history, he brought back the Mossadegh years of the early 50s, thus pointing out the support the Mossadegh cultivated among the Iranian people.” An older woman recalls her beautiful green-eyed son. Returning from his education in the U.S., excited about working for equality between men and women in Iran, at 22 he was imprisoned and executed on charges of joining the opposition. Thousands have died in Iran’s hell chambers. Mass genocide of 60,000 people was perpetrated by the Iranian government. Voices of those who suffered have been long silenced, and are finally beginning to rise. Their voices are like notes struggling to catch air from a flute – first soft, timid, then stronger and louder until they hang in the air like a mist undeniably present. This thing we call freedom has become a word, an ideal; as this film reminds us, freedom is life itself. Its plight must not be ignored, its cost cannot be measured. AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 A Twinge, a Smile, and a Kite BY ELISSAR W. HAIKAL The Kite By Randa Chahal-Sabbagh International Distribution: Soread 2M Production: Ognon Picture, Ulysse Productions, Lebanon 2003 Life-affirming is the spiritual freedom found in art. It gives us a kite whereby the remains of our apprehensions, doubts, and fears take flight, sedately drifting on the From ‘The Kite’ by Randa Chahal-Sabbagh wind. Randa Chahal-Sabbagh has so gifted us, and the experience is farreaching. A Tripoli-born director and scriptwriter residing in Paris, her film bespeaks both the intensity and beauty of its Lebanese material.“Le Cerf-volant” (The Kite) saw light after a series of former cinematic ventures of hers, like “Souha Bechara, Portrait d = une Résistante,” “Civilisées,” “Les Infidèles,” “Nos Guerres Imprudentes” and “Ecrans de Sable,” none of which acquired deserved recognition except for “Civilisées,” seen as controversial due to its acute and frank confrontation of the Lebanese civil war. “The Kite” is the result of FrancoLebanese collaboration, co-produced by Humbert Balsan, whose portfolio include Elia Suleiman’s “Divine Intervention” and Youssef Chahine’s “Destiny,” “Silence,” and “We=re Rolling,” to name a few. It won the Jury Grand Prix Silver Lion at the 60th Venice Film Festival in August, 2003. In October of the same year, after its premiere at UNESCO Palace in Beirut, the Lebanese government awarded Chahal the www.ALJADID.com Order of the Cedar, the government’s most esteemed tribute. The film’s idea was inspired by the brutal separation of villages in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel since 1967. Shot in two Lebanese West-Bekaa villages, Biré and Ain Arab, it is a pioneer in communicating the calamity experienced by the region’s Druze community. Lamia (Flavia Bechara) will marry her cousin Sami whom she has never met. To join her husband, she will pass, walking in her wedding gown, Israeli control towers to reach his village. She relinquishes her past thinking that in her passage lies her emancipation from a patriarchal and imperiled prison. As events unfold and she resolves to return, we see her developing feelings for an Israeli Druze soldier, Youssef (Maher Bsaibes), who had already fallen for her after having drawn her features in his mind’s eye when her marriage was being settled amidst danger zones and loudspeakers. Chahal’s choice of filmmaking elements, like cast and music, is unbeaten; Liliane Nemry (who could miss her in Ziad Doueiri’s “West Beirut”?) fulfills her role fiercely. The cherry on top is “l’enfant terrible,” the great Ziad Rahbani. What a comeback! This witty, infiltrating, avant-garde artist is timeproof. He plays the role of Youssef’s commander-in-chief who’s in love with Jamileh (Julia Kassar), the woman awaiting Israel’s retreat and his return tirelessly. The film ends on a particularly meaningful note; its concluding scene raises questions, defeats prejudices, and converses with identity and loyalty dynamics head-on. It imparts the devastation of the Druze coerced to serve as soldiers for their occupier, exposing that occupier’s brutality and nonchalant Continued on next page 37 A Twinge, a Smile, and a Kite Continued from previous page demeanor, utterly conscious of human destinies that will forever be wronged. Chahal’s choice of music is also one of the film’s manifest strengths. Ziad Rahbani’s tunes accompany proceedings confidently; Najat’s “I Adore the Sea” still reverberates in my ears; and Souad Massi, that beautiful Algerian voice, lingers in The film ends on a particularly meaningful note; its concluding scene raises questions, defeats prejudices, and converses with identity and loyalty dynamics head-on. harmony, awarding the visual ambiance a poignantly tender countenance. Chahal has an intimate perceptivity into her subject matter and feeds it keen degrees of cultural and human meaning. Unlike similar films that favor the political over the personal, “The Kite” draws on personal experience in construing varied sociological and political concerns of the time. To some, the film may seem a bend of “truth.” Yet to the deeply conscious of the multifaceted relationship between reality and art, the film is a testimony of ethics and aesthetics in concert. Both compete and transpose for Chahal. Barbed wire detains, demeans, and undoes human ties. Loudspeakers replace embraces and the flicker of eyes. Land mines paralyze freedom. Life proceeds, but not without the nagging disquietude of memories and