A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar by British writer Suzanne Joinson was one of the most intriguing debut novels of 2012. Published by Bloomsbury in the UK and US, the ambitious novel interweaves two main storylines, one set in 1920s Eastern Turkestan (today’s Xinjiang Muslim-majority autonomous region of north west China), the other in modern-day London. The seemingly separate storylines gradually converge as personal histories and secrets are revealed. There is a poetic quality to Joinson's prose, and she captures place, atmosphere and character with skill. The two storylines are engaging and take the reader on unusual journeys.

The novel was launched with considerable fanfare and received many highly favourable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. It made the  LA Times bestsellers’ list and National Geographic Traveler Magazine chose it as its book of the month. It was also nominated for the Anobii First Book Award. The Sayle Literary Agency is promoting the film rights.




Now Bloomsbury is to release A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar in paperback in the UK and US, on 13 March and 20 April respectively. The cover designs of the UK and US 2012 hardbacks differ from each other, and the paperback editions have two new designs. The design on the UK hardback (pictured at top) isparticularly striking: a colourful ostrich feather motif sweeps round the front, spine and back of the book against a deep cobalt blue background. Along the spine of the feather are features of the London and Kashgar skylines, reflecting the novel’s dual setting. A woman in 1920s dress rides a model of bike from that era towards the edge of the front cover.



The US hardback cover emphasises the novel's Eastern Turkestan angle, with the traveller and her bicycle portrayed in a desert landscape against a snowy mountainous background. The UK paperback shows in  silhouette a woman cyclist wheeling her bike near a lake, with mountains beyond. (On her hazardous journey Eva passes through the Tien Shan Celestial Mountains, and sees the famous freshwater lake Baghrasch kol ). The US paperback cover, with the woman character seen from behind holding a notebook and pen, stresses the fact that the lady cyclist is writing a Guide on her travels.



The two storylines of A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar are presented in alternate chapters. The 1920s storyline takes the form of diary entries by bicycling enthusiast Evangeline (Eva) English who has travelled to the Silk Road city of Kashgar as part of a Christian missionary delegation. Her travel companions are her sister Lizzie and the dominant Millicent Frost. It was under Millicent's influence that Lizzie discovered she has a "calling". Eva does not guess at the true nature of the relationship between Lizzie and the mannish Millicent until she is shocked to glimpse them in an intimate position. Unlike Millicent and Lizzie, Eva is fired not so much by missionary zeal as by the prospect of bicycling to faraway places and writing a Guide on her travels. She already has a publisher lined up.

The Eva chapters of the novel are each headed “Notes for A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar”. She is travelling on a “glorious green BSA Lady’s Roadster bicycle” and at the top of each of her chapters  is a quote from Maria E Ward’s groundbreaking 1896 book Bicycling for Ladies.


The second storyline, written in the third person, focuses largely on Frieda. Like Eva she is writing a work based on her travels in the East – in Frieda’s case she is interviewing the youth of the Islamic world in order to write a report for a European-funded think tank with a secret name. Frieda has visited 15 countries in seven months to research her report. But she feels a fraud, despite her fellowship, her PhD and her government-sponsored paper The Youth of the Islamic World.

Joinson, who works part-time organising international literature projects for the British Council, has herself travelled widely. For several years she specialised in projects focusing on the Arabic speaking world. Over the past decade she has visited most countries in the Middle East, as well as China, Russia and countries in Western and Eastern Europe.

When Joinson visited Kashgar in July 2009 there was trouble between Uighur Muslim communities and Han Chinese. She managed to tour the city and to take photographs of the old quarters, which would not have changed greatly since Eva's visit in 1923. But she had to leave the city at short notice for safety reasons. In the acknowledgements in her novel she mentions "the anonymous Chinese girl who helped me to leave Xinjiang province when riots flared up in Urumqi and Kashgar."

The novel starts with a memorable and harrowing scene as the three women approach Kashgar.  Lizzie, a keen photographer, is lagging behind on horseback with her Leica camera in order to photograph sand, believing "she can capture sight of Him in the grains and dunes."  Eva and Millicent come across a a girl of only 10 or 11 "a belly as ripe as a Hami melon" who is about to give birth and is in a desperate situation. Millicent rises to the occasion, delivering the baby with the help of her forceps. But the young mother dies.

Far from Millicent’s intervention being appreciated as an act of compassion, the missionary women are  accused by the crowd of killing the mother and stealing her heart to protect themselves from sandstorms, and of planning to take and eat her baby. When they arrive in Kashgar they find they face trial on charges of murder and witchcraft. They are put under virtual house arrest first in an inn, hosted by Mohammed who turns out to have three wives, and then in Pavilion House.

It is a time of religious and ethnic conflicts in the area, and Eva, Lizzie and Millicent are caught up in a disastrous train of events. Millicent's strident Christian evangelism - “smell it, the rancid smell of these wasteful lost souls” she shouts out as she visits a Kashgar market - and her converting to Christianity one of Mohammed's daughters exacerbates their problems.

Frieda's storyline begins with her returning to London from a five-week trip for her research on young Muslims. She has been waited all evening in her flat on the Peabody Estate in Pimlico for Nathaniel, her  married lover of five years. But he has failed to show up. In the small hours Frieda muses that “lighting the scented candles had been a mistake: now the room smelled like a synthetic pine forest.” She pours the bottle of wine she had opened down the sink.


Frieda notices a mysterious coughing man sleeping outside the door of her flat and leaves a blanket and pillow for him. The next day finds she has left on the wall a large drawing of a bird and words of poetry in Arabic and English. The man is Tayeb, a Yemeni in his 40s who overstayed his student visa 15 years earlier and has lived as an illegal ever since. But he has been betrayed to the British immigration authorities and is now on the run. He is an artist, calligrapher and former filmmaker who had made a documentary film in Yemen which the censors saw as anti-Yemeni. They demanded more than a thousand changes. Tayeb dissociates himself from the Yemeni immigrant community.

Among the mail awaiting Frieda on her return to London  is an official letter from a Council in south east London informing her that as the "next-of-kin" of the recently-deceased Mrs Irene Guy she has  a week to clear out the dead woman’s flat. Frieda has no idea who Irene Guy is. Nor is it easy for Frieda to try to find out through her parents who Irene Guy might be. Frieda is the daughter of hippyish parents whose belief in open marriage did not work out in practice, and she long ago lost touch with the mother who abandoned her. She has only a distant relationship with her father and when she phones him to try to find out where her mother is he tells her that the last he heard was that she was living on a commune in the county of Sussex on the south English coast.

The contents of Irene Guy's flat includes an owl in a cage. Tayeb, whose father reared birds in Yemen, helps Frieda capture the owl when it escapes after Frieda takes it to her own flat. Birds recur in a variety of contexts throughout the novel. The book's two epigraphs are  a translation of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's  Here the Birds’ Journey Ends, and lines from Ecclesiastes: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.” Each of the Frieda chapters is headed by an illustration of a different feather.

The novel's two storylines have various points of resonance. There are similarites between the two female main protagonists. Like Eva, Frieda is fond of cycling, and she uses her bike to get around London. The two women are independent, adventurous and curious about the world. But both  have a sense of aloneness, of being out of kilter with wider society. Neither has succeeded in establishing a stable relationship with a man, both are seeking a way of transcending  their situation. Same-sex relationships play a part in both storylines, from the 1920s covert gay scene - of which Eva is dawningly aware - to cruising in contemporary London. The pernicious effects of blinkered religious belief are seen in both storylines - whether certain types of Christian evangelism, Islamist extremism or guru-centred New Age religions.


Neither main character is wholly sympathetic. In order to help her capture the tone of Eva's voice, Joinson read archives of missionary diaries. By today's standards, some of Eva's  reactions and opinions are almost racist. Frieda comes across initially as rather passive, especially in her relationship with her married lover. But the events set in train by her investigation of the contents of Irene Guy's flat and her growing friendship with Tayeb, offer her a chance to moving onto a more fulfilling path and to try to resolve some issues within her family. 

Joinson’s first literary success came with the story Laila Ahmed, which was inspired by her purchase in 2006  of a box of letters from Deptford Market in London. Laila Ahmed tells of her quest to find out who the letters had belonged to. The story won the 2007 creative non-fiction New Writing Ventures prize. This gave Joinson a year’s mentoring and enough money to buy a laptop, thereby helping her to finish A Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar.

Joinson still works two days a week at the British Council, and "in theory" writes on the other three days. She is also studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, London University. She juggles her job and her writing with being mother to two young children. “I have no social life and I don’t watch any TV, and I can just about fit everything in,” she has said.

In November she was a contributor to the Lonely Planet's anthology Better than Fiction: True Travel Tales from Great Fiction Writers , edited by Don George, with pieces by 32 writers including DCB Pierre, MJ Hyland, Isabel Allende and Jan Morris.


She has been writer in residence at Shoreham Airport on the Sussex coast, writing a  blog, The Flying Machine, on the experience. “My next book is inspired by the Art Deco Shoreham Airport in Sussex, and is about early female pilots, inter-war London and the establishment of the British Mandate in Palestine," she says.


Joinson lives by the sea in Sussex, and was recently asked by Cycling Active to design a Lady Cyclist's Guide to Shoreham, published as a four-page article incorporating an interview with the novelist. Joinson described her own passion for cycling. When,weary of London's buses and trains, she started bicycling instead "it literally revolutionised my life, and the city transformed completely. Suddenly I was liberated from London’s transport system, and I had this incredibly different knowledge of London… It felt like I suddenly owned the city; somehow I had got it under control.”

Joinson has established herself as an original and refreshing literary talent with A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar. Her readers are waiting expectantly to see what she weaves from her new themes of mandate Palestine, pioneering women pilots, and 1920s and 1930s London.  
by Susannah Tarbush

International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) shortlist stresses evolving talent, springs surprises 
by
Susannah Tarbush

The judges of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF - the Arabic Booker) today announced in Tunis the six-book shortlist for the  2013 prize worth a total of $60,000 to the winner (including the $10,000 that goes to each shortlisted novel). None of the shortlisted authors has been previously longlisted for the prize. The chair of the hitherto anonymous judging panel, the Egyptian writer and academic Galal Amin, said the shortlist brings "to the fore several evolving talents around the Arab world." The shortlist omitted last year's IPAF winner Rabee Jaber and several other long-established and acclaimed authors who were on the longlist.

The shortlisted novels are:

 Ave Maria by Sinan Antoon (Iraqi) Al-Jamal
 

The Beaver by Mohammed Hassan Alwan (Saudi Arabian) Dar al-Saqi
 

Our Master by Ibrahim Issa (Egyptian) Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP)
 

The Bamboo Stick by Saud Alsanousi (Kuwaiti) Arab Scientific Publishers
 
His Excellency the Minister by Hussein Al-Wad (Tunisian) Dar al-Janub



The shortlist, and the hitherto secret identities of the judges, were revealed at a press conference in the Municipal Theatre in Tunis. The IPAF statement said: "The shortlist reveals a number of varied thematic concerns, which lie at the heart of the Arab reality of today. They include, religious extremism; the lack of tolerance and rejection of the Other; the split between thought and behaviour in the contemporary Arab personality; the Arab woman's frustration and her inability to break through the social wall built around her; the laying bare of the corrupt reality and hypocrisy on social, religious, political and sexual levels."

The winner will be announced at an awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi on 23 April 2013, on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. IPAF was launched in Abu Dhabi in April 2007, and is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by the TCA of Abu Dhabi which was announced as the new sponsor of the Prize in September 2012 (taking over from the Emirates Foundation).

The six were chosen from the longlist of 16, announced on 6 December and selected from 133 entries from 15 countries, published in the previous 12 months. There are some surprising omissions from the shortlist. Rabee Jaber of Lebanon, who won IPAF 2012 for The Druze of Belgrade and was also shortlisted in 2010 for America, had been longlisted for IPAF 2013 with The Birds of the Holiday Inn but did not make the shortlist.  

Other heavyweights of Arabic fiction omitted from the shortlist include Lebanese Elias Khoury,  longlisted for Sinalkul (Dar al-Adab);  Lebanese Hoda Barakat, longlisted for The Kingdom of this Earth (Dar al-Adab); Palestinian-Jordanian Ibrahim Nasrallah, longlisted for Lanterns of the King of Galilee (Arab Scientific Publishers); and Algerian Waciny Laredj longlisted for Lolita’s Fingers (Dar al-Adab).

The judges, chaired by  Galal Amin, are Lebanese academic and critic Sobhi al-Boustani; the head of the Arab Cartoonists' Association, and owner and chief editor of the independent Syrian daily newspaper Al-Domari, Ali Ferzat; Polish academic and Professor of Arabic Literature at the Arts College of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, and specialist in Arabic Literature Classical and Modern and Gender Studies at Manchester University Professor Zahia Smail Salhi, .

Galal Amin commented: 'The members of the committee feel extremely pleased that they were able to select an excellent shortlist of newly written Arabic novels, which bring to the fore several evolving talents around the Arab world. The committee is gratified to note that outstanding creativity is common across Arab countries and generations of writers.'

 Jonathan Taylor, Chair of the Board of Trustees, comments: ‘We're delighted to welcome and honour six new writers for the Prize. Their works have been selected by our Judges for their outstanding quality and it is a great pleasure to be able to bring them to the attention now of a wider Arabic audience and, in due course, to international readership.’

An English translation of the winning novel is guaranteed for the winner. The winners of the prize in its first four years all secured English publishing deals for their novels - Bahaa Taher (2008), Youssef Ziedan (2009), Abdo Khal (2010) and joint winners Mohammed Achaari and Raja Alem (2011). Taher’s Sunset Oasis was published in English by Sceptre (an imprint of Hodder and Stoughton) in 2009 and has been translated into at least eight other languages worldwide. Ziedan’s Azazel was published in the UK by Atlantic Books in April 2012 and English translations of Abdo Khal and Mohammed Achaari’s winning novels - Throwing Sparks and The Arch and the Butterfly are imminent, from BQFP.

IPAF synopses of the shortlisted novels:

Ave Maria by Sinan Antoon
The events of the novel take place in a single day, with two contradictory visions of life from two characters from an Iraqi Christian family, drawn together by the situation in the country under the same roof in Baghdad. Youssef is an elderly man who is alone. He refuses to emigrate and leave the house he built, where he has lived for half a century. He still clings to hope and memories of a happy past. Maha is a young woman whose life has been torn apart by the sectarian violence. Her family has been made homeless and become separated from her, resulting in her living as a refugee in her own country, lodging in Youssef's house. With her husband she waits to emigrate from a country she feels does not want her. Hope collides with destiny when an event occurs which changes the life of the two characters forever. The novel raises bold and difficult questions about the situation of minorities in Iraq, with one character searching for an Iraq which was, while the other attempts to escape from the Iraq of today.

 I, She and Other Women  by Jana Elhassan
The heroine of the novel, Sahar, feels a sense of loss and loneliness within her family, following her marriage. She had hoped to be a different kind of woman from her mother but finds herself falling into the same trap after her marriage to Sami. In constructing another self in her imagination, she finds an outlet which brings intellectual and existential fulfilment. The novel has an innovative structure, psychological and philosophical depth and a profound humanity.

The Beaver by Mohammed Hassan Alwan
The novel's hero Ghalib al-Wajzi goes from Riyadh in Saudi Arabia to Portland in the USA. He travels back in time, through the story of three generations of his troubled family: separated parents, and brothers with nothing to connect them except the house where they live. Ghalib leaves Riyadh at the age of 40. He heads to a distant city to try to restore his memory with fragmented stories, with the help of a beaver that accompanies him on his fishing journeys to the Willamette River. Throughout the novel, he contemplates his relationship with his girlfriend who visits him over many years in different towns when she can get away from her husband.

Our Master by Ibrahim Issa
The novel relates the career of Sheikh Hatim Al-Shanawi (‘our master’), the permanent guest of a television programme presented by Anwar Outhman. The charming Sheikh answers viewers' questions and becomes one of the richest people in the country through exploiting visual media to the utmost degree for his own ends. By using his natural cunning he gives replies to please everyone, including the security services, though they bear no relation to his personal convictions. The hero has varied adventures such as his relationship with Nashwa, veiled from head to toe, who he later discovers is an actress working for the secret services. The hero plunges into the depths of Egyptian society and uncovers its secrets in a witty and satirical style. The characters appear to live in a corrupt environment dominated by fear, spying and bribery, where people lie to each other and are only concerned with outward appearances and the surface of reality.

The Bamboo Stick by Saud Alsanousi
Josephine comes to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a household servant, leaving behind her studies and family, who are pinning their hopes for a better future on her. In the house where she works, she meets Rashid, the spoiled only son of his mother Ghanima and father Issa. After a brief love affair, he decides to marry Josephine, on condition that the marriage remains a secret. But things do not go according to plan. Josephine becomes pregnant with José and Rashid abandons them when the child is less than two months old, sending his son away to the Philippines. There he struggles with poverty and clings to the hope of returning to his father's country when he is eighteen. It is at this point that the novel begins. The Bamboo Stick is a daring work which looks objectively at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Arab countries and deals with the problem of identity through the life of a young man of mixed race who returns to Kuwait, the ‘dream’ or ‘heaven’ which his mother had described to him since he was a child.

His Excellency the Minister by Hussein Al-Wad 
The novel tells the story of a Tunisian teacher who unexpectedly becomes a minister. He witnesses first hand the widespread corruption in the country, eventually becoming embroiled in it himself. It is a richly humorous novel which successfully describes many aspects of human weakness.

--
Biographies of the shortlisted authors

Sinan Antoon is a poet, novelist and translator who was born in Iraq in 1967. He has published two novels, I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody (City Lights, 2007) and The Pomegranate Alone (Arab Insitute for Research and Publishing, 2010) as well as a volume of poetry entitled The Baghdad Blues (Harbor Mountain Press, 2007) and a number of articles in Arabic and English. His writings have been translated into English, German, Italian, Norwegian and Portuguese. In 2003, he returned to Iraq to direct a documentary film, About Baghdad (2004), about Baghdad after dictatorship and occupation. He has translated the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Sargon Boulos, Saadi Youssef and others into English and his English version of Mahmoud Darwish's In the Presence of Absence (Archipelago) appeared in 2011. He has taught Arabic literature at the University of New York since 2005.

 Jana Elhassan was born in northern Lebanon in 1985 and lives in Beirut. In 2006, she obtained a bachelor’s degree and teaching diploma in English literature and is currently working on her masters. She has published investigative pieces and general articles in several newspapers and also literary texts and short stories in the cultural supplements of Al-Nahar and the Bahraini Cultural Magazine. Her first novel, Forbidden Desires was published in 2009 and won the Simon Hayek Prize in Batroun, northern Lebanon. She recently translated a publication by the University of Oxford entitled The Future of Technology in 2030. She currently works as a reporter for The Daily Star.

