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Egyptian fast food outlet 'Koshari Street' opens its doors in London's theatreland

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inside the Koshari Street shop

At lunchtime today I made my way to the new London fast food outlet 'Koshari Street', which specialises in the iconic Egyptian street food  - lentils, rice and pasta topped with spicy tomato sauce and garnished with chickpeas and caramelised onion - from which it takes its name.The The Koshari Street shop was handing out free sample tubs of koshari and bottles of its freshly pressed juices, and was attracting quite a bit of interest from passers-by. Although the shop is aimed primarily at the takeaway trade, there is seating inside for around 10 people. Much thought has gone into the branding and design aspect of the project, with a distinctive purple predominating.



The shop is located at 56 St Martins Lane, Covent Garden.  St Martins Lane  runs from Trafalgar Square, and is in the heart of London's theatreland:  theatregoers are likely to be among those keen to try this novel and exotic fast food.

 a tub of Koshari Street's signature dish

On hand to greet those sampling the shop's fast food were the consultant to the project -  renowned Lebanese-Syrian food writer, blogger and broadcaster Anissa Helou (profiled on this blog here) - and one of Koshari Street's two Egyptian directors, Salah Khalil (the Koshari Street website has a link to bios of the project's team).

Among the books Helou has authored is Mediterranean Street Food (Harper Collins) which includes a recipe for 'Koshari: Rice, Lentils and Vermicelli with Hot Tomato Sauce'. Now Helou has taken this street food to a new level. Koshari Street website says the project was Anissa's brainchild: "She has developed the menu and recipes, adapting the traditional koshari to bring it into the 21st century, using the best ingredients and jazzing up the sauce served with it with specific chillies to offer different degrees of heat. She has also given our koshari a little crunch by adding her own doqqa."

the 3 degrees of Koshari heat: mild, hot and mad

Anissa's Koshari is an intriguing and satisfying mixture of flavours and textures, topped with a layer of  shredded onions fried and caramelised to just the right degree of golden brown. The addition of doqqa is a masterstroke, though Anissa declines to reveal the secrets of her particular doqqa blend of spices, herbs and nuts.

I opted for the highest, "mad", level of hotness which suited me very well. To accompany my tub of koshari I chose beetroot & apple juice, a tasty blend of sweetness and  astringency. I am definitely looking forward to future visits to Koshari Street, and can imagine its Koshari becoming quite an addiction.

The Koshari Street menu includes regular (£4.50) and large (£6.50) tubs of Koshari, white tabbouleh salad, non-bread fattoush salad, and soup of the day. There are two special Meal Combos: regular-size Koshari with either a salad and apple juice (£7.50), or with soup and apple juice (£7.00).  There is a choice of three desserts: Muhallabiyeh (fragrant organic milk pudding), Mishmishiya (apricot leather pudding), and fresh fruit salad. The freshly-pressed juices on offer are apple, apple & beetroot, carrot, blood orange and mango. 
Susannah Tarbush

Palestinian handicrafts and food on sale at CFAB Spring Fair in Kensington, London

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based on an announcement  from the Palestinian Mission UK

The Annual CFAB spring fair: a chance to buy Palestinian handicrafts and food  



The Annual Children and Families Across Borders (CFAB) Spring Fair will be held on the 14th and 15th May at Kensington Town Hall, Hornton Street, London W8 7NX. This is the 54th such International Spring Fair and Food Festival.

VIPs are invited from 5.30pm to 7.30pm on 14th May.

The fair will be open to the public from 7.30pm to 9.30pm on the 14th. and from 11am to 5pm on the 15th.

Eighty diplomatic missions, Palestine being one, take part in this wonderfully colourful and enjoyable event, bringing food, crafts and international entertainment. This splendid event raises money for a good cause.

For details please see CFAB.org.uk. Go to the EVENTS page for a full list of raffle prizes, silent auction and entertainment.

Come and support Palestine and stock up on Zaytoun olive oil and on ceramics, limited edition hand made accessories, textiles, bags and jewellery and sample Palestinian food catered by the Palestinian Maramia Cafe. We look forward to seeing you. If you can't make it please do pass on the invite to all your friends. Ps ceramics featured in the picture are examples only. Pps, the event is very busy so no pushchairs are allowed in the main hall. We look forward to seeing you all

 
Thank you
The Palestine Table Team.

Labour2Palestine benefits from night of music and food at famous London jazz club

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Labour2Palestine co-director Martin Linton (L) and Labour MP Andy Slaughter

The Palestine Night benefit held by Labour2Palestine last Tuesday took place at the legendary 100 Club at 100 Oxford Street, one of the oldest jazz venues in London. The venue proved a most congenial setting for an evening which featured music from Palestinian and other performers, Palestinian food, and sales of CDs and literature. The basement club was packed out and the benefit, which included a collection among audience members, succeeded in raising £2,725.

Labour2Palestine's mission is to increase understand of Palestine in the Labour Party by organising visits there. "Come to the West Bank for one of our visits and help to awaken the sleeping consciousness of the British public, and even many parts of the Labour Party, to what is going on in Palestine," said co-director of Labour2Palestine and compere of the evening Martin Linton, a former Labour MP and Guardian journalist. The audience included 30 to 40 delegates who had been on Labour2Palestine visits and several of the 15 who are to leave on Thursday on the next trip.

Linton recounted how the benefit came to be held at the 100 Club. When activist Elizabeth Dudley was walking to work one morning, a bull terrier sank its teeth into her leg. She needed to go to hospital for stitches and was advised by the doctor to rest for a week. But Elizabeth was due to go the West Bank two days later with a Labour2Palestine delegation, and she insisted on ignoring the doctor's advice and going ahead with her visit.

On Elizabeth's return from Palestine the dog's owner Jeff Horton contacted her and explained that he also owned the 100 Club. He asked whether she would like a free hire of the Club to make amends for his dog's bite. Elizabeth leapt at the chance, and donated her free hire to Labour2Palestine.
(Read here an interview with Jeff Horton in which he talks of his strenuous efforts to keep the iconic venue from closure, with the help of major music artists).

Elizabeth was one of the organisers of the Palestine Night, along with Martin Linton, Sara Apps and Paul Hughes-Smith. Sara Apps, co-director of Labour2Palestine, is a Scottish Londoner and human rights campaigner who works for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) and co-founded Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East. (Sara also happens to be married to Martin Linton.) Paul Hughes-Smith, who worked for a long time in production at BBC TV and has been involved in encouraging the appreciation in the UK of Palestinian, Yemeni and other Arab music, is a dedicated activist on Palestine. He was instrumental in organising the music content of the benefit.


Raed Jabari

Linton gave a vote of thanks to all those who made the evening possible, including those performers who gave their services free. He also bade farewell to  Palestinian Raed Jabari who, as the first Shaath scholar, had spent three months in the UK as the guest of Labour2Palestine and was about to return to Hebron. The money raised during the benefit evening will partly go towards funding another Palestinian for a three-month visit to London, probably later this year.

During his time in the UK Jabari worked in the office of Andy Slaughter, the Labour MP for Hammersmith, and Shadow Justice Minister. He also spoke at 25 Labour Party meetings up and down the country.  

In his address to the audience Slaughter said nobody has been as effective as Martin Linton, acting from the grassroots, in bringing the issue of Palestine to the attention of a wider group of people within the Labour movement and beyond. "One thing you can say about Martin is he's action not words: he's a person who just gets on with the job. I'm sorry he isn't in the House of Commons still, but our loss is certainly Palestine's gain."

Slaughter thanked Jabari for his stint working in his office, and said as a fluent English speaker who studied at Manchester University he "probably knows rather more what goes on here than I do. Nevertheless, it was an opportunity to work int he heart of parliament and to find out how we do things here." Jabari had also been a very good ambassador for Palestine: "There's nothing better than hearing from the horse's mouth exactly what is going on from people who know and experience it every day." Slaughter presented Jabari with a pair of House of Commons gold-plated cufflinks, one reading 'Ayes' and the other 'Noes':  "Aye for Palestine and No for occupation" quipped Slaughter. In reply Jabari said he had learnt a lot from his time working in Slaughter's office.

 Jeremy Corbyn, Labour MP for Islington North

In an address later in the evening Islington North Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn praised Martin, Sara and their team for all they are doing "to ensure there is "a really strong lobby in support of Palestine and Palestinian rights, and to make people in this country understand what it's like to live three and four generations under occupation with the inability to travel, lead a normal life, and all the things we take for granted."

Corbyn has visited Gaza, the West Bank and Palestinian refugee camps many times. "Every time I go I feel more depressed, and every time I come back I feel more angry, and ever more determined to do more and more and more until justice arrives for the Palestinian people." Through taking people out to Palestine, Labour2Palestine has helped them understand what life is like there: the Wall, the checkpoints, the theft of water,  the imprisonment of children, the imprisonment of elected parliamentarians from Palestine, and the sheer misery of so many people's lives.

"It has opened things up a lot and also, despite the best efforts of the Home Office, Martin also managed to bring a lot of guests here and they in turn have been able to engage with people throughout this country".

Corbyn added: "We are turning opinion round very very fast on the issue of Palestine and of justice. If we want peace in the Middle East it will only be achieved when there is real justice, a real place in the sun, a real place in the world, real recognition, for the Palestinian people and their heroic struggle."

The music content of the evening began with a performance multicultural collective RAAST which performs music from the Middle East and elsewhere. By the time I arrived at the 100 Club RAAST was coming to the end of its performance. The collective received an enthusiastic response from the audience crowding the venue.

Reem Kelani

A major attraction of Palestine Night was the renowned Palestinian singer and musician Reem Kelani , rightly introduced by Linton as "incomparable". Kelani performed a captivating set of songs with the classically-trained young jazz pianist Bruno Heinen. Kelani and Heinen have worked together for a number of years, and have developed a remarkably fruitful musical rapport.

Their performance started in a dramatic fashion with Bruno playing an introductory turbulent, clashing series of chords and notes. Reem then intoned: On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 the guns of Europe fell silent. Two trainee Muslim clergymen celebrated Armistice Day thinking that Woodrow Wilson would keep his promise and grant Egypt independence. Of course that was never to be." These two Muslim clergymen,  are intoxicated, torn between their faith and their love of life, between East and West." 

She broke into a rousing, jazzy and inventive rendition of The Preachers' Anthem, her arrangement of  the song written in the voice of the two Muslim clergymen by the great Egyptian composer Sayyid Darwish (1892-1823) and lyricist Badi' Khairi. Kelani's forthcoming album, on which she has been working for some nine years, is devoted to the compositions of Darwish. Her arrangement of The Preachers' Anthem was punctuated by playful vocal effects, the lyrics switching between Arabic and English and ending with a snatch of the First World War song "It's a long way to Tipperary!"  Speaking about the challenges of arranging the song, Kelani said she has listened at the British Library's National Sound Archive to recordings of infantry jazz bands, which influenced Darwish's music and her arrangement.

Reem Kelani flags up her musical message
There was a change of mood with Galilean Lullaby, in which Kelani's music is paired with traditional Palestinian lyrics on desertion and loss. The song is from Kelani's debut 2006 album Sprinting Gazelle: Palestinian songs from the Motherland and the Diaspora  Though melancholy in tone it ends on an upbeat note with a cameleer riding past the abandoned village and telling the mother that hardship should not last forever for anyone.


The benefit evening marked Kelani's first-ever performance in England of  the strikingly beautiful and haunting Munyati, a song with music by Sayyid Darwish (she and Heinen had previously performed it at Seattle Conservatory of Music). The writer of the lyrics is unknown. Kelani said: "I'm seemingly taking you back to Egypt but also to Muslim Spain where this particular style of singing developed, called muwashshah". The time signature was 14/4. There was laughter when Kelani described the song: "It's Muslim Spain meeting Baroque meeting Jazz musician meeting a Palestinian crazy woman."

This was followed by The Doormen's Anthem, with music by Sayyid Darwish and lyrics by Amin Sidqi. This song on a Nubian theme is an example of Darwish's writing of many songs about marginalised people.


Bruno Heinen
Two of the songs had lyrics by famous Palestinian poets. Samih al-Qasim's Love Poem was delivered in a sultry Palestinian jazz style. Kelani told of how during military rule in Israel  the 1948 Palestinians within the green line spoke to, and about, the beloved as a code for Palestine which could at that time not be mentioned.

Ghayati has lyrics by Ibrahim Touqan. Noting that the song was written almost 100 years ago, Kelani saw it as a riposte to Golda's Meir's assertion that there is no such thing as Palestinians or their identity. She and Heinen rounded off the set with Darwish's The Porters' Anthem with lyrics by Khairi. The audience clapped along, and exploded into applause, calls and whistles at the end, while Kelani was presented with a bouquet.

Heinen is gaining increased recognition as one of Britain's most talented young jazz musicians. Both his parents performed with the late German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Heinen's new CD Tierkreis (meaning Zodiac), a reinterpretation of  Stockhausen's work of that title, has garnered some excellent reviews (hear some samples here).

To round off the evening there was a session of jazz standards and reggae by the Bruno Heinen Quartet, with Heinen appearing alongside Gary Williams on drums, Larry Bartley on double bass and Michael Winawer on guitar. The music was just right for late evening in a jazz club and people began to dance the rest of the night away.
report and pictures by Susannah Tarbush



Michael Winawer, Larry Bartley and Gary Williams




Caine Prize for African Writing shortlist is a coup for Nigerian writers

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Susannah Tarbush reports from London:

Nigerian writers have done well in the Caine Prize for African Writing in the 14 years of its existence - last year  Rotimi Babatunde became the fourth Nigerian winner, and Nigeria has been well-represented on shortlists - but this year is a real standout for Nigeria with no fewer than four of the five shortlisted stories being by writers from that country. The fifth writer on the shortlist, announced today, is from Sierra Leone which has had one winner so far: Olufemi Terry who won in 2010.

The winner of the £10,000 prize will be announced at the annual celebratory dinner to be held at the Bodleian Library, Oxford University, on Monday 8 July.

Chair of the judges, the art historian and broadcaster Gus Casely-Hayford , said: “The shortlist was selected from 96 entries from 16 African countries. They are all outstanding African stories that were drawn from an extraordinary body of high quality submissions.”

He  added: “The five contrasting titles interrogate aspects of things that we might feel we know of Africa – violence, religion, corruption, family, community – but these are subjects that are deconstructed and beautifully remade. These are challenging, arresting, provocative stories of a continent and its descendants captured at a time of burgeoning change.”

Yet again there is no author from Arab North Africa on the shortlist. But one of the judges is from the  region: the Egyptian-Sudanese winner of the Caine Prize in its inaugural year, Leila Aboulela. At the time the judges  were announced back in Feburary, the Caine Prize pointed out that Aboulela was the first past winner to judge the prize.

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

The 2013 shortlisted authors are:

Elnathan John (Nigeria) shortlisted for ‘Bayan Layi’ from Per Contra, Issue 25 (USA, 2012) www.percontra.net ·

 Elnathan John

Tope Folarin (Nigeria) ‘Miracle’ from Transition, Issue 109 (Bloomington, 2012) http://dubois.fas.harvard.edu/transition-magazine ·

Pede Hollist (Sierra Leone) ‘Foreign Aid’ from Journal of Progressive Human Services, Vol. 23.3 (Philadelphia, 2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wphs20#.UZOV4bVlk_g ·

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim (Nigeria) ‘The Whispering Trees’ from The Whispering Trees, published by Parrésia Publishers (Lagos, 2012) http://www.parresiapublishers.com/ ·

 Chinelo Okparanta (Nigeria) ‘America’ from Granta, Issue 118 (London, 2012) www.granta.com

 Chinelo Okparanta

As always the stories will be available to read online on the Caine Prize website www.caineprize.com and will be published along with the 2013 workshop stories in the forthcoming Caine Prize anthology A Memory This Size to be published in July by New Internationalist and seven African co-publishers: Jacana Media (South Africa), Cassava Republic (Nigeria), Kwani? (Kenya), Sub-Saharan Publishers (Ghana), FEMRITE (Uganda), Bookworld Publishers (Zambia) and ‘amaBooks (Zimbabwe).

Once again, the Caine Prize winner will be given the opportunity of taking up a month’s residence at Georgetown University as a Writer-in-Residence at the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice. The award will cover all travel and living expenses. The winner will also be invited to take part in the Open Book Festival in Cape Town in September.

The  shortlisted writers will be reading from their work at the Royal Over-Seas League on Thursday, 4 July at 7pm and at the Southbank Centre, on Sunday, 7 July at 6.30pm.
On Friday, 5 July at 2-5pm and on Saturday, 6 July at 5pm they will take part in the Africa Writes Festival at The British Library, organised by ASAUK and the Royal African Society.

Last year's winner Rotimi Babatunde has since co-authored a play ‘Feast’ for the Young Vic and the Royal Court theatres in London.