suspended dreams. The film opens with a flying kite and ends in a like manner. But we know not what compels a kite to fly; is it the wind? The string? The bittersweet delight it catches in our eyes? Or perhaps our hearts? Who knows, when in each throbbing heart silently dwells a story. AJ Culture Clash Continued from page 29 How had Iryan suffered or enjoyed the love affair? What was the cost to Rawda, even if viewed from Iryan’s point of view? In fact, the reader cannot quite comprehend the cultural implication of such a forbidden love story between two people in an Arab society. The story opens with Iryan’s conversations with Helen, his nurse in a remote hospital in the outskirts of London. Iryan’s conversations do not feel real, but rather resemble a monologue that the author sustains throughout the book. All of Iryan’s “conversations” prove his intelligence, his wit and the wisdom that he has gained in his life. The protagonist, Iryan, in the very first pages assures that he is no regular man; he has written three books, has gone to the best university in the West and has challenged an English expert on literary subjects. The problem, from a literary point of view, is that these statements are merely assertions throughout the book and they are irrelevant to the theme. At one point, the reader is exposed to Iryan’s views on the Islamic world. One wonders what these quick exposures are supposed to signify, because they certainly do not add to the joy of reading. The question remains: Is it necessary to depict Iryan as an extraordinary man in order to make him worthy of love? AJ A Thousand and One Recipes Continued from page 31 cultures, and politics. “Crescent” is marvelously complex, humorous, sad, uplifting, disturbing, irreverent, solemn, and entertaining, although the happy ending of Sirine’s story is less satisfying than the savvy conclusion to the uncle’s tale, with its explicit parody of happy endings. The novel illustrates the human dimension – and the human toll – of political events, while subverting some of the appalling representations of Arabs in the media. It also explains some of the reasons for the anger at U.S. foreign policy felt in many parts of the world, especially in Arab countries, even as many Arabs embrace American culture and values. So far, no other work of fiction has accomplished this. AJ AL JADID ON LINE Frequently updated. On the Web at www.aljadid.com 38 www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 A Century of Lebanese Literature Continued from page 24 one who finds that it answers an intellectual and emotional need; each is meaningful if it deepens the understanding of the works under scrutiny and broadens the horizons of the scholar, the critic, or the reader. Whatever the approach, it should act as a catalyst, stimulating and exciting those involved in the pursuit of knowledge and encouraging them to develop their own potential. Salem’s constructive criticism has become a creative act. It turns what is an intellectual exercise that works within the confines of the mind, into praxis, thereby broadening the experience of cultural life in Lebanon over the past century. Elise Salem has documented Lebanon’s tensions exceptionally well and offers us a vehicle for understanding its cultural and political evolution as a nation over the last century – all through her examination of Lebanese literary narratives and musical theater. She helps us to understand, with Bruner, our culture and the nature of the world in which we exist where “one cannot reflect upon self...without an accompanying reflection on the nature of the world in which one exists.” The Lebanese writers are clearly not afraid of innovation; they have grasped sharply and clearly that our age, the age of globalization, of the global village within the traditional city, and of the intense and tumultuous life, is in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behavior, and language. They have always played their part in promoting the national interest, informing our native conscience, and taming barbaric instincts. With her treatise, we can begin to develop, critically, a canon of Lebanese literature. Salem’s eloquent “Afterword” reiterates and frames her arguments, and adds a rich commentary, concluding with this possibility: “[These] provocative narratives suggest a new language, vocabulary, style, approach, and thematics that expand the possibilities for Lebanon. They are, after all, the nation’s stories and, though fictions, the most telling.” Literature was indeed central to Lebanon’s origin. Salem’s hope, and mine, is that it will be equally important in helping it face its present crises. With Kamal Salibi, we note that “disgraced and abandoned by the world, it is possible that the Lebanese are finally beginning to discover themselves. There is a noticeable consensus among all but the more committed extremists today that all are Lebanese, sharing the same national identity, regardless of other, secondary, group affiliations and loyalties.” We can also affirm with Amin Maalouf that “my identity is made of many elements…and I have to acknowledge each one.” AJ Palestinian Embroidery Continued from page 30 solidifies the novel’s place as an important contribution to contemporary American writing. Mawal tells the reader that her village is known for its beautiful embroidery “with both Palestinian and Western stitches and patterns [which] captures the spirit of Nawara.” Now the village can also be