Mohammed Hassan Alwan was born in Riyadh, Saudia Arabia. He has an MBA from the University of Portland, Oregon. He has published four novels as well as short stories and writes a weekly column for a Saudi newspaper.

Ibrahim Issa is an Egyptian journalist, born in 1965. He began working on the Rose al-Youssef magazine when he was still in his first year of studies at the College of Media, Cairo. He was editor of the Al-Dustur daily newspaper from 1995-1998 and from 2004 until October 2010, when he was sacked by the paper's owner Sayyed Al-Bedawi. Ibrahim Issa has been among the most active of Egyptian journalists in protesting against political practices in Egypt, and as a result the authorities closed down three newspapers edited by him and confiscated his novel Assassination of the Big Man. He has been awarded several prizes including the Gebran Tueni Prize (2008), the Journalist of the Year Award in 2010, from the British Society of Editors, and the Index on Censorship Award's 2010 Freedom of Expression Award. His novels include: Hussein's Blood (1992), The Last Manifestation of Mary (1993), Blood on a Breast (1996), Assassination of the Big Man (1999) and National Ghosts (2008). Although he has left his post at Al-Dustur newspaper, Ibrahim Issa continues to edit the electronic publication The Original Dustur which is separate from the newspaper, and he has been editor of Al-Tahrir newspaper since July 2011.

Saud Alsanousi is a Kuwaiti novelist and journalist, born in 1981. His work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab magazines. He currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper. His first novel The Prisoner of Mirrors was published in 2010 and in the same year won the fourth Leila Outhman Prize, awarded for novels and short stories by young writers. In the Stories on the Air competition, organised in July 2011 by the Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic, he won first place for his story The Bonsai and the Old Man.

Hussein Al-Wad Hussein al-Wad is a university professor and researcher, born in 1948 in Moknine, Tunisia. He is the author of several books on classical and modern Arabic literature, notably his studies on Al-Ma'arri's The Epistle of Forgiveness, on Mutanabbi and aesthetic experience among the Arabs and on the poetic language of Abu Tamam. His previous novel, Scents of the City, was published in 2010.

Ziauddin Sardar is a leading British-Pakistani Muslim scholar and critic. In this interview with Susannah Tarbush, he talks about the magazine "Critical Muslim" he founded and which he sees as an "intellectual, cultural, philosophical and creative backup" for the revolutions of the Middle East 

In January a year ago, a refreshingly different kind of Muslim publication, the quarterly Critical Muslim (CM), was launched in Britain. Published by London-based C Hurst and Co, CM takes the form of an attractively-produced paperback book of over 250 pages. Its stated mission is to be a quarterly of "ideas and issues showcasing ground-breaking thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a rapidly changing, increasingly interconnected world". CM's founder and editor is leading Muslim scholar, critic and public intellectual Ziauddin Sardar. Born in Pakistan in 1951, Sardar grew up in London where he still lives. He is a prolific and much-read writer: since the late 1970s he has written some 45 books as well as numerous articles and essays. Sardar's CM co-editor is the prominent British-Syrian novelist, critic and blogger Robin Yassin-Kassab.

To mark the first anniversary of CM's launch, Qantara interviewed Ziauddin Sardar on the quarterly's concept, first year of publication, and future plans... read interview at Qantara.de

 

On Wednesday 23rd January, at 7pm, London’s oldest radical bookshop Housmans - at 5 Caledonian Road, King's Cross, N1 9DX - hosts poet and psychogeographer Aidan Andrew Dun who will read from and talk about his new book Unholyland–  a Palestinian-Israeli love story in the form of 264 sonnets. The book, published recently in London by Hesperus, is the first part of a trilogy: its full title is Unholyland: Rambam. The sonnets are arranged in 12 chapters on 153 pages and are followed by 20 pages of detailed notes.

Unholyland chronicles the love between Jalilah, a 16-year-old Palestinian rapper from Shatila camp in Beirut, and Moss  (pronounced Mosh, a diminutive of Moshe) Rambam, a Galilee-based Israeli Jewish DJ who is totally alienated by Israel's past and present policies towards the Palestinians.


Moss and Jalilah first meet after Jalilah smuggles herself over the border into Israel in order to perform at an underground Palestinian night club, Transworld. Rap and 'Slingshot' Hiphop are central elements of  Unholyland , woven through the text in its story, characters, rhythms and language. Slingshot was developed by Palestinian rappers, some such as DAM in Israel, others elsewhere such as The Palestinian Rapperz (P.R.) of Gaza. Slingshot derives its name from the biblical story of David fighting Goliath with a sling. In his notes to the sonnets Dun writes: "In spite of the vehemence of the name the fundamental philosophy of Slingshot Hiphop is non-violent, proposing that the way forward for Palestinian freedom-fighters is to "put down the gun and pick up the mic." Part of Dun's creative impetus in writing Unholyland came form learning of the popularity of Slingshot among young Israeli Jews.

The story opens just as Moss turns 18. He was conceived in 1992 on a beach in Goa, where his Israeli parents had like number of other young Israelis gone to get away from Israel and its "state terrorism" and the obligation to serve in the army. Moss was reared in Goa to a background of reggae music until when he was 14 his father became Hasidic and took his family back to Israel. Moss rebelled against his father and "became a DJ in Galilee, / 'MC Rambam' his main tag / sometimes also 'DJ Scallywag'; / struggled from his old man to be free"  . In Moss's view "Israel was not legit;  / Palestine was stolen bit by bit". Moss is a blue-eyed Rastaman with blond dreads.

Moss drives to Nazareth to see his Palestinian friend and hash supplier Rayyan, but an  Israeli attack on Gaza has triggered riots in Nazareth and the city is aflame.  Rayyan's sister Shaza and his mother rescue Moss from his car. Rayyan manages to smuggle a disguised Moss into Transworld to hear Jalilah, and Moss is dragged on stage to join this "half angel, half hot coquette".  Among the other characters in the story  are Jalilah's bodyguard brother Aziz (who gets together with Shaza), non-Israeli entrepreneur Sajjid and African hand-drummer  Laurence. Hashish, with its various origins and forms, is part of the subculture for some. There are references to Romeo and Juliet, and to Leila and Majnoun, in the poetry: "Let's remember that the way to truth / begins with the story of doomed youth."

The sonnets have pacey rhythms and a sense of  urgency. There is much humour and word play. The text is rich with the evocations of the landscape, history, Biblical references, art, mixed in with the contemporary storyline, of modern youth and transgressive love. There are scenes of brutality, and passages of lyrical tenderness and soft sensuality. Two centrepieces are Jalilah's rap on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and the rap Moss gives in answer after she challenges him to do so. A lot of spliffs and hash, haze. This first part of the Unholyland trilogy ends on a cliffhanger. Moss has told Jalilah that having turned 18 he has soon to enter the army, while Jalilah faces a dangerous journey trying to cross back into Lebanon.

The Northern Irish poet and critic Tom Paulin, Emeritus Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, says: "I was deeply moved by Unholyland - it has extraordinary energy, wit, knowledge, and beautifully marries the vernacular with rhyme. It reads beautifully and is like nothing else I've read."

The Palestinian-British writer, journalist and TV producer Karl Sabbagh, former managing director of Hesperus, has championed the work. He describes Dun's verses as "a  mixture of classical structures and free-ranging rap. They are earthy and immediate, and as well as appealing to regular poetry readers, Unholyland will attract a wider range of people who will be drawn along by the rapidly developing story."

Andrew Aidan Dun spent "a fantastical childhood" in the West Indies, and says he knew his calling for poetry from an early age. He returned to London as a teenager to live with his grandmother, the great ballerina and dance teacher Dame Marie Rambert, born Maryam Rambam in Poland. Marie Rambert, known as Mim, founded the Rambert Dance Company in 1926 and was a huge influence on dance in Britain and internationally.


In his introduction to Unholyland Dun writes that although his grandmother's ballet company toured the world she would never take the company to Israel, and would not set foot in that country. An older sister had settled in Israel after fleeing Warsaw and the Holocaust, but the sisters did not remain in touch. Even in the middle decades of the 20th century "when the new state of Israel was still riding a wave of world sympathy because of the Nazi scourge, Mim felt for the Palestinian people, dispossessed, cruelly treated. To my certain knowledge Rambert felt about the situation in the Middle East exactly as those courageous men, Daniel Barenboim, Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappe feel today."
And "as a direct descendant of Maimonides (Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known as The Rambam) Marie Rambert would have doubtless concurred with that philosopher's advice to his people when he asked them not to allow the sufferings of exile to drive a return to the land of memory."

Dun  writes of the profound effect his wise and spiritual grandmother had on his life. At a time when he was almost totally estranged from his father, she became "my guiding-light, my teacher, my guru, my friend."It was from his grandmother that he first heard, in Russian, "the magnificant sonnets of Pushkin, witty, heartbreaking, cynical and tender; the voice of Byron raised to a higher power." Unholyland takes as its model the Onegin sonnet form of Pushkin.

Dun is renowned for his long poetic and psychogeographical works published over the past two decades. After being drawn  back to London after years travelling abroad he explored the psychogeography of the King's Cross area of London, an area which has long attracted visionaries and which is in a process of regeneration. His first published epic poem Vale Royal (Goldmark Books), which took  him 23 years to write, was launched at the Royal Albert Hall in 1995. This led to his being called The Poet of Kings Cross.

In this video 'Kings Cross Mysteries' Dun speaks at the British Library about “the psychogeography of mysterious Kings Cross referencing William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud and the Old Church of the Pan Cross.” The talk was part of the Library’s event 'Unreal city? London in Writing'.

Vale Royal was followed by a string of Dun's poetry books published by Goldmark, starting with  Universal in 2002. Then came The Uninhabitable City (2005) and Salvia Divinorum (2007). His 283-page verse-novel McCool : A love-triangle set against conflict in the Middle-Eastappeared in 2010. His poems have also appeared a variety of publications.

Q and As with Aidan Andrew Dun

What inspired you to write Unholyland? 

I suppose the bottom line about all this, the reason why I came up with the title Unholyland, is because I feel that in Israel the Jews are being untrue to themselves, betraying the fundamental principles of Judaism, which replaces sacrificial mind-sets with ethical codes - and which does not as Abraham sacrifice Palestine as Isaac, which does not return evil for evil, violence for violence, which does not subscribe to a racist ideology, which holds out the hope of the redemption of the whole human family, Jewish, non-Jewish, alike.

As a friend of Jalilah's says in Unholyland 2 ............ "Zion is a state of mind, not a state in the Middle East."

I feel it is the work of artists not only to inoculate the world with disillusion but to remind humanity of the possibility of the Golden Age of cultural unity mediated by visionary art. The conflict in Palestine being certainly the most intractable on the planet seemed the place to engage. I also note that Britain has two outstanding connections with Palestine/Israel, one recent and historical, one 'legendary'. The first is the Mandate/Balfour political complex, and the second is the vast subject of 'The Matter of Britain', where Jesus, in his 'lost years', comes to Britain with his rich uncle Joseph of Arimathea - who trades in Phoenician ships for Cornish silver and tin - and sets up the Celtic Church himself in Glastonbury - and Kings Cross. William Blake believed the truth of this  - 'And did those feet...' -  and so do I. It is central to my philosophy.

I believe, as Blake did, that work is prayer, and without wanting to sound precious I see my work as a long sustained meditation for peace. Everywhere I hear artists these days saying war is ineradicable and that to believe otherwise is fanatical. For me these statements are simply a confession that such art is too frail to face the existential challenge of replacing 'corporeal war' with 'mental fight' and I shall not cease... Insh'allah. Being, through my grandmother Marie Rambert a lineal descendant of Maimonides, I feel the responsibility of this connection very deeply, specially because, as I point out in the preface, a thousand years ago he recommended strongly to his fellow-Jews that they not attempt to return to Palestine.

Where did the rap and hip hop elements in Unholyland and the characters of Jalilah and Moss originate? 

Unholyland really began when I saw the documentary Rap Refugees [video here - the film was part of the 2010 BBC series Syrian School] in which two schoolgirls Shaza and Rahab from Yarmouk refugee camp in Damascus are shown fighting the school authorities for the right to rap. They face profound opposition from their elders and betters but talk charmingly, poignantly, about their love of rap, their passion for expressing their longing for home, their thirst for justice, through this medium. These two captured my imagination completely.  So Jalilah is based on these two lovely girls struggling for the right to speak in a new way. Though she's based in Shatila Camp in Beirut, not in Damascus. How unbearable to think of the situation in Syria and the predicament of young Shaza and Rahab and so many others trapped in all this turmoil.


Moss has many roots. I have a friend in Israel who organizes a fairly famous transcultural Arab/Israeli storytelling festival near Nazareth. I also became aware early on of the talented American Hasidic rapper/rootsman, Matisyahu, who, I know has collaborated with Arabic artists. I also detected early on the relative scarcity and poverty of Israeli rap, while observing the paradoxical attraction of Israeli kids to Slingshot Hiphop. I also became interested in Israeli right-wing rapper Subliminal, not because he can rap, he can't, but because he and Tamer Nafer of Dam were friends before the Intifada and Subliminal helped Nafer find fame, so he must be OK deep down. A film exists about their friendship and its implosion called Channels of Rage but I have only seen clips.

Another source of the poem was the tour of Israel in the mid-nineties of Jamaican roots-reggae trio Israel Vibration, probably the hippest and coolest music unit ever. All three guys are on crutches and when I first saw them on film perform to an Arabic/Israeli audience that was a big shift in consciousness for me. So they figure in the poem as prophetic unifying symbols of the golden age returning through music as Plato speculates.

How did publication of Unholyland come about and how did you get to know Karl Sabbagh?

A good friend, a leading literary academic at Oxford, put me in touch with Karl, who at that time was heading Hesperus. He took one look at Unholyland and decided to go for it. We met a few times for lunch in a small Lebanese restaurant near his offices and one of Karl's first questions to me was "How many times have you visited Israel?" When I said I had never been there he was astonished and I remember him saying that the poem reads as if I had been there for years, which pleased me, coming from him, enormously. However, I have lived in various Islamic societies including in Morocco - many times - and magnificent Afghanistan - where I stayed in 1976 for 6 weeks while on the road in my world-travels. Karl gave me his book Palestine: a Personal History' in those early days and we became real friends and remain so now, my wife and I have even stayed with Karl and Su at their home. 

Please say something on the structure of the particular sonnet form you choose here and how it may mirror rap in some way. Have you used this form in your previous books? 

I used the sonnet form of Unholyland first in my first verse-novel McCool which, set in London and Lebanon, seems to have predicted the Arab Spring and the Syrian Revolution. I believe this sonnet form, rhyming ababccddeffegg, can be traced back though Pushkin who used it in Onegin, via La Fontaine, to the time of the troubadours, obviously very influenced by Arabic culture. I have made a slight modification to the tetrametric line-structure, allowing myself sometimes a shorter 7-syllable variation to the basic 8-syllable metre. Pushkin allows the 9-syllable line of course and so do I. This 7-syllable variation produces a higher velocity in the poem making it more modern: shorter lines are so in vogue, they are certainly more difficult to write.

Writing Unholyland must have taken a lot of energy. How long did it take to write and how easily did it come or did it vary from day to day? 

 I usually write every day, from early morning until inspiration flags; on a good day this may go on until midnight. I normally don't eat for 4 or 5 hours at first, drinking lots of cold water and breaking for short yoga/breathing sessions to re-center myself physically. Unholyland was written in about 8 months.

Unholyland is the first volume of a trilogy. How far have you got with the subsequent two volumes? 

I have Unholyland: Jalilah very nearly finished. The poem is exactly the same length and format as the first volume: 12 chapters of 22 sonnets each. Unholyland: Jalilah concentrates more on Jalilah's narrative, her feelings, her background in the refugee-camp of Shatila/Beirut. While the first volume sees things through Moshe's eyes, the third volume will bring them together - or possibly tear them apart.

Where have you so far presented Unholyland to audiences, and what was the reaction? 

At the Dragon Cafe, Southwark, at Christmas with an audience of 150, I intro'd with Bob Marley's No Woman No Cry which I played solo on a Spanish guitar, dedicating it to the Palestinian women whose tears have filled the Mediterranean Sea. The room went very quiet. When the audience understood this thing was about reconciliation in the light of truth, non-violence symbolized by romance in the face of war, they got very involved. There is much activist-fatigue about these days: understandably, a 'new' take on the problems of the Middle East is refreshing. I recited about 15 to 20 sonnets from the first half of the poem, little groups of sonnets sometimes, at other times single verses. Lightning intros commented on these so that the audience travelled in a linear way thru the plot with me, most references clear. Then, after a good half an hour, I ended with Jalilah's rap The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine which is very dramatic in performance because I've rapped it myself to my music in the studio and live so many times. But unaccompanied, the effect is devastating. I left it there.

The second reading was at Pentameters, the atmospheric theatre in Hampstead,. at the fest of visionary poetry in late November. My night was called Burning Tyger Revue. I invited Marius Kociejowski author of The Pigeon Wars of Damascus, and a fine poet - and Stephen Watts, another fine poet, to share the stage that night. Same intro, stark moving song from Marley. Then the sonnets marching into rapt silence of a blacked-out auditorium. Same climax, the seven or eight sonnets preceding Jalilah's rap, then the rap itself, authentic, horrifying, lyrical, just like Slingshot.

The third was at Poltroon, a difficult rock-poetry room, very louche and decadent sometimes, very punk-funny often, risky stuff, but always real poets too in an intense house. Here I got deeply into the body-language of performance, miked on a small stage in semi-darkness I let out the whole of Chapter 9 with only the briefest intro, really brief, just explaining what Slingshot is about, truth and non-violence, using my line which goes: Many don't imagine Jewish DJ's falling in love with Palestinian women rappers, but it happens in Unholyland, as in real life.'

This set the whole thing up nicely and it was word-bombs-away. In the first few sonnets I got some cool ad-libs in Arabic from the darkness, I knew and welcomed them, growls of Arabic appreciation from in front. I never saw the guy and can't recall the sayings now, but it was very encouraging. I also got big chuckles at Poltroon; this is a hard-core lit-crowd who get every nuance, light and dark.

I remember near the end at Poltroon climaxing on the sonnets where Jalilah is challenging Moshe to rap in effect: 'He'd spit his wisdom Blam blam blam' I span around in a half-crouch and machine-gunned the audience with that phrase, they loved! Then, after lotsa applause a long silence, most unusual for Poltroon. MC got up well-shaken and said: Can we believe? he said, several times... while making it clear he was quite persuaded himself...