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

The African winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer and J M Coetzee are Patrons of The Caine 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.

Previous winners are Sudan’s Leila Aboulela (2000), Nigerian Helon Habila (2001), Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina (2002), Kenyan Yvonne Owuor (2003), Zimbabwean Brian Chikwava (2004), Nigerian Segun Afolabi (2005), South African Mary Watson (2006), Ugandan Monica Arac de Nyeko (2007), South African Henrietta Rose-Innes (2008), Nigerian EC Osondu (2009), Sierra Leonean Olufemi Terry (2010), Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo (2011) and Nigerian Rotimi Babatunde (2012).

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

nominations open for the Arab British Centre Award for Culture

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 Baroness Helena Kennedy, chair of judges of the Arab British Centre Award for Culture 2013

Applications for the Arab British Centre Award for Culture opened on 20 May. The Award, worth £2,500, celebrates the individual who is judged to have made the most constructive contribution to British understanding of Arab culture in the past two years. It is open to individuals working in any cultural field.

The shortlist will be revealed in mid-September, and the winner  will be announced at the Award Ceremony to be held at Leighton House Museum in London on 26 September. In addition to the prize money, The Arab British Centre is able to provide the winner with opportunities to promote his or her work more widely. Applications are welcome directly from individuals wishing to be considered for the award. Details of the application process are on www.arabbritishcentre.org.uk  For further information contact Ruba Asfahani ruba@arabbritishcentre.org.uk | 020 7832 1310

Ruba Asfahani recently joined the team at the Arab British Centre as project manager and as a trustee. She told this blog: “We’re extremely excited to announce this award after a two year hiatus: the concept has changed slightly to allow us to celebrate an individual who is making a worthy contribution to British understanding of Arab culture"

She added: "With a strong panel made up of some of the most respected individuals working in Music, Film, Art and other cultural enterprises, we will no doubt see an influx of applicants. These applicants deserve to be recognised with an award like thi,s mainly because in the last few years the Arab arts scene has developed exponentially in the UK, and if it wasn’t for these hardworking individuals, none of it would have been possible.”


The Arab British Centre has been playing an increasing role in promoting cultural and artistic events related to the Arab world. Its role was honoured in April this year when it was named co-winner of the prestigious UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture 2012.

The UNESCO-Sharjah Prize rewards significant contributions to the development, knowledge and spread of Arab culture by means of artistic, intellectual or promotional outreach aimed at enhancing intercultural dialogue and understanding. According to UNESCO Assistant Director-General for Culture Francesco Bandarin, the Centre has been recognised for "the various activities and events organised, within and outside the Centre, to promote a better understanding of Arab culture and foster intercultural dialogue".

The Arab British Centre Award for Culture is successor to the Arab British Culture and Society Award, which was worth £5,000 to the winner and ran for four years in 2008 - 2011. The Culture and Society Award celebrated organisations and individuals which had made a considerable impact on the British public’s understanding of the life, society and culture of the Arab world. In practice, although open to both organisations and individuals, in each year an organisation won: the four winners were Al Saqi Books, Zaytoun, Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival and Al Jazeera English. A number of individuals were, however, specially commended.

The new Arab British Centre Award for Culture is, unlike its predecssor, open only to individuals rather than to both individuals and organisations. The change will be welcomed by those who felt it was difficult to judge individuals alongside organisations, especially given the greater financial resources of the latter category.

The winner of the 2013 prize will be chosen by a panel of distinguished experts with knowledge of the cultures of the Arab World and the United Kingdom. The panel is chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC who was previously a chair of the judges of the Arab British Culture and Society Award.  Kennedy has served as Chair of the British Council and of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), and is a Trustee of the British Museum and the Booker Prize.

The other panellists are: Maxime Duda, CEO and Founder of Arab New Trends; Rose Issa, a curator, writer and publisher who for the last 30 years has been promoting contemporary art and films from the Arab world and Iran; Deborah Shaw, Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Director of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012, and Brian Whitaker, journalist and former Middle East Editor of the Guardian newspaper.

Deborah Shaw of the RSC, a judge of the Award

Biographical details of the panel:

Baroness Helena Kennedy is a barrister, broadcaster, and member of the House of Lords, and is  Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford. An expert in human rights law, civil liberties and constitutional issues, she has received many honours for her work. Current chair of Justice - the British arm of the International Commission of Jurists - she was the Chair of the British Council and of the Human Genetics Commission. She recently produced a report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission on Human Trafficking in Scotland and was a member of the Government Commission on a British Bill of Rights. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and Co-Chair of the International Bar Association’s Institute of Human Rights.

Maxime Duda Maxime Duda is CEO and founder of Arab New Trends. In 2007, he was commissioned to build what became the public association called LEOPArts (Lebanese Export Office for Performing Arts). LEOPArts was an Agency of Public Interest, supported by the Lebanese Minister of Culture, H.E Tarek Mitri. After moving to London in 2009, Duda launched Arab New Trends Limited, a UK based company that proposes Arts and Culture consulting services, with a focus on the Middle East and Northern Africa. Since moving to London Duda has collaborated with Al Jazeera, the Jordan Festival and several Universities. He also has worked in curating events for Shubbak Festival, Nour Festival, the V&A, Barbican, Sadler Wells, The Tabernacle, The Scope and Rich Mix.

Rose Issa  is a curator, writer and producer who has championed visual art and film from the Arab world and Iran for nearly 30 years. She has lived in London for the last 25 years where, from her project space in Great Portland Street ,she showcases upcoming and established artists. Rose Issa has been guest curator for numerous private and public institutions in Beirut, Liverpool, London, Moscow, Geneva, Berlin, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Brussels amongst others. She also advises public and private art institutions on their loans and acquisitions of contemporary artworks from the Middle East, including The British Museum, Imperial War Museum, Museum of Mankind, Victoria and Albert Museum; the Written Art Foundation, Wiesbaden; the National Museums of Scotland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Smithsonian Institution (Sackler/Freer Gallery and National Museum of African Arts); the World Bank, and The National Gallery of Jordan.

Deborah Shaw  has a career in theatre spanning over 20 years, as Associate and Artistic Director in regional theatre, as a producer, director and writer in the UK and USA and most recently as Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Director of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012. The World Shakespeare Festival was the centrepiece of the official culture programme of the London Olympics, and included 75 productions and projects (including film commissions, education and online projects). She has commissioned, developed and presented productions and co-productions from Iraq, Tunisia, Kuwait, Germany Czech Republic, Russia, Brazil, Mexico, USA, Canada, India, Poland, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, South Africa and Zimbabwe. She is Executive Producer and the only non-Iraqi founder member of the Baghdad-based Iraqi Theatre Company, which won Best Production of 2012 for their latest production, Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, which was seen in the UK, Qatar and Iraq in 2012 and is touring Germany and USA in 2013/14. Later this year she joins Historic Royal Palaces as Head of Creative Programming, with responsibility for a new programme of artistic projects across the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace and Banqueting House.

Brian Whitaker is a journalist and former Middle East Editor of the Guardian newspaper. He is the author of two books about the region, "What's Really Wrong with the Middle East" and "Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East". His website, www.al-bab.com, is devoted to Arab culture and politics. The Arab British Centre 1 Gough Square London, EC4A 3DE

Brian Whitaker

The Arab British Centre is a registered charity which works to improve the British public’s understanding of the Arab world. It organises and promotes cultural and artistic events relating to the Arab world, and hosts a regular programme of activities including Arabic calligraphy classes and Arabic language classes. It also housse permanent and temporary collections of contemporary Arab art, has a specialised library open to the public, and recognises individuals and organisations working in similar fields through its  award.

In addition to its regular on-site activities the Centre works in partnership with other institutions including the Mayor of London Shubbak Festival and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's Nour Festival. In 2012, it produced ‘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.
report by Susannah Tarbush

Moroccan novelist Mahi Binebine's Horses of God explores the path to suicide bombings

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Horses of God probes minds of young Islamist suicide bombers
by Susannah Tarbush, London 

Horses of God (Granta Books) translated by Lulu Norman

This month marks the tenth anniversary of Morocco's worst-ever Islamist terror attack, in which 14 young men carried out a series of suicide bombings in the heart of Casablanca. The bombings on the evening of 16 May 2003 killed 45 people - 12 bombers and 33 innocent victims - and wounded more than 100.

Many of the victims were killed when the attackers knifed a guard at the popular and packed Casa de España Spanish-owned restaurant and blew themselves up inside. The other targets were the five-star Hotel Farah, a Jewish cemetery, a Jewish community centre, a Jewish-owned Italian restaurant and the Belgian consulate.


Mahi Binebine

It was found that all the bombers, aged from 16 to 23, had come from the shanty town of Sidi Moumen. The attacks raised profoundly disturbing questions, and in a search for answers the Moroccan writer and painter Mahi Binebine decided to go to Sidi Moumen.

On a visit to the UK last month, supported by English PEN, Binebine said: "We just weren't used to this type of terrorism in Morocco. Most people were very shocked and I wanted to understand what was happening to us."

In Sidi Moumen "I discovered a town of 50,000 inhabitants living in shacks with corrugated iron roofs, without electricity, without light, without water or proper sewerage. I found I was in another country, not Morocco."

The shanty town is hidden behind big walls and is not visible from the motorway: "If you're outside you wouldn't know there are 50,000 people living in this place. And in the middle of it is a rubbish dump. Everybody's working in that rubbish dump - you've got children rummaging around in it, you've got lorries parking up to dump more stuff on it." He witnessed horrendous scenes when people were so keen to be the first get to stuff being dumped that it was deposited virtually on their heads.

"The first picture of Sidi Moumen I had was of kids playing football on top of the rubbish dump, and I said to myself OK, those kids are going to become the heroes of my next novel." That novel, Les étoiles de Sidi Moumen (The Stars of Sidi Moumen), was published by Flammarion in France in 2010 and won the Grand Prix du Roman Arabic 2010.

The novel was made into an acclaimed film Les Chevaux de Dieu directed by Paris-born Moroccan-Tunisian director Nabil Ayouch. Jamal Belmahi's script is based on Binebine's novel, but makes well-judged changes of plot and tone. The young actors in the film are from Sidi Moumen, with one set of actors playing the bombers as boys and another set portraying them as young men. The actors give some remarkably powerful performances. The film won Ayouch the 2012 François Chalais Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Binebine's visit to the UK in April marked the publication by London publisher Granta Books of Lulu Norman's translation of the novel from French under the title Horses of God. The translation won an English PEN Award last November for writing in translation. These Awards help British publishers with  marketing. The six books which received Awards last November were selected by a panel chaired by the renowned literary translator Ros Schwartz. In celebration of Binebine's visit to the UK, English PEN Atlas published his short story Stolen Eyes.

Ros Schwartz and Mahi Binebine

Horses of God is the second of Binebine's novels to be translated to English by Lulu Norman and published by Granta Books. The first, Welcome to Paradise (the original French title is Cannibales), appeared in 2003 (it was reviewed in the Guardian by Maya Jaggi). Welcome to Paradise is about human traffickers; its characters are desperate to get from North Africa to Europe through clandestine and perilous migration across the Strait of Gibraltar.

Horses of God is Binebine's reimagining of the Casablanca suicide bombings. The first-person narrator Yachine, blew himself up in the bombings aged 18. Now a ghost, he looks back over his life and at the events that led him to become a suicide bomber.

"Sometimes I'm overcome by the urge to scream when I find misguided dreamers following in my footsteps.." Yachine muses. "Abu Zoubeir lied when he said we'd go straight to paradise.  He said that we'd suffered our share of Gehenna in Sidi Moumen and therefore nothing worse could happen to us."

Yachine says he didn't hang around in life too long, because there wasn't a lot to do. "And I have to say right now: I'm not sorry to be done with it. I don't have the slightest nostalgia for the eighteen years or so of misery that were my lot." And yet the tone of the novel, narrated from beyond the grave, is serene and rueful with touches of humour.

Yachine has a passion for football, and took his name from that of the legendary Soviet goalie Lev Yashin. As a boy growing up in Sidi Moumen he is in thrall to his dominating and violent older brother Hamid. Life is cheap in the shanty town. Hamid kills a man who had been teasingly coming on to Yachine, and buries his body among the rubbish of the shanty town.

Binebine's prose is spare and poetic, and conveys the texture of the world of Yachine and his friends. Yachine's boyhood comrades include beautiful Nabil who is a prostitute's son, Khalil the shoeshine, Blackie the coalman's son, and Fuad with whose sister Ghizlane Yachine is in love. He at last plucks up the courage to kiss her on what he knows will be his last night on earth.

"We made up our own little family: it was us against the world," Yachine says, remembering his friends. A current of homoeroticism runs through Horses of God.  There is a rape scene set on a drunken evening when Hamid forces himself on a virtually comatose Nabil, and the other boys follow Hamid's lead. Yachine feels shame that he is unable to perform, and he instead quietly comforts Nabil.

from Les Chevaux de Dieu

The boys' drift towards extremism begins after Hamid falls under the spell of an Islamist, Abu Zoubeir, and his clique. Hamid undergoes a radical transformation: he starts praying and going to the mosque,  grows a beard and finds a job in the city. He abandons his wild ways and becomes sober and serious. "He managed to spin a kind of austere web that ensnared us all."

Yachine and his friends fall under the influence of Abu Zoubeir and an Islamist emir and his companions. The TV is tuned to a channel that shows massacres of Muslims on a loop, making the boys' blood boil. They are told Jihad is their salvation. "Abu Zoubeir said we had to react. The Prophet would never have tolerated such humiliation". Not long before the suicide attacks the bombers are taken on what they are told is "a holiday" in mountains far from Casablanca, where they undergo final training and indoctrination. "The time we spent in the mountains will always be one of the happiest memories of my short life," Yachine says. During their time in the mountains Nabil and Yachine find themselves making love.

Binebine's English PEN-supported visit to UK

Binebine was born in Marrakech in 1959. After studying mathematics he worked as a maths teacher in Paris before turning to painting and then writing. He spent many years living and working in Paris, New York and Madrid and then returned to live in the city of his birth. His paintings are in the permanent collection at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and are in many other collections. One of his works is on the cover of the latest issue of Banipal magazine of modern Arab literature in English translation.

During his April visit to the UK Binebine took part in three events. At the first he was in conversation at St Anne's College, Oxford University; the event was coordinated by Oxford Student PEN, in association with St Anne's Arts and Humanities Discussion Group.

The second event was held in the cinema of the Institut français in South Kensington, London, where a screening of Les Chevaux de Dieu was followed by a discussion with writer and curator Omar Kholeif.

Sarah Ardizzone, Mahi Binebine and Omar Kholeif

The visit concluded with a launch of Horses of God, at the Brunei Suite, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London University. A discussion between Binebine and Ros Schwartz was followed by a lively Q and A session. The event was organised by the Royal African Society. After the event he signed copies of his book with an individual drawing for each one.

At both London events the interpreter was Sarah Ardizzone, a highly-regarded translator of French literary works including novels by the young writer Faïza Guène, born in France to Algerian parents.

a painting by Mahi Binebine on the cover of Banipal

Binebine's first novel, Le sommeil de l’esclave (The Slave Girl's Sleep) appeared in 1992. A further eight books, fiction and non-fiction, followed, most recently Le Seigneur vous le rendra (The Lord Will Reward You). His novels often focus on the marginalised.

Ros Schwartz asked Binebine him how the two art forms in which he works - writing and painting - are connected. He said he has a "really military discipline", working in his office from 8 am until midday and spending his afternoons until 7 pm in his studio. Asked if the subject matter of  the two art forms is connected, he said that when he is writing a novel the paintings he produces at that time are linked thematically to the theme he is treating in his novel.

In general, the literature comes prior to the painting - except in the case of his most recent novel, where it was the other way round. ."For several years I'd been painting figures of people who are wracked with strain. And I had no idea that I was in fact going to write a novel the central character of which is a baby that is mummified. That was the first time that the painting influenced the novel."

'a suicide bomber is at the same time a victim'

Schwartz said: "In Horses of God you trace the development of kids who go from being carefree and playing football  to being suicide bombers. And I get the sense that, without in any way trying to write an apology for the horrific bombings, you are also showing that these young men are victims: they are  victims of poverty, and in  a way you are asking who is really to blame for this."

Mahi replied that "poverty doesn't necessarily lead to terrorism. But I wanted to show that poverty is like a petri dish, it's an area in which issues can ferment, particularly when you have these Islamist mafias installing themselves within the shanty towns."

Binebine said that if fingers of blame are going to be pointed, they should be pointed at the state, which allow these shanty towns to exist, and at the religious mafia that set itself up within the shanty towns and brainwashes uneducated young people who are easy prey.  "And we can also point at the Moroccan bourgeoisie who underpay the people who work for them: the official wage is 200 Euros a month but you've got the Moroccan bourgeoisie paying 100 Euros a month, half the official wage.