known for its thoughtful and colorful narrative embroidery. AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 www.ALJADID.com 39 MEM OIR O F AR AB C AN LIFE IN T HE 119 930s MEMO OF ARAB AB--AMERI AMERIC Let Them Eat Bread BY FRED M. SAIDY This story was written in the 1930s and was made possible by the courtesy of Anthony Saidy – The Editors them. I know it is magic because I have seen hardened gourmets, upon first sampling the stuff, burst into little twitters of delight. Magic also, because the method by which Mrs. Nazrallah piles I have just returned in weary triumph from Mrs. Nazrallah’s candy and pastry shop on Hollywood Boulevard, where by dint of careful diplomacy I succeeded in buying five pounds of baklava. Baklava is not what it sounds like, the name of a central European village where a war broke out at one time or another, but a Syrian pastry, which – if it could be distributed to the armies of the world – would probably end war all together. Unfortunately, the total annual output is hardly enough to sustain a troop of healthy Boy Scouts, let alone an army, and a contributing factor to this perennial scarcity is the Oriental psychology of merchandising. The quality involved, of which Mrs Nazrallah is a prime exponent, may be described as a determined selling-resistance on the part of the vendor. Mrs. Nazrallah is a rolypoly, middle-aged woman with glittering black eyes and shiny “Eye Glasses for Cats” (2003) by Zareh black hair parted in a zigzag and pulled tightly back over the ears into a chignon. Dominating her twenty layers of flaky crust into a slab half face is a Levantine nose of which the an inch thick is just as obscure, to me, as convex curve resembles the beak of a the workings of a zipper. parrot. You probably infer, between the I am no fledgling aficionado myself – lines, that she is not beautiful, but the I’ve eaten one piece, I’ve eaten two – and point is not important. Beauty is a dime a when Mrs. Nazrallah greeted me warmly barrel in Hollywood, but who owns the behind her showcase of homemade talent to confect butter, dough, sugar- sweetmeats, I quickly returned the greeting syrup, and pistachio nuts into the and asked for five pounds of baklava, to apocryphal reality which is Baklava? be put up in two boxes. I hoped to take her Only Mrs. Nazrallah and a few solitary by surprise, before we became involved in geniuses like her, and when they vanish a long discussion of my family’s health, from the earth, their magic goes with and be out of the place in ten minutes, 40 www.ALJADID.com which is the equivalent to shooting a birdie. But the brusqueness of my approach stunned her. Rallying her forces, she launched into negotiations. “Five pounds?” she repeated. “You want that much, you sure?” I wasn’t sure – the amount was a stab in the dark and could as well have been seven pounds or six – but in the moment of my hesitation, my doom was sealed. “Well,” I temporized, “I just wanted to give a couple of presents to some friends.” She was listening eagerly, her eyebrows lifted in concentration. “Big families?” she said. “Children?” “No,” I replied, “no children – but these people are crazy about your pastries. I guess they could actually use about 50 pounds.” I smiled weakly to indicate a witticism. “I see,” she said thoughtfully. “Well, you know I bake it fresh everyday, my baklava – you don’t just have to take just as much as you want.” I thought I knew what she meant, but to press for an explanation might result in getting one; I didn’t feel, conscientiously, that I could spare the time. “Any amount you think is O.K.,” I said. “Just put it up in two boxes.” Her forehead was still wrinkled in puzzlement. Then quickly the wrinkles cleared away; she had come to a decision of some sort. “Wait,” she said. “I show you a tray – I just baked it this morning.” She scurried through a doorway into the small kitchen, and shortly bustled back with an aluminum baking-pan full of the pastry neatly criss-crossed into diamond-shaped pieces, “This run four and a half, five pound,” she said. “It look AL JADID FALL 2003 good?” “It looks beautiful,” I told her. “Just divide it in two.” “Maybe you like it not brown so much?” she continued. “I like it any way at all, Mrs. Nazrallah,” I assured her. She glowed with satisfaction. “Fine. I give you some to eat.” Before I could stop her she had dished a portion and set it on the counter. I dutifully munched on it and announced it delicious. This was, more or less, a mistake. “Maybe you like to try it my candy,” she pursued eagerly, “All home made, I make it right here, pure butter.” It was no use pointing out that I had sampled her candy and her generosity on numerous occasions; she took my demurrer for Oriental bashfulness. Nimbly she reached into the case and removed some fudge, a couple of caramels, and a slice of Brazilian-nut roll, which she heaped on the dish before me. “Really,” I pleaded, “I don’t think I can eat another thing – I had a heavy breakfast just before.” She dismissed the protestation with a motherly wave of the hand. “Healthy young man like you? You could eat all day, I bet you!” She winked archly, making it clear she had penetrated my transparent excuse. With an effort I nibbled off the corner of a caramel, prudently suppressing a comment for fear Mrs. Nazrallah might yet maneuver herself into a net loss on the transaction. Any attempt to compensate for the refreshments, I knew, would be constructed as an insult, pure and simple. After