Moved a lot of books on these 3 nights, signed a lot of books. Really hoping for a big one at beloved Housmans.

After your next reading from Unholyland, at Housmans on 23rd January are further gigs planned, and would you hope to have readings in the Middle East at some point?

I'm concentrating this year on launching the poem and the reading at Housmans is part of an ongoing campaign to get the poem noticed and circulated. I have further readings planned; the next is on Feb 14th at Central St Martins in a specially-built wooden theatre. The British Library is interested in a perfomance, and Filthy MacNasty's lit-venue in Islington will be in April on a date to be confirmed. Karl is very keen to help me read in Palestine/Israel at some point this year, I would be so proud to read at Birzeit University, for instance, which is one of the things he has in mind I believe.

How do you view the cultural boycott of Israel? 

I yearn to see Zionism redefined as a cultural movement as proposed by Martin Buber who, as you may know, deeply resented Herzl's political and racial definition of the term. Meanwhile I do support the academic and cultural boycott of Israel, with the proviso that Ilan Pappe, Daniel Barenboim, Avi Shlaim are the real Israeli voices and should be heard loud and clear. I try to avoid buying Israeli goods including music software and support Palestine by buying Palestinian olive-oil.

The High Impact: Literature from the Low Countries evening at the Tabernacle in Notting Hill, West London W11 last Saturday was a rousing finale to the six-day UK tour of Dutch-writing authors from the Netherlands and Belgium. The tour had kicked off in Oxford, and then moved to Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Norwich before ending up in London for a packed-out Gala Gathering at the Tabernacle.

I had been particularly drawn to the event by the presence on the programme of the fine Palestinian-Dutch poet, actor and director Ramsey Nasr. The poet was born in Rotterdam in 1974 to a Dutch mother and a father originally from the West Bank village of Salfit. For the past four years he has been the Netherlands poet laureate - a position which, unlike its British counterpart, is decided by a public vote.

I had previously seen and blogged on Nasr when he appeared at the London Review Bookshop in London in June 2011 in conversation with poet Ruth Padel. That event marked the launch of the  first-ever selection of Nasr’s work in English translation: Heavenly Life: Selected Poems. The anthology was translated by prizewinning Australian translator David Colmer and published by  Banipal Books, with a foreword by Padel. (The book was reviewed in Banipal magazine by Norbert Hirschhorn.) The London Review Bookshop published Nasr’s then latest poem the house of europe in a limited four-page edition of 250 signed copies, in Dutch and in Colmer's English translation. Banipal issue 35 had as its cover story a special feature showcasing the work of Nasr and 10 other Arab writers who write in Dutch,  translated into English.

It was a pleasure at the start of the Tabernacle evening to hear Ramsey recite from the stage. Goldsmith said he was "one of the best poets I've heard", and noted it was his last week as poet laureate. He began with the house of europe, followed by I wish I was two citizens (then I could live together). Much of Nasr's poetry is linked to music, and his third poem was in memory of  his favourite composer Dimitri Shostakovich (1906-75).  Nasr said  he was so obsessed by the composer that he had visited his widow. The poem he recited was allegretto from the three-poem sequence winter sonata  (without piano and viola) . The allegreto poem is built around a guided tour of a garden "approved and designed by the most supreme leader of the proletarians.."

Although I had originally gone to the Tabernacle mainly out of a wish to see Nasr, I found the evening as a whole a a real eye-opener. The Dutch are renowned for their interest in, and translation of, world literatures. But I had not realised quite how much Dutch literature, fiction and  non-fiction, has been translated and published in English in recent years. The translators whose names cropped up during the evening - sometimes repeatedly - included (with links to profiles by High Impact) David Colmer, Sam Garrett, Liz Waters, Ina Rilke, Nora Mahony and Stacey Knecht. 

The tour was advertised as *6 AUTHORS * 6 CITIES * 6 DAYS. In But , as High Impact artistic director Rosie Goldsmith, pointed out at the Tabernacle the number of writers had been 7,with travel writer Geert Mak joining as a special guest. The other writers, in addition to Ramsey Nasr, were non-fiction literary reportage writer Lieude Joris; comedian, satirist, actor and novelist Herman Koch; novelist Peter Terrin;  short story writer and novelist Chika Unigwe, and illustrator and graphic novelist Judith Vanistendael. The tour was blogged on the High Impact website by Michele Hutchison.

Three prominent UK-based writers who have based famous novels on Dutch themes took part in the Tabernacle evening as Gala Guests - David Mitchell, Deborah Moggach and Tracey Chevalier. They read extracts from their novels, respectively  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Tulip Fever and Girl with a Pearl Earring which was made into an award-winning film (reviewed here by Will Self) starring Scarlett Johnansson and Colin Firth). The three novels are historical. Two are set in the Golden Age of Dutch painting.  Tulip Fever was inspired by a 17th century Dutch painting bought by Moggach,  and Girl with a Pearl Earring weaves a narrative around of the Vermeer painting of that era. Mitchell's prizewinning novel opens at the end of the 18th century in the Dutch East India Company trading post of Dejima in Nagasaki, Japan. Mitchell gave a rollicking read in the voice of his drunken narrator.


The Nigerian writer Chika Unigwe who lives in Belgium and writes in English and Dutch won the BBC Short Story Award in 2003 and the Commonwealth Short Story Award in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2004. Her novels are The Phoenix (2005), On Black Sisters' Street (Jonathan Cape, 2009)  and Night Dancer published  by Jonathan Cape in 2012, having been published in Dutch as Nachtdanser in 2011. At the Tabernacle she read some of her new work. Unigwe gives a voice to those immigrants to Belgium whom "you don't hear about because they are not terrorists or footballers." On Black Sisters' Street focuses on the lives of African sex workers in Brussels.
report and pictures by Susannah Tarbush

'in the West and even in Arab countries we always talk about the same Palestinian writers'

Banipal's co-founder and editor, the Iraqi novelist Samuel Shimon, introduced the event. Shimon said he had first met Asma'a at the Frankfurt Book Fair some five years ago and had met Marwan last year. Prior to their work appearing in translation in Banipal 45 he published the two poets in Arabic on his cultural website kikah.com.

In order to show how the Palestinian literary landscape has changed in a decade Shimon flourished two issues of the magazine: Banipal 45 containing Writers from Palestine, and Banipal 15/16 , published almost exactly 10 years ago, which includes a  130-page special feature Contemporary Palestinian Literature. A comparison of the names of the authors published in the two issues shows that very few are the same: nearly all the Palestinian authors in Banipal 45 are new.




Shimon said some people have asked him why Banipal has published its Writers from Palestine special section.  "I told them I spoke with the Qattan Foundation two years ago and told them I wanted to bring new writers to our magazine in the English language. I read a lot in newspapers and on websites about the new names on the literary scene in Palestine, but here in the West and even in Arab countries we always talk about the same names of Palestinian writers".  

He gave as examples the names of  Ghassan Kanafani, and Palestinian women writers  Sahar Khalifeh, Liana Badr, or Samira Azzam . "But in the  last 10 or 15 years there are new writers in Palestine, and their writing  is completely different from that of the old generation." 

He noted that in her editorial for Banipal 15/16 Obank had written that that issue celebrated Palestinian literature not primarily out of solidarity but out of "admiration because we love their literature. We love their writing, and then we have solidarity with their case."

In the 1970s Shimon was a member of the PLO in Lebanon. In preparing Writers from Palestine  he was happy to have been invited to Ramallah, where he met many friends. It had been "like a dream" to walk around  Ramallah. He had also gone to Haifa and Acre. "I really can write a book about my love for Palestine and how proud I feel to be engaged in this case, this literature." 

He recalled telling Obank after the launch of Banipal that it was his dream to one day publish a magazine devoted only to Palestinian literature. "I said at least we have to take care of the Palestinian writers in our magazine." After Banipal launched its book publishing arm Banipal Books in 2004, it published books by Palestinian authors. "I published stories by one of the masters of the short story Mahmoud Shukair  and we published also half-Dutch half-Palestinian  Ramsey Nasr , and Issa Boullata.

"And always I mentioned in our magazine the contribution of Palestinian writers in Arab literature. It is immense from Jabra Ibrahim Jabra to Emile Habibi to Mahmoud Darwish, to Taufiq Ziad to Tawfiq Sayegh and Fadwa Touqan."

'a new and refreshing literary map of that forsaken country'

The introductory article to Writers from Palestine, is  by acclaimed Palestinian poet, author and translator Anton Shammas who was born in Israel in 1950. He describes the section as "a very special amalgam of young Palestinian voices, whose writing offers a new and refreshing literary map of that forsaken country, and whose almost unprecedented collective presence realises a long overdue literary dream." 

The main drive behind this initiative was "to open up the English gates for some new waves, some new and young and uncompromising voices from all regions of Palestine (totally ignoring what is euphemistically referred to as the Green Line)." The voices are young and new "not necessarily because of age but, rather, because of a fresh and ingenious look at Palestinian realities, which the older generation was probably unprepared to fathom."





 
The Mosaic Rooms event was compered by Omar Qattan (pictured left), secretary of the board of the Qattan Foundation. Introducing Azaizeh he said "I am very honoured to say she is one of the laureates of the Qattan Foundation's Young Writer Award, in 2010 for her collection Liwa now published by Dar Al-Ahliya in Amman." Her poetry has been translated into English, German, Farsi, Swedish, Italian and Hebrew."
 
Azaizeh was born in 1985 in the village of Daborieh, Lower Galilee, and graduated in English Literature and Journalism from the University of Haifa in 2006. A journalist since 2004, she writes for a number of Palestinian and Arab newspapers. She is currently presenter of a Palestinian television programme on culture and art, a lecturer in creative writing and editor of the poetry section of qadita.net.  

Marwan Makhoul was born to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother in 1979 in the village of Boquai'a in Upper Galilee. His first book of poetry Ard al-Bassiflora al-Hazinah (Land of the Sad Passiflora) was published in 2007 by Al-Jamal Publishers. In the same year a second edition was published in Haifa by Maktabat Kul Shai'. A third edition appeared in Cairo in 2012. Makhoul's poetry has been translated into English, Turkish, Italian, German, French, Hebrew and Serbian. In 2009 he won prize for best playwright in the Acre Theatre Festival for his first play.

Makhoul has a degree in Civil Engineering from Al-Mustaqbal College, and is a a civil engineer and director of a construction company.. He lives in the city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha, in Galilee. (In an October 2012 interview with Haaretz he spoke frankly of the difficulties he and his wife have had living in the  mixed Arab-Jewish city of Ma'alot-Tarshiha where they moved in 2004).



Makhoul recited the poems On the Tel Aviv Train; Hello Beit Hanoun; Portrait of the People of Gaza; An Arab at Ben Gurion Airport (Hello Beit Hanoun and Daily Poems are on the Banipal website). He read in an engagingly warm, husky voice, accompanying his words with expressive gestures. 

His long poem An Arab at Ben Gurion Airport (English translation below) is a tour de force. Its beginning  "I’m an Arab! / I shouted, at the doorway to departures, / short-cutting the woman soldier’s path to me."
resonates with the opening of Mahmoud Darwish's 1964 poem Identity Card "Write Down! /  I am an Arab". 

The poem alludes also to another late 1948 Palestinian writer, Emile Habibi, whose famous 1974 novel The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist examines the condition of being a Palestinian who remained in Israel. The Arabic term translated as Pessoptimist - al-Mutasha'il - combines mutasha'im (pessimist) and mutafa'il (optimist). An Arab at Ben Gurion Airport includes: "Pess-optimistic I was in the seventies / but I’m optimistic about the roars of disobedience / right now being raised to you in Gilboa gaol...." (a reference to Palestinian hunger strikes).

In the Q and A session an audience member said when Makhoul read this poem in Arabic "I thought it was kind of surreal the way you were reading it and it made me laugh although you are writing about a bad experience and very sad subject. There was sukhriya [irony]. Whereas when it was read in English it was completely serious and very heart wrenching. How did you write it, what were you trying to portray when you were writing it? Did you want it to be sukhriya?"

'we've surpassed the era of lamentation which I felt was more like a general hysteria'

Makhoul said: "Stephen's read in a much more dramatic way because that is his style. It is also the nature of poetry: whoever reads it will interpret it in his own way. The reason I write ironically is that we have been lamenting for years and years but this enemy seems to be very obstinate and therefore I feel that we've surpassed the era of lamentation which I felt was more like a general hysteria and I'm now trying to capture a new voice which is more ironic. This is my character ,this is my personality." To audience hilarity he said: "For example a man walked in just now looking like Jesus Christ and I said, 'what made him get up?'"



Makhoul added: "If I were to step back a little bit, in the Second World War 36 million people were killed and art and literature and all expressive arts were deeply affected by this, we went into a phase of total arbitrariness, the theatre of the absurd, and so on. And so if you imagine a guy who's in his Phantom jet above Gaza playing Play Station and killing 1444 ... there is really nothing one can say except to be deeply ironic and sarcastic."

Stephen Watts was "very aware when I was reading the English translation that I was missing a lot of irony, I was really striving ... there is great complexity and irony and also yes, any situation of being asked questions at an airport in whatever circumstances - let alone the circumstances of this poem - there's a surreality about it, but I chose to read it in a particular way." 

A member of the audience quoted the Jalal al Din Rumi aphorism "the wailing of broken hearts is the gateway to God" and said he had often felt, and others had observed, that the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust made many Jewish people turn away from God, turn away from faith,  how could God have allowed this to happen. He asked: "Do you feel that the suffering, the contemporary agony of Palestine is driving .. let's say poetry for want of a better term .. away from spiritual revelation or towards it?"

Azaizeh said she doubted whether this is the case in Palestinian poetry: "On the contrary I think Palestinian people think they are suffering because God is examining them. I think religion doesn't have to do with the Palestinian case regarding to suffering and war experiences and stuff like this. But regarding literature and poetry modernity is more engaged with ...   visions  as ideology, not as a response to suffering, and I think it's more mature, more valuable and remarkable.

"I'm not saying that Palestinian literature and poetry is in its  modernity is fantastic, I have also my reservations on everything that has been written and is being written but still you can't see any unreligious views or points of views by Palestinian poets and writers. I think it comes from a more mature angle and not as a reaction of being under occupation or suffering or stuff like this. Yes we did pass this catastrophe the Nakba but religion is not existed in this .. I think".

The poets were asked about the place of Palestinian poetry as an art form within the Israeli and Palestinian educational systems and its role in critical thinking, especially at the secondary level.

Makhoul said the Israelis will not allow Palestinian poetry - and certain not political poetry - onto the curriculum. "When in the early days of Oslo there was an attempt to introduce a Mahmoud Darwish poem into the Israeli curriculum the whole state stood up against it. Occupation tends to start from the cultural sphere and then into the military .."

Asma'a said it was a question not only of poetry, but of the whole curriculum. When she was helping her 11-year-old niece with her geography homework "she had a lesson on Galilee and how people settled in the Galilee as if it was a desert, nobody was there ...  suddenly people came from the sky and settled in the Galilee" in the 20th century. Everything in the curriculum -- history, geography, politics, and literature -- is geared towards  building this Arab Israeli who is inserted "from the sky into this place" and is not seen as a native of the land, part of a  native nation. 

Omar Qattan added that as regards the Palestinian curriculum Palestinian poetry is intensively taught in a kind of traditional way. There are attempts to change this, but it's a long process.

The poets were aksed whether in modern Palestinian poetry is there as much of a divide between academic poetry, performance poetry, and storytelling, as there is perhaps in the West

Makhoul said  "there is the classical Arabic poetry - a lot of that is being regurgitated now - I tend to fall asleep after the first verse  - and then there is modern poetry:  most poetry today is written in the form of free verse." He added: "Some of our classical  poets are more enterprising and more modernising than many of the poets writing today."
report and photos by Susannah Tarbush
---

From the poems by Asma'a Azaizeh translated by Khaled al-Masri for Banipal 45:

A CORPSE IN RAMALLAH

Ramallah is arid and I am a fish that must transform its space into a womb.

Who am I now?
Is my foolish old voice turning into a woman?

If only I were a man!

How beautiful it would be, before I go to bed,
to piss on my emotions standing up,

There is no wind here to move my face, so I can smile.
It is the sun that burns my lips.

Bayreuth
and Wagner’s ghost
are more merciful than Ramallah
and my ghost.

--
REVIVAL

That was some raven tonight, cawing

at the window
to snatch the laughter from my little death!
And in the morning,
the explosion of dawn woke me
and a feather fell from my ear.

--- 

From the poems by Marwan Makhoul translated by Raphael Cohen

AN ARAB AT BEN GURION AIRPORT

I’m an Arab!
 I shouted, at the doorway to departures,
 short-cutting the woman soldier’s path to me.
 I went up to her and said: Interrogate me! But
 quickly, if you don’t mind. I don’t want to miss
 departure time.

She said: Where are you from?

Descended from Ghassassanian kings of Golan is my heroism, I said.
 My neighbour was Rehab the harlot of Jericho
 who gave Joshua the wink on his way to the West Bank
 the day he occupied the land that occupied history after him
 from the very first page.
 My answers are as stony as Hebron granite:
 I was born in the time of the Moabites who came down before you to this submissive ancient land.
 My father a Canaanite
 my mother a Phoenician, from South Lebanon of old.
 My mother, her mother died two months ago
 and she was unable to see her mother off two months ago.
 I wept in her arms so that on-looking from Buqaya might console
 the worst blow of tragedy and fate:
 Lebanon, you see impossible sister,
 and my mother’s mother alone
 to the north!

She asked me: Who packed your bag for you?

I said: Osama Ibn Laden! But hold on,
 take it easy. It’s no more than a joke in poor taste,
 a quip that the realists here like me use professionally
 for the struggle.
 Sixty years I’ve fought with words about peace.
 I don’t attack any settlement
 and I don’t have a tank like you do
 ridden by a soldier to tickle Gaza.
 Dropping a bomb from an Apache isn’t on my CV
 not because I lack qualifications,
  no, but because I see on the horizon a ripple echoing
 enough to the out-of-place revolt of the non-violent
 and to good behaviour.

Did anyone give you something on the way here? she asked.

I said: An exile from Nayrab refugee camp
 gave me memories
 and the key to a house from the fabled past.
 The rust on the key made me edgy, but I’m
 like stainless steel, I compose self with self should I grow nostalgic,
 for the groans of refugees
 spread wings of longing across borders.
 No guard can stop it, nor thousands
 and not you for sure.

She said: Do you have any sharp implements in your possession?