"And so in that sense yes, these young people are victims. Of course, that is a very difficult statement to make in the West - but a suicide bomber is at the same time a victim."


Ros observed that his recent novels appear to have a common theme of escaping poverty and misery. In Welcome to Paradise the protagonists are seeking to leave their country and find paradise in Europe. They want to get away, with fatal results. In Horses of God they seek paradise in martyrdom - again, with tragic results. "And in your most recent novel Le Seigneur vous le rendra the narrator Mamoun seeks and finds escape through literature and education. Would you say that's your message, of the importance of education as a way out of poverty and misery?"

Binebine said "of course the priority of priorities has to be education." In Le Seigneur vous le rendra a child is born with an extraordinary talent for begging. His mother hires him out to beggars, who outbid each other to have him beg on their pitch for the day. But then the child starts growing, which is not good for business. His mother has heard of the Chinese practice of binding feet to stop them growing, and she decides to "mummify" her baby.  "Of course she doesn't entirely mummify him - she stops at the neck. So the body stops growing but the head carries on growing."

'the baby has his own Arab Spring'

In order to remain a baby the child is forbidden to speak. "And of course this is a metaphor for all these Arab societies which stop people growing up and infantilise them." But the baby is given access to culture by a  Spanish person he meets (just as Binebine was very much encouraged early in his artistic endeavours by a Spanish artist who became a friend.) "The baby has his own Arab Spring. He's going to kill the mother - not physically, he's going to cut that umbilical cord - and he's going to do exactly what the Arab people have been doing these past two or three years, they stop being frightened of their dictators . So revolution stems from education, but it also stems from love, because he'll also encounter love." (The novel received a favourable review in Libération).

Schwartz finds the striking thing about Binebine's work to be "the extreme richness of the characters: every character has a story and the stories are humorous, they are unusual, there are stories within stories. Where does the inspiration for this extraordinary range of characters come from?  Do people tell you their stories, are these people that you grew up with?"

"I was born in the heart of the madina in Marrakech and in order to get to school I had to cross the central square of Marrakech, Djemaa el Fn, where you have all the performers and snake charmers," Binebine said. "I spent years crossing that square  witnessing the oral tradition that's so central to our country. On the other hand people never stop telling stories in Morocco so I harvest these stories people tell me and I don't really have to invent anything. It's as if we writers are fighting over who is going to nick which story!" 

Ayouch and Binebine have maintained their links with the young people of Sidi Moumen. Asked by Ros Schwartz about their project in the shanty town, Binebine said that in order to do something for the youngsters, he and Ayouch had organised a major auction of donated art works to be held in Casablanca on 16 May - the 10th anniversary of the suicide attacks. The proceeds would go towards building a cultural centre for children in Sidi Moumen. The auction would be preceded on the previous evening, 15 May, by a screening of  Les Chevaux de Dieu in  Sidi Moumen, bringing together the families of the victims and of the suicide bombers.

Forty-one painters, sculptors, photographers and private collectors donated 66 valuable artworks for the auction which was held in a room offered by the Hyatt Regency hotel and was supported by Hicham Daoudi of Compagnie Marocaine des Oeuvres et Objets d'Art (CMOOA), Binebine posted a euphoric message on Facebook announcing that the auction had raised 2 million dirhams (equivalent to around  $US 233,000.

still from Les Chevaux de Dieu

During the event at the Institut français, which began with a screening of Les Chevaux de Dieu, interviewer Omar Kholeif said that despite the brutalism and poverty "there's a real romanticism to this coming of age story. Was that intentional? There's even a line where one of the characters says they don't necessarily hate living in this particular kind of context."

Binebine said: "That’s precisely why I didn’t write a dark book. It is a very funny book even if Nabil Ayouch the cineaste turned it into a very serious film. The novel itself is not very dark because the children I encountered in Sidi Boumen were light, were fun, they laughed, they played with a sardine tin, there truly was a point when I said they almost seem to be happier than the kids who live in the posh areas."

Binebine started writing the novel in 2004, a  year after the attacks, but stopped writing in 2006 "because it was out of the question to apologise for terrorism, to justify the unjustifiable. And at the same time I said if I was born in that, and I wasn't educated, and I was living in that kind of dirt, I would have been an easy prey for those dream merchants." 

He said the dictators who have ruled Arab countries in past decades have created a kind of void around them. "They've killed, they've imprisoned, they've corrupted all the alternative voices, all those who could have offered something different, which means they've laid down the red carpet for an Islam that actually has nothing to do with Islam. These Islamists are the children of the dictatorships and not the children of the revolutions of the Arab Spring, they've been there for 40,50 years; they won, they are there."

Kholeif asked Binebine whether he had ever been conscious, or worried, that his novel might be instrumentalised or misconstrued as something that could be used to promote those people who are keen to promote Islamic xenophobia.

Binebine said: "There is a risk, because in Sidi Moumen there are Islamists who have installed themselves there and we’ve let them set themselves up there and they’ve emptied, cleared out, the other mafia who are the 'normal' mafia, the almost-nice mafia, who sold hashish, who did little deals – a normal mafia. It was a mafia that didn’t kill as much as these Islamists – they set themselves up and they created order."

When Mahi met people in Sidi Moumen they were "very happy about the Islamists arriving because they said 'these guys cleared out the hash sellers, the wine sellers, they cleaned the place up'. They’ve got money, they help people and are very present in people’s lives. And so in the film in the story these are people who take the kids away from the rubbish dump, they clean them up – if you’re going to be praying 5 times a day you’ve got to clean yourself up 5 times a day – wash – and they separate them from their families. And the group becomes their family.

"They find jobs for them, and what they are given is dignity, a kind of dignity they have never had. And little by little they embark on the work of brainwashing – so they start showing them tapes of Palestinians, Chechens, martyrs, you’re going to save Islam – you are the horses of God – it’s terrible how little by little you start to create human bombs. They are already in hell, that’s what they're told, what have you got to lose? What they are being offered is a direct ticket to paradise – 70 virgins, I don’t know if that’s funny or not – they are offered this and that and little by little they convince them."


Iraqi writer, satirist & columnist Khalid Kishtainy appears at Iraqi Cultural Centre London 8th June 6.30pm

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Khalid Kishtainy | The Man Entire
Khalid Kishtainy is a controversial man of many parts, author of some 34 books, journalist, artist, politician and gripping story teller. People often see one part of him, but this rare event, presents him in his entirety as he will talk about his life, his work and his ideas. It will be all supported by his autobiography, Time in Iraq and England, published last month and available at the Centre, as well as during the joint exhibition of his paintings and the paintings of his daughter, Jasmine. His son Adam Kishtainy will be playing guitar music.

 خالد القشطيني بكامل شخصيته خالد القشطيني شخصية متعددة الادوار والجوانب والاهتمامات. فهو مؤلف لنحو 34 كتابا، وكاتب ساخر، وصحافي و فنان و مفكر سياسي و قاص متمكن. قد لايعرف الآخرون عنه سوى جانب واحد، و لكن في هذه الأمسية المتميزة، سيظهر القشطيني متكاملا حيث سيتكلم عن حياته و اعماله و افكاره. و ستتوج الأمسية بأستعراض كتابه الجديد المتضمن سيرته الذاتية والصادر مؤخرا تحت عنوان " زمن في العراق وانكلترا" والذي ستتوفر نسخ منه خلال الأمسية وطوال فترة المعرض الشخصي المشترك للوحاته الفنية و لوحات ابنته ياسمين. وسيقدم السيد آدم القشطيني-أبن الأستاذ خالد- عزفا على القيثار.
JOIN US!

6.30 pm Saturday 8 June
  
Iraqi Cultural Centre in London 
Threshold and Union House 
65-69 Shepherds Bush Green 
London W12 8TX

A review of Khalid's book of saucy London and Iraq stories: Arabian Tales: Baghdad on Thames (Quartet, 2012)

A review of Khalid's novel By the Rivers of Babylon (Quartet, 2008)

In honour of Khalid Kishtainy : an evening of humour, writing, music and painting at London's Iraqi Cultural Centre

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report and photos by Susannah Tarbush 

 Waheda al-Mikdadi introduces Khalid Kishtainy

At an event held in his honour at the Iraqi Cultural Centre in Shepherd's Bush, West London on  the evening of 8 June, the Iraqi journalist, satirist, writer and painter Khalid Kishtainy spoke about his eventful life and work. The event also launched his new book, an autobiography entitled Time in Iraq and England (Dar Al Hikma, London).

The evening was introduced by journalist Waheda al-Mikdadi, who paid fulsome tribute to Kishtainy's many achievements and contributions. Kishtainy thanked Waheda for her kind words and flattering phrases, which reminded him of "the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he was in a similar situation giving a lecture, and the chairman showered him with praise... the Archbishop came to the platform, paused for a while and said 'excuse me, I'm sorry but I have to make two prayers: one to ask the Almighty to forgive the chairman for all these flattering words, the other to pray to the Almighty to forgive me for having enjoyed all this flattery!'" Kishtainy continued: "In addition to these two prayers I make another one: that you will say these same things behind my back!"



'swerving between the worlds of word and paint'
Kishtainy was born in Karkh, Baghdad, on 10 October 1929. His father, Shakir Mahmud Kishtainy, was a teacher. A 12-page booklet on Khalid's life and works issued on the occasion of the evening begins: "With so many interests and talents, Khalid Kishtainy spent most of his life swerving between the world of the word and the world of paint. At the age of 18, he was busy writing poetry, like most educated young Arabs, and thought of improving his power of poetic description by studying painting, which prompted him to join the art department of the Fine Arts Institute in Baghdad." There he was coached by Faiq Hassan, a grand master of Iraqi art.

After spending five years at the Fine Arts Institute Khalid won a scholarship to study painting in London, where he was enrolled at Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Art and Design and the Central School of Art and Design. This period "influenced his entire life and opened his mind to Western thought." On returning to Baghdad, Kishtainy taught painting and theatre design at the Fine Arts Institute.

The evening honouring Kishtainy included the official opening in the Iraqi Cultural Centre's gallery of an  exhibition of paintings by him and by his daughter Jasmine Jones-Kishtainy. Jasmine was born during Khalid's first marriage: the booklet on Kishtainy tells of how "in some very unhappy circumstances, Khalid Kishtainy was separated from his only daughter, Jasmine, almost fifty years ago."

After a long and painful search he managed to trace her and re-established contact. To his surprise he found that she too had pursued a career in art, and had like him studied at the Central School of Art. 

Kishtainy's writing career began when he started writing for the Lebanese magazine Al-Adab during his time in England. He has written some 34 books in Arabic and English, and has a widely-read and highly-appreciated columnist in the London-based newspaper Ash-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper. He recently started to write a well-received satirical column for the London-based Middle East monthly magazine, and contributes to various other publications.

A selection of Kishtainy's books in Arabic and English was displayed on the glass table in front of him at the Iraqi Cultural Centre. One of his books, Arab Political Humour (Quartet Books 1985), was a particular favourite of the late renowned scholar of International Relations and of the Middle East Professor Fred Halliday, who regularly commended it to audiences.

Kishtainy's other books in English include The New Statesman and the Middle East (Palestine Essays) published in 1972 by the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut; The Prostitute in Progressive Literature (Allison and Busby 1983); Tales from Old Baghdad: Grandma and I (Quartet 1997); Tomorrow is Another Day: A Tale of Getting By in Baghdad (Elliott and Thompson Limited 2003); By the Rivers of Babylon (Quartet, 2008), and Arabian Tales: Baghdad on Thames (Quartet 2012).

The Kishtainys are a highly talented family. The evening at the Iraqi Cultural Centre included guitar performances by one of Khalid's two sons, Adam, who is an accomplished musician and a music therapist. Introducing Adam, Khalid said there was nothing more fitting for a beginning to the evening than "the mistress of all the arts, music". Adam gave a beautiful performance of  Isaac Albeniz's famous composition Asturias. 




 Adam Kishtainy

"You may wonder why I brought him here," Khalid said, joking that Adam's music therapy might be needed in case the audience were shocked when they read his latest book Time in Iraq and England.

Sitting in the audience was Britain's former ambassador to Iraq (in 1985-89) Sir Terence Clark. Khalid recounted how on a recent trip to Baghdad he and Sir Terence had been stuck in Al-Rashid  hotel in the Green Zone with little to do. He had noticed Sir Terence looking bored, and so gave him a copy of his new book, suggesting he read a few pages to pass the time. "The following day he came to me and said 'I spent the whole night reading this book and I tell you, it is a shocker!'" Kishtainy said readers might get a series of shocks from Time in Iraq and England, and "if you're not satisfied with that you can go to my short stories and you will have even more shocks. One of you may even faint and collapse, or get a nervous breakdown - and here is the music therapist to revive you."

 Adam Kishtainy prepares to "therapise" the audience

Introducing the second piece he performed Adam explained that music therapy - in which he did an MA, after a first degree in physics - is very diverse, and  that you can listen to music in a wide variety of ways. His second piece was an improvisation, as used in the type of therapy sometimes known as receptive music therapy in which the therapist actually performs the music. "So you are about to be therapised if that's OK - don't listen too closely - just let your mind wander and see if it takes you somewhere. I don't  know where this will go, but it's made up just for you tonight. " He embarked on a  delightful meditative improvisation that suggested Moorish influences.


The artist Emad Altaay (standing) at the unveiling of his portrait of Khalid Kishtainy

Adam's guitar performance was one of several surprises during the evening. Another was the unveiling of a portrait of Kishtainy painted by the Iraqi artist Emad Altaay. Altaay specialises in equestrian painting: "He came to one of my lectures and as he listened to me he said 'oh this man must be a horse' and he decided to paint me as a horse." The portrait is in fact an excellent likeness of Kishtainy.

In a wide-ranging, often amusing, account of his life and experiences Khalid revealed how his wife Margaret, whom he married in 1972, had encouraged him to write about his family and Iraq, and about his coming to England.

Looking back over his life Kishtainy said: "My real trouble is backing the wrong horse or, putting it plainly, espousing unpopular causes". In his latest book he recalls how as a child he saw peasants and their families and children pushing at each other while competing to get morsels of food his family had left behind after a picnic. That incident influenced him deeply:  "Poverty and the poor and the eradication of poverty became the theme of all my life - and it was a very unpopular theme which landed me in so many unpalatable situations."





In his young days Kishtainy became a communist, but he found the communists did not solve the problems of the poor. "I started writing against them, and turned the communists against me too. Being a communist in a Muslim country is bad enough but to have the communists against you as well...."  Another of his concerns was corruption and ways of tackling it. "I came to discover the only period Iraq was free from corruption was when Iraq was under the British mandate. Really the people who were more considerate to the poor and trying to help them were the British and not the Iraqi nationalist leaders who took over."
Further down the line "I went even further and wrote that the leaders of the sacred cow in the Arab world, that national liberation movement are no more than a bunch of thieves."

He then began to address the question of Arabs and Jews and spent years studying the problem of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict "as a result of my contact with Palestinians who were working with me in the BBC."  He wrote a dozen books on this subject, the last of which was the novel By the Rivers of Babylon. He and his publisher, Quartet, had high hopes for the book and "waited to see a great stampede for it, at least in Israel where we have a very big community of Israelis of Iraqi origin - but that hope did not materialise. The Arabs didn't like the book because it portrays a Jew as a noble man who risks his life to save a Muslim woman. The Jews, or most of the Jews, didn't like it either because there's a Palestinian who suddenly appears on the scene and says to an Israeli Jew 'this house you live in was the house in which I was born and spent my childhood'. Most of the Jews didn't like the mention of a Palestinian at all. As a result the book was boycotted in Israel as well."


Sir Terence Clark about to open the exhibition of paintings by Khalid and his daughter Jasmine

After Kishtainy's talk Sir Terence Clark cut the red ribbon to open the exhibition of paintings by Khalid and his daughter Jasmine. Khalid said that he still paints "with an impressionist's brush, and in a realistic fashion. Realism and impressionsm I adhere to - and they are out of fashion. I describe the bulk of modern art as humbug; all this stuff of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst is humbug and I wouldn't follow their track. This is another cause in which I lost, I am old fashioned and behind the times." His daughter happened to follow the same school of realism as he did, although in her case it is photographic realism. After graduating from the Central School of Art she did a Masters in History of Art at Nottingham and a further course at the Hochschule DerKünste, Berlin.