I had turned down her offer of hot coffee, just made fresh, Mrs. Nazrallah lapsed into momentary silence as she laid out two boxes, lined them with wax paper, and prepared to transfer the pastries from the pan. We were making real progress, finally. She was about to insert a knife around the edges, when she caught herself short. “I forgot to show you other kind!” she announced, with an air of selfreproach. “Some people like not so brown.” She started for the kitchen. I knew it was useless to say anything more. If my friends had to have Baklava – I, personally, would settle for plain vanilla-topped coffee cake without raisins – this was the only way to get it in greater AL JADID FALL 2003 Los Angeles. She was back now, bearing another panful, the glossy crust a shade more blondish than the first. “You like it better?” she asked eagerly. I like them both,” I said. “What’s the difference?” “Well, not really much,” she replied. “This one” – pointing to the second – “maybe little bit sweeter. You like to taste?” “No, thank you!” I assured her. “Give me whatever you like.” The wheels of activity again came to a standstill. She could not consummate the deal on this imprecise basis. Her hand, the knife in it, fell to her side and her brows went up again. “It is not what I like,” she said, like a patient schoolteacher www.ALJADID.com addressing a backward child. “Is what you like.” “All right,” I decided with brisk finality, “I’ll take the first pan – just pack it in two boxes.” As I had only a little cash with me, I would have to give Mrs. Nazrallah a check – and I dreaded the prospect. She would, of course, be completely gracious about accepting it, and this in fact was the whole trouble. I feared another delay of five minutes while she convinced me it was quite all right, during which time she probably would ply me with homemade fondant and pralines, “Did I ask you for money?” Continued on next page 41 Let Them Eat Bread contributors Continued from previous page “Tayeb Salih: Ideology and the Craft of Fiction” (Syracuse University Press, 2003) and is currently writing a book on Anglophone Arab and Arab-American fiction. She was still shaking her head when she tied the last blue ribbon around each box. Packing the pastries in boxes was something of an irregularity, as I usually took the whole pan with me and returned it empty later, but I was sure Mrs. Nazrallah had been pleased with the extra trouble. “This is the right amount – $3.75?” I asked, handing over the check. She paid no attention to the check and even ignored the question. “There isn’t sales tax, is there?” I continued, reaching into my pocket for some coins. “That’s all right,” said Mrs. Nazrallah, with a quick blinking of the eyes and a confidential nod, as though she were a bootlegger delivering a case of contraband gin. I didn’t know exactly what was all right; to make an issue of sales tax might continue our little tete-a-tete well into the night. The boxes were under my arm by now and I was poised for a quick getaway. “You didn’t have to give me a check,” was Mrs. Nazrallah’s parting word. “You could pay me when you bring the pan back.” She was, of course, well aware of the fact that I wasn’t taking any pan with me this time. She was also aware that I was aware, but it would have been gauche and unreasonable on my part to point out the obvious flaw in her Oriental logic. Our eyes met, for a moment, in wordless acknowledgment of the situation; then with a curt, Occidental “Thank you,” I turned and left. AJ Unveiling the West Continued from page 33 scrutiny and broad understandings of historical patterns, societal contexts, and examination of artistic strategies. Each chapter swells and leaves a wake that builds to establish a cumulative and creative discourse. “Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art” is a welcome addition to my library, a rich reference book that I will visit periodically and recommend to others. AJ 42 Continued from page 17 Afshin Matin-asgari (“Tehran-Anxiety,” p. 34) is assistant professor of religion and Middle East history at California State University, Los Angeles. He has published “Iranian Student Opposition to the Shah” (Costa Mesa, CA.: 2002) and a number of articles on 20th century Iranian political, religious and intellectual history. His current research topics are Iran’s political prisoners as well as the idea of the “West” in contemporary Iran’s Islamist and secular intellectual discourses. Samir Mattar (“A Century of Lebanese Literature: A Culture Viewed Through its Narratives,” p. 22) is a former editor of the academic publication Issues, and has written over 40 papers in technical and management journals. Mai Munasa (“Toufic Faroukh on Jazz, Saxophone and Memory,” p. 13) is a Lebanese novelist, music critic, and journalist in the Lebanese daily An Nahar. J. Rae Niles (“Life After the Torture Chamber,” p. 36) is a singer, songwriter and recording artist. She is also a student of philosophy. Lynne Rogers (“A Literary Text of Palestinian Embroidery,” p. 30) is a professor and author of many articles on the Palestine question in professional journals and books. Sarah Rogers (“Arab Art: Beyond Dichotomies,” p. 45) is currently a Ph.D student in the history, theory and criticism section of the Department of Architecture at MIT. She writes regularly on Arab arts. Fred M. Saidy (“Let Them Eat Bread,” p. 40). Fred Milhem Saidy (1907-82) was born in Los Angeles of Lebanese immigrant parents. He made