I said: My passion
 my skin, my olive complexion
 my being born here in innocence, but for fate.
 Pess-optimistic I was in the seventies
 but I’m optimistic about the roars of disobedience
 right now being raised to you in Gilboa gaol.
 I’m straight out of the
 tragic novels of history, the end of the story
 a funeral for the past and a wedding
 in the not far-off hall of hope.
 A raisin from the Jordan Valley raised me
 and taught me to speak.
 I have a child whose due date I postponed, so he’ll arrive
 to a morning not made of straw like today, daughter of Ukraine.
 The muezzin’s chanting moves me, even though I’m an atheist.
 I shout to mute the mournful wailing of the flutes,
 to turn pistols into the undying strains of violins.

The soldier took me to search my things
 ordering me to open my bag.
 I do what she wants!
 And from the depths of the bag ooze my heart and my song,
 the meaning of it all slips out eloquently and crudely, within it all that is me.

She asked me: And what’s this?

I said: The sura of the Night Journey ascending the ladder of my veins, the Tafsir of Jalalayn,
 the poetry of Abu Tayyeb al-Mutannabi and my sister Maram,
 as a photograph and real at the same time,
 a silk shawl to enwrap and protect me from the chill exile of relatives,
 tobacco from a kiosk in Arraba that made my head spin until doubts got stoned.
 Inside me a fierce loyalty, the wild thyme of my country,
 the fieriness of pomegranate blossoms, Galilean and sparkling.
 Inside me agate, camphor-wood, incense and my being alive,
 the pearl that is Haifa: scintillating, everlasting, illuminating,
 preposterous, relaxing in the pocket of our return for one reason
 only: we worshipped our good intentions and bound
the nakba to a slip in the past and in me!

The soldier hands me over to a policeman
who pats me down and shouts in surprise:
What’s this!?

The manhood of my nation, I say
 and my progeny, the fold of my family and two dove’s eggs
 to hatch, male and female, from me and for me.
 He searches me
 for anything that could pose a threat
 but this stranger is blind
 forgetting the more destructive and important bombs within:
 my spirit, my defiance, the swoop of the hawk in my breath and my body
 my birthmark and my valour. That is me
 whole and complete in a way this fool
 will never see.

Now, after two hours of psychological grappling
 I lick my wounds for a sufficient five minutes
 then embark on the plane that has taken off. Not to leave
 and not to return
 but to see the soldier below me
 the policeman in the national anthem of my shoes below me
 and below me a big lie of tin-can history
 like Ben Gurion become as always, as always, as always
 below me.
 --

HELLO BEIT HANOUN

Hello!
Beit Hanoun?
I heard on the news
that an artisan baker has come
to distribute bread
on the back of fresh artillery,
and I also heard
that one of his loaves feeds at least twenty children
and is so warm it burns, and solid
like a randomly targeted shell.
They said
the children woke up early that day
not to go to school
but to the local youth club
opposite the town’s playground
that in summer is big enough for two massacres
and a certain hope, the hope to live.
I also heard
that when they were on their way they made light of their wounds
and poured blood on the corners
till blood took the colour of the streets
and feelings.
When I saw what I saw on the screen
I thought I was dreaming
or the TV was dreaming the impossible made real.
I never imagined, Beit Hanoun,
that you’d mean anything to me
what with all the fun I’m having
like being busy with friends discussing
whether wine in the bottle
ferments or not.
I never knew you’d mean anything to me,
even something small something small,
Beit Hanoun.
Hello . . . ?
Hello . . . ?
Beit Hanoun?
Can you hear me?
I think the phone’s not working or is perhaps asleep,
it is very late after all.
Never mind, let it go.
I’ve nothing better to do
than catch up with my brothers shading themselves
by the axed trunk of Arab solidarity.
Goodbye, Beit Hanoun.
Goodbye.

--
DAILY POEMS

The homeland having fallen down a well
and after sixty years, it’s up to us
to raise the rope a little, then let it fall again,
 for only thus will hope learn patience.

***

There are things I don’t understand,
not being an Israeli
and not being entirely Palestinian.

***

My country is the rape victim
 I will marry.

***
My grandfather told me: Palestine is an irregular verb in the past.
 My father said: No, it’s in the present tense.
 I say, and a plane has just landed nearby: My grandfather’s right
and my father too.

--

The Beirut-based journal Portal 9 makes an auspicious debut 
by
Susannah Tarbush

In his first editorial as editor-in-chief of the new Beirut-based journal Portal 9 - which describes itself as "an exploration of the nexus between urbanism and culture by people who care about cities and think rigorously about them" - the Lebanese poet, journalist and translator Fadi Tofeili turns for inspiration not to a renowned architect or city planner but to the great Portuguese poet, author and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935). This indicates the breadth of vision and multi-disciplinary approach of Portal 9's editor-in-chief, who has three poetry books to his name and has translated many literary works. The full title of the publication whose editorial team he leads is Portal 9: Stories and Critical Writing About the City.



Tofeili introduces his editorial with an extract from Pessoa's acclaimed The Book of Disquiet in the Penguin translation by Richard Zenith. He points out that Pessoa's works include a  guide book to the city the Portuguese poet loved: Lisbon - What the Tourist Should See.

"In a journal about the city, place, and urbanism, we call upon and seek inspiration from Pessoa because his body of work stands as a paragon of how to render the city - its places and spaces - a field for unbridled interplay of the imagination," Tofeili writes.

The theme of Portal 9's first issue is The Imagined. "Does imagination call for the city? Or does the city call for the imagination?" asks Tofeili. "These questions will forever remain open to debate, a debate that will continue to affect our relationship to the city itself - for whenever we believe the city to be complete, we return to the imagined that challenges our presuppositions. And so, the city regains its dynamic, its premise."

Tofeili writes: "'The Imagined' in the city through time is an exploration of the metaphysical and probable realities, as well as the internal unbound logic of the city. It is an open path to unexpected passages and countless gateways. 'The Imagined' has no destination, no boundaries, no port of call. Its meaning eludes conclusions. If 'The Imagined' leads to and reveals a particular place, then that place will embark with 'The Imagined' on a journey of endless self-discovery."

Cities are like socio-economic being, always under construction, forever in formation, Tofeili observes. And cities that witnessed profound change in history, cities like Beirut, despite its troubled history and successive shocks, "have the privilege to deepen and broaden the meaning of urbanism. It is a privilege with the risk of cruelty, but a privilege all the same. For who is to say that cruelty is not intrinsic to the city?"  Tofeili concludes: "This journal aspires to be a new gateway, a new portal, to Beirut. We invite you to enter this portal and to reflect on its many prospects."


Portal 9 is backed by Solidere, the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central District, and is published twice a year by Solidere Management Services. Its website is at portal9journal.org . It is on Facebook and  Twitter and has a  Blog . The printed edition of Issue #1 can be ordered via the Portal 9 website from Antoine Online for $20.

Why the name Portal 9? An explanatory note in the journal explains that in the 19th century there were seven fortified gates, or portals, in the walls around Beirut. The number was considered a symbol of perfection and represented the seven families who guarded those entrances. As the walled town grew, an eighth gate was added. "Portal 9 is an imaginary opening into the city, an intensive exploration of the urban condition from architecture and planning to metropolitan mores and cultural pursuits. It is a gateway to endless possibilities."

While it is regional and international in outlook, the Lebanese origins of Portal 9 are evident. The first article in the English edition of Issue #1 is an excellent, moving piece by Lebanese poet and writer Youssef Bazzi,  entitled  Before With My Father, After for My Son: Three generations live in the shadow of a fractured city. (Bazzi is the author of Yasser Arafat Looked at Me and Smiled: Diary of a Fighter.)

Bazzi meditates on the changes he witnessed to downtown Beirut in 1975-91 during the civil war, and then since 1991. Over the past few years he has come to believe that the city centre is not his city any more. "It is my son's city. But why is it that, so far, he does  not have a real relationship with downtown? I began to imagine him and his generation, writing a life for the city center and for themselves, different from the one that we had lived." Bazzi spins an imaginary journey for his son through Beirut threading "the invisible strings between the city's parts and parcels, making memories on pavements, balconies, entrances, exits, alleys, streets, rooftops, rooms."

Portal 9 is published in the form of a handsome, elegantly-designed journal in separate English and Arabic editions, which fit snugly side by side in a cardboard sleeve open at both sides which serves as the cover. The cover text and illustration is displayed in English on one side of this cover sleeve, and Arabic on the other. The beautiful design is greatly to the credit of Portal 9'screative director Nathalie Elmir, who has been involved with the project from the start.


The striking cover image of Issue #1 shows a woman in a red summer dress and yellow scarf standing in front of body of water with a building in the distance, her arm waving in the air. The building is in fact the Suez Canal Company in Port Said, and the picture was published in Al Musawwar magazine in 1957. The same image accompanies an article by New York University doctoral candidate Mohamed Elshahed on Port Said 1957: Egyptian Modernism Unfurled.

The English and Arabic editions have cream covers with a minimalist design incorporating just the title and some main highlights from  Issue #1 including South Sudan's new Capital City - Baghdad visionary Kahtan Al-Madfai - Reconstructing Port-au-Prince - Chinese City in the Fast Lane -  Beirut through Three Generations.

The list of contributors includes well-known names from Arabic journalism, culture and the arts, including from Lebanon Rasha Atrash, Hazem Saghieh, Hazem Al Ameen, Waddah Chararah, Mohamed Soueid and Hatem Imam. From Egypt there are Youssef Rakha and Omar Kholeif (who is Portal 9's reviews and critique editor). From Iraq, novelist Shaker Al Anbari interviews Kahtan Al-Madfai: Baghdad Visionary Octogenarian Architect.

Among the non-Arab contributors to Issue #1 are Brian Whitaker of the Guardian newspaper (writing on  Express Delivery of the Arab Revolts ), Pooja Bhatia (who writes on Haiti's capital Port au Prince two years after the earthquake, and Copenhagen-based anthropologist Michael Ulfstjerne. 

 
 Amman: illustration from Hazem Al Ameen's article No Place to Call Home

The content of the English and Arabic editions is not identical. "The English and Arabic editions have some similarities but they are not mirror images of each other," says the London-based editor-at-large of Portal 9, editor, journalist, and curator Malu Halasa. And in addition, the Portal 9 website carries some online-only articles.

Clearly much thought has gone into the design of this new journal devoted to the interplay of architecture, culture and society in urban environments in the Middle East and elsewhere. The journal has high production values and succeeds in combining readability and wide interest with scholarship. It is  packed with articles, colour and black and white photographs, and graphics.


The content is organised within sections including Narratives; Documents; Photo Essay; Numerology; Urbanography; Conversations; Correspondence; Flaneur; Episodes; Creative Writing; Reviews and Critique; Arabic Inserts. The creative writing content in Issue #1 includes a beautiful story set around a bridge in Isfahan, by Tehran-based writer and critic Alireza Mahmoudi Iranmehr, translated by the Iranian writer, translator, editor, monitor for the BBC Nilou Mobasser who died last year at 52.

And there are detachable inserts, tucked like hidden goodies into the pages. The Arabic inserts include a fold-out of a sketchbook by Beirut visual artist and designer Hatem Imam entitled Where Majnoun Roams. 

The English version includes a pamphlet: The Republic of Lebanon at the New York World's Fair 1939 prepared by Portal 9's managing editor Eyad Houssami. And there is an eight-page booklet Reading Gaza Through Dubai, compiled by Joumana Al Jabri and Karim Elgendy, a comparative portrait in facts and figures (for example, the 828-meter height of Dubai's Burj Khalifa tower is slightly greater than the 800-meter length of the Gaza tunnels across the border with Egypt, of which there are more than 1,000). 





As someone interested in Middle Eastern music I was pleased to find Portal 9 has an interview by Manal Nahhas with Kamal Karim Kassar, founder of the Foundation for Arabic Music Archiving and Research which comprises the "largest Middle Eastern music collection in the world".

Portal 9 has made an impressive beginning, executed with real flair. I am enjoying savouring Issue #1 and look forward to seeing Issue #2 later in the year. Malu Halasa tells me the theme is to be The Square.  There could hardly be a more topical Middle Eastern architectural theme these days.

Over the past week, Syrian literature has been in the spotlight in London due to the visit of Syrian novelist Nihad Sirees and to the wish of audiences to try to learn more about Syria and its writers, especially in light of the dreadful situation there.

Sirees' visit to London coincided with the publication by Pushkin Press of his novel The Silence and the Roar in English translation by Max Weiss. The Silence and the Roar, the first of Sirees' novels to be published in English translation, received an English PEN Award for Writers in Translation 2013.

One of several events in which he participated was the Syrian Writers' Panel organised by English PEN at Waterstones Piccadilly on Wednesday evening. The event ended with a drinks reception and book signing.


The panel was chaired by the journalist, presenter and writer Rosie Goldsmith who presents many literature events, particularly those involving works in translation. In her introduction she said: "We'll perhaps surprise you with the topic we're going to start with: we're going to talk about sex and humour as an artistic response to the Syrian dictatorship".
Goldsmith described The Silence and the Roar as "such an unusual book, such a brilliant book." It is a slender volume, but "there's is an awful lot in here, there's a lot of wisdom, and there's a lot of politics, and there is some humour and there's a lot of sex."  People in the West often assume that those in the Arab world are "incredibly prudish and so on, but of course that's not the case." She had been surprised that the book had so much sex in it was like erotic fiction. Fathi, the central protagonist, is "a very sensuous  man". The hot steamy weather adds to the sensual atmosphere, with Fathi and his girlfriend stripping off and having showers.

Halasa said "coming from the West there is a tendency to think about sexual relations as something very private and individual between consenting adults. It  doesn't really act as any kind of mirror on the social and political situation".

Whereas when she had asked Sirees on Night Waves why sex was so important to the protagonist of The Silence and the Roar, "it became clear that within the context of the novel, and perhaps for some people in Syria, sex is a way of showing that they are free individuals within a totalitarian regime. And I thought that was very interesting. I mean we're sort of jaded about sex in the West."

Sirees said at the end of a day in which Fathi has been in the city with the roar the regime has pushed people to make, and after he has been in the basement of the secret police, "he finds himself in need to be with his girlfriend just to feel that he's all right, and he will stand and confront all these difficulties and problems." The regime wants him to work for it, but "because of his  nice relationship with his girlfriend he refuses to give up."

Goldsmith found the two main women characters - Fathi's girlfriend Lama and his mother Ratiba - "wonderful characters, They are very positive images of beauty and love and comfort: you see women in a quite positive way, I think." Nihad simply replied "Always!"



Halasa too was interested by Ratiba. "Fathi's mother is a 56-year old widow planning to marry a regime official - her son is just finding out about this. So you have this traditional woman who wants to have a life, who's looking forward to getting married, and then you contrast her with the girlfriend Lama who figured out that her husband went off and had a secret second marriage - and she and Fathi have a very sexually free relationship.

"I found it very interesting contrasting the traditional attitude towards marriage and sex and then this couple - they are reacting against this totalitarian regime, this day-long march where people are hysterical and proclaiming their love of this great leader - and this couple is trying to insulate themselves from that - and yet all of that is coming into their lives in more ways than one."

"They are creating a cocoon" Goldsmith said. "Fathi is walking against the crowd, and the masses are coming this way, the leader's 20th anniversary, and there is propaganda everywhere and this noise as you call it the roar. Tell us about the title, this perfect title."

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation was awarded last night to Roger Allen during the Society of Authors' Translation Prizes 2012 awards ceremony held at Kings Place, central London. Allen won the prize for his translation of  Moroccan author (and Culture Minister from 2009-2012) Bensalem Himmich's novel A Muslim Suicide. The £3,000 award was presented by the editor of the Times Literary Supplement Sir Peter Stothard.

When Allen ascended the stage to receive the award, he thanked the Saif Ghobash Foundation, the Society of Authors and the Banipal Trust. And then, to much applause, he announced: "Above all I have the honour tonight to tell you that the author himself is in the audience." (It appears that Himmich was the only author whose work in translation had won a prize to be present at the ceremony).

Allen's 414-pagetranslation was published by Syracuse University Press in 2011. The central character  is the Sufi philosopher Iban Sab'in (1217-1269 CE) who was born in Murcia in Al-Andalus, southern Spain but was forced to migrate to Africa because of his controversial views. He was later expelled from Egypt and spent his final years in Mecca.

The Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize, first awarded in 2006, is sponsored by Omar Saif Ghobash of the UAE and his family in memory of his late father Saif Ghobash.

The runner-up was Humphrey Davies, commended for his translation of  Palestinian poet and author Mourid Barghouti's I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, published by Bloomsbury.

Allen recently retired from his position as Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, having served as Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations for 43 years.

Allen, whose native city is Bristol in south west England,  obtained a D Phil in modern Arabic literature from Oxford University: he was the first student to obtain a doctorate in that field at Oxford, under the supervision of the late Dr Mustafa Badawi. In 1968 he moved to the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.



Allen had travelled from Philadelphia for the awards ceremony. This morning he gave a three-hour Masterclass on Arabic Literary Translation in the Meeting Room and Library of the Arab British Centre. This evening he and Bensalem Himmich are in conversation at the Mosaic Rooms at an event chaired by Professor Paul Starkey, chair of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. The event will be followed by a reception.

In all, eight of the language prizes administered by the Society of Authors were awarded during the evening (not all the ten prizes it administers are annual awards). The ceremony was introduced by Paula Johnson of the Society of Authors. She co-hosted the event with Sir Peter Stothard, who presented each award.



The judges of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize were poet Ruth Padel, novelist Esther Freud, Iraqi poet, novelist critic and translator Fadhil al-Azzawi and translator and university teacher John Peate.

Presenting the prize to Roger Allen, Sir Peter Stothard said: "In the view of the judges the most important aspect of this historical novel that takes the 13th century Sufi philosopher Ibn Sab'in as its hero, is its language. The Arabic original is written in a language not only related to its heritage, but also full of contemplations and Sufi ideas, they accompany the main hero on his long journey across different cities and countries, from Spain to Mecca. And  this also opens up remarkable historical, cultural and religious perspectives of the Islamic heritage."

In the judges' opinion "it's hard to imagine anyone in the world besides Roger Allen capable of bringing this serious book to English readers. He has succeeded with his wonderful style not only to turn Himmich's text into brilliant English prose but also to create a real piece of literature." 

Allen read to the audience a passage from A Muslim Suicide. He introduced it by saying "we have just heard  this novel described: it is the story of one of Islam's most radical thinkers, Sufi philosopher, theologian and physician, and perhaps there is a contemporary aspect in that - precisely because of the radical  nature of his thought he is hounded out of basically every place he tries to settle down, from Spain to North Africa to Egypt and finishes in Mecca. And it's in Mecca that I choose to read a passage about something which is quite familiar to us yet  is told in Hammich's unique style."