Khalid said visitors to  the exhibition would notice that some of the people in his paintings are wearing masks. "This was a stage in my career when I tried to express the theory of Dr Al Wardi who wrote a book about the duality or duplicity of the Iraqi character. There is always a dual personality for the Iraqi, and its not only Iraqi - in this country it's just the same." 

pictures at an exhibition





two of the "mask" paintings by Khalid Kishtainy
above and below, paintings by Jasmine Jones-Kishtainy


 Jasmine Jones-Kishtainy


'Unholyland': Aidan Andrew Dun's book of Palestine-Israel love sonnets launched at P21 Gallery London 20 June

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UPDATE: THIS EVENT HAS NOW BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO ARTIST ILLNESS - WILL BE RESCHEDULED

From the P21 Gallery: 

The staff of the P21 Gallery invite you to our next Thursday Fringe session -

Night of the Poets Presents: 

The Launch of Aidan Andrew Dun's Critically Acclaimed Book Unholyland  [reviewed here ] -  a dark romance of the Shift, a love story at the crux of our time

Thursday 20 June
6.30-9 pm
Hosted by Moses Latif: actor, lyricist, DJ and Music Producer
RSVP essential: info@p21.org.uk
£5 entry fee on the door

P21 Gallery 21 Chalton Street London NW1 1JD



Please see the attached invite. We very much look forward to seeing you there. 


Aidan Andrew Dun



'Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus' launched at the Mosaic Rooms in London

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In the past two years a variety of books on the Arab revolutions have appeared in English. They range from "instant histories" based on tweets to the accounts of journalists who covered the uprisings. 

The book Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus published recently in London by IB Tauris is different from other books so far on the Arab revolutions. It is a unique collection of substantial essays on the revolutions by eight authors from different Arab countries (excerpts are on the IB Tauris website). All but one of the essays were completed between May and December 2011. Wishful Thinking by Saudi journalist Safa Al Ahmad is dated September 2012.

The essays were specially commissioned by the editors: activist and writer Layla Al-Zubaidi, who is Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in South Africa and was previously based for the Böll Foundation in Beirut and Ramallah; journalist and photographer Matthew Cassel, who covers the Middle East for Al Jazeera English and is former Assistant Editor of The Electronic Intifada; and literary agent and writer Nemonie Craven Roderick .

The introduction to the collection is by the renowned Syrian writer, journalist and activist Samar Yazbek. In 2012 Yazbek won the PEN Pinter International Writer of Courage prize, and the PEN Tucholsky Prize in Sweden, for her book  A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution (Haus, 2012). This year she won the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression.

Yazbek writes: "These revolutions pre-empted the process of revolutionary and intellectual theorizing, and yet now wait on a new form of literature to describe them: a writing forged in the present moment." The essays "vary between the personal and the general, but all express a single point: that writing at a time of revolution is part of the process of change. Moving between the subjective and the dispassionate, they offer us examples of heroism and of hope for the future."

L to R: Matthew Cassel, Layla Al-Zubaidi, Nemonie Craven Roderick and Mohamed Mesrati

At an event on Writing Revolution at the Mosaic Rooms in London, Nemonie Craven Roderick said: "I don't think it's inappropriate to invoke Walter Benjamin who, when he felt there was a need for a new kind of historical writing, said it should be by those who can bear witness to change at a moment of risk or danger. That's what the contributors to this book have done, and the essays are incredibly striking. They are certainly very personal, and passion really flies off the page."

The excellence of the book was recognised when it won an  English PEN Writers in Translation Award 2013 last November. The awards provide publishers with funds to promote and market the winning books.

Craven Roderick said it is hoped that, following its publication in English, there will be various foreign editions of Writing Revolution. It already has a Turkish publisher, Metis, which was co-founded by "an amazing courageous publisher Müge Sökmen - a wonderful woman." She added: "We are in conversation with a few Arabic publishers."

The evening at the Mosaic Rooms was one of several UK events to mark the launch of Writing Revolution. There were events at the Hay Festival,with English PEN's director Jo Glanville; at the Frontline Club in London, chaired by journalist and writer Rachel Shabi;  and at St Anne's College, Oxford University, organised by Oxford Student PEN.

On 28th June there is an opportunity to hear contributors Mohamed Mesrati of Libya and Malek Sghiri of Tunisia when they appear at The Rich Mix in London as part of the Shubbak Festival of contemporary Arab culture.

At the Mosaic Rooms Mesrati appeared alongside the book's editors. Layla Al-Zubaidi said: "For us the aim was to get out some of the voices that usually wouldn't be translated: some of the authors have never been translated into English and some have never written anything, even in their own languages."

She said that although journalism and the activities of foreign reporters have been important, "we felt that it's also important to hear people who are actually engaged in the revolutions writing about themselves in their own language. We wanted them to write in a literary fashion so that we wouldn't have the same as is found for example in blogs or newspapers."

Craven Roderick highlighted the vital role of translator Robin Moger, who translated five essays and Yazbek's introduction from Arabic to English. She noted that Moger is also translating Mesrati's novel-in-progress Mama Pizza and his other work, and is  "incredibly excited" about his writing.

Algerian journalist Ghania Mouffok wrote her essay  We Are Not Swallows in French; it was translated to English by Georgina Collins. Safa Al Ahmad and Egyptian journalist and writer Yasmine El Rashidi submitted their contributions in English.

Al-Zubaidi said the editors had wanted to make sure that the contributors were really honest about their weaknesses and doubts: "If you read the essays you can read a lot of doubt and sometimes also fear about the future. We felt it is extremely difficult in that milieu to find people who really express themselves very honestly... we didn’t want to have political messages, we really wanted to have personal stories with all their kind of conflicting identities, opinions etc."  

Matthew Cassel pointed to the limitations of journalism, with journalists having to meet limits such as word count and deadlines, and increasingly relying on "a small number of elite experts who have made a career out of analysing events in the Middle East."

He said: "That's exactly why I think we need more voices who at least couple the journalism with the voices on the ground to really give us the depth, the detail about what’s happening on the everyday. If we just follow the news we’re not really going to get a full picture of what’s happening in these countries."

The Mosaic Rooms event was enhanced by readings from Writing Revolution by actors Sam West and Jonjo O'Neill. Belfast-born Jonjo O'Neill read from Mesrati's essay Bayou and Laila in his warm Irish accent. Sam West gave a powerful reading from Bahraini activist, critic and author Ali Aldairy's essay  Coming Down from the Tower.

Mesrati completed his wide-ranging essay in exile in London in May 2011 while the Libyan revolution was raging, its outcome far from certain. He said: "When I wrote it I thought it was going to be the last thing I'm going to write, because at that time I was going back to Libya."

Nemonie Craven Roderick and Mohamed Mesrati

Bayou and Leila is named after Mesrati's parents, opponents of the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. They fled Libya with their children in 2005 and were eventually given asylum in the UK. Mesrati was 21 when he wrote his essay. At the time he was beginning to make a name for himself as a writer of short stories, and an excerpt from Mama Pizza had been published in April 2011 in Banipal 40's special feature on Libyan Fiction (Mesrati talked about his life and writing in this interview).

Knowing the essay might be his last-ever piece of writing, Mesrati tried "to deliver many messages - to tell the story of my parents in opposition, and to tell the story of my friends, and to say what I wanted to do in this life, and what I wanted to write, and all the dreams that I wanted to come true - but there was only one thing I had to do, to go back there and be among all the rebels and join the fighters."  He felt he needed to put into the essay "all the novels I'd like to write in the future, and all the essays".

Mesrati's wide-ranging essay begins with his being "born into history" in Tripoli in 1990, when Libya was suffering under the sanctions imposed after the Lockerbie bombing. With humour and precision he conveys the flavour of life as a child growing up under the Gaddafi regime as part of "a generation born from our fathers' defeats." In art classes pupils would illustrate "tragic and deeply dull themes like 'Spring', 'The Joy of the Libyan People at the Revolution', or 'Cleansing the British camps from the Homeland's Soil'. Not once were we asked to draw a loved one's face or our parents."

He and his four deareset friends Khairi, Altakali, Baaisho and Faris got up to mischief and played schoolboy pranks.  But there were undercurrents of fear. Mesrati's father was an actor and theatre producer, but the regime's repression, censorship and paranoia severely curbed artistic freedom. He earned his living working in the oil industry.

Young Mohamed's favourite childhood story was The Elephant, O Ruler of Time! which his father would tell him with "his rich radio voice and his theatrical gestures." Only some years later would Mesrati fully grasp the desperate truths about Libya and its ruler Colonel Gaddafi symbolised in the story.

 Jonjo O'Neill

Mesrati's essay takes a chilling turn when he depicts the horrific days when his student father and schoolgirl mother witnessed the terror of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Students were crushed and  some were publicly hanged.

When the Libyan uprising started on 15 February Mesrati re-established from the UK contact with his childhood friends Khairi, Baaisho and Altakali in Libya (Faris had been killed in a car crash). He received daily reports from them which he circulated on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. The three friends went to fight for the revolution. On 21 February 2011, "the day of sadness, the day the cross of tears was lowered across my back", Mesrati learned that they had been killed.

Mesrati's essay concludes: "This story doesn't end here. The truth is that there are many stories that need to be told ... this is a people that have borne the weight of enough stories to fill all the novels and films you could wish for. To be continued..."

Mesrati is now working on a film, The Morganti Rebels, with Lebanese director Nisrine Mansour. The film tells of four friends who were on the frontline during the revolution and launched a coffee shop in the heart of Misrata. "They have a library and they are doing gigs every Thursday and they have literary events and a place for discussions. Many intellectuals, writers and activists after the war started to go regularly to that coffee shop. We would like in this film to focus on art activism in Libya after the war and how culture and art are the only things that can make a change in society."

Ali Aldairy participated in the uprising in Bahrain but now lives in exile, founding the  online Arabic newspaper Mira'at al-Bahrain (The Bahrain Mirror). He was unable to attend the UK launches of Writing Revolution, but at the Frontline Club event he was represented by his friend and fellow Bahraini activist Ali Abdulemam. Abdulemam was one of the first to agree to contribute to Writing Revolution, but he then went into hiding for two years and the book's editors lost touch with him. He was sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison and recently fled from Bahrain to the UK where he has been granted political asylum.

Aldairy gives a vivid account of participating in the uprising, which was met with violence by the security forces. He writes that the Bahrain revolution is about two things: state and sect. "How does a sect make the transition to a state? How does the state become a system of governance capable of incorporating a number of sectarian gropus with different (if not openly contradictory) cultures, interests and historical narratives?"

He recalls the funeral on 18 February 2011 of engineering student Ali Ahmad al-Mumin, shot in an attack by security forces on Pearl Square. Al-Mumin's final entry on his Facebook page was: My blood for my country. "Six hours later his words became reality, a truth that stunned his father, mother and six siblings when they received news of his martyrdom." Looking at al-Mumin's Facebook page "my senses were penetrated by his glowing image. I sat frozen before the picture: from its depths something was calling me to write about him."

Aldairy wrote an article for an-Nahar, addressing the dead student. "I see you in every young man I met" he wrote. University students copied the article and made it into a booklet which was distributed in Pearl Square. Aldairy was overwhelmed when Al-Mumin's father phoned him, and when later on he met the student's brother.

 Sam West

Saudi journalist Safa Al Ahmad writes perceptively of her visits to Arab countries in the throes of revolution, intercut with highly critical observations on Saudi Arabia. She begins: '"I'm Saudi. I'm sorry.' It's a phrase uttered at every introduction in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, not so much in Libya. Whisper it to myself in Bahrain."  Sitting with Yemeni women who are discussing revolution she feels they are decades ahead of Saudi Arabia on women's rights and civil society. In her Cairo hotel room she experiences "full-on revolution jealousy and depression".

 Layla Al-Zubaidi said that in their essays the contributors to Writing Revolution reflected on their own roles and "described what has led up to the revolutions so that people realise the revolutions didn't actually fall from the sky." The contributors had already invested much time and energy in political change before the uprisings began.

The Tunisian activist, trade unionist and student leader Malek Sghiri is from a long line of activists: his father was a political prisoner for a total of seven years under the Bourguiba and Ben Ali presidencies. In  Greetings to the Dawn: Living Through the Bittersweet Revolution  he writes of how during the revolution he and his comrades were horribly tortured at the Ministry of the Interior. His interrogator told him: "In 1991, inside this building but in a different room, I was one of those who interrogated your father."

Egyptian journalist and author Yasmine El Rashidi writes in  Cairo, City in Waiting of leaving her grandmother's Cairo house, in which she had grown up, to go and study in the  US in 1997. On visits back to Egypt she saw Cairo becoming "downtrodden and dim".  In summer 2010 she realised something was shifting, and later she was an eye-witness to the revolution: "... my memories of the 18 days, the revolution, are mere fragments of a larger journey and search that I now wait to complete."


 Matthew Cassel and Layla Al-Zubaidi

In  The Resistance: Armed with Words Yemeni journalist, poet and author Jamal Jubran writes as a Yemeni who was born in Eritrea to an Eritrean mother. On going to live in Yemen as a boy he suffered racism and was teased for his less than fluent Arabic. But he then had a revelation: "My talent for writing in Arabic would be my ticket out of the terminal state of weakness and vulnerability that left me exposed to daily humiliations."

Jubran has endured a series of vicissitudes, personal and political. After the unification of Yemen in 1990 he worked for a socialist newspaper. Then in the disastrous civil war of 1994 the Socialist Party was defeated. He eventually became a lecturer in the French department of a university, but then found his name on a hit list of an extremist party's "enemies of Islam". He became emboldened by a group of young journalists who championed  honest writing and freedom, and in his articles he expressed in particular his anger at the prospect of president Ali Saleh passing power to  his son Ahmed. Around the time students started to demonstrate for the removal of the president, Jubran was dismissed from his post at the university.

When the "Arab Spring" reached Yemen Jubran found it painful that certain Arab writers and intellectuals "found it hilarious that such a thing should be attempted in Yemen, and regarded our young people as poorly equipped for a revolution when compared with their contemporaries in Tunisia and Egypt."  Many were killed but "we did not fire a single bullet in response." He lost many of those he knew and feels bad about not joining the demonstrators in the revolution. "I did nothing but write."

Algerian journalist Ghania Mouffok's essay  We Are Not Swallows is a reminder of Algeria's painful history. "This epic has gone on for 130 years" she writes. When she takes her son on demonstrations  "it's not to teach him anything, but to show him that being a citizen of Algeria can be joyous, chaotic and rebellious." Her essay has an elegiac tone. She writes: "We are not swallows. We're not just making spring but also winter, autumn and summer too, because we've been around for a long time."

Khawla Dunia is a Syrian lawyer, writer and researcher and a member of the editorial board of the Damascus Center for Theoretical Studies and Civil Rights. She is the author of several studies, and contributes to the Arabic website Safhat Suriya. And like Yazbek she is one of those Alawites (the sect to which President Bashar Assad belongs) to take a courageous stand for freedom.

Dunia's essay, an account of the uprising in its first 100 days after the killing of demonstrators in Deraa, has the apt title  And the Demonstrations Go On: Diary of an Unfinished Revolution. As Misrati does with Libya, she compares Syria to the republic of fear portrayed by George Orwell in his novel 1984. Her husband had already been imprisoned twice previously for his political activities, and he is arrested for a third time during the uprising. He suffers brutal torture in detention, its marks obvious when he is released on bail.

Dunia's words "where is the country heading? The future is is terrifying and obscure" are, unfortunately, as apposite today as when she wrote them.
report and photos by Susannah Tarbush



part 1 of pop-up mathaf: mapping arab literature in london

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Tayeb Salih

Serpentine Gallery and Mathaf:Arab Museum of Modern Art map London-Arab links
by Susannah Tarbush
Part 1
(Part 2)
 
London has long been an important city on the world map of Arab literature, with Arab authors writing about it and sometimes making it their home. The Arab literary relationship to London was the focus of  Pop-Up Mathaf: Mapping Arab Literature in London, an evening event held recently at the London Review Bookshop. The event was part of Continuous City: Mapping Arab London, a series of talks, discussions and publications mapping relationships between London and Arab cities. Continuous City is being developed by Doha-based  Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art  and the Serpentine Gallery's Edgware Road Project as part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture.

The event was a tribute to the late great Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih (1929-2009), author of the acclaimed and pioneering novel Season of Migration to the North which was first published in Arabic in 1966. The novel was translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies, and has appeared in around 30 other languages. Season of Migration is partly set in London, where Salih himself resided for a long period and where he was at one time head of drama for the BBC Arabic Service.


The gathering offered the audience the privilege of hearing from Salih’s 82-year-old close friend and collaborator, the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, a man of much wisdom, clarity and charm. His major retrospective Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist , bringing together 100 works produced over more than 50 years, opened at London’s Tate Modern on 3 July and runs until 22 September.


Ibrahim El-Salahi

Pop-Up Mathaf: Mapping Arab Literature in London was hosted by Deena Chalabi, a New York-based writer and curator who grew up in London and was founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art. This year she is guest curator of the two Pop-Up Mathaf programmes in London and Liverpool.