his childhood debut as a baseball writer in Manitou Springs, Continued on page 43 www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 contributors Continued from page 42 Colorado. After a stretch as a Hollywood screenwriter, he found his niche as a playwright of Broadway musical comedies. The best-known of these is “Finian’s Rainbow”(1947), which pioneered the issue of race in America. In 1969 it became a Coppola movie starring Fred Astaire as an Irish immigrant, in the title role. Saidy, an expert mimic, joke-creator and raconteur literate in Arabic, liked to keep roomfuls of folks rollicking in laughter with his stories about the Syrian-Lebanese immigrants of New York. Paul Sullivan (“Lebanon: A Focal Point for Unsolved Tensions,” p. 25) has been a professor of economics at the National Defense University since July 1999. He taught and researched at the American University in Cairo. The opinions expressed in this review are the reviewer’s. correction Due to production error, the identification of Nadine Saliba in Al Jadid no. 44 was left out. Saliba, who translated “Moroccan Asilah – an Arab Capital of Art and Culture” and “Iraqi Music: Pulse, Sorrow, Wisdom,” is a graduate student in political theory and international relations at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Visit www .aljadid.com www.aljadid.com and register to receive electronic updates on newly posted content and a preview of for thcoming orthcoming issues AL JADID FALL 2003 A Beggar at Damascus Gate By Yasmine Zahran 1995,155 pages $12.95 ISBN:0-942996-24-0 “Cold and alone in an ancient Palestinian village, a traveling archeologist finds the threads of a narrative that will direct his life for the coming decade. Its characters are a Palestinian woman and an English man, each deeply committed to the conflicting demands of love and national loyalties. As the narrator slowly pieces together the fate of the two unfortunate lovers, he also uncovers a tale of treachery, duplicity and passion that highlights the contemporary plight of the enormous number of displaced Palestinians: the final resolution surprises them both and reveals a depth to their commitments that neither had previously realized.” –Cole Swensen Sitt Marie Rose By Etel Adnan 1978, 1989 $11.00 ISBN: 0942996-27-5 “It has become clear that maps of the Middle East and their accompanying tests have failed to account for the religious, economic, and political divisions that rage within these borders, defined in history by people who did not live there. ‘Sitt Marie Rose’ visualizes the struggle in Lebanon in terms of ethical borders that the West never sees, presented as we are with pictures of the ‘Arab morass.’ Adnan gives sterling credence to a moral and political literature, a literature that sets about to inform.” –New Women’s Times Rumi & Sufism By Eva de Vitray-Meyerovitch Translated from the French by Simone Fattal Illustrated with 45 photographs, charts, and maps; index and bibliography 1989 2nd edition,167 pages $12.95 ISBN: 0-942996-08-9 “In this fine volume all of the arts come together in a splendid unfolding of all that is Rumi Sufism. The photographs and paintings play against vibrant prose, open all of the locked doors leading to the universality of Rumi and his teachings. The great care taken in the translation is a marvel unto itself.” – The New England Review of Books Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz) By Etel Adnan 1993, 85 pages $11.00 ISBN:0-942996-21-6 “But where ‘Paris, When it’s Naked’ delves into the accumulated layers of the self, ‘Of Cities & Women’ is more concerned with the nature of race itself, its definition and redefinition, through philosophical speculation, observations on the relations between artists and their ostensible subjects, between women and cities, between women and men. – Ammiel Alcalay, The Nation There By Etel Adnan 1997, 70 pages $13.00 ISBN 0-942996-28-3 “‘There’ is a poem of hidden seams, fissures that we cross unsuspecting. A smooth surface conceals a universe of sudden shifts and transitions from one level to another – a philosophical level which pursues the mysteries of consciousness and place, a second level which asks the same questions in a committed social and political vision, a passionate and engaged post-modernism.” – Michael Beard, Univ. of North Dakota New Release Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film By Jalal Toufic 2003, 400 pp $15.00 ISBN 0-942996-50-x Relentlessly uncompromising, Toufic’s radical and visionnary poetics gird the reader to forge ahead into uncharted territory.. One could not find in current film theory anything as suggestive or useful as Toufic’s writing on the relationship of medieval Islamic philosophy to certain contemporary Central Asian or Middle Eastern cinematography...In his insistence upon treating the dead as a great part of the potential force of this world, Toufic plumbs the poetics of disaster and recuperation in ways that remain both suggestive and relentlessly radical. – The Village Voice Screams By Joyce Mansour 1995 80 pages $10.00 ISBN 0-942996-25-9 The Post-Apollo Press 35 Marie Street, Sausalito, CA 94965 Tel: (415) 332-1458, Fax: (415) 332-8045 Email: postapollo@earthlink.net – Web: www.postapollopress.com www.ALJADID.com 43 REFLECTIONS War, Peace and Garbage BY HANAN CHEBIB Downtown Beirut (Photos by Hanan Chebib) “Garbage, for me, became an indicator of how Lebanon changed after the destructive effects of a thing called