Allen read a dramatic passage towards the end of the novel  in which Ibn Sab'in witnesses a crush of hajj pilgrims in which people are being trampled and killed. "I suddenly spotted the head of a young girl screaming beneath the pile of rigid, expiring bodies. Rolling up my sleeve, I plunged into the fray, grabbed her by the hands and started pulling her out as though she were some poor animal ensnared in the fangs of a ravenous beast."

Ibn Sabi'in saves the life of the young girl. The next day the warden tells him that the girl is from Khurasan and has been reunited with her father and aunt, but that her mother had been crushed to death. the previous day. "He told me that tragedies such as this happened every year during the pilgrimage season, something that caused us both to seek refuge in God from such calamities."






In announcing the commendation of Humphrey Davies, Stothard observed that he is a former winner of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize and that judge al-Azzawi had described him as "one of the masters of translation from Arabic into English. For the judges, "what Humphrey Davies has done once again is to adopt exactly the right palette of both vocabulary and tone in his translation all the way through."

The judges had added: "The great skill in his translation is not just in the sophisticated understanding of the original, which should be beyond doubt, it is also in the rendering of an apparently effortless yet deeply nuanced English prose, beyond which - translators will know - undoubtedly lies long, long hours of intense reflection and research. Davies is a true exemplar to translators in work such as this."

Davies lives in Cairo and was unable to be present. In his absence Senior Commissioning Editor of Bloomsbury Bill Swainson stepped forward to receive the commendation on his behalf.

Davies won the inaugural Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize prize in 2006 for his translation of Elias Khoury's novel The Gate of the Sun (Harvill Secker 2005). In 2010 he won the prize for his translation of Khoury's Yalo (MacLehose, 2009)as well as being joint runner up with his translation of Bahaa Taher's Sunset Oasis (Sceptre 2009).

A Muslim Suicide first appeared in Arabic as Hadha Al-Andaluisi published in Beirut by Dar al-Adab in 2007. The Arabic original was longlisted for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF - often known as the Arabic Booker Prize).

Allen explains in his illuminating translator's afterword how the choice of title for the  translation was made. He had happened to meet Himmich when the latter was writing the novel, which the author originally proposed to call Al-Intihar bi jiwar al-Ka'ba (Suicide Inside the Ka'ba). Allen had suggested that while the title was exciting and reflected historical accounts, it was also "not a little provocative and even controversial in contemporary terms."

Allen does not know what happened in the intervening period, but he thought the title under which the novel was eventually published Hadha Al-Andaluisi (literally, This Andalusian) went too far perhaps in the other direction. "I can report that is it at the author's specific request that this translation into English reverts to his original ideas concerning the title of this novel". (In addition to his afterword Allen provides an invaluable 14-page glossary.)



A Muslim Suicide is the third of Himmich's novels that Roger Allen has translated. First came his translation of Himmich's 1989 novel Majnoun al-Hukm, which won the London-based Al-Naqid prize for fiction. Allen's translation of this account of the reign of the controversial (and probably schizophrenic) Fatimi caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (d 1021) was published in 2005 by the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press under the title The Theocrat.

Himmich's 1997 novel Al-'Allamah on the latter years in Cairo of the great Arab historian and historiographer Ibn Khaldun (died 1406), was translated by Allen as The Polymath  (AUC Press 2004) The Arabic original of the novel won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for fiction.

Allen has now translated a fourth Himmich novel - Mu'adhdhibati (Dar El Shorouk) which was shortlisted for IPAF 2011. With its theme of "extraordinary rendition" in the post-9/11 era, this novel is a major shift from Himmich's past emphasis on historical fiction. The noun in the title is the feminine of TormenterorTorturer.

It is surely only a matter for time before the book finds a publisher. IPAF says of it: "In a gripping novel, whose narrative style is a blend of Kafka and One Thousand and One Nights, Himmich imagines an innocent man’s experience of extraordinary rendition in an American prison.

"During his captivity, the protagonist is subjected to interrogation and torture by both Arabs and foreigners and yet, against all odds, the author manages to find some hope in an otherwise desperate situation.". 

The eight Translation Prizes went to six novels and two poetry books. In his lengthy article on the prizes in the latest issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Adrian Tahourdin (the TLS's French Editor) leads with Allen's translation: "Most challenging among the novels is undoubtedly Bensalem Himmich's A Muslim Suicide."

The novel is set in "turbulent times - the Crusades and the Mongol advance are in the background - but this is very much a personal quest. Poetry, philosophy and Sufism, with its goal of the transcendent, the  'Necessary Existent', are constant presences in this dense and complex novel." Tahourdin adds: "And the many women who cross Ibn Sab'in's path are presented in a style that seems appropriate to the time and place: 'her diaphanous dress was set and showed every details of her luxuriant body'." 




As always, the awards ceremony was followed by the annual Sebald lecture, named in memory of the late W G Sebald, founder of the British Centre for Literary Translation (BCLT). The lecture, entitled Paradise Lost: Confessions of an Apostate Translator, was delivered by the Russian author and translator Boris Akunin. Akunin is one of the most widely read authors in Russia, and has been compared to Gogol, Tolstoy and Arthur Conan Doyle. His best-selling detective novels are translated into English by Andrew Bromfield.

But Boris Akunin is actually the pen name of Grigory Chkhartishvili, a translator particularly from Japanese into Russian. Akunin's revealing and entertaining lecture was a fascinating account of the interplay of translating and writing in his life in the Soviet era and now. In accordance with his habit of dividing everything into chapters, Akunin divided his lecture into three chapters: ‘The 2nd cleanest profession in the USSR’ (according to his mother translation, after medicine, but definitely not writing);‘The bliss of translation’; and ‘Shadows mutiny’ (how after the age of 40 he lost the urge to translate, and how his writing fountain ‘started to gush’ when a middle of the road readership sprang up).

The annual Society of Authors' Translation Prizes ceremony is an occasion for translators, whose role is all too often overlooked, to step forward to receive prizes and commendations. The winners have the chance to talk briefly about, and read from, their winning translations. The ceremony is an excellent opportunity to get an idea of what is being translated in different languages and to break out of literature-in-translation language ghettoes.

Once again the acclaimed translator from Spanish and Portuguese Margaret Jull Costa featured in the list of those honoured. She was both winner and runner up for the £3,000 Calouste Gulbenkian Prize for translation from Portuguese. Her winning translation was that of Teolinda Gersão's novel The Word Tree set in Mozambique. The novel is published by Dedalus which has a sample chapter on its website.

One of the founders of Dedalus was Robert Irwin, the Arabic and Middle Eastern history scholar, author of several novels and many works of non-fiction. He is the commissioning editor for the Middle East of the TLS. Dedalus says that "in The Word Tree Teolinda Gersão paints an extraordinarily evocative picture of childhood in Africa and the stark contrast between warm, lush, ebullient Mozambique and the bleak, poor, priggish Portugal of Salazar." Certainly the extract read by Jull Costa made me want to hear or read more.

Jull Costa was commended for her translation from Portuguese of The Land at the End of the World (Norton) by Antonio Lobo Antunes. She was also commended in another prize: the £2,000 Premio Velle Inclán for translation from Spanish, for her translation of Seven Houses in France by Bernado Atxaga (Harvill Secker).

The winner of the Premio Velle Inclán was Peter Bush for his translation of Exiled from Almost Everywhere (Dalkey Archive Press) by Juan Goytisolo. Bush spoke of the surprise there had been that Goytisolo had in his late 70s written a novel on cyberspace, "though he doesn't know one end of a mouse from the other."

Born in Barcelona in 1931, Goytisolo went into voluntary exile in 1956 and has never returned to live in Spain. Goytisolo lives much of the time in Marrakesh: Himmish recalled warmly last night how Goytisolo wrote the introduction to the Arabic original of his novel Majnoun al-Hukm (The Theocrat in Allen's translation).

The Hellenic Foundation for Culture Translation Prize for translation from Greek, awarded every three years, was won by Avi Sharon, a classicist from Boston University who works in finance in New York City. He won the prize for his translation of The Selected Poems of Cavafy (Penguin Modern Classics). Constantine P Cavafy is of course very much associated with Alexandria, the Egyptian city where he was born to Greek parents and lived for most of his life. Sharon's translation of Selected Poems has been widely praised and won the 2009 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, a $1,000 award by the Academy of American Poets for volume of poetry translated from any language.

The other poetry collection to receive an award was Robin Fulton's translation of Chickweed Wintergreen: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books) by the Swedish poet Harry Martinson, which won the Bernard Shaw Prize for translation from Swedish. Although Martinson jointly won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 with fellow Swede Eyvind Johnson, Fulton noted that few of his poems have previously been translated.

I found poems such as Evening Inland read by Fulton powerful and haunting. The judges of the prize, Andrew Brown and Dr BJ Epstein said: "Martinson is a writer who uses rhythms and rhymes of Swedish in ways that cannot be reproduced, but only at best recreated in English. This Robin Fulton has triumphantly accomplished." 

report and pictures from Kings Place by Susannah Tarbush

How have artists and art institutions in the UK and beyond responded to the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq? How we might think about the entanglement of art, war and peace in light of these responses?

We would like to invite you to join a discussion of Iraqi artists who will discuss these issues at the Ark on 2-4pm Saturday 9th February, in preparation for a day-long set of talks, workshops and panels at the Mosaic Rooms in London, in which you are also invited to participate. The event, which will take place on Friday 22nd March 2013, will provide a platform for artists to talk about their own practice, and for artists, curators and writers to reflect on the broader issues raised by the responses of artists and art institutions to the war.

What themes and topics could this event address and develop? What kinds of workshops would allow a wider audience to explore these themes? Which curators, writers and commentators might be involved in the discussions? We would like the discussion group to consider these and other questions and to help formulate the programme. Attached is a short paper that provides some background for the discussions.

We suggest meeting to discuss and develop these issues in advance of the event at Mosaic Rooms, which will form part of the Reel Iraq festival of film, literature and music running from 21st-24th March. Previous Reel Festivals have highlighted the culture of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Lebanon and have received national press coverage. The discussions of the group and on the day itself will be reflected in a short report, and we will explore possibilities for publishing a roundtable discussion in an online forum such as the Arab Review, Jadaliyya or Ibraaz.

The project is supported by the Ark Artist Space, Mosaic Rooms, the Reel Iraq festival and University College London (UCL), which is contributing funding to facilitate public engagement in these issues in the period surrounding the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Please let us know if you are interested in taking part and, if you wish, your initial thoughts on the above questions. We look forward to hearing from you.

Dr Alan Ingram (UCL) and Yousif Naser (the Ark)

The event will take place at the ARK premises : Top Flat / Acton Town Hall / High Street / London W3 6NE Buses : 7, E3 ,70 , 207 , 266 , 427 , 607 . Over ground Acton Central . Under ground : Acton Town For more information you can call : 0208 7520775 or 07943785223

Over the decades Arabs of various nationalities have settled in Britain, and there are now sizeable communities of Palestinians, Lebanese, Iraqis, Egyptians, Libyans and others. In the summer Britain hosts a large number of visitors from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries.

But the oldest Arab (and Muslim) community in Britain is one of the least known - that of the Yemenis, whose presence goes back well over a century. Many first came as merchant seamen sailors who settled in ports such as Hull, Liverpool and the Welsh capital, Cardiff. Others were drawn by industry, including the Yemenis of Sheffield who worked in often dangerous conditions in the steel industry for which Sheffield used to be famed.



The exhibition Last of the Dictionary Men, which openedat the Mosaic Rooms at the Qattan Foundation in London a week ago and runs until 22 March, pays tribute through portraits and video to the Yemeni community in the port town of South Shields in the north-east of England. The town is located at the mouth of the River Tyne and is some five miles from the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

The maritime and industrial heritage of the North East along the River Tyne was a magnet to Yemenis looking for employment away from their impoverished country. Thousands of seamen from Yemen settled in the small town and made it home. The region's industrial and shipping tradition is  now in sharp decline.


'our land is the dictionary of our people'

The exhibition's title is inspired by the blind Yemeni poet and writer Abdullah al-Baradduni (b 1929 - this 1999 obituary appeared in the Guardian). In 1995 Al-Baradduni wrote: "Our land is the dictionary of our people - this land of far horizons where the graves of our ancestors sleep, this earth trodden by processions of sons and sons of sons."

The exhibition is the brainchild of Iranian film director Tina Gharavi, a Lecturer in English (Digital Media) at the University of Newcastle who was educated in the US and France. She is founder and creative director of independent media production company Bridge + Tunnel whose project the exhibition is.


The exhibition takes the form of interviews with, and portraits of, 14 men who are the last survivors of the first generation of Yemenis to settle in South Shields. The striking large photographic portraits around the walls of the ground floor exhibition space of the Mosaic Rooms are by the renowned Egyptian photographer Youssef Nabil. He uses hand-colouring, an old-fashioned technique which was popular in Cairo. As his website puts it, this technique "removes the blemishes of reality, and recalls the heyday of Egyptian film." It gives his photographs of the Yemeni men an ageless, nostalgic and poignant quality.

Visitors to the private show of the exhibition on 2 February were able to meet one of the Dictionary Men - Saeed Mohamed Aklan Ghaleb, originally from the Yemeni city of Taiz. He chatted about his 38 years as a seaman during which he travelled to many destinations including Japan, Argentina, Ghana, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, Libya, the USA. He had vivid recollections of how difficult it was for the sailors when they arrived in East German ports during the Cold War. 

Also present at the private view were Adnan Sayyadi and his sister Leyla. They are grandchildren of Dictionary Man Mohammed Al-Sayyadi, now 99 years old, a former Sheikh of the South Shields Al Azhar Mosque who came originally from the town of Ibb. The mosque is one of the first purpose-built mosques in Britain. The MP of the solidly Labour South Shields  constituency is former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who visits the Mosque from time to time to connect with the town's Yemeni and Muslim community.


The Jordanian-British novelist Fadia Faqir had also travelled down from the North-east of England for the private view of the exhibition. Faqir, who is Writing Fellow at St Aidan's College, Durham University, is a trustee of Bridge + Tunnel Productions, a charity.

She said of the exhibition "We are so excited that we managed to bring it here. We worked really hard with the Qattan Foundation - and they were wonderful." Asked about the development of culture in the North-east of England, Faqir said "I think because we are not in London we are growing in our own ways."  She says the North-east has never before been presented the way it is in the Bridge + Tunnel feature film I Am Nasrine.  The film, set in the North-east, is "about an Iranian woman who had to leave her country, and comes here with her brother, and then the journey she and her brother make through this society - an initiation into Britain."

Gharavi was recently nominated for a BAFTA for the film, in the category ‘Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer’. It won the Best Screenplay Award at the Brooklyn Film Festival last year. The film is set in modern day Tehran and the UK.

Faqir said Bridge + Tunnel has another project "brewing", Video-Pal. "We are going to teach kids in the North-east and Palestine to use cameras and then document their lives, and Tina Gharavi is going to turn it into a documentary film. And then we have another documentary film brewing and another feature film". 




In the downstairs space of the Mosaic Rooms is a video installation with multiple screens, each on a TV set which is a domestic model commonly seen in British homes from the 1950s to 1980s. Each TV stands on a plinth, at the real-life height of the individual subject. Each of the 14 Dictionary Men tells the story of his life and his journey towards becoming settled in South Shields, while visitors listen over headphones. 

The exhibition also includes the official trailer of the film The King of South Shields, made by Gharavi.
The film is an experimental documentary looking at the day in 1977 (the year of  the Queen's Silver Jubilee) that boxing champion Mohammad Ali came to Tyneside and had his marriage blessed at the town's Al-Azhar Mosque. The film explores the effect this event had on the young Yemeni-British men who attended the Mosque. It examines the emerging Arab/British identity, and briefly introduces the historic Yemeni community. The BBC website has this article on the film. A DVD of the film is on sale in the Mosaic Rooms shop.

The Mosaic Rooms has commissioned a new short video to be developed by Bridge + Tunnel, to be screened during the latter part of the exhibition. This video will capture oral histories recorded from a range of participants from the Yemeni community in London. An oral histories workshop with Gharavi is to be held on the weekend of 2-3 March (Yemenis who would like to participate and share their stories are invited to email education@mosaicrooms.org for more information, or to call 020 7370 9990. Places are limited to a maximum of 15 people).  

Gharavi initiated the Last of the Dictionary Men project in 2005. The exhibition was first shown in 2008, initially at the BALTIC arts centre at Gateshead and then in Yemen at the Al-Saeed Cultural Centre in Taiz and the National Museum in Sana'a.

On Saturday 2 March at the Mosaic Rooms at 12pm Gharavi will be in conversation about Last of the Dictionary Men and The King of South Shields with Venetia Porter, Assistant Keeper of the Islamic and Contemporary Middle East at the British Museum.

Several other events at the Mosaic Rooms this month and next also relate to the exhibition. For example in Qat, Coffee and Qambus to be held at 7pm on 28 February DJ and record collector Chris Menist is to play rare Yemeni vinyl singles from the ‘60s and ‘70s, featuring vintage oud and vocal music. In a 2012 article in the Guardian Chris described record-hunting in Yemen.
report and photos by Susannah Tarbush

When Roger Allen stepped onto the stage of Kings Place in London last Monday to receive the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation for his translation of Moroccan writer Bensalem Himmich's novel A Muslim Suicide (Syracuse University Press, 2011), he spoke of the relevance today of the novel's central figure, 13th century Sufi thinker Ibn Sab'in (1217-1269).

Allen said the novel is "the story of one of Islam's most radical thinkers, Sufi philosopher, theologian and physician, and perhaps there is a contemporary aspect in that: precisely because of the radical nature of his thought he is hounded out of basically every place he tries to settle down, from Spain to North Africa to Egypt, and finishes in Mecca."



The contemporary relevance of Ibn Sab'in was also a main theme of a discussion between Allen and Himmich, held on Tuesday evening at the Mosaic Rooms and chaired by Paul Starkey, chair of the Banipal Trust for Arab Literature. Starkey retired in September 2012 from Durham University where he had been Head of the Arabic Department.

Introducing the event, Starkey said A Muslim Suicide has "some relationship to the kind of debates that go on in the Islamic world at the moment, the sort of things people see in our newspapers day by day. It's so modern."

Ibn Sab'in's career "exemplified many of the debates and the clashes of civilisation - if one can use a cliché - that were evident at the time. This was after all the century when the Mongols came from the East and sacked Baghdad .. . And it was also a period when relations between the Muslim world and the Western world were going through an interesting phase."