Chalabi said it had been "an absolute honour" to know El-Salahi since the opening of Mathaf almost three years ago. He was not only one of the artists in Mathaf's opening exhibition, Sajjil: A Century of Modern Art, but was also featured in the exhibition Interventions. "The work he has made in Doha before and since continues to be an inspiration to all of us."

Pop-Up Mathaf: Mapping Arab Literature in London was one of the events in the three-day Ehtifal Festival of art, literature, music and family events presented by the Serpentine Gallery and the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) as part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture. Ehtifal was also one of the final events in the Shubbak Festival of contemporary Arab culture from 22 June to 6 July.

Since opening in Doha in December 2010 Mathaf has explored various strategies for engaging with audiences in the Arab world and beyond. The Pop-Up Mathaf framework, developed by Deena Chalabi, aims to engage with international audiences through a “flexible, innovative and engaging cross-cultural platform for multiple voices on art and ideas.” This year Chalabi is guest curator of the two Pop-Up Mathaf programmes in London and Liverpool.

Deena Chalabi

Chalabi said the Continuous City project grew out of conversations she had with the Edgware Road Project, and during her upbringing in London with Arab relatives who were always referencing and thinking about other cities and places. Added to these conversations was “my exposure to the cosmopolitanism of Arab artists and writers in my work over the past five years with Mathaf”. Together, “they outline the importance of activating culture and memory, intergenerational dialogue, and engagement with place in different ways, as being crucial to each of us as we try and navigate our own space in the world.”

Jochen Volz, head of programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, explained that the Edgware Road Project is one of the Serpentine’s off-site initiatives. Since 2008 it has brought artists, thinkers, writers and researchers to the Edgware Road area. “Here we have worked with members of the community to chart histories and map relationships between London and the Arab world from a local perspective. It is in the spirit of this project that we are very happy to be collaborating with our great friends at Mathaf, the QMA and Shubbak to present this evening's programme"

Volz noted that he and the Serpentine’s Director Julia Peyton-Jones and Co-Director Hans Ulrich Obrist have worked with the QMA on many occasions. This collaboration included the commissioning of a public installation Rock on Top of Another Rock, by artists Fischli and Weiss, currently on display in Kensington Gardens.

Rock on Top of Another Rock in Kensington Gardens

Volz said: "It is with this idea of exchange in mind that this evening we will hear from writers and publishers who span generations of Arab literature in London. They will interrogate questions of time, place, memory and migration.”

He added that “Continuous City invites artists, writers, economists and historians to develop an atlas charting relationships between London and the Arab world. We will see the results of this research emerge through publishing initiatives, online and through events.”

Janna Graham

Janna Graham, curator of the Edgware Road Project, explained "we've been working on archives for many years connecting the Edgware Road to other places in the world. It was a great moment when Deena approached us and said what would it be like to do this in a broader way - to think about London, mapping histories of the relations between the Arab world and London, but not through a sociological or purely anthropological or purely journalistic perspective, but through all the kind of poetics and artistic strategies that have been developed over a number of years. We're really happy to be launching this year of work together, which complicates this question of what it is to do a mapping to begin with, because we all know histories of mapping are not always the best histories to refer to."

Amal Khalaf

Amal Khalaf, assistant curator of the Edgware Road Project said Continuous City is “a really great opportunity for us to put out all of the research, the studies, the stories that we've been collecting on the Edgware Road with artists and people from the community, from the cafes, from the community centres and cultural centres.”

Deena Chalabi said the Pop-Up Mathaf event was "just the beginning of the Continuous City project which will feature research on many different aspects of Arab London. The publication will hopefully include many expanded versions of the conversations and readings this evening." The contributions during the ever would be “teasers for what will come later" in Continuous City. “Each of our writers and artists has tremendously varied experiences of the world and this particular world city we're in and we're delighted to have them all with us.”

Serpentine co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist screened a short section of a two-hour interview he conducted with Tayeb Salih at his house in Wimbledon in 2006 as part of the gallery's first Marathon event. Obrist cited Eric Hobsbawm “who always said we need an urgent memory moment”. Obrist added that “memory may be in our age of the internet even more urgent than before: because we have more and more information there are more memories. Maybe as Rem Koolhaas said there is much amnesia in the centre of this information age.”

His interview with Salih included discussion of mapping, memory and Season of Migration to the North. The novel is "an inspiration not only to so many writers but also to many architects we work with, and to many visual artists. So we felt it was very important to do an event in memory of Tayeb Salih."

He discussed with Salih what Hobsbawm had told him about living in an age of increasing amnesia and that he thinks we should somehow protest against forgetting. Salih responded “I also claim that I'm trying to do that because in the things which happen to a country like the Sudan and the changes and the coups and the new ideology, the various ideologies, often people think they are doing something new but they are not.

"If only they could go back 100 years, 200 years, 500 years they will realise that they are not doing anything new, they are merely repeating, in a slightly different way. And a great deal of time is wasted because people imagine they are innovating, they are pioneers, they are doing something new, they are not. So awakening memory is very important."

Salih compared the writing of a novel to carrying out archaeology. "In my writing I hanker after something impossible: to keep the world I knew and loved the same. And of course I know very well that is impossible, but there is no harm in trying. Many architects are now trying to do the same, and poets and painters and so on.”

Obrist asked Salih about Season of Migration and issues of transition, migration and being out of place.  Salih said "when you read Season of Migration with reference to an earlier novel called The Wedding of Zein – in which the community I grew up in is more or less intact - then you see the trauma which befell the community in the end.

a photograph of the young Tayeb Salih (R) displayed during Pop-Up Mathaf

“There is a stranger coming from the outside - and then the place undergoes a very extreme trauma with double murder in the village and things the like of which never happened before. It’s almost a Shakespearean idea or Greek idea. Shakespeare [Hamlet] says ‘Time is out of joint’. And the time comes out of joint in Season of Migration.”

Obrist read out a message which the legendary 88-year-old Beirut-born poet, writer and visual artist Etel Adnan had sent to the event from Paris.  Obrist said many of Adnan's paintings had been shown in the last Documenta in Germany and that she had often talked to him about Salih and his notion of time being out of joint.

Adnan's text began: "I am writing you a letter, dear Tayeb, as where you are computers haven't reached yet... " She recalled meeting him in Beirut in around 1973. “You were radiant. A beautiful human being. I had to interview you for my newspaper. I had such a love for your writings that I couldn't say much. I still can't.

“You brought Africa in Arab literature - of course the whole of North Africa is African but that didn't really enter our consciousness. We have a serious reality problem, we are mainly Africans, and because of you we may start to belong to that continent that is still to be discovered by its own people... you brought - with the immense expanses of the Sudan and the incredible majesty of the Nile - a modernity and an elegance of style that no one in Arabic had ever achieved."

She wrote that Salih "spoke of our new nomadic lives, the caravans nowadays not following the Silk Road, but always North. I remember that your voice over the radio had the humming of a drum, and your thinking the originality of wild life."

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Ibrahim El-Salahi

After the screening of the excerpt from his 2006 interview with Salih, Obrist recalled that during the interview “I asked him about art and his answer was very short: he said for him art is Ibrahim El-Salahi."

In conversation with Obrist, El-Salahi spoke captivatingly about his creative friendship with Salih whom he first met at secondary school in Omdurman. "I remember him very well indeed. He was a little bit shy, kept to himself, he was a bookworm. He read a great deal and he learnt and recited Arab poetry and colloquial local poetry.” As far as Arabic classical poetry is concerned he was “in love till his last days with Abu Tayeb al-Mutanabbi”.

At secondary school "we grew really close to each other and I understood him fully during our fourth year and that was in 1948, a long time ago." Tayeb loved chatting and getting together. But it was only years later that he found out Tayeb was a writer: “he was secretive, almost shy” about his writing.

"The first time that I knew he was a writer was in the early 60s. I was contacted by Tawfiq Sayegh, the Lebanese publisher, who ran the magazine called Hiwar - Dialogue - and he said to me 'Tayeb Salih says that you have to illustrate this book', which was The Wedding of Zein, with the seven stories in it. So I read the material .... I was puzzled, I said to him when I met him later, Tayeb Salih, you have all this wealth of literature and creative work and you never tell me about it? He said it's very simple, there's nothing much at all about it. He was very humble about his work, as if he wasn't sure in the beginning of the strength and power in his work." Working on illustrations for The Wedding of Zein was "when I realised what a powerful writer Tayeb Salih is."


This period "coincided with a time when I returned from Europe and for many reasons had to change my style and my work and get down to simplify form. So I did the initial illustrations for him - many people who saw it, I remember, thought that ‘this chap can't draw’ because it is simplified almost to the backbone. And I used to work on something which is representational and so on in detail with perspective, and anatomy, everything - but this was bare."

El-Salahi said when he had heard Salih's voice in the extract from Obrist's filmed interview it "made me a little bit sad not to see him here with us. But he speaks about the past, the wealth of the past in Sudan, long before the time of Kush, and the kingdoms we had. And he always evokes the past in such a lively way.

 “I know he cared a great deal about my work as a picture maker, as a draughtsman, but I think of him as a real artist because he can create with words the essence of the scene and makes it so alive that it's fantastic - he's a painter."

Ibrahim El-Salahi spent time as a political prisoner in Sudan in the 1970s. Tayeb Salih helped him during this difficult period. "He was at that time working as a director of information in Qatar and he sent two telegrams to get me out of Sudan to Qatar with the pretence of helping in the process of creating a department of culture - which was there before. It was just a kind of a trick to get me out."

In Qatar he was asked by  Doha magazine to illustrate Salih's story Maryud (which was published in  English translation by Denys Johnson-Davies, together with the story Dan al-Beit, as Bandarshah). "That was something I enjoyed enormously because here with all the characters which are in it and all of them who evoke the past and the riches of the life we had before - I never know what happened later on - that's the kind of work I did in The Wedding of Zein and all the seven stories which are involved in that book and with Maryud. I used to call him Maryud because I saw in him the flag of our history, the flag of our dignity, as Sudanese - a mixture of Arab and African and Nubian."


Obrist told El-Salahi he had been reading during the previous couple of weeks "this incredible book which Salah Hassan edited,  Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist , which is actually in a different form and different cover the catalogue of your Tate exhibition." The book includes an interview with  Ulli Beier on his collaboration with Tayeb Salih in Qatar, and the illustrations to his work made for Doha  literary magazine. "You said how important they were because they led you to something more surreal, more colourful. They were  somehow the trigger for you, for many many works you did after, larger designs with calligraphy elements. I think it's so interesting this dialogue between you as an artist and him as a writer, which was much more than illustration - it triggered something."


El-Salahi said Salih was "always interested in seeing how I developed my work. I remember that when I came back from Europe I changed into a style which was manifested first in his books which I illustrated. I cared about two elements which I found valuable as far as aesthetics are concerned: Arabic calligraphy and African motifs and sense of decoration, which also takes me back to my childhood. I remember I was sent to school at the age of two and there whenever we learnt certain verses of the Koran we decorated our wooden slates with a sense of decoration that we called sharafa - sharafa means the honoured one - and we honour what we learn and what we believe in.

"I took those two elements - Arabic calligraphy, and the sense of decoration -  and I put them in a melting pot to see what I could derive from them, what I could get out of this combination of two elements - an abstract form, an abstract design. And that's how it worked in the beginning. In  the early 60s in the Sudan I was working in  collaboration with other artists who were there at the same time and had the same notion of the identity of the Sudanese in Northern Sudan - and this was called later on the 'School of Khartoum'." It was the painter and art critic Denis Williams who gave this title to the art movement in Northern Sudan.

Self-Portrait of Suffering by Ibrahim El-Salahi 1961
Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany © Ibrahim El-Salahi

The artists in this movement were "trying to create a new alphabet, a new idiom, a new pictorial idiom, which can relate and join up with the people, because we cared very much indeed not to be artists who are separate and living in a vacuum, but to bridge a gap between the artist and the public. I find that the artist has three entities to address: the first is the self, and the second is others around in society, and the third is all, which is the human being wherever it might be. If an artist can hit those three birds with one stone he will make it.

"Tayeb Salih was very keen and always asked me to show him what I am doing.  He used to say to me  sometimes - because I had some times when I managed to break the form of the letter to see the components and what is in it - other things came out - plant forms and animals forms and spiritual shapes - he used to say to me, 'all those devils you create, you'd better control some of them, otherwise they will overpower you.' I'll never forget him saying that."

Obrist asked him about unrealised projects. "We can see five decades of your work at Tate Modern, so much of your realised work, books in collaboration with Tayeb Salih are also in the exhibition... are there projects you still have not realised? What are the unbuilt roads of Ibrahim?"

"There are many of them," El-Salahi said. "I keep working continuously, until now. I am 82 years, I am going to be 83 soon, in September, I keep working daily - I only stop now because there is an exhibition. But I work about 12 hours a day seven days a week - I find it is something which has to keep going on. I have works comes to me as ideas as sort of a sperm of an idea kind of a germ, a small thing. By working at it continuously it grows and develops.

"Right now I have masses of canvases which are still blank, and I'm just waiting for this exhibition to finish to start working on them. The thing is that there's a child within me - 82 years, 83 years, but I still have a child which has never grown and therefore never leaves me alone at all, and reminds me that there is a lot to be done before it's time to say goodbye."

part 2 of pop-up mathaf: mapping arab literature in london

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Hisham Matar in conversation with Deena Chalabi

Serpentine Gallery and Mathaf:Arab Museum of Modern Art map London-Arab links
by Susannah Tarbush
Part 2
(Part 1)

The second half of Pop-Up Mathaf: Mapping Arab Literature in London, held at the London Review Bookshop, featured three Arab authors with strong links to London: prizewinning Libyan novelist and essayist Hisham Matar; Jordanian short fiction writer and advertising copywriter Ma’n Abu-Taleb (who, like Matar, lives in London); and Qatari-American writer, artist and filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria who describes London is one of her "two adopted cities".

The three appeared along with Margaret Obank, publisher, former editor, and co-founder in 1998 of London-based Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature. 

Pop-Up Mathaf marked the beginning of Continuous City: Mapping Arab London, a series of talks, discussions and publications mapping relationships between London and Arab cities. Continuous City is being developed by Doha-based  Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art  and the Serpentine Gallery's Edgware Road Project as part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture.

The event was hosted by its guest curator Deena Chalabi, a New York-based writer and curator who grew up in London and was founding Head of Strategy at Mathaf, which opened in 2010. The evening was a tribute to the great Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih (1929-2009) who for many years lived and worked in London. The British capital is the setting of crucial parts of his masterwork, the novel Season of Migration to the North.

The first part of Pop-Up Mathaf included an engaging conversation between Co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Salih's friend and creative collaborator, the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi. The artist's major retrospective Ibrahim El-Salahi: A Visionary Modernist opened the day before the event took place and continues to 22 September.

The participants in Pop-Up Mathaf: Mapping Arab Literature in London spanned the generations. Ibrahim El-Salahi, is 82, and the Beirut-born poet and artist Etel Adnan 88. (Adnan sent from Paris a text on Salih which was read out at the event by Co-Director of the Serpentine Gallery Hans Ulrich Obrist.)

Six decades separate Adnan from Sophia Al-Maria who, at 29, has already made quite an impact with her writing and art, some of which is on concepts of  Gulf Futurism. Al-Maria's writing has appeared in publications including Harper's, Five Dials, Triple Canopy and Bidoun. Her acute, courageous and entertaining memoir The Girl Who Fell to Earth, published last November by Harper Perennial, has attracted much favourable attention.  

Sophia Al-Maria's memoir

Al-Maria studied comparative literature at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and aural and visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been exhibited at the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea, the New Museum in New York and the Architectural Association in London.

Al-Maria spoke on the background to her writing a memoir at the age of only 29. "Although I'm here in very amazing company to talk about Arabic literature, I write, speak and dream for the most part in English. And since this is an event that is supposed to be about mapping, I'm going to talk a little bit about the landmarks, the literary landmarks specifically that made it possible for me to write this book and to find my way here."

The project of Arab literature as she first read it at AUC seemed to be about "the internalisation of the post-colonial state - the narrativization of trauma from the safe distance of fiction - the speaking of things left too long unspoken.

"The books on my syllabus all occurred at least in part in London, this metropolis of Arab dreams or, as Tayeb Salih terms it, 'London, another mountain, larger than Cairo, where I knew not how many nights I would stay.' To Arabs through the 20th century 'Lenden' provided a sort of centrifugal point where the gravity of reputation, language and nationality is set to zero, if only for a brief moment, somewhere along the Edgware Road or, increasingly these days, the richer cousins in Knightsbridge.

The first pair of books to "make a serious dent in my nascent ideas about being Arab, and actually about writing", were published in the mid-1960s: Season of Migration to the North and Waguih Ghali's Beer in the Snooker Club. Both were "filled with antagonism and indifference and were set in the complex terrain of post-colonial and post -evolutionary states. They were stories encased inside the extremely subjective but also supremely fun to read experience - that of young philandering male narrators who travel to the West, or perhaps more accurately to the North or whatever."