war.” When traveling, the world is a classroom. At times, the intended lesson does not come at the time of study. My time of study began in 1992, at the age of 19, shortly after Lebanon’s civil war ended. My parents had sent the three of us, my sister, my brother and me, to our grandparents for a month. We saw such devastation that we wondered if our parents had made a mistake; had they known what the living conditions were they certainly would not have sent us. Ten years after my 1992 visit, the lesson came home after I witnessed a change made possible even in the most hopeless of environments. Garbage, for me, became an indicator of how Lebanon changed after the destructive effects of war. In war, garbage collection stops. The entire infrastructure of waste collection breaks down. During the war, the Lebanese suddenly had to decide how to get rid of the waste they created. Most decided not to decide at all. They just tried to survive. So it sat. In piles, on hills, in courtyards and it sat there forever. Garbage does not decompose, not as it seems to do when it is collected and magically disappears to the landfill and one is allowed to forget its existence. In fact, garbage left to lay creates a mass of smells, pests such as rats and cockroaches, and other health hazards. I remembered the first time I had to kick a rat off my shoe as I walked down a darkened hallway to my 44 Uncle’s apartment. Or how I only slept three hours the night I realized I had shared my pillow with a cockroach. So some decided to Barbar Aga Castle in northern Lebanon (Photo by Hanan Chebib) burn the garbage. It seemed the immediate solution, but they had to live with the thick, black smoke, the ground beneath now unable to grow anything. In 1996, my second visit, I learned that I did not like burning garbage any more than I liked piles of garbage. As time went on and the memory of war became more distant, the issue of garbage www.ALJADID.com changed. In 2000, people’s energy moved more away from basic survival to improving the quality of life. A company named Sukleen emerged and they regularly come around, even to the most remote of places. They are known by the color of their trucks and collection bins, a lovely mint green. Every day, my Teta would walk to the curb to dispose of the day’s waste in those bins. Piles of garbage, the pests and other health hazards had disappeared. In 2002, I noticed on a popsicle wrapper I had just bought the universal symbol of a nondescript human throwing away garbage in the proper bin. Underneath the symbol were the words “for Lebanon.” The decision of where my wrapper goes was no longer left up to me, but to the Sukleen company. My final lesson came during my last visit, when I realized that garbage had become a symbol for change. During a short 10 years I was able to witness changes a country went through. And even when an outsider like myself felt hopeless about Lebanon’s ability to grow, it did. The remarkable Lebanese people are resilient and war’s devastation on them was temporary, not permanent. In fact, I predict they will continue to change. And bylaws will be in place, if not already, to fine people for an action they had done without thinking for 20 years– littering. AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 Exhibitions Arab Art: Beyond Dichotomies BY SARAH ROGERS Art historians have only begun to acknowledge contemporary Arab visual culture, and current art criticism continues to frame contemporary Arab art within the stifling tradition-modernity binary. Nonetheless, the burgeoning, throughout the United States, of art exhibitions devoted to contemporary Arab arts vividly illustrates the rich vitality of Arab culture and attests to the continuing contributions of Arab artists to the international art scene. The exhibition, “Diversity in Harmony: A National Exhibit by Artists of Arab and Middle Eastern Heritage,” at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, succeeds at challenging the conventional framework. Conceived of and curated by the artist and art historian, Hashim alTawil, “Diversity in Harmony” brings together the work of 17 artists: Hashim al-Tawail, Adnan Charara, Maysaloun Faraj, Mohamed Fradi, Mumtaz Hussain, Lila Kadaj, Sari Khoury, Leila Kubba, Illham Mahfouz, Joseph Namy, Salam Norie, Mahmoud Obaidi, Kathleen Rashid, Mamoun Sakkal, Wafer Shayota, Kegam Tazian, and Sabah Yousif. The collection displays the various thematic and stylistic trends at work among contemporary Arab-American artists and thus disrupts the conceptual assumption that Arab art is traditional and modern art is Western that haunts art history discourse. Held at the Alfred Berkowitz Art Gallery, “Diversity in Harmony” ran September 8 - October 10, 2003, and was the inaugural exhibit sponsored by the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan’s Dearborn campus. (Dearborn is home to one of the largest Arab American communities.) With the founding of the center in 2001, Hashim al-Tawil conceived of the exhibit as a first step in a larger project. After showing his work in the United States for the past 15 years, al-Tawil felt frustrated by the lack of professional settings AL JADID FALL 2003 gives these works their power. Forced to question the dichotomy set up by traditional art history, the viewer begins to understand that Arab visual culture is already a model of diversity. Art institutions in the Arab world, formed during the colonial period, most often taught