Allen had travelled from Philadelphia to receive the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize. The discussion at the Mosaic Rooms was one of two events organised by the Banipal Trust to celebrate his presence in London: the first event was a three-hour translation masterclass given by Allen on Tuesday morning at the Arab-British Centre.

Allen, who was born in England in 1942, recently retired from his position as Sascha Jane Patterson Harvie Professor of Social Thought and Comparative Ethics in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. He had served as Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations for 43 years and has translated numerous works of modern Arabic literature.

Himmich, born in Meknes in 1949, is a novelist, poet and philosopher. He earned a doctorate from the Sorbonne in Paris for a thesis on Ibn Khaldun. He has been a Professor of Philosophy at Mohammad V University in Rabat, and served as Moroccan Culture Minister in 2009-12.




Himmich's 11 novels include several historical novels. A Muslim Suicide - which was longlisted for the 2009 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF, often dubbed the Arabic Booker) is the third of Himmich's historical novels that Allen has translated. And Allen has also translated a fourth of Himmich's novels - Mu'adhdhibati (Dar El Shorouk) - which is set in the 21st century's "War on Terror", and for which Himmich was shortlisted for IPAF 2011 (see below).

Himmich is one of the most distinguished contemporary Arab novelists, and has won numerous prizes. He received the 2002 Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature for his 1997 novel Al-Allamah, on Ibn Khaldun's later years in Cairo, translated by Allen as The Polymath (American University in Cairo Press, 2004).

His 1989 novel Majnun al-Hukm won the London-based Al-Naqid Prize, and was translated by Allen under the title The Theocrat  (AUC Press 2005).  The novel is an account of the controversial Fatimid Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah  In 2009 Himmich received the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature from the Union of Egyptian Writers for the whole corpus of his work.

Roger Allen said one of the amazing things about A Muslim Suicide is the very good impression it gives about an era in relations between two cultures "which is utterly different from our conception about the relationship between the West, and what we'll call the Middle East, now." Andalus was the place where one would go to seek knowledge and enlightenment. It was gradually losing that status, "but still you had the Christian King of Sicily, the Holy Roman Emperor King Frederic, writing to a Muslim intellectual asking him profound questions about existence, reality, the spirit, and everything else."

This correspondence between Frederic and Ibn Sab'in took place when Ibn Sab'in was living in the Moroccan town Sabta (Ceuta), the first place he settled when forced to leave Andalus. "If you want some contemporary relevance, it is not  irrelevant that King Frederic of Sicily was excommunicated by the Pope," Allen said. "Perhaps some of the greatest penseurs of any particular generation go through that particular process as a necessary part of maintaining their intellectual honesty when it comes to matters of theology and spirituality."

Allen raised the question of Arab novels after the watershed of the Naksa (Setback) of 1967 and the role of the past, and what novelists are to make of the past, use the past, what is the relationship with the past. The texts written in the wake of the Naksa had two prevalent trends. The first was Turath (legacy), and the second was Asala - ie the quest for authenticity. "And what we see is an enormous and pleasurable variety of ways of negotiating with the past, using the past."

Allen described Ibn Sab'in as a brilliant intellectual scholar, a wonderful human being, a superb doctor and psychologist. Allen said  he is constantly struck by the qualities of the scholars of the Andalusian period - for example Ibn Hassan, one of the great controversialists of Islam who was determined to negotiate meaning with adherents of other religions communities in Spain, and was also a  great poet. Or Ibn Quzman, a wazir who wrote some of the dirtiest zajals in the whole history of Arabic poetry.

Allen spoke of "this enormous variety of intellects and talents represented by this particular culture, this particular moment in the cultural history of Europe which still needs to be rediscovered. And here is Ibn Sab'in writing about the demise of this culture."

One of the most telling things in the novel for Allen is Ibn Sab'in sitting in Sabta, from where one can see Spain, and talking to his students about the demise of Spain, which had led to his expulsion, and the fact that Granada is the only place left, "and we all know of course that Granada is eventually going to fall as well. And a great period in European cultures had come to an end".

'at every turn Salafi belief and politics interfered'

This description of the period of demise is "not only a historical event, it is something which has profound implications and Ibn Sab'in, this radical thinker in Islam - and yes we are thinking about Mali today - who wishes to communicate with a variety of different religious communities, but who wishes to think of Islam as a dynamic force which adapts and changes, and which takes the best of other cultures into itself.

"And yet at every turn Salafi belief and politics interfere to expel him from wherever he is until he lands up in the centre of Islam itself where he confronts the great hero of the defence of the Middle East, Sultan Baybars - who turns out himself to be extremely Salafian in his beliefs and demands the head of Ibn Sab'in."

The novel perhaps suggests that the version of history in which the great battle of Ain Jalut - at which the army of Egypt led by Baybars in 1260 defeated the Mongols - is seen as a tremendous turning point in the Middle East, and that "everything suddenly got happy",  is not quite the right way to look at things. Ibn Sab'in eventually emerges and decides that the only thing he can do is to end his own life. 

Allen said there is a great deal written about historical novels and what they are and what they might be – there is a great deal of theoretical literature – and now also about the parlous relationship between history and fiction – even the fact that history is very often fiction itself, in other words fiction being something which is written by somebody in which somebody puts something in and leaves other things out.

"Any work of this kind which makes use of history in this way seems to me to have things to say to contemporary readers even though it may not be about family life in some Arab capital and problems of women in society or whatever it may be – valuable though those contributions to modern Arab fiction may be.

"This type of work is representative of a strand of novel fiction writing which asks more profound questions, that are concerned about – yes, as Paul said, in Huntington’s dreadful phrase, the clash of civilisations..."



'I am a prisoner of this category, the historical novel' 

Despite the acclaim for his novels set in the past, Himmich said he disagreed with the categorisation "historical novel". He said: "I am a prisoner of this category historical novels" when he actually has "a diversity in my production". He has written novels on present-day issues, for example clandestine immigration, and he is currently writing "a new novel about a very new subject - a businesswoman. But after one decade it will be a historical novel! Indeed history is all, we cannot escape.

"I think the best manner is to consider the past like the present, and this present maybe after all will be a past, this is history, but this label 'historical novel' I don't agree with. I can't put barriers between the past and the present and the future, because at the moment, tomorrow, after tomorow is a past - which is very interesting for a novelist."

He described himself as being "a little iconoclastic" and distinguished between "easy" and "difficult" historical novels. In the "easy" category he put Jurji Zaidan's historical novels. Himmich claimed that Zaidan (1861-1914) had "a deficit of imagination and invention" and that "the historian for me has more credibility than I can find in the novels of Jurji Zaidan." 

Himmich also maintained that Nobel prizewinning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz's trilogy on Pharaonic Egypt, which were published at the beginning of Mahfouz's writing career, was of only "middling" quality, and that Mahfouz's writing only really started to take off with his 1945 novel Al-Qahira al-Jadida (Cairo Modern). (Mahfouz's Pharaonic trilogy consists of Khufu's Wisdom  (1939), Rhadopis of Nubia (1943) and  Thebes at War (1944).) Himmich also made fleeting criticisms of works by two contemporary Arab writers of historical novels.

Himmich said he respected Zaidan and Mahfouz, but he contrasted their "easy" type of historical novels with "difficult" historical fiction such as The Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and  Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert. He said historical fiction needs to have a clash - such as is seen in Albert Camus's play Caligula. He gave further examples of the importance of history to great writers: Balzac's novels are like historical novels. And central to all Shakespeare's theatre was a historical dimension.

Himmich described the many difficulties facing the writer of his kind of novel. The author must thoroughly research the information from historians and historiography, and after that the work of creation, of invention, begins. But with some novelists there is not this depth of research and "it’s very superficial".

The writing of novels with real significance, raises existential questions. When he was working on A Muslim Suicide or The Polymath he thought endlessly about the character of  Ibn Sab’in or Ibn Khaldun, and "it is for me an obsession, all the time I think about him. The first thing is to know all about this person – it’s necessary – and after that I think what this person was confronted with." In the case of Ibn Sab'in, why did he constantly need to move from place to place? Himmich feels a sense of responsibility in writing about characters who are outsiders, or marginal, and to "recuperate persons out of history."
. 

how 'this man from Spain' metamorphosed into 'a muslim sucide' 

Starkey asked Allen why the title of the Arabic novel Hadha al-Andalusi (literally 'this Andalusian')became in the English translation A Muslim Suicide. Allen said that while he was translating The Polymath he had met Himmich at a conference - ("one of the  many conferences held in what now appears to be a different era in the cultural life of Egypt, when Gaber Asfour organised a conference on the Arabic novel and indeed there was a Cairo prize for the Arabic novel" - the Arabic Novel Award given by the Egyptian Ministry of Culture.)

Himmich had told him he was writing a new novel on the very controversial Andalusian figure, Ibn Sab'in, and had decided its title would be Al-Intihar bi jiwar al-Ka'ba (Suicide inside the Ka'ba).Allen had said  he wasn't sure this was a good idea;  "certain people might perhaps not be too happy" about that title.

When Allen  received his copy of the new novel he found the title was Hadha al-Andalusi. "And I thought to myself well, that's slightly tilting in the opposite direction from the title which I had originally discouraged."

When Allen translated the novel he gave it the title This Man from Spain, but then received an email from Himmich saying that with the English translation "we're going back to my original intentions." Himmich suggested a number of titles, one of which was A Muslim Suicide.

Thus, the English title is "not a massive reinterpretation of everything the text is about but it is a reflection of the original intentions of the author." Allen said it was interesting that certain people who have read the Arabic now regard the Arabic title as supremely good -  and various people who read the English translation also regard that title as extremely good.

"In a sense it involves two quite different readings of the text itself. In my role as a teacher of literary theory the whole notion of Beginnings and of Titles - and the way that impacts on the reception of text - is a very interesting topic."

Himmich said Ibn Sab'in's committing suicide in the sacred space around the Kabba by slitting his wrists was "an act of sacrilege if ever there was one, which in all probability was not motivated by personal considerations but more likely sprang out of an ineradicable desire ... to hasten his union with God which ... was too slow to happen."

who will have the courage to publish 'my torturess'?

In addition to his translations of The Theocrat, The Polymath and A Muslim Suicide Allen has produced an as-yet unpublished translation of Himmich's post-9/11 novel Mu'adhdhibati (Dar El Shorouk) for which Himmich was shortlisted for IPAF 2011. The title means my female torturer, or tormenter. Allen said  "I coined the non-existent British term My Torturess" for the title.

My Torturess is about extraordinary rendition. It tells of a Moroccan who is extraordinarily rendered, and of his sufferings inside a dreadful anonymous camp.  "I’m hoping that it will be published," Allen said. "But there seems to be a rather cagey element amongst the publishing industry about publishing a work about this extraordinary terrible criminal activity which took place during the George W Bush administration in America.

"Insha'Allah eventually someone is going to have the courage to publish this: the translation’s complete and ready." He added "Stand by for the title:  I'm calling it My Torturess but we'll see what comes out, who decides what." Laughter erupted when Himmich said: "If he is afraid about this title, I have another." 

IPAF said of the novel at the time it was shortlisted for IPAF 2011: "In a gripping novel, whose narrative style is a blend of Kafka and One Thousand and One Nights, Himmich imagines an innocent man’s experience of extraordinary rendition in an American prison. During his captivity, the protagonist is subjected to interrogation and torture by both Arabs and foreigners and yet, against all odds, the author manages to find some hope in an otherwise desperate situation."




Allen said the historical novel itself has a history. "Many people believe that Sir Walter Scott is the origin of the historical novel, certainly Tolstoy – there are some major figures – but the historical novel is not a static entity – nor is it a unified entity - there is a large variety of novels called historical.

"Now the relationship between the writing of fiction and history is an incredibly varied subject – particularly in our current times when we live in a world of spin. I’ve just been through an American election where people have been paying out millions of dollars to lie.

"And so the question I often ask my students is what do we do in a world where fiction has no opposite? And in this particular environment the works of Hayden White and most recently David Shields and his wonderful manifesto Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, talking about the dilemmas of writing different kinds of texts.

"The word ‘historical novel’ covers a multitude of sins and perhaps the best way of going about it might be simply to talk in terms of narrative. And Arabic in fact is using terms such as sarid to try and avoid these problems of generic definition. Genre invites definition but as soon as you define a genre, it makes a habit of breaking those definitions."

Allen expressed a markedly more sympathetic view of Jurji Zaidan than Himmich had. "I would stick up for Jurji Zaidan – Jurji Zaidan is writing in the 1890s and he’s absolutely trying to educate, that’s what he’s doing – he’s educating a people and he’s developing a sense of Arab nationalism in a group who are in a society where people are facing foreign occupation from European colonial powers.

"But I would certainly be in favour of not  trying to nail down anything called historical novels,  that’s not what current literary theory’s all about."

(Jurji Zaidan - 1861-1914 - wrote 22 novels on Arab history. In the more than 100 years since they were published more than 100 translations into over nine languages have been published - but unitl recently none in English. The Zaidan Foundation has now sponsored the English translation and publication of five of the novels. Roger Allen translated The Conquest of Andalusia, and Paul Starkey Saladin and the Assassin.)




In the introduction to his book The Arabic Literary Heritage: The Development of its Genres and Criticism (Cambridge University Press, 1998) Allen says he is not going to use the word history, because I am trying to write a version of what Arabs wrote about that is not based on historical and dynastic criteria. Instead his emphasis is on genres. "You know,  I often think when Abu Nawas woke up in the morning, he didn’t say to himself 'I’m an Abbasid poet!'".  

Allen was asked, as someone who has translated many Arab fiction writers, about his experience of translating Bensalem Himmich. How did he deal with his intertextuality and how did he convey in English the different registers in Himmich's Arabic text?

Allen began his answer by recalling how he first started to translate Himmich. Someone at a conference complained to him that the Modern Arabic Literature volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature - to which he contributed two chapters - contained very little on the Maghreb.

Allen went back to the volume and found the complaint was well-founded, and he decided to spend his next sabbatical in the Maghreb. This he did, and that was when he met Bensalem Himmich. It was a conscious choice on his part to introduce to the Anglophone world novels written by Maghrebi writers, and he has mostly concentrated on Morocco - and especially on Himmich and on Ahmed Toufiq (Allen's translation of Moon and Henna Tree by Toufiq is to be published in May by University of Texas Press - following his translation of Toufiq's Abu Musa's Women Neighbors: A Historical Novel from Morocco - Post Appollo Pr, 2005 ).

Allen told the questioner "you’re absolutely right that these particular texts immediately present you as a translator with a number of issues, the first of which is the extraordinary level of erudition which is implicit in the text itself.

"The publication of The Theocrat raised a very fascinating issue of translation, and this is partially reflected in all the texts, which is that Bensalem regularly puts somewhere in the text what his sources are. I point out of course that Jurji Zaidan does exactly the same thing.

"But I put into the text of The Theocrat the footnotes which Himmich had kindly provided to the various historical sources which he was using, or the accounts of the peculiar behaviour of Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah - and believe me, his behaviour was frequently very peculiar indeed – such as banning the hajj, and banning molokhia in Egypt – can you imagine that? And everybody had to work at night and sleep during the day – I mean this is interesting stuff,  but the point is it was all footnoted to actual historical accounts, and the AUC Press wrote to me and said 'we don’t do footnotes' so I had to point out, Iwe are talking about TS Eliot’s The Wasteland and the footnotes and the fact that TS Eliot put notes to the complexities of language.

"Anyway, that aside, I had to explain that the footnotes are part of the novel, they are an intrinsic part of the process of writing this text and its use of source material.

"But this is just part and parcel – particularly trying to convey here the difference between the description of travel and as it were the more habitual things which go on in the life of Ibn Sab’in. And than discussing Ibn Sab’in arguing about the accuracy of Ibn Rushd’s version of Aristotle and then meeting Shushtari and listening to Shushtari’s poetry and of course including some of Shushtari’s poetry. This was extremely complicated as a translation exercise, one of the more complicated ones I’ve done.

"But I just point out that there’s a recently-published collection from Columbia University Press [ed Salma Khadra Jayyusi] called Classical Arabic Stories : An Anthology which you may have seen in which I translated six of the Al-Maqamat (The Assemblies). So I have a sort of yardstick about complexity of text.

"But this (A Muslim Suicide) is a modern text, and all of these three texts are, and because Bensalem is such an enormously erudite scholar of pre-modern Arabic texts of a particular kind, the novels that he writes, which include references, are very challenging to translate."

When a member of the audience asked Himmich how his books are received in Morocco he said: "I can't speak about me: I detest autobiography  because autobiography is impossible. Freud was right,  is it possible to write about when I was a child, my problems with my mother, my sexual problems? No no it is not possible. All autobiography is impossible because there are secret gardens - for example if someone has an accident in his life - a sexual relation with his sister - he can't write this.

"For this reason I am against all autobiography except when we have a foolish person, an outsider, a person who has problems with everybody, like Jean Genet for example. But when I am very very old perhaps I will write like an au revoir to my life, the life in the world. Basit".
report and photos by Susannah Tarbush

British journalist Alan Mackie’s book The Sons of Adam: A Memoir of Egypt
by
Susannah Tarbush
 
[an Arabic version appears in Al-Hayat Arabic daily newspaper
http://alhayat.com/Details/482310 ]

The British financial journalist and consultant Alan Mackie has specialised in the Middle East, and particularly Egypt, for most of his journalistic career. He has written on Egypt for a variety of publications including the Financial Times, Middle East Economic Digest (MEED), and the Economist magazine.

Now Mackie’s highly–enjoyable book The Sons of Adam: A Memoir of Egypt has been published in London by Muswell Press. In his book Mackie writes of his five decades of experiences in, and views on, Egypt from his first brief visit in 1965 to his most recent trip there in 2012.

Mackie was living in Cairo at the time of the 1973 October war. He feels there are certain similarities between the 1973 war and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011. “In facing down Mubarak’s intimidating security machine Egyptians overcame their fear as they had done in the October war when they challenged Israel’s vaunted invincibility and stormed the Bar Lev line,” he says. And “just as in 1973 they experienced for a few exhilarating days what it was like to control their destiny.”

He writes that the Revolution marks “a profound turning point for Egypt. Most importantly in redeems the promise of 1973 when Egyptian briefly took control of their destiny only to see it snatched from them by force of circumstance and their own lack of readiness to assume, in Sadat’s words, responsibility for themselves.” This time it is different. Tahrir Square was an act of national bonding that touched all Egyptians, whether they supported the Revolution or not: “2011 introduced an entirely new dynamic”.

Mackie first visited Egypt in 1965 when he was a university student travelling in his summer vacation. He had travelled from Turkey to Aleppo and Damascus and arrived in Beirut, where he got to know a glamorous young American woman called Linda Kanelous. She had been involved in Beirut with a small-time gangster named Farid who had given her a flat and a chauffeur-driven car. But she ended the relationship when she found Farid too controlling.