Later, when the time came to write of her father's travels from the Saudi desert to the Pacific North West, where he met Al-Maria's mother, "these two books are the ones which paved the road. Like my father, both Ram and Mustafa like women and drinking, and both books talk quite explicitly about sex, specifically sex with foreign women - an act that seems in their hands to be a symbolic conquest sometimes or occasionally, more disturbingly, some kind of retrograde revenge for the rape of their respective countries."

While reading the books she had "moments of cringey discomfort in the thought of my American mother falling prey to my father, the young Arab student. Had he objectified her in this way? Had my father been as cynical?

"No, nor was he as educated or entitled, but he was like the protagonists of these novels in another way - because in the end he came to the same understanding: that the chasm between his home and this alien culture was too deep for him to cross. In the end he returned to the Gulf with the legion of others like him and started a second family with his cousin, my stepmother Flu."

Al-Maria asked "What happens to the offspring of these sojourns? Where does the story go with the narrative? This was where my mission picked up, this is where I hoped vainly to write something new and this is what turned my book into some kind of weird sequel to Season and Snooker -  at least in my mind - both of which circled my two adopted cities Cairo and London."

Many books gave Al-Maria "the courage/terrible idea to write from the experience of being a decentered Arab woman: Ahdaf Soueif's Aisha, Nawal El Saadawi's Woman at Point Zero and, more surreally, Fantasia by Assia Djebar."

Most of the time outside the syllabus of modern Arab literature was spent with SF, cult, weird fiction and comics. "I was wallowing in the Janus-faced literature and film born of binaries, the stories of mutts and half-castes and twins and trannies. The neither/nors with crossed eyes who spoke in doublespeak - forever possessive of their dispossession.

 Sophia Al-Maria

"In revisiting the only recently abandoned Atlal of my personal past I found my way as an extraterritorial extraterrestrial lost with nothing but a broken moral compass of these books and music and movies for a guide."

She said she couldn't talk about the beacons that led her to writing without talking about the over-arching theme of her book: "being lost". In writing her memoir "I had to have a clear destination and route in mind when I began or I'd end up hacking my way down the same old paths as my predecessors who are far better at writing anyway. .. navigating a narrative from my prehistory to my present without falling into certain traps of writing as or about being Arab and being female was going to be tricky. There were traps set out for the native informant not all of which I avoided successfully ... anthropological musings on Islam, tribalism, cultural mores, sexual proclivities and that sin of sins self-Orientalisation."

Al-Maria concluded: "The leaden personal geographies of north, south, east, west, here, there have in the 20th and 21st centuries provided a fine ballast to the literatures of the Arab world, and more generally post-colonial literature - but I'm not so sure any more.

"This approach - however wonderful and necessary at the time Tayeb Salih or Waguih Ghali were writing - has in this age of selfies started to seem really indulgent and has turned us into tail-eating ouroboroses, Golems lost to time isolated in our caves, muttering in schizophrenic debate about identity politics, when the world is waiting for a surprise and something shiny and new, something ... precious to emerge."

Ma'n Abu-Talebreads All Things

In introducing Jordanian writer Ma'n Abu-Taleb to the audience, Chalabi said he was "determined to steer clear of identity politics" in his contribution.  In addition to his fiction writing Abu-Taleb is co-founder and editor of the online Arabic music analysis and criticism magazine Ma3azef.com. His story, All Things, was translated jointly by him and Egyptian Wiam El-Tamami, who in 2011 won the Harvill Secker Young Translators' Prize. Abu-Taleb's interests include philosophy and his story is introduced with a quote from Alexandre Kojève: "Except that the dog is here and now, while its concept is everywhere and nowhere, always and ever." Abu-Taleb works in communications and in his short fiction he has a talent for succinct writing and clarity.

The narrator of All Things is on a worldwide quest to recapature the experience of eating a wondrous chocolate ice-cream once given to him by a big, comforting hand in a strange street in which people are speaking a strange language. "In London, I thought I would find it. This is why I fell in love with that city: if there were five people in the entire world obsessed with one very odd and obscure thing, three of them would be in London - and will most likely have formed some sort of club.

"There, I got together with ice-cream lover; in fact, I joined a society for fans of my flavour, chocolate. Our monthly meetings were held in a pub called The Duck and Barrow and were usually attended by twelve or thirteen people, most in their forties. We would have a few pints, share stories about ice cream, and organize visits to ice cream artisans all over Europe I soon came to realise, however, that their obsession was not quite the same as mine..."


Hisham Matar''s debut novel

In the final session of the evening, Chalabi interviewed Hisham Matar and Margaret Obank. Like Sophia Al-Maria, Hisham Matar writes in English. His first novel, In the Country of Men (Viking, 2006), set in Libya, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. His second novel Anatomy of a Disappearance also won accolades. Both novels have been translated to many languages. Matar writes for publications including the New Yorker magazine and the Guardian newspaper. 

Matar wrote the introduction to the New York Review Books Classics 2010 edition of Denys Johnson-Davies' 1969 English translation of Tayeb Salih's The Wedding of Zein, illustrated by Ibrahim El-Salahi.


 New York Review Books Classics edition of The Wedding of Zein, with an introduction by Hisham Matar

Matar said he had been deeply touched by Obrist's discussion with Ustadh Ibrahim El-Salahi about the artist's friendship and artistic collaboration with Tayeb Salih. "It was a wonderful portrait that you painted of two friends - I think you said coming to know one another perfectly - it made me think about whether I know anyone perfectly, I don't even think I know myself perfectly.

"I find it very difficult to imagine that Tayeb Salih wouldn't feel deeply grateful to you for this wonderful, generous portrait that you've painted tonight - generous towards him but also towards us. So it's an inspiration."

Matar thought it appropriate that Tayeb Salih had been chosen as the inspiration of a conversation about London. He remembered reading the line by Edward Said describing Season of Migration to the North as a Heart of Darkness in reverse. "That statement is for a Western audience - but for me in a sense Season of Migration to the North is a sort of Heart of Darkness not in reverse, in the sense that through it he managed to paint for us a sense of isolation that perhaps we were enduring and feeling but no one had articulated in this particular way."

Matar thought London was an interesting place to do that because "notwithstanding the usually stated assertion that London's wonderful qualities of tolerance and acceptance of outsiders it remains on some level a complicated place to be a foreigner. It lacks some of the social grace - for lack of a better expression - that eases the path, that maybe even helps to delude, the foreigner that he or she is not a foreigner.

London is an interesting and wonderfully appropriate place for an exiled artist to work because it offers an "abstracted existence where you are not socially obliged - in fact you are socially almost the opposite - in a sense that the abstracted space itself is on some level cruel, it needs to be cruel, and so for me personally it's a place that it's good to make work for that reason."



Asked by Chalabi whether, after all these years, he thinks of London as home, Matar said: "I never think of this question about home, until someone asks me. When I sit and make work I don't think about home, when I'm walking around I don't think about home. I think about incredibly mundane, specific things - who I'm going to see, where will I sleep, when do I eat, you know. It's home in the sense that I know how to do all of those things here, I know the good places to eat, I know where my friends are, and I know where to escape, which I think is a definition of home."

Chalabi said it is clear from Matar's books that he is able to function in a variety of cities. "I would be interested to hear you talk further about this idea of dislocation and of mapping cities onto cities and that process that occurs as a exile."

Matar replied that when he first came to London as a 15-year-old "I found that my most visceral experiences were happening with literature, and art, and film, and music. I didn't belong to an Arabic community that was somehow sheltering me. I felt very exposed to British culture for that reason.

"Being Libyan and from a family that's the wrong side of the dictatorship your immediate instinct when you hear a Libyan voice is to run in the opposite direction. So your own don't represent a sense of kind of a sheltering community, and my engagements were through art and literature."

Matar added, to audience laughter: “When I watch the quantity of Arabs that hover around Selfridges I think that maybe that is also a sort of engagement with the city. Perhaps the history of the Middle East would be entirely different if the amount of people that have been going to Selfridges from say 1948 - an interesting year - to the present had gone, say, to the National Gallery or the Serpentine Gallery."

Matar, who was born in 1970, said: "I think one of the things London does, to particularly the younger generation of Arabic artists and writers, is it becomes a sort of dreamscape, it becomes a space where to fantasise - particularly about conduct actually, not even identity, but ways of being. And so it becomes a space for experimenting with this. I think that's something that hasn't - for many good reasons - really come through work by writers from a previous generation. Not even from my generation. I think it's something that's happening more now."

Asked about the experience of having his work translated, Matar said "I don't really have much to say except that every time I am translated into a language I know it is a deeply painful terrible process, not marked by any pleasure at all." Even though he thinks very highly of his Arabic translator, with whom he works together, it is still "deeply painful".  He is not sure of all the reasons for this, but "one of the things we forget when we read a book in translation is that none of the words in there have been written by the author. If you are the author, it is slightly complicated. But as a reader I find it incredibly interesting... when I  read a translation, particularly a good translation. It's fascinating because what you're hearing is two writers working at the same time in a sense. And a good translation can conceivably be better than the original because you have two writers working on it. But when it's my own work I'm too close and too involved to be objective about it."

Chalabi said the landscape sounds very different from when Matar began, and "we see that in London with Shubbak as a festival, now in its second iteration." (Pop-Up Mathaf was one of the final events in the second Shubbak festival of contemporary Arab culture, which ran in London from 22 June to 6 July).  She said: "I think it's interesting to see that there is a certain generation of young Arab authors, artists etc who feel that this notion of the Other is no longer necessarily relevant". She asked Matar about the issue of "how does one conduct oneself, how does one position oneself, in terms of representation, in terms of acceptance by different places to which one is supposed to belong ." 

Matar said that one of the things that happens to you when you're Arab, or from anywhere in the world, and you go to a place that has very specific ideas about who you might be or the place you come from is that you are immediately confronted with history, that you have to engage with in a sense. At some level history is not only events but it is also assumptions. Britain has a ... very definite sense of the self which expresses itself in a kind of confident gesture such as criticising oneself, criticising the place, flirting with ideas of living here and there, buying places here and there, a kind of expression on one level of a sort of national confidence that invests a lot in certain readings of history.

"And if you come from a place like Libya or the Sudan, and you are a young man here, and you are not surrounded by your own, then you are in a sense in a very vulnerable historical place. I remember when I first came here and there wasn't a day I didn't hear something on the radio or read something in the paper that wasn't presumptuous about myself, or about my part of the world, or about my history. It had some sort of presumption that wasn't exactly accurate and that is something that you have to find a way to deal with. I think particularly as an artist."

Margaret Obank

Margaret Obank said that during the evening she had been remembering the various occasions on which she and her husband, the Iraqi writer and editor of Banipal Samuel Shimon, had met Tayeb Salih. She particularly recalled a conference in Nottingham. "When all of us who had been at the conference had nothing to do, Tayeb engaged us by reciting Mutanabbi the whole evening. Absolutely brilliant, word perfect".

She recounted how Banipal came to be founded in 1998. She knew many members of the Iraqi community in London and then met and married the Iraqi writer and journalist Samuel Shimon who was at that time a publisher of poetry in France, with the small press Gilgamesh Editions. She had been trying to learn Arabic at night school and so on "but never learnt enough  to read it. I've always loved poetry and literature myself." And so the idea was born of translating and publishing Arab literature in English themselves, and after discussion with some of their many Arab writer friends "we decided to do that. And we didn't know how it would happen but it did.

"We felt really the most important thing was the literature of the Arab world is part of the canon of world literature. We, I, felt a responsibility to bring it into the English language." She showed the audience the first issue of Banipal, with its cover illustrated by the Syrian aritst Youssef Abdelké showing the Arabic letter "ayn" and the letter "E" to symbolise the Arabic and English languages. The magazine started an A4 size but is now in a book format. Three issues appear annually and the 47th issue of Banipal, with a focus on Kuwait fiction, has just been published.

Obank said the magazine had received a lot of letters telling them they had made a mistake in depicting Banipal as a magazine of Arab, rather than Arabic, literature. "We said no, we haven't made a mistake. Arab authors write in many different languages, particularly with the growing diaspora.  So we publish Arab authors who write in any language, and even in English of course."

Many Arab writers do not know any English, and are very pleased to be translated into it. Obank noted the ways in which the world of translation has changed since Banipal started, including the introduction of new technology. When Banipal started, many people thought that translation from Arabic had to be carried out by a mother tongue English speaker with an English name. If a translator had an Arabic name some found this less acceptable - an attitude that still persists to a small extent. 

The teaching of Arabic, and of translation, has completely changed. Since 9/11 there has been a phenomenal growth of interest in the Arab world, and translation departments are massively over-subscribed. "Two or three generations of young students have come out who are  very keen and who have a completely different attitude from the older generation about the Arab world."


"We're always looking for ways to encourage people to read, to get across, because you've got in this country a massive media, you've got a massive state establishment, and you have an ideology which is actually full of stereotypes about the Other, particularly about the Arab world, considered to be full of camels." (When the Mayor of London Boris Johnson spoke at the Shubbak reception, he told a story about a camel and its drooling lips..)

 But on the other hand we want readers all over the world to enjoy contemporary Arab authors and to get into the heart and soul of those countries where they come from. And we really feel that it's through literature that you understand the other and you get this dialogue between cultures and, you know, when somebody reads a translation you read and you get involved in it and you have such an incredible experience - you are sort of living the life of the author, of the author's characters, and so for human beings this is incredibly important. to have an experience of other cultures.

Banipal receives many requests from the younger generation with BAs or MAs from top universities to work as interns at Banipal, and "so we have this continuous stream through".

In addition to the magazine, Obank felt ahamed that the field of Arab literature translation was so poor, and so every few years Banipal launches an initiative to increase it. One of its major initiatives was to start the first-ever prize, the annual Saif Ghobash - Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, for an Arabic literary translation published as a book.

This immediately put Arabic on the same level as languages such as French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Greek and Hebrew for which there are literary translation prizes administered by the Society of Authors and awarded at the annual awards ceremony.

Banipal has also organised tours of Arab authors, "bringing them over from different countries to travel around Europe, going to read in libraries and we came here to the London Review Bookshop." Then the London Review of Books started World Literature Weekends, which in 2011 included an Arabic Literary Translation Workshop run by Professor Paul Starkey.

Deena Chalabi said that one aim of Continuous City: Mapping Arab London is to try to map out archives in London that help to tell certain kinds of histories and stories about the Arab world. She asked Obank about the Banipal archive. "How accessible is it, and what are your plans for increasing its accessibility?"

Obank said "we haven't really thought about it being accessible unless somebody's doing a PhD or a study." She noted that the Banipal website carries every issue of the magazine, and information about the contributors, including authors and translators. There have been around 800 contributors so far.

Obank pointed out that although Banipal has many translators and authors all over the world, "in our little office is a very small team." And Banipal does not really get any support from the Arab world. "We always thought that we would once we started we would get major funding and would be able to employ somebody to create and look after an archive." But there is virtually no funding coming from the Arab world, and yet there are huge foundations translating into Arabic from other language.

Obank said the lack of respect for contemporary Arab literature is "a big problem in the Arab world." There are many prizes, and literary festivals, but "making sure that the rest of the world hears the voice of contemporary Arabic literature is not one of the concerns. And that's a problem for us - we have to rely on asking the Arts Council to give us some support" - which is tiny. "We'd love to have an archive, but we need the funds to create it. If anybody wants to come to our office, they're very welcome to visit."

arab new trends issues call for exhibitors for the souq @ nour festival

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press release from Arab New Trends:


ARAB NEW TRENDS LAUNCHES THE SOUK @ NOUR FESTIVAL
14 November - 1 December 2013

a call for exhibitors for London's very first pop-up Arab Arts and Crafts Boutique

The event is part of the Nour Festival of Arts, which will deliver dazzling contemporary artistic talent from the Middle East and North Africa to London audiences during October-November 2013.
A Borough-wide event, the festival partners include the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ismaili Centre, the Mosaic Rooms, Al-Manaar: the Muslim Cultural Heritage Centre, The Tabernacle, the Arab British Centre, Qatar UK Year of Culture, the London MENA Film Festival and us, Arab New Trends Ltd.

The Nour Festival of Arts aims to:

- reflect and celebrate the arts and culture of contemporary Middle Eastern and North African regions

- promote film, literature, music, visual arts, fashion, dance, crafts

- demonstrate artistic excellence and work that is thought-provoking and challenging

The Nour Festival is coordinated by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and reflects the Council’s commitment to bring the very best international contemporary arts and culture to the borough. Nour – which means ‘light’ or ‘illumination’– sets out to explore contemporary culture from across the region. The festival was inaugurated at Leighton House Museum in 2010, a building that is recognized as being an international symbol of east meeting west.