conventional European painting styles, yet this did not become an isolated trend; neither did pre-modern artistic forms. The work of these artists disrupts available for contemporary Arab artists in the United States. Attributing this to a perceived absence of market value for contemporary Arab art, al-Tawil saw the academic setting of University of Michigan as an ideal venue for an exhibit of contemporary ArabAmerican art which highlights its aesthetic value. Choosing the theme of diversity, al-Tawil moved away from the pigeon hole in which contemporary ArabAmerican art is often placed. Moreover, the accompanying catalogue marks al-Tawil’s intense desire to establish a critical artistic discourse for contemporary Arab art. Anyone who studies modern and contemporary Arab art understands the critical necessity of documenting the exhibit, both visually and textually. The brief catalogue includes an introduction to the exhibit, an image from “Salat,” ceramic, unglazed earth stone, two pieces each artist, and the artists’ 17.5”x8.5” each by Maysaloun Faraj statements on their own work. the established binary between Arab and The visual diversity among the American, Islamic and Western, and thus artwork is readily apparent. The organic stands testimony to the fact that artistic stone sculptures of Maysaloun Faraj worlds have inhabited one another long enliven an interesting contrast with Lila before art history began to discuss cultural Kadaj’s realistic landscape paintings done hybridity. in oil. Next to the calligraphic prints of Despite the visual symphony of Mamoun Sakkal, al-Tawil placed Sari media, subject matter, and formal Ibrahim Khoury’s abstract acrylics, elements, “Diversity in Harmony” offers infused with symbols influenced by a few highlights. The work of Hashim alArabic writing, Islamic design, Byzantine Tawil is one such example. Reminiscent icons and the work of European artists of Byzantine icons, al-Tawil uses oil and such as Klee and Gorky. mixed materials on board to create layered Yet it is not simply that works such as textures with rich colors of gold, blue, and Khoury’s exhibit influences from both aquamarine. Arab-Islamic iconography European and Arab art, but moreover the matched with modern artistic techniques fluid visual movement between the two seemingly different sources of inspiration Continued on page 46 www.ALJADID.com 45 Arab Art: Beyond Dichotomies Continued from page 45 and abstracted faces challenge the break often established between “modern” and “traditional” art. Instead, various formal languages draw upon each other in creatively innovative ways. The work of Adnan Charara offers a distinct contrast to alTawil works, yet constitutes another powerful statement within the show. Charara exhibited three works of mixed media on paper. A conglomeration of figures, animals, and landscape depicted in Cubist-inspired visual language, Charara’s works might be characterized as a modern-day Bosch. A visual and intellectual delight, Charara’s works envelop the viewer in a Greatest,” oil, acrylic and silver foil microcosmic world of “The on canvas, 30” x 40” by Mumtaz Hussain satire and metaphoric symbolism. Al-Tawil, who put forth an open call to artists, clearly chose works which challenge a hegemonic approach to contemporary Arab art. Even those which might be labeled as Arab-Islamic because they focus on Arabic calligraphy, such as that of Mamoun Sakkal and Mumtaz Hussain, instead execute their subject matter with contemporary media. For example, Sakkal plays with calligraphy through computer-generated images. Artists such as Charara challenge the notion that contemporary Arab artists privilege political concerns over aesthetics. This is not to claim, however, that “Diversity in Harmony” merely speaks to an artistic agenda. The importance of exposing the public to Arabs as cultural producers cannot be overemphasized. Although scholars such as Edward Said opened the scholarly world to the discourse of Orientalism, scholarship has yet to open its eyes to Arabs as producers of culture. “Diversity in Harmony” succeeds at dismantling the media’s stereotypical representation of Arabs as terrorists and “stuck in the past.” In contrast, the artists included in the show demonstrate that artistic languages are being manipulated and invented among contemporary Arab artists in innovative ways; art criticism does itself a great disservice by ignoring these artists. Al-Tawil hopes that the next step will be a show revolving around a few select artists who explore similar themes. We can only hope that his goal comes to fruition. AJ Contemporary Art - Paintings by Zareh http://www.artistzareh.com 46 Hybrid Vigor: The Art Of Emna Zghal BY NAJWA ADRA E mna Zghal’s paintings are powerful: they dare to be beautifully crafted in a world tilted towards facile conceptual work, and they hang by themselves without gratuitous Oriental icons screaming their ethnicity. In fact they don’t scream at all. They are as quiet as the traditional Arab mediator negotiating between warring factions, and as subtle as the work of Adonis, another Arab artist also influenced by Western training. Emna received her B.A. from the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Tunis, and the M.F.A. from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She has held several prestigious residencies, What Zghal wants most is that her art be seen “as contemporary Arab.” Yet she is, at the same time, a global artist, not