One day, sitting by the swimming pool of the St George’s Hotel in Beirut, she quoted to Alan from Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, and suggested she and Alan go by boat to Alexandria, and from there to Athens.

Alan spent only a day and a half with Linda in Egypt, and by then they had already started to quarrel. After they arrived in Athens they separated and he never saw nor heard of her again. But “something happened in that 36-hour shore leave in Alexandria that was to change my life.” He explains that he was born in the East - in Sri Lanka – and as a child went to boarding school in England, returning to the East by air in the holidays. “These trips by air had the quality of being transported by a magic carpet to another world.” in Egypt he found “unmistakable whiffs of the East: the smell of slaked dust, donkey cars, water buffaloes, palms and mangoes.” His trip through Asia Minor and then to the shores of the Sahara had “covered the dead ground between these two worlds and united them.”

In the several following years Mackie worked as a journalist in London, but his sense of nostalgia about Egypt remained with him. And when he found an opportunity to live In Egypt he took it, arriving in Cairo in 27 January 1973. He remained there until early June 1974, so was in Cairo during the October 1973 war with Israel. The war made a deep impact on him. Although disillusionment had followed the initial Egyptian success in the 1973 war, Egyptians “came out of the war knowing they had it in themselves to change their circumstances...”
 

Before going to Egypt in 1973 Mackie had learned some basic Arabic at evening classes One goal of his living in Egypt was to learn Arabic. At first he stayed in the Lotus Hotel, before moving to the legendary Golden Hotel whose proprietor was Fares Sarofim. Sarofim still used to visit the family estates in Al Minya, Upper Egypt.

Mackie wanted to totally immerse himself in Egypt and to understand it from the point of view of Egyptians. On the acknowledgments page of his book he pays tribute to the two wise old men who were his “gurus" in Egypt. One was Fares Sarofim, who died in 1982. The other was Hassan Fahmi, a retired engineering professor from Cairo University. Mackie writes that “Hassan Fahmi provided the “lateral dimension to my understanding of Egypt and Sarofim as a Copt provided the vertical dimension.”

Fahmi’s wife was English, and he was the father of the famous dancer Farida Fahmi . Mackie was taken to meet him several times in his flat in Zamalek, and in his book he records some of their conversations.

The Sons of Adam: A Memoir of Egypt has three main sections. In the first section Mackie presents his wide-ranging analysis of the Egyptian revolution. The middle section consists of the detailed personal diary that Mackie kept during his 18 months in Egypt in 1973 and 197.

In the final section of the book Mackie writes about his trips back to Egypt since 1974, and what became of the people and places he had known. He assesses what went wrong with the Sadat presidency between the 1973 war and his assassination in 1981, and then the factors that led to the downfall of the Mubarak regime.

Mackie’s book is difficult to categorise within any one genre. It is part memoir, part diary, part travel book, part political analysis – and in some places it reads like a novel, with some stunning passages of description, and skilfully-drawn characters who come alive in the pages. As well as writing about Egypt, Mackie vividly records a visit he made to Yemen.



Mackie frequented cafes such as Groppi’s, Lappas and Cafe Liberté. It was at the Lappas cafe that he met a young man called Maher who had lived in London and was the son of the actress Malak el-Gamal. Maher invited Mackie to a party where all the guests were actors and actresses, and also to a hashish den. When Maher heard how much Mackie was paying for his room at the Golden Hotel he said he was shocked, and suggested that Mackie move to live with Maher’s uncle Am Mohammed in the district of Shobra. A quarter of Cairo’s population lived in Shobra, nearly half of them Copts.

This was how Mackie came to live with the El-Gamal family for much of his time in Cairo. Am Mohammad and his wife had a son, Atar, and two daughters Buzeina and Malak. A Palestinian, Ibrahim, had the room next to Alan’s.

Mackie continued to visit the Golden Hotel where one of his best friends was the manager, a young Copt named Amin Simaika who was the nephew of Fares Sarofim and came from Alexandria. He invited Alan to visit Alexandria with him, and the chapter on Alexandria is one of the most beautifully descriptive in the book. Mackie succumbed to the charms of Alexandria, and those of Agami a bus ride away, where he lay on the beach and let the sun and the warmth wash over his mind “till it was scoured and smoothed in the ebb and flow of the sea cleansing the sands”.

As a tall blond man Mackie had some problems during the war after Al Ahram published a picture of a smiling Egyptian soldier with a tall blond Israeli prisoner of war. He became a figure of some suspicion and was twice forced to go to a police station to be questioned, Am Mohammed coming to his rescue. The mukabarat were suspicious of the notebook in which he wrote Arabic words he did not know, and the fact that he underlined certain words in newspapers, although as Am Moahmmed explained to them, this was because he was learning Arabic. Later, when spies were arrested, it became even more dangerous for Mackie for a time.

After Mackie left Egypt in 1974 he continued to work as a Middle East financial journalist. He worked in Cairo as a journalist throughout the latter Sadat years and returned periodically in the 1980s and early 1990s but then for around 10 years he did not visit at all. When preparing his book he visited, most recently in June 2012.

When he revisited Alexandria in 2002 he was sorry to find that a six-line highway had been constructed along the cornice, cutting the city off from the sea. And he was saddened by the changes in Agami. “The half mile walk to the beach through what used to be walled lanes and fig orchards was now more reminiscent of Gaza, a slum of crumbling algae-stained tenements, pools of fetid groundwater between them.” But the changes in Shobra were more positive, especially with the building of the Metro line.

In assessing the Revolution, Mackie stresses its grass roots nature, and how the revolutionary experience brought Egyptians together across traditional alliances, “turning established structures on their head and pitting friend and foe of the ancient regime against new forces, that occupy the middle ground.” It has “energized political debate at all levels of society.” He is hopeful that a regenerated and reformed Islam, rather than Islamist extremism, may emerge.


He observes that neighbourhoods set up community centres and organised their own social and security networks just as they had done in the October War, “which accounted for the extraordinary self discipline with which the demonstrations were organised.” Mackie is very concerned about Egypt’s always fraught relations with the West and examines the neo-colonialist dimension and the West’s support for Israel.

“Popular anger at the way the Palestinians have been treated, and the West’s collusion in their oppression, colours the political discourse in the new Egypt” he writes. Palestine “defines the Arab world’s relations with the Israel and Israel defines the West’s relations with the Arab world.” Israel was “a colonial enterprise a century too late. .. now it survives by force of arms”.

The transitional government had to rein in its initial open embrace of Palestinian resistance, as it did approaches to Iran, and President Morsi has declared Egypt will honour existing peace agreements. But future relations with the Jewish state will be on a different footing and there has even been talk of a referendum on the Peace Treaty at some point “to give the authorities diplomatic cover for a tougher policy.”

Mackie condemns the way in which the West has tended to engage with other cultures through its own stereotypes, with alien cultures being demonised if they are considered hostile. “Resisting America’s view of reality has been one of the most daunting challenges Egypt and other Arabs have had to face....” he writes “so overbearing and ruthless is the juggernaut of military and economic power deployed to impose it, and unnervingthe faith Americans place in their democracy to ‘do right’.”

He slams the West’s antipathy and prejudice towards, and ignorance of, Islam, and its tendency to meddle in the region’s affairs, which give oxygen to extremist elements. He left Egypt in 1974 with the sense that the West is not very good at “listening”. Instead, it tends to “talk down” to other cultures, assuming that its values are a universal good. But the Arab and Muslim world has proved extraordinarily impervious to western cultural imperialism.

On 9/11 the West woke up to the fact that a large part of the world, if not actively “hating us” wanted to be taken into consideration and heard. “Since then a profound shift in economic power eastwards is forcing the West to adapt to different ways of seeing things, whether it likes it or not.

The judges of the 2013 Caine Prize for African Writing were announced today. The chair of the judges' panel is art historian and broadcaster Dr Gus Casely-Hayford.


The judges include the Sudanese-Egyptian writer Leila Aboulela, who won the Caine Prize in its inaugural year, 2000. "This is the first time that a past winner of the £10,000 Caine Prize will take part in the judging" a statement from The Caine Prize notes.  Aboulela went on to have a distinguished literary, broadcasting and creative writing teaching career; her third novel Lyrics Alley appeared in 2011.


The other judges are the Nigerian-born artist Sokari Douglas Camp; author, columnist and the Lord Northcliffe Emeritus Professor at University Collge London, John Sutherland, and Assistant Professor at Georgetown University, Nathan Hensley. 

This year 96 qualifying stories have been submitted from 16 African countries. This is a decrease in number of entries, from 122 in the 2012 shortlist, but the number of countries is up from 14. In 2011 there were 126 entries from 17 countries. The judges will meet in early May to decide on the shortlisted stories, which will be announced shortly thereafter. The winning story will be announced at a dinner at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University,  on Monday 8 July.

The five shortlisted stories, together with stories written at the Caine Prize workshops are published annually by New Internationalist (UK), Jacana Media (South Africa), Cassava Republic (Nigeria), Kwani? (Kenya), Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana), FEMRITE (Uganda), Bookworld Publishers (Zambia) and ‘amaBooks (Zimbabwe).


Included in the 2012 anthology, African Violet, are the stories by last year’s winner, Nigerian writer Rotimi Babatunde and the four other shortlisted authors. Rotimi Babatunde won for Bombay's Republic; Billy Kahora of Kenya was shortlisted for Urban Zoning; Stanley Kenani of Malawi for  Love on Trial; Melissa Tandiwe Myambo of Zimbabwe for  La Salle de Départ; and Constance Myburgh (the pen name of Jenna Bass) of South Africa for Hunter Emmanuel.

Chair of judges Bernardine Evaristo said of the winning story “Bombay's Republic vividly describes the story of a Nigerian soldier fighting in the Burma campaign of World War Two. It is ambitious, darkly humorous and in soaring, scorching prose exposes the exploitative nature of the colonial project and the psychology of Independence.”

The Caine Prize is named after the late Sir Michael Caine, former Chairman of Booker plc and Chairman of the Booker Prize management committee for nearly 25 years. The Prize is awarded for a short story by an African writer published in English of 3,000 to 10,000 words. An “African writer” is normally taken to mean someone who was born in Africa, or who is a national of an African country, or whose parents are African.

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

The Caine Prize is sponsored principally by The Oppenheimer Memorial Trust, the Booker Prize Foundation, Weatherly International plc, China Africa Resources, CSL Stockbrokers and Miles Morland. Other funders include the British Council, The Beit Trust, The Thistle Trust, the Royal Overseas League and Kenya Airways.

The Gospel According to Cane
by Courttia Newland
Telegram, London
367pp, pbk, £7.99
  
review by Susannah Tarbush



It is often said there is nothing more agonising for a parent than the death of their child. But for Beverley Cottrell, first-person narrator of the novel The Gospel According to Cane by black British writer Courttia Newland, there is one thing even more agonising, and that is "being uncertain whether your child is alive or dead.”

Beverley has lived with this agony for 20 years, ever since her eight-month-old son Malakay was snatched from a locked car. Her husband Patrick had left the car outside a Chinese takeaway while he went inside to order food. Malakay disappeared without trace, and despite intensive police investigations, a blaze of media publicity and the offer of a reward there has been no clue as to his fate.

But now a young man claiming to be Malakay has appeared on the scene. 

The arrival of Wills, as the young man is called, throws Beverley's life into turmoil and raises many questions. Is he indeed her long lost son or an imposter? And if he really is the missing Malakay, why is he adamant that the police should not be told of his reappearance? And how does a mother reconnect emotionally with a child she has not seen for two decades?

Beverley's circumstances have changed in many ways since Malakay disappeared. "That person, the woman I was, is not exactly gone as much as she has faded into the background, distant like a stationery object viewed from a speeding train" she says. Her marriage collapsed and her ex-husband Patrick has remarried and gone to live in the USA. The beautiful family house was sold, and she now lives in a flat on a tough council estate near Portobello Road, in the Notting Hill area of West London.

Beverley has a Bachelor of Education and at the time of Malakay's disappearance she was teaching English in a prestigious private secondary school. After her son vanished she gave up her job and went through a period of incapacitating grief and depression. Once she was better she volunteered to start holding writing classes for young people in a back room of a youth centre For the past 12 years she has now been running this After-School Club. At least she is not under pressure to find paid work: she benefited from the sale of the family house, and her late father provided well for her. 

One of the strengths of The Gospel According to Cane is that Newland develops not only his central but also  his secondary characters, fleshing them out with their complexities and ambivalences. Seth, a policeman Beverley first met when he was one of the team investigating Malakay's disappearance, is a close friend and sometimes lover.

Another support is Beverley's therapist Sue who helped her with her grief over Malakay's disappearance and whom she still sees. And Beverley has a long-standing friendship with an elderly white neighbour, Ida who frequently bakes sweet pies for Beverley or plays cards with her. Through Ida we see an older generation anxious about the challenging groups of youths hanging around the estate.

The Gospel According to Cane purports to be Beverley's written account of the turbulent chain of events set in train by the arrival in her life of Wills. Interwoven with the strong storyline are Beverley's memories of her childhood and youth, as well as disturbing dream sequences in which she and her parents and sister are in Barbados in slavery days, and her thoughts on matters including life, time and pain.

Beverley says "I write, but I am not a writer". Her concern is not narrative, character or chronological structure, but "the rearing of children in modern society, the ills a lack of proper parenting can produce - and "the strange phenomena of pain". People write because they want to make sense of their pain, she tells her After-School writing class.

Beverley also includes in her narrative short sections on neurophysiology, the structure of the brain and the manifestations of pain. For example the pia mater works with the other meningeal layers to protect and cushion the brain: the Latin means "tender mother".


a leading black fiction writer


The Gospel According to Cane is the fourth novel by Newland, one of Britain's leading black fiction writers. Newland was born in 1973 in West London to a father whose roots lie in Jamaica and a mother of Barbadian origin.  He grew up in Shepherd's Bush, not far from the Notting Hill area in which The Gospel According to Cane is set.

Newland's acclaimed novels, short stories and dramas draw on the experiences of black Britons. His first novel The Scholar, published in 1997 when he was only 23, and the second, Society Within (2000), are set among young blacks on the fictional Greenside Estate in West London. His third novel Snakeskin (2002), a detective thriller in which a black MP's daughter is murdered, is also set in London. These three novels were published in the UK by Abacus.

The Gospel According to Cane is published in London by the Saqi fiction imprint Telegram and in New York by Akashic Books. Publishers Weekly contributing editor Calvin Reid has named the novel as one of the seven Notable African-American fiction titles 2012-13.   Newland today begins a five-day visit to New York and Baltimore for four events to promote his new novel.

Over the years Newland has been nominated for several major literary awards and his short stories have appeared in a number of anthologies. He co-edited with Kadija George the 1991 anthology  IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain, and was co-editor, with  Monique Roffey, of   The Global Village: Tell Tales Volume 4 (Peepal Tree Press, 2009).




Newland's fourth novel looks set to further cement his reputation as a powerful chronicler of the life of black Britons, particularly the marginalised young living on estates. The Notting Hill area is one of the most mixed parts of London in terms of race and wealth. Some of the richest people in London live in multi-million mansions at some of the capital's most sought-after addresses, just metres away from deprived estates.

Notting Hill's multiculturalism is for many one of the most attractive features of the  area. The annual Notting Hill carnival is a huge draw for Britons and tourists. But life in the area can be a long way from that portrayed in Notting Hill -  the film starring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts, in which hardly any  black characters appear. As Deborah Orr wrote in the Independent newspaper at the time of the film's release: It's Notting Hill, but not as I know it. The ethnic minorities of the area suffer problems of high unemployment, discrimination and sometimes disproportionate police actions. There are gangs, knife and drug crime, and shootings.

Newland deftly builds the tension in this absorbing psychological thriller that arrests the attention throughout (I read the novel in virtually one sitting). The book is disquieting from the start, with Beverley noticing a tall boy with a sneer and lazy walk, clad in a black hoodie, who is staring at her and seems to be following her as she strolls the stalls of the Portobello Road outdoor market.

an old newspaper cutting

Beverley has an immediate sense of the significance of this boy. In the small hours of the night someone rattles her letterbox and knocks loudly on her front door. She thinks it is him, but does not answer the door. Some nights later he again knocks on her front door. He shouts through the letterbox that Beverley knows who he is, and as proof of his identity he feeds an old newspaper cutting through the letterbox. Beverley finds that the cutting dates from 20 April 1991: it is a report with photograph on the police press conference at which she and Patrick pleaded for help in finding their son.

As Wills speaks to Beverley through the letter box she cringes at his coarse, deep voice and his pronunciation and accent - "more like the kids I taught in the club than the one I imagined for years."  She tells him he can't come in until morning and passes a blanket to him through letter box so he can try to sleep outside her door. Seeing him standing up, "he's huge, like his long-lost grandfather, like everyone on our side".

When she lets him in for breakfast she feels "nothing. No sensation, familiarity. We searched each other's features." But she soon grows euphoric, with sensations similar to those of falling in love.

Wills tells her about the person he says abducted him and brought him up. But he makes her promise not to tell the police about him. He tells her he's had been having trouble at the place where he has been living with a girl who is an old schoolfriend, and her boyfriend, and that he has recently been sleeping rough.

Beverley feels she can only confide in her closest family and friends that a young man claiming to be Malakay has turned up. Others are in the dark as to why this respected and much-liked teacher in her mid-40s suddenly has a male stranger less than half her age living with her.

Beverley's sole sibling, her sister Jackie, and her brother-in-law Frank are concerned. Sue is supportive but sceptical that Will is Malakay and encourages Beverley to arrange a DNA test. She points out that even if Wills is Beverley's son, he is probably psychologically damaged by his upbringing and may have mental health issues and could even be dangerous. At one point she asks Beverley whether she is more worried that a DNA test would be positive than negative.

Beverley is not a wholly reliable narrator, prone to omissions and contradictions in her account of events. As the story unfolds there are signs that Wills can be violent - but is this just an understandable reaction from a young man who feels cornered and misunderstood, or is she too prepared to make excuses?

race and class

Newland explores questions of race and class in the novel, but in a far from heavy-handed way. Beverley's father was upwardly mobile: he drove a Mercedes and sent Beverley to a private school. He tells her he developed a process involved in the manfuacture of edible fat, and that this is the foundation of the family he has worked so hard to support. Beverley's sister Jackie and brother-in-law Frank are both university lecturers. Their encounters with Beverley and Wills are cringe-inducing, Jackie telling Beverley that Wills is not family but "a feral child, just like those kids you teach."