The Event producer: Founded in 2009 by Maxime Duda, Arab New Trends Ltd is a cultural consulting company specialized in creating, marketing and producing Arts and Culture projects in link with or dedicated to artists, creators and Arts adventurers in the Arab World and the Middle East.

The Event: London will host its very first pop-up Arab Arts and Crafts Boutique, Al Souk @ Nour Festival, for 2 weeks in buzzing Notting Hill.

Right in the heart of one of London’s most fashionable district, we will present the very best and upcoming artists, designers and craftsmen from the Middle East and Northern Africa. Unique pieces, design object, exhibitions of art and photographic works shown for the first time in the UK.

Conceived of as a combination of an art exhibition and one of those free open-air markets that are so typical of the Arab World, Al Souk @ Nour Festival will be bustling with the sounds of the streets of Cairo, Beirut, Aleppo and Marrakech, with a selection of the very best in design, fashion, jewelry, visual art, photography, music, literature, illustrated books, furniture and stationery.

We will handpick all the artists and designers who will present new works in London, with a vast range of pieces and prices perfect for everyone’s wallet.

Al Souk @ Nour Festival will take place between November 14th and December 1st in two of Notting Hill’s most reputed Art galleries :

West Bank Gallery (14-21 November) and The Tabernacle W11 (25 November - 1 December)



Al Souk @ Nour Festival will provide a huge exposure to all the artists who will be invited to share our space:
- Through the Festival programme, distributed throughout London during 3 months. (Sept-Nov 2013)

- With the special brochure of the Souk that we will print in September 2013 (20 000 brochures)

- Thanks to our extensive e-promo on Facebook, Tweeter, Instagram, Tumblr and on the Festival website

- Along with our numerous local Institutional and Arts partners in the UK and London (Shubbak Festival, RBKC, Arab British Center, Embassies, etc...)

- Through the 2 galleries that will host the Souk (25 000 followers and arts and crafts buyers).

- A large press and media campaign will be led in Art specialist media, Arab specialized press and all UK and worldwide lifestyle media.

- This event is a unique opportunity for you to get a broader exposure in the UK, and particularly in London and the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, reputed for its large Arab Diaspora.

WE ARE OPENED TO RECEIVE APPLICATIONS FROM EXHIBITORS, ARTISTS AND CREATIVE COMPANIES IN THE FOLLOWING SECTORS:

- Design (objects, jewelry, modern crafts)
- Fashion (couture and high street)
- Furniture design (home appliance, small furniture, lighting, textile)
- visual art (painting, collage, mixed media, photography, sculpture)
- music (preferably via a music label / distributor)
- literature (illustrated books, comics, art books, novels)
- Stationery (calligraphy, notebooks, etc)

What are we looking for:
● Be contemporary: we aim at showcasing the best in contemporary design from the region. We do not aim at promoting folkloric objects.
● Have a “regional twist”: we are looking for unique pieces, that couldn’t be found anywhere else in the world and are representative of the perception of Arts and Crafts in the Arab World.
● Be realistic: Please make sure that all the pieces you want to propose us can easily be carried/sent to London in November.
●Be unique: propose us your most original pieces: we are exhibiting in 2 Art Galleries, we want you to be bold!

To all designers, artists and companies interested to join us on this project, please email:
- Your CV/ brief about your work
- Links to any relevant website, with pictures
- A price list of the pieces you would wish to exhibit. (in USD or Euros)
to: maxime.duda@gmail.com or md@arabnewtrends.com

Applications will be accepted until August 31st 2013 but the first candidacies will be considered in priority, so feel free to just drop an email and ask any question you might have and contact us asap

Sarah al-Hamad's book 'sun bread and sticky toffee' elevates the date to star status

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Kuwaiti writer and home cook Sarah Al-Hamad, a long time resident of London, broke new ground in Middle Eastern cookery writing with the publication in 2008 of her first book  Cardamom and Lime: Recipes from the Arabian Gulf (review in Banipal magazine). Al-Hamad revealed a fascinating cuisine in which Indian, Persian and Turkish influences mingle with the traditional Bedouin diet of dates and dairy products.


Now with her second book, Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee: Date Desserts from Everywhere, Al-Hamad has elevated the traditional Gulf staple food, the date, to star status. The new book is, like the first, published by Interlink Publishing of Northampton, Massachusetts. And like the first book, Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee is beautifully and imaginatively produced. Its many striking pictures include photographs taken by Al-Hamad in date-producing locations across the globe.

Sarah Al-Hamad at the launch of Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee

At the launch of her book at the Mosaic Rooms in London, Al-Hamad gave an entertaining slideshow on her "date trail" through the world of dates and date desserts. "My love affair with the humble date goes back to my childhood in the Gulf; you can say it's in my DNA. And growing up surrounded by palm trees helped."

Her interest in dates was reignited some three years ago by the English dessert sticky toffee pudding, of which a main ingredient is dates.

Al-Hamad wanted to know how, when and why this "quintessentially English" dessert came to have dates as its crucial ingredient. "That's what spurred me on and sent me off on this three-year journey of recipe testing, researching, talking to people and travelling."

Al-Hamad's version of sticky toffee pudding

Dried fruits entered the medieval kitchen in England kitchen around the 15th century when the first ships travelled from North Africa to England carrying dried nuts and fruits. "Medieval cookbooks from that time have recipes, especially custards and pies, that contain dried fruit and marry them with meats because in those days they considered that optimal health was attained by mixing cooling and warming foods."

As dates were considered cooling they would be mixed with meats like mutton or pigeon to create a wholesome recipe. "And so, thanks to trade, dried fruits were brought into the UK, and I think improved the British diet immeasurably"

Cartmel, a small town in Cumbria, England, claims to be the "home of the sticky toffee pudding". When Al-Hamad visited the town she found a lot of sticky toffee puddings being made and sold for consumption locally or abroad. But Cartmel is far from being the only place in England that claims to be home to the sticky toffee pudding. "I couldn't actually pinpoint where the dessert originates from," Al-Hamad said. "You can't help but imagine it being eaten at sumptuous banquets hundreds of years ago - but in fact the dessert first appeared on menus in the 20th century."

Al-Hamad's version of the pudding, Sticky Sponge Cake with a Toffee Sauce: King of Dates Pudding, is named after the medjool date. This  large, fleshy, and sweet date, with its irresistible toffee notes, is regarded as "the king of dates".

The recipes in Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee are divided into five sections: breads and spreads; cookies, brownies and slices; date cakes; puddings, fudges and custards; and ice cream, milkshakes and stuffed dates. Each section includes a photo spread on a particular place of interest on Al-Hamad's "date trail".

With the date having been an important part of Middle Eastern diets since antiquity, Al-Hamad provides frequent historical references. In some cases she devises a modern interpretation of an ancient recipe. For example Pineapple Palace Cake: Upside-down in Babylon, topped with an attractive pattern of sliced dates and pineapple, is a lighter version of the rich palace cake that the Babylonians would make for the gods.

Al-Hamad's Sun Bread: Date, Spice and Honey Loaf is a "dense, fragrant, sweet bread", inspired by the ancient recipe from Upper Egypt. The ancient Egyptians, like the Mesopotamians, used wheat, barley or corn as a base for bread, and for special occasions added dates, spices, honey and seeds. Al-Hamad suggests her Sun Bread be eaten for breakfast "slathered with cream cheese, or any time with a cup of tea."

an amateur's rendering of Sun Bread: Date, Spice and Honey Loaf

I had a go at making Sun Bread, using a cake tin rather than the bread tin specified in the recipe. The recipe includes generous amounts of chopped dates, almonds, eggs and honey and 1 tablespoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg. The quantity of spices seemed disconcertingly large, but their presence proved subtle rather than overpowering.

Sun Bread gets its rise from the whites of six eggs beaten into soft peaks. The bread rose nicely, with the crust having a slightly honeyed gloss, and had a pleasing texture, something between a cake and a bread, with the crunch of almonds and succulence of dates. Al-Hamad says the Sun Cake keeps for days. However, it is so delicious that it is unlikely to survive for long in most households.

At the launch of Sun Bread and Sticky Toffee guests had the chance to sample three different types of date, as well as some of the goodies from the book including Desert Date Balls, Pinwheel Date Shortbread, and Bejewelled Haroset: Date, Walnut and Apricot Spread.

Desert Energy Balls [pictured below], or Hais, are an ancient sweetmeat for which Al-Baghdadi gave a recipe in his 1226 cookbook Kitab al-Tabikh. They consist of a paste of dates, almonds, pistachios and vegetable oil shaped into balls (or other shapes) and rolled in toasted sesame seeds, desiccated coconut or chopped pistachios.


 

The decorative and moreish Pinwheel Date Shortbreads are made by spreading a date and pistachio mixture on a rich pastry, rolling it up into a long sausage shape and slicing into biscuit shapes ready for baking.

Pinwheel Date Shortbreads

Haroset, the fruit and nut paste eaten by Jews at Passover, symbolises the mortar used by slaves in Egypt. While the Ashkenazi version is traditionally basic, with apples and walnuts, the Sephardi version is - depending on local ingredients - likely  to be sumptuous, with the addition of dates, chestnuts, almonds, figs and raisins.

The trajectory of Al-Hamad's date trail was partly determined by the feasibility of visiting particular date-producing countries. "There are many other date-tastic places that I wasn't really able to visit," she said. Saudi Arabia is today's premier date centre, but was not easily accessible, so she went instead to the UAE. Nor was it practicable to do a research trip to Iraq, which was for much of the 20th century the world's 's leading date centre. The city of Basra in particular was famed for its extensive date plantations and the high quality of its dates. But decades of war, occupation and repression have devastated Iraq's date plantations and date production is only a fraction of what it once was.

Al-Hamad began her date trail in the indigenous home of the date, the Arabian Peninsula. In her slideshow there were pictures of Gulf date shops with their great mounds and displays of dates. People tend to buy dates in large quantities, especially before the month of fasting in Ramadan. Dates are customarily eaten as the first food to break the fast, and they are often given as charity.

The book includes a recipe for tamriya, a typical Khaliji date dessert in which dates are cooked with flour and vegetable oil. She calls her tamriya Desert Date Fudge, and finishes it off with slivered pistachio or chopped walnuts or almonds.

In the Gulf Al-Hamad came across date-flavoured flatbread, baked by Afghan bakers, and delicious with sharp white cheese. Another Gulf date bread is the Parsi dish Kajoor ni-ghari: Coconut and Date Stuffed Naans. 

honeyed barhi dates

In the UAE Al-Hamad went to the Date Festival in the Liwa Oasis green belt of villages and date plantations on the edge of the Empty Quarter. "In the Gulf they say the date has 360 uses, and when I  went to Liwa I understood why." In addition to the profusion of fresh dates on show, Al-Hamad found women weaving palm baskets, fans and mats. There were palm offshoots for sale, and palm-leaf houses to admire.

In Spain Al-Hamad visited Europe's largest date plantation in Elche, a half-hour drive from Alicante. In its heyday in Moorish times, in the 10th or 11th centuries Elche had about 1 million palm trees.  Today the number has dwindled to a quarter of a million and the Palmeral of Elche is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

"One of the interesting things for me is that in the kitchen the Spanish did not really absorb the date although it grows very well there," Al-Hamad said. "There was a bit of distancing themselves I think, historically." They do have pan-fried almond-stuffed dates, and  Elche makes a date liqueur. Elche is also world famous for the snack Delicias de Elche - almond-stuffed dates wrapped in bacon - although Al-Hamad did not find it on menus in the town.

The Mediterranean region is peppered with date palms, and there is evidence that  dates were eaten up and down the Mediterranean. Roman soldiers battling the Persians ate dates, and inspired by an Italian classic Al-Hamad has a recipe for the stunning-looking Ruby Polenta Cake: Date and Polenta Cake with Pomegranate Syrup, topped with pomegranate seeds.

Al-Hamad's date trail concluded with a visit to New World date cultivation, in California. The 1920s date boom in California came about after the medjool date variety was struck down in North Africa by a disease. The US Department of Agriculture was asked to help, and it took 11 healthy offshoots to Nevada and planted them out to see how they would do. They thrived, and grew into the newest date producing centre. Al-Hamad was interested to find that date producers in California still use the traditional Arabic words to describe different stages of maturity of the date.

Southern California's Coachella Valley is the home of the date palm in the USA.  At the valley's heart is the town of Indio which hosts the National Date Festival every February. Al-Hamad says that no visit to the valley is complete without a stop at the Shields Date Garden, which started in 1924. A quirky 15-minute film The Romance and Sex Life of the Date "playing here since the 1950s, sets the mood as the garden's signature 'blonde' and 'brunette' dates are sampled and a deliciously refreshing date shake is enjoyed."Al-Hamad's recipe for Highway Date Shakes starts involves blending dates, milk, and ice cream or frozen yoghurt, and adding adds sesame seeds, coffee powder or smooth peanut butter.

One of  the most moving things Al-Hamad found during her research was that "the date palm is very human:  there's a female and a male, only the female bears fruit - the  pollen is gathered from the male tree and sprinkled onto the female tree - and they have an almost human average life span of 75 years. They have  little baby offshoots that are then planted and grow into adult palm trees. They are very sociable, they like to be in company, they can overheat, they can grow sick."
by Susannah Tarbush

second issue of Beirut-based city journal Portal 9 focuses on the square

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Portal 9 editor-in-chief Fadi Tofeili and his team probe the significance of the city square in the Arab region and beyond
by Susannah Tarbush 



The squares of Arab cities and towns have been constantly in the news over the past two and half years as places and symbols of demonstrations, uprisings and revolutions.

 It is therefore highly appropriate that the Beirut-based journal on urbanism and the city, Portal 9 (in Arabic Al-Bawwaba al-Tasi’a), has chosen The Square (al-Sahat) as the theme of its recently-published second issue.

In his editorial essay "The Square" introducing the second issue, Portal 9’s editor-in-chief, the Lebanese writer, poet and translator Fadi Tofeili, explores the roots and history of the two main Arabic terms for square - sahat and midan. He looks at the ways in which the ideas associated with these two words intersect in various ways with what has happened over the past two and a half years in the squares of cities and towns across the Arab region. The diverse movements unsettled a long period of stagnation. “The crowds of activists, like water over the earth, gravitated toward the squares and open spaces and breathed new life into the original meanings of sahat and midan.”


Fadi Tofeili Editor-in-Chief of Portal 9

Portal 9 is backed by Solidere, the Lebanese Company for the Development and Reconstruction of the Beirut Central Districtand is published twice a year by Solidere Management Services. Its name was inspired by the historical gates of Beirut. In the 19th century the walls of Beirut had seven gates. With the growth of the city an eighth was added. Portal 9 is an imaginary opening into the city, “a gateway to endless possibilities.”

When the first issue of Portal 9 appeared in early 2013 it was immediately clear [as reported on this blog] that here was an original, exciting new kind of publication, dedicated to "Stories and Critical Writing About the City". The theme of that first issue was The Imagined. The second issue of Portal 9 has sustained and built on the quality of the first.

Each issue of the journal consists of separate Arabic and English editions, which are sold together and fit sugly side by side within a durable sleeve made of card, on one side of which is the Arabic cover words and images and words and on the other side the English. The journal’s articles are in-depth, and well-informed, yet highly readable. The journal is beautifully designed and the text is interspersed with copious high-standard photographs, drawings, maps and plans. It is a journal that readers will want to keep, and is set to to be a collector’s item.

Editor-in-chief Fadi Tofeili was born in Beirut in 1973. Asked about Portal 9’s aims and philosophy he says: “We hope to make Portal 9 a platform for city thoughts, histories, studies, and writings. A publication that deals with unwritten and oral stories and transforms them to documents and texts.” He adds: “Its ambition is to be a think tank that may produce multidisciplinary products and publications.”

The second issue of Portal 9 contains a variety of articles and stories inspired by squares and other public spaces that became vital areas of dissent, in the Arab world and elsewhere.


There are articles on Tahrir Square, on public spaces in Tunisia, on Martyr’s Square in Algiers, on the battle for Belgrade’s Streets, and on the gap between Casablanca city centre and its slums as seen in the novels of Muhammed Zafzaf. From Yemeni journalist Jamal Jubran there is the essay "Sanaa’s Walls and the Myth of Security".(Jubran is also a contributor to the recent I B Tauris anthology of essays Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus.)

The creative writing section includes a powerful short story by Tofeili entitled "Bones". It also has a moving essay-memoir by Syrian novelist and activist Khaled Khalifa who is originally from Aleppo, entitled “In Search of a Tahrir Square”, translated into English by Maia Tabet.

Like other contributors, Khalifa was specially commissioned by Portal 9 to write his essay. “Every piece in Portal 9 is a commissioned piece written exclusively for our journal and dealing with the theme of the issue,” Tofeili says.