trapped in an ethnic gallery. including one year at the Cité Internationale Des Arts in 199495 and a MacDowell Fellowship in 2002. In 1995, her work received First Prize of the City of Tunis. Her solo exhibitions include two in New York City. The first, at Scene Gallery in 2002, was reviewed by Roberta Smith in The New York Times. The second, “The Prophet of Black Folk,” was held at the New York based ALWAN for the Arts in November 2003. Like other successful artists, Zghal rebels against much of her training. At a time when the relevance of painting is being questioned, she insists that she is primarily a painter. Of her interest in beauty and craft, she writes, “I … use those qualities to question today’s trends about the alarming absence of beauty, craft and color beyond a superficial appropriation of imagery and empty reference to some distant practice or culture. I like for my images to be appreciated first and foremost for the emotions they convey. I like them be read as poems not as statements.” When Zghal’s teachers in Tunisia discouraged the idea of infinite pattern in art but encouraged her to keep her content “Oriental,” she pushed against artificial constraints to explore the potentials of the medium. When they advocated Westernstyle composition, she did not necessarily agree with the relationship they recommended between foreground and background. She finally found a satisfying model in Art Wolf’s aerial photo of elk in the snow in Wyoming. As Zghal tells it, “This photograph defied Western principles of composition: the animals were all over; there was no focal point.” Here was a way to incorporate the concept of infinity in interesting ways. She decided to explore organic pattern and its spread in her painting. Beginning with woodcut prints on paper followed by www.ALJADID.com AL JADID FALL 2003 Hybrid Vigor “rubbing, drawing, collage and painting,” she “meanders through knots and brush strokes” playing with the grain of wood, paint drippings and canvas. This results in abstract paintings which, like old Persian carpets, are full of unpredictable detail. Emna’s most recent work is “The Prophet of Black Folk,” a series of 12 paintings acquired by the New York-based Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. These are highly crafted improvisations on the “Revolt of the Zanj,” a collection of poems by Adonis. Poetry and drawings celebrate the 9th century revolt of slaves brought from East Africa to clear salt from the marshes in southern Iraq. Under the leadership of the Arab poet, Ali Ibn Muhammad, the slaves revolted from their Abbasid owners, built their own capital, minted their own currency and controlled Basra for 10 years. The entire revolt lasted 14 years. It ended when the Caliph al-Muwaffaq ordered that Ali be killed and his severed head brought to him as proof. Adonis chooses to call Ali, nabiyu l zanj (prophet of the blacks), a title his contemporaries had tried to confer on him and which he rejected. He is known in history books as qa’id al zanj (leader of the blacks). This collection brings together two important formative influences in the artist’s life. Zghal found the story of this revolt empowering when she first heard it as a secondary school student. She sees in it an alternative to “being stuck in a place of victimization.” The work is also a homage to a personal hero. In a recent interview, Zghal recounted her introduction to Adonis and his poetry: “As a teenager, all of the radical and modern readings I was exposed to were in French. So Adonis’ work that I discovered at age 20-21 was a revelation. I saw him on French television. I then found his books at a book fair in Tunis, and heard him read his poetry in person when he visited Tunisia.” The artist was pulled towards the poet’s comparison of sufism with surrealism and connected this with her artwork. “Adonis was reading Arabic without defensiveness or insecurity,” she continues. He was a source of inspiration. The paintings combine etching, lithograph, monotype, and paint on wood and paper to create very emotive and highly textured work. Colors are muted, in contrast to Zghal’s other work. A verse from Adonis’ poetry is written in Arabic somewhere on each painting. It is inscribed simply, not in calligraphic style. Near each work is an English translation of the poetry. Not all of these translations are successful; however, they are not intrinsic to the work and are included only to aid audiences unfamiliar with written Arabic. As Zghal describes it, this is the first time she has felt that she is creating work with Arabic content, and this contrasts with many Arab artists who “focus on confronting mainstream misunderstandings of Arab identity, but with little effort to dig into that identity and understand it. They are not focusing on the empowering aspects of Arab identity.” What Zghal wants most is that her art be seen “as contemporary Arab.” Yet she is, at the same time, a global artist, not trapped in an ethnic gallery. Her work demonstrates that it is possible, without overt confrontation, to create beautiful emotive art and still be highly innovative, setting new artistic standards. AJ AL JADID FALL 2003 “Prophet 1” woodcut & etching. He/ is getting ready to reform the sky. “Prophet 9” monotype. History is a marriage/between the image/ and the meaning. “Prophet 12” monotype. Rekindle the flamme of memory. “Prophet 3” etching–whitness cannot/ be unless it is/fertilized by/ Black luster. www.ALJADID.com 47