Beverley's dreams about her family's roots in Barbados seem to carry guilt. She recounts these vivid, often horrific, dreams to Sue. She feels that her family were freed slaves and helped plantation owners maintain the slavery system by selling them shackles, chains and so on, leading to the family being hated by fellow Africans. In one dream Beverley gets caught up in a terrifying fire deliberately started in a  cane field.

Beverley tells Sue that when hearing the youths at her After-School club talk about their lives she realises how much her parents shielded her, in emphasising books and sport and education and in being there for their daughters. When Sue points out that Beverley has no evidence her family was involved in the slave trade Beverley says her family has been wealthy for generations, and its other members are, like Beverley, light-skinned: "You don't get either way in the Caribbean without a bit of dabbling."

Those around Beverley are wary and suspicious of the young man who has inveigled himself into her life and flat and she becomes somewhat isolated. The presence of Wills drives a wedge between Ida and Beverley.

The members of Beverley's After-School Club are particularly wary of this "brudda" who has moved into Beverley's flat. Newland draws these youngsters well, capturing their slang and banter with the authenticity of an insider. Beverley, clearly a dedicated teacher, describes perceptively their different personalities and the group dynamics. She gets them to write: they express themselves fluently and often with real talent in language influenced by rap and hip hop. She encourages them to read authors such as Raymond Carver, and George Pelecanos.

They have a protectiveness and affection towards Beverley, while keeping her on  her toes with their liveliness and humour, but their respect for her is at risk as they grow to suspect there is a sexual element to her relationship with Wills. "Tell the truth, you're pipin that yout, innit?" one of them says. 

Given the subject matter and setting of The Gospel According to Cane and the skill with which it is written, it would not be surprising if it was adapted into a film or TV drama. And there is a precedent: the TV drama West 10 LDN broadcast as a pilot on BBC 3 was based on the interconnected stories in Newland's second novel Society Within. The drama can be viewed in instalments on YouTube.

The nine-day  Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, which starts today, is one of Britain's most high-profile literary festivals. It gives those attending the chance to enjoy a rich programme of literary events in the setting of one of Britain's most beautiful and historic cities.

On Sunday 24 March, the festival features two Arab authors from opposite ends of the Arab world, both with novels newly published in English translation by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP), the joint venture of Bloomsbury Publishing plc and the Qatar Foundation. The authors are flying in from their respective overseas locations to take part in the events.


Qatari engineer and journalist Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud [above] is a historical novelist whose first published novel The Corsair - published in both Arabic and English by BQFP - is set in the Gulf, India and England in the early 19th century. It tells of the British government's fight against piracy on the high seas and against the expansion of Wahhabism in Arabia. One of the novel's central characters is the legendary 19th century corsair Erhama bin Jaber, who controlled certain trade routes of crucial importance to the British. (There is today a state-of-the-art shipyard named after him in Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar). The novel was translated into English by Amira Nowaira.



Mohammed Achaari, a Moroccan poet and novelist who is a former culture minister, focuses on a contemporary political theme in his novel The Arch and the Butterfly, which was joint winner in 2011 of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF). (The other winner was Saudi novelist Raja Alem, for The Doves' Necklace. The two winners appeared together at an event at the London Festival of Literature in July 2011 to talk about their prizewinning novels.)


The central protagonist of Achaari's novel is a left-wing Moroccan journalist, Youssef al-Firwasi, son of a German mother. Youssef's life is thrown into turmoil when he receives a letter telling him that his only son, whom he had thought was studying in Paris, has been killed as a "martyr" fighting for Islamists in Afghanistan. The novel touches on some of the most burning issues in the Middle East today, with its exploration of religious extremism, cultural identity and generational change. It has been translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid.


On 24 March Abdulaziz al-Mahmoud will be appearing alongside another historical novelist, Harry Sidebottom, in the event Imagining the Battles of the Past to be held in Christ Church, Festival Room 2  from 10-11am, chaired by author, broadcaster and historian Julie Summers.

Mohammed Achaari will be discussing his novel from 2-3pm in Convocation House, part of the Bodleian Library.

This will be the second occasion within two months that a Moroccan writer and former culture minister shortlisted for IPAF 2011 has been in England. In early February Bensalem Himmich travelled to London for the awarding of the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation to Roger Allen for his translation of Himmich's novel A Muslim Suicide.

Allen's translation of the novel for which Himmich was shortlisted for IPAF 2011, My Torturess, which focuses on extraodinary rendition during the "war on terror" has yet to find a publisher as Allen explained at an event with Himmich at the Mosaic Rooms.  
Susannah Tarbush

The Arab British Centre– a London-based charity promoting arts and culture of the Arab world – will receive the  UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture  from UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova at a ceremony to be held at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris at 7pm on 25 April. (The full programme is on the UNESCO website here.)

The Arab British Centre is the first-ever British recipient of the prize, which was launched in 2011. In addition the Centre is the first-ever organisation, rather than individual, to be awarded the honour.

The UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture, now in its 11th edition, recognises commitment to the dissemination of Arab culture in a global context.The official prize giving ceremony will be preceded by a series of talks entitled: “5 itineraries, 5 visions, 1 question: What is the Role of Arab Culture in Tomorrow’s World?” Five international personalities, renowned for their involvement in Arab culture, will attempt to answer this question. The ceremony will be followed by a concert by the Palestinian group Khoury Project, featuring Egyptian oud player Mohamed Abozekry.


The Arab British Centre is located in Gough Square, off London's historic Fleet Street, and stands next door to Dr Johnson’s House, which has been restored and opened to the public. The Centre organises and promotes cultural and artistic events relating to the Arab world, and hosts a regular programme of activities including classes Arabic calligraphy classes and the Arabic language. In addition to its regular on-site activities, the Centre has worked on a number of one-off projects in external locations, including the major 2012 project ‘Safar: A Journey Through Popular Arab Cinema’, a week-long series of popular Arab cinema which took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

An international jury of experts selected the Arab British Centre as co-winner of the prize, with Professor Mustapha Cherif of Algeria. The $60,000 prize money  is shared equally between the two laureates.

Francesco Bandarin, Assistant Director-General for Culture at UNESCO, said the international jury "recognised the dynamic efforts of The Arab British Centre in promoting different aspects of Arab Culture. The various activities and events organised, within and outside the Centre, to promote a better understanding of Arab culture and foster intercultural dialogue were highly appreciated”.

The Arab British Centre’s Chairman Virginia Forbes said: “It is a huge honour for The Arab British Centre to be awarded this prize and is testament to the hard work of our small but dedicated team. We are encouraged to redouble our efforts, presenting the best of Arab arts and culture to a British audience. With the wonderful endorsement of UNESCO, we hope that we can engage more people with all that the Arab world has to offer.”

Despite limited budgetary resources, the Arab British Centre is able to undertake its activities through working with an extensive network of partners to promote the culture and arts of the Arab world in the United Kingdom. The Arab British Centre anticipates spending it $30,000 share of the prize money in furthering this aim.

The novel The Bamboo Stalk by Kuwaiti author Saud Alsanousi was tonight announced as the winner of the sixth International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF - often known as the Arabic Booker). The prize is worth a total of $60,000 to the winner, comprising the first prize of $50,000 and the $10,000 that goes to each of the six shortlisted authors.

Alsanousi is the first Kuwaiti writer ever to win the prize. Born in 1981 he is also, at the age of 31, the youngest writer to win IPAF. The Bamboo Stick (published by Arab Scientific Publishers)is Alsanousi's second novel; the first, Prisoner of Mirrors, was published in 2010. [update 26.4.2013- a podcast of Granta magazine deputy editor Ellah Allfrey's interview with Alsanousi, with IPAF administrator Fleur Montanaro interpreting between Arabic and English, is posted on Granta's website].

The winner was announced by this year’s Chair of Judges, the Egyptian writer and academic Galal Amin, at a prize ceremony held in Abu Dhabi on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2013.  Alsanousi will take part in his first public event at the book fair tomorrow, and there will also be a series of talks featuring some of the shortlisted finalists. In addition to the prize money Alsanousi is guaranteed an English translation of his novel, as well as increased book sales and international recognition.


A daring work which looks objectively at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Gulf countries, The Bamboo Stalk is the story of Issa, the son of a Kuwaiti father and a Filipino mother. On returning to his father’s homeland as an adult, Issa finds himself in a difficult position. Rather than the mythical country his mother has described to him, he discovers he is caught between the natural, biological ties he shares with his father’s family and the prejudices of a traditional society, which views a child of Kuwaiti-Filipino heritage as socially unacceptable. Skilfully constructed, The Bamboo Stalk is a story of great strength and depth which questions identity in modern society.

The Bamboo Stalk was chosen as the best work of fiction from the last 12 months, selected from 133 submissions from across the Arab World. On behalf of the Judging Panel, Galal Amin commented: 'The members of the Judging Panel are delighted that The Bamboo Stalk has won the Prize. All the Judges agreed on the superior quality of this novel, both artistically and also in terms of its social and humanitarian content.’

The five other shortlisted finalists were also honoured at the ceremony alongside the winner, each receiving $10,000. The six names on the shortlist were announced in January, in Tunis, by the  distinguished Judging Panel of academics and cultural figures. The shorlist was selected from a  longlist of 16 novels, announced on 6 December and chosen from 133 entries from 15 countries.

Chaired by Galal Amin, the Judging Panel comprised: Lebanese academic and critic Sobhi al-Boustani; Ali Ferzat, who is head of the Arab Cartoonists' Association, and owner and chief editor of the independent Syrian daily newspaper Al-Domari; Polish academic and Professor of Arabic Literature at the Arts College of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, and Professor Zahia Smail Salhi, specialist in Arabic Literature Classical and Modern and Gender Studies at Manchester University.

The Prize is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by the TCA Abu Dhabi in the UAE, which marks its first year as the new sponsor of the Prize in 2013. IPAF was previously funded by the Emirates Foundation.

Jonathan Taylor, Chair of the Board of IPAF Trustees, said: ‘The Prize has a history of discovering new voices and we’ve done that again this year. The Judges have been working without fear or favour with their sole objective to identify the best of Arabic fiction published over the last year. We salute a distinguished shortlist and congratulate an outstanding winner.’

To date, five of the six winning novels have secured deals for publication in English. Overall, winning and shortlisted books since 2008 have been translated into over 20 languages. (For further information about the Prize, visit www.arabicfiction.org or follow the Prize on Facebook).

Saud Alsanousi is a novelist and journalist whose work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab magazines. He currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper.

His first novel The Prisoner of Mirrors won in 2010 the fourth Laila al-Othman Prize, awarded for novels and short stories by young writers. In the "Stories on the Air" competition organised in July 2011 by Al-Arabi magazine with BBC Arabic, he won first place for his story The Bonsai and the Old Man.

In The Bamboo Stalk Josephine comes to Kuwait from the Philippines to work as a household servant, leaving behind her studies and family, who are pinning their hopes for a better future on her. In the house where she works, she meets Rashid, the spoiled only son of Ghanima and Issa. After a brief love affair, he decides to marry Josephine, on condition that the marriage remains a secret.

But things do not go according to plan. Josephine becomes pregnant with José and Rashid abandons them when the child is less than two months old, sending his son away to the Philippines. There he struggles with poverty and clings to the hope of returning to his father's country when he is eighteen. It is at this point that the novel begins. The Bamboo Stalk is a daring work which looks objectively at the phenomenon of foreign workers in Arab countries and deals with the problem of identity through the life of a young man of mixed race who returns to Kuwait, the ‘dream’ or ‘heaven’ which his mother had described to him since he was a child.

Tomorrow there will be a "Meet the Winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2013" event held at the  Discussion Sofa at 7-8pm, hosted by Dr Maan Al Taie

At the Live Book Club at The Tent Iraqi writer Sinan Antoon will talk about his shortlisted novel Ave Maria with Al Raweyat tomorrow at 5.30-6.30 pm.

Egyptian shortlistee Ibrahim Issa will on Thursday discuss with host Mohamed Mazrouei 'how to write and read after the Arab Spring', at the  Discussion Sofa 7pm-8pm

Further information on the above events, as well as additional events with IPAF authors at the fair, can be found on the book fair’s website: www.adbookfair.com



When the shortlist of IPAF 2013 was announced in Tunis it was noted that none of the six shortlisted authors had previously been longlisted for the Prize. The shortlist omitted last year's IPAF winner Rabee Jaber and several other long-established and acclaimed authors who were on the longlist. The chair of the until then anonymous Judging Panel,  Galal Amin, said the judges felt "extremely pleased that they were able to select an excellent shortlist of newly written Arabic novels, which bring to the fore several evolving talents around the Arab world." The panel was "gratified to note that outstanding creativity is common across Arab countries and generations of writers.'

In addition to The Bamboo Stick the shortlisted novels were:

 Ave Maria by Sinan Antoon (Iraqi),published by Al-Jamal
 

The Beaver by Mohammed Hassan Alwan (Saudi Arabian), published by Dar al-Saqi
 

Our Master by Ibrahim Issa (Egyptian), published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing (BQFP)
 

His Excellency the Minister by Hussein Al-Wad (Tunisian), published by Dar al-Janub


IPAF said the shortlist revealed "a number of varied thematic concerns, which lie at the heart of the Arab reality of today. They include, religious extremism; the lack of tolerance and rejection of the Other; the split between thought and behaviour in the contemporary Arab personality; the Arab woman's frustration and her inability to break through the social wall built around her; the laying bare of the corrupt reality and hypocrisy on social, religious, political and sexual levels."

IPAF providedsynopses of the shortlisted novels:

Ave Maria by Sinan Antoon
The events of the novel take place in a single day, with two contradictory visions of life from two characters from an Iraqi Christian family, drawn together by the situation in the country under the same roof in Baghdad. Youssef is an elderly man who is alone. He refuses to emigrate and leave the house he built, where he has lived for half a century. He still clings to hope and memories of a happy past. Maha is a young woman whose life has been torn apart by the sectarian violence. Her family has been made homeless and become separated from her, resulting in her living as a refugee in her own country, lodging in Youssef's house. With her husband she waits to emigrate from a country she feels does not want her. Hope collides with destiny when an event occurs which changes the life of the two characters forever. The novel raises bold and difficult questions about the situation of minorities in Iraq, with one character searching for an Iraq which was, while the other attempts to escape from the Iraq of today.

 I, She and Other Women  by Jana Elhassan
The heroine of the novel, Sahar, feels a sense of loss and loneliness within her family, following her marriage. She had hoped to be a different kind of woman from her mother but finds herself falling into the same trap after her marriage to Sami. In constructing another self in her imagination, she finds an outlet which brings intellectual and existential fulfilment. The novel has an innovative structure, psychological and philosophical depth and a profound humanity.

The Beaver by Mohammed Hassan Alwan
The novel's hero Ghalib al-Wajzi goes from Riyadh in Saudi Arabia to Portland in the USA. He travels back in time, through the story of three generations of his troubled family: separated parents, and brothers with nothing to connect them except the house where they live. Ghalib leaves Riyadh at the age of 40. He heads to a distant city to try to restore his memory with fragmented stories, with the help of a beaver that accompanies him on his fishing journeys to the Willamette River. Throughout the novel, he contemplates his relationship with his girlfriend who visits him over many years in different towns when she can get away from her husband.

Our Master by Ibrahim Issa
The novel relates the career of Sheikh Hatim Al-Shanawi (‘our master’), the permanent guest of a television programme presented by Anwar Outhman. The charming Sheikh answers viewers' questions and becomes one of the richest people in the country through exploiting visual media to the utmost degree for his own ends. By using his natural cunning he gives replies to please everyone, including the security services, though they bear no relation to his personal convictions. The hero has varied adventures such as his relationship with Nashwa, veiled from head to toe, who he later discovers is an actress working for the secret services. The hero plunges into the depths of Egyptian society and uncovers its secrets in a witty and satirical style. The characters appear to live in a corrupt environment dominated by fear, spying and bribery, where people lie to each other and are only concerned with outward appearances and the surface of reality.

His Excellency the Minister by Hussein Al-Wad 
The novel tells the story of a Tunisian teacher who unexpectedly becomes a minister. He witnesses first hand the widespread corruption in the country, eventually becoming embroiled in it himself. It is a richly humorous novel which successfully describes many aspects of human weakness.

At an event held in the gallery of  Notting Hill Community Church in West London, last Tuesday evening novelist William Sutcliffe and writer, broadcaster and one-time Beirut hostage John McCarthy discussed their latest books, both on Israeli-Palestinian themes. In the chair was William Sieghart, chairman and founder of the conflict resolution NGO Forward Thinking which works with the leaderships of the different sides in the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The event, 'Two Sides of the Wall: Untold Stories from Israel/Palestine', was organised by Lutyens and Rubinstein Bookshop located opposite the church in Kensington Park Road. The bookshop was founded in 2009 by literary agents and former publishers Sarah Lutyens and Felicity Rubinstein, who in 1993 started the Lutyens and Rubinstein literary agency.


Introducing the evening Felicity Rubinstein recalled that Sutcliffe was "practically my very first client when we started the agency nearly 20 years ago. He'd written an incredibly funny first novel about being in the sixth form at Haberdashers' Aske's, called New Boy and he then went on to publish four more hilarious bestsellers including Are You Experienced which to this day is mandatory gap-year reading.

“Nothing about his career suggested that he would write a book that would be a cornerstone for a serious literary event about the Palestine-Israel debate." But he then produced The Wall (Bloomsbury), “a heartbreaking novel about a teenage boy living in an imaginary community with unmissable similarities to the West Bank - and so the idea for tonight's event started to germinate."

The Wall is a political fable whose 13-year-old first-person narrator Joshua lives in the isolated hilltop town of Amarias. Although the setting is not named, Amarias is clearly an Israeli Jewish settlement of new houses in the West Bank. At its edge it has a high wall to keep out the enemy, and a checkpoint manned  by soldiers. While looking for a lost football Joshua discovers a tunnel under the Wall and cannot resist passing through. On the other side of the Wall he gets to know teenage Leila, and through her and her family he learns about the harsh realities of life for his supposed enemies. Bloomsbury has published the novel in Adult and Young Adult versions with different covers.  



Lutyens and Rubinstein were keen to have John McCarthy on the platform with Sutcliffe. "John's career as a TV journalist, which in 1986 led him to be captured and held hostage for five years in Lebanon, and the books he has written since his release, have made him a national figure," Rubinstein said. "His most recent book You Can't Hide The Sun: A Journey Through Israel and Palestine (Bantam Press) weaves the testimonies of Palestinians who remained in Israel after its formation in 1948 with John's experience of living under constant threat." [McCarthy's new series on the Middle East, In a Prince's Footsteps, began on BBC Radio 4 on 6 May]