Portal 9’s creative writing section contains a piece by Mario Sabino, editor-in-chief of Brazil’s most influential weekly, Veja, in which he reflects on the square on which he lives - Place du Palais Bourbon in Paris. 

The new issue of Portal 9 has a lively interview, conducted by Todd Reisz, with the outspoken veteran Egyptian architect and urban planner Dr Abdulrahman Makhlouf, under the title "Plans the Earth Swallows". And there is an extensive photo essay by Ziyah Gafic on the architect Oscar Niemeyer and his designs for the Brazilian capital Brasilia, built from nothing in the 1950s.

One of the journal’s attractive features is the folded, removable, inserts placed in its pages like small treasures, each one individually designed. Tofeili says: “The inserts in Portal 9 are part of its identity. They give spaces for different styles in approaching our themes and topics. These ideas are related to our multidisciplinary backgrounds as a team of writers, editors, designers, and artists.”

There are four different inserts in the second issue, two in the English edition and two in the Arabic. In the English edition is Palestinian-Jordanian artist and architect Saba Innab’s folded insert “Disco”– on how radical Italian architects in the 1960s deserted the public space as a site of experimentation in favour of the underground city: they built discos.

One of the two inserts in the Arabic edition is by George Arbid, Professor of Architecture at the American University of Beirut. On the basis of old documents he recently discovered, he compares the three competing design projects for the National Museum of Antiquities and Fine Arts in Beirut in the competition of 1928.

Tofeili attaches much value to the research of old documents and other archival material. “Photographs, objects, old newspapers articles, and keepsakes from personal archives are always sources of fascination, so we seek them,” he says. “They are great sources of knowledge about a place and its inhabitants, and they merit special consideration in print and publications.

Formulating the presentation of these important sources, with academic research and creative writing pieces, makes a very special identity for Portal 9.”


What kind of readership is Portal 9 aimed at? Tofeili says an idea of the type of readers can be “concluded from the map of our contributors in the first and second issues. Because what we aimed for as contributors mirrors what we have in mind as the audience.

“We had young writers, in their early 20s, publishing their first writings, and we had professional researchers, academicians, novelists, journalists, photographers, a taxi driver, artists, historians, and critics. This circle of contributors includes a wide range of audience, interested in reading stories, research texts, and images as well.”

He adds that the Arabic and English bilingualism of the journal ”widens the map of contributors and audience, which lends diversity to Portal 9. It gives us incentives to look for new possibilities with each theme of the journal.”

The English and Arabic editions of Portal do not contain exactly the same contents in the two languages. The photographs illustrations in the two editions are different. Some articles appear in only one of the printed editions, but the translation into the other language can be found on the journal’s website. And the website recently added two videos supplementing articles in the new issue of the printed journal.

Tofeili says the project to launch Portal 9 started as an informal conversation around two years ago between him and his friend Nathalie Elmir, who is now creative director of the journal.


Portal 9's Creative Director Nathalie El-Mir

 “Our common interest in publications drew us together,” he says. “I was a freelance writer and translator with years of experience in newspapers, and Nathalie was a designer producing publications for Solidere. She had received several communication design awards, such as the notable German Design Council Gold Award for a corporate annual report.”

Their initial conversations “investigated how to re-engage people with their city center in Beirut – which has endured intense and devastating experiences of war and division – and how to re-involve them in their city’s existing public realms.”

They then held “a brainstorming workshop which included an architect, urban planner, novelist, photographer, publisher, artist, journalist, academic, theatre director, and designer, from Lebanon and abroad. “



The three-day workshop took place in Beirut city centre – “the location of the Solidere Multidisciplinary Design Department, and also the ‘kitchen’ of Portal 9. We discussed the structure of the journal and its possibilities.”

The workshop resulted in the formation of a team of editors based in Beirut and abroad. Editor-in-chief Tofeili and the managing editor Eyad Houssami are based in Beirut. The editor-at-large Malu Halasa, a curator and a writer of books on Middle Eastern visual culture, is based in London. 

The journal’s reviews and critique editor is Egyptian-born Omar Kholeif, a curator, writer and editor who was based in Liverpool in the North of England but now works in London. The urbanography editor, architect and writer Todd Reisz, who is a visiting assistant professor in Urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture.

Tofeili’s academic background is interior architecture, which he studied in the Institute of Fine Arts at the Lebanese University. While studying, he started to write for An-Nahar newspaper’s literary supplement Al Molhak. He wrote poetry, essays on city and urban issues, and reviews and critique pieces.

After graduating from the Institute of Fine Arts he worked for a year as a designer in an architecture studio in Beirut. “But I didn’t like what I was doing. So I decided to make a major shift in my career... and found myself involved completely in writing”

His first professional position as a journalist was as a reporter in Assafir newspaper. Then, in 1999, he joined the team of novelist Hassan Daoud who was establishing the cultural supplement, Nawafez, of the then new Al-Mustaqbal newspaper.

“My experience in Nawafez was a great opportunity in writing, editing, and translation,” Tofeili says. In addition to Hassan Daoud, the team included the prominent poet and translator Bassam Hajjar (1955-2009); poet and journalist Youssef Bazzi, and the anthropologist Chawky Douwayhi. “The result was a very significant weekly supplement that covered a wide range of culture.” He spent ten years at Nawafez, gaining major experience as a writer.

 “During that period I decided to continue my studies. I did an MA in American Studies at the University of Amsterdam. I focused on metropolitan America, as I was fascinated by the American metropolis.” At the same time he continued to send weekly articles from Amsterdam to Al-Mustaqbal.

Three books of his poetry have been published: Aw Akthar (2000), Hal Jarahta Yadak? Hal Jarahta Khaddak? (2008) and Shajara Baydaa' Touhawelo t'tayaran (2010).

In addition Tofeili translated several books including the novel Shame in the Blood (Aa'ron fi Al Solalaby) by Japanese writer Tetsuo Miura, and the classic study The Myths of the Cherokee (Al Hikayat al Shaa'biyya Li Kabilat Al Cheeroke), in three parts, by the American anthropologist James Mooney.

The inclusion of Tofeili’s short story "Bones" in the second issue of Portal 9 prompts the question, has he written other fiction? “Yes, I do write fiction,” he says. “I am trying to finish a book which is a collection of stories linked with a thread of characters and certain places in Beirut. It is a sort of novel – but I don’t call it a novel yet!”

The theme of the third issue of Portal 9 is to be Fiction. “It will contain a novella, and many other stories.” Tofeili says. The journal welcomes submissions of new writing in English and Arabic: the Portal 9 website provides a form for submissions, and a downloadable PDF of an eight-page style sheet.

Copies of Portal 9 can be ordered via the journal’s website, which links to stockist AntoineOnline. The journal is distributed to book stores and subscribers in the Arab countries by COLIDI. The international distributor is Amsterdam-based Idea Books which distributes the journal in the EU, US and Australasia. It is hoped that in the future it may also be possible to distribute Portal 9 via Amazon.

As editor-in-chief of a journal devoted to studies and writing on the city, which are Tofeili’s five favourite cities? He names: 1-Beirut 2-Amsterdam 3-Istanbul 4-New York 5-Berlin “The reasons for the first 3 are very personal,” he says. “I favour them because I know them very well, or because they are very nostalgic to me.” His choice of New York is “because of cosmopolitanism.” As for Berlin, “it is because of art, culture - and tragic historical lessons.”
[a version of this article appeared in Arabic translation in Al-Hayat newspaper on 25 August 2013]

Tina Gharavi's BAFTA-nominated 'I Am Nasrine' screened in Notting Hill

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feature film on Iranian refugee siblings shown at Gate Cinema
by
Susannah Tarbush 


Micsha Sadeghi as Nasrine

I'd been hoping to see Tina Gharavi's feature film I Am Nasrine ever since I heard about it at the opening in February of the Last of the Dictionary Men exhibition on the Yemenis of South Shields, held at the Mosaic Rooms in London. This touring exhibition was conceived and executed by Iran-born filmmaker  Gharavi, who trained as a painter in USA and studied cinema in France.

My chance to see the BAFTA-nominated film - written, directed and produced by Gharavi -  came a few days ago at a special screening at the Gate Cinema in Notting Hill, West London. The screening was introduced by economist Susie Symes, Chair of 19 Princelet Street - the East London-based Museum of Immigration and Diversity, the only such museum in Britain (in a nice touch 19 Princelet Street gave members of the audience on arrival Middle Eastern sweets from Edgware Road).

After the screening Symes chaired an on-stage Q and A session with two of the film's stars  -  Shiraz Haq who plays Iranian refugee Ali (Nasrine's brother), and Steven Hooper who portrays Gypsy traveller Leigh.

I Am Nasrine is the first feature film of  Bridge + Tunnel, the award-winning production company founded by Gharavi in 1998 in the north-eastern English city of Newcastle to support "unheard voices, untold stories".  Bridge + Tunnel, of which Gharavi is the creative director, has produced a string of acclaimed documentaries and short dramas, and has several other feature films and documentaries in development. I Am Nasrine had the distinction earlier this year of being on the BAFTA Film Awards 2013 five-film shortlist for 'Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer'.


Tina Gharavi

Patron of the project to make I Am Nasrine was actor Ben Kingsley who wrote a letter of support for "an important and much-needed film." The film has attracted considerable high-profile interest and praise, including from critic Jason Solomons who wrote about it in The Observer under the heading "The Other Argo" (a reference to Ben Affleck's Oscar-winning 2012 film Argo which centres on a phoney American film crew in post-revolutionary Iranon a secret mission to rescue American hostages from their embassy).

I Am Nasrine is relatively short, at 93 minutes, but has a wide scope  and its story unfolds with admirable economy and surprising developments. Nasrine and Ali are the children of a comfortably-off Tehran family. Nasrine is hauled in by the police after she is seen riding with a boy on the pillion of his motorcycle. The policemen's interrogation of Nasrine morphs into sexual violation. Nasrine's saying "I Am Nasrine!" is her defiant assertion of her strength in the face of this attempt to crush her. Micsha Sadeghi, with her eloquent facial expressions, gives a powerful, sensitive performance as Nasrine.

Realising that things are likely to get even worse for his daughter, Nasrine's father decides that she must leave Iran for safety abroad, and he arranges for people-traffickers to transport her and Ali to the UK. They reach there with other illegals in the back of a lorry, and claim political asylum. While their asylum claim is considered they are accommodated in a flat on a  run-down council estate in the Tyneside area of north-east England. 
 

 actors Steven Hooper (left) and Shiraz Haq answer questions after the screening

While Nasrine is a free spirit and open to her new surroundings Ali is a buttoned-up, watchful character, aware of the burden of responsibility for his sister. He and Nasrine have to renegotiate their relationship as they come to terms with their new surroundings. They face problems as Muslim immigrants living in a deprived area, especially after the 9/11 attacks in the USA.

One might expect a relentlessly downbeat story of alienated and desperate asylum seekers in the UK,  but Gharavi's film is a nuanced mixture of light and shade. It is a non-stereotypical film with surprising turns. It gives a strong flavour of life in Tyneside, an area with a distinctive character and scenery. Nasrine is befriended by a spirited Gypsy Traveller girl Nichole (played by Nichole Hall) who rides around in a horse and cart. They first meet when Nichole comes to Nasrine's aid and reprimands some men who are harassing her. Nasrine is warmly accepted into Nichole's family, who live in an encampment of caravans. As an outsider herself Nasrine seems to find an affinity with a marginal group reviled by some other parts of society.

 Shiraz Haq as Ali

The scenes in which Nasrine learns to groom and ride horses, finding a sense of release and freedom, are some of the most beautiful in the film. One scene is set at the famous Appleby Horse Fair  which is held for a week in June every year in the Cumbrian village of Appleby-in-Westmorland. It is attended by thousands of Gypsies and Travellers. In the scene Nasrine and Nichole ride a horse through the river.

Nasrine and the tall, softly-spoken, Traveller Leigh are drawn to each other, but her ordeal in Iran at the hands of the police carries over into her new life in England and she fends off Leigh's physical advances at a certain point. At the same time, over-protective Ali is wary of Nasrine's friendship with the Travellers, and tries to come down heavily on her budding relationship with Leigh. But she points out to Ali that he has he has sexual identity issues of his own to grapple with. He begins to unfreeze and realises he is free to explore new possibilities. The film packs an increasing emotional punch, and some scenes are likely to have viewers reaching for their hankies (OK, I admit I was among them).


Steven Hooper as Leigh

Ali is part of the immigrant workers' sub-culture, working first in a car wash and then - when the carwash  hurriedly closes down in the face of  official checks for illegal immigrants - in a fast food takeaway.  The film captures both the constant anxiety of the immigrant workers and their camaraderie.  When Nichole and Nasrine dress up and put on makeup for a night on the town, and go to visit Ali at the takeaway, Ali is angry at what he sees as his sister's shamefulness. But his co-workers behind the counter defuse the situation, defending Nasrine and teasing Ali for his almost regimental restraint.


Nasrine and Leigh at the seaside

The cast give authentic, natural performances. Asked during the Q and A session whether shooting  had started with a complete script, or whether there was development and improvisation while the film was being made, Haq said it had started out with a 30-page script rather than the 90 or so pages that might have been expected. Much of the dialogue and characterisation emerged during the making of the film. Haq said that on occasion Ghiravi had asked him to stay silent during certain shots, and once he saw the film he had understood why. His expressions say a lot without words.

Haq described how he and the others involved in the shooting of the Tehran scenes had travelled to Iran and worked covertly, with the risk of discovery constantly present. Gharavi  had used her resourcefulness to get the footage out of Iran.

Seeing the actors in "real life" one realised how fully they had developed and inhaibted their on-screen characters. They described the processes through which they arrived at their characterisations. Both had needed to master accents: Haq, who was born and brought up in England  had to learn to speak in English with Ali's Iranian accent, and Hooper  needed to speak in Leigh's Geordie accent. 

Haq told how once he had started to learn the Iranian accent he would go to parts of London such as Kilburn where many Iranians live and work. Once he wasmore  confident of the accent, he put on old clothes and went to other parts of London, masquerading as a recent immigrant and asking directions  in heavily accented English "because I needed to feel like a refugee".  The experience really did  make him feel small, and low, he said.

Hooper joined the cast at a fairly late stage, and had little time to prepare a Geordie accent in advance. For the first day's filming, " I had to learn it in a couple of minutes; I spoke to some Geordies and they gave me advice. After that, it was a  case of trying to talk with the accent constantly day after day on set, and off set, asking the people I was working with 'is this right?', and 'how would you say it?''" They advised him that one of the most important things was not to force the Geordie accent in a stereotyped way but to be natural. "They said  Byker Grove [a TV youth series set in Newcastle] was not a good example" because its characters have exaggerated  "wahey man"-type exaggerated Geordie accents. 

For his role as Leigh, Hooper had needed to feel comfortable within the Traveller community, and he spent time with the Traveller family who took part in the film. In addition, "the producer took me to a local farm where I learned to ride horses, and a horse and cart.. I would spend time with the horses just touching them, because I'd not worked with animals before or been near them and horses pick up very easily on how you're feeling. If you're nervous, you make the horse nervous and it becomes a potentially dangerous situation." 

The two actors spoke warmly of the genuine immigrants they had met who, as non-professional actors, had roles in the film.

Nichole (Nichole Hall) and Nasrine (Micsha Sadeghi)

It is to be hoped that I Am Nasrine will reach the wide audience it deserves. It has been on a UK tour, of which the Gate Notting Hill was a venue. The tour's the final screening will take place tomorrow in the Centuria Building of Teesside University, Middlesbrough,  at 18.30 (doors open at 17.30).

In the USA the film will be screened at the Creative Alliance at the Patterson in Baltimore on 24 October. The film returns to the north of England on 8 December when it will be shown at the Alhambra Cinema in Keswick. 

I Am Nasrine has yet to be screened on a UK TV channel. Film programmers at channels such as Channel 4, Film Four, BBC2 or BBC4 should definitely consider showing it. Not only is the film compelling, with excellent performances, but it addresses vital issues of today including migration, identity, various kinds of bigotry, Traveller life, and the North-South divide in England.  

Arab British Centre announces shortlist for its Culture Award 2013

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The London-based Arab British Centre announced today the six-person shortlist for its 2013 Award for Culture, for which nominations were submitted from 20 May. The winner will be announced at an Award Ceremony to be held at Leighton House Museum, London, on Thursday 26 September.

The shortlistees are:


Palestinian visual communicator Danah Abdulla, founder, creative director and editor of Kalimat Magazine



 Iraqi playwright and scientist Dr Hassan Abdulrazzak




Syria-born oud performer of Iraqi descent  Khyam Allami 




Daniel Gorman, a founder of Reel Festivals




Palestinian singer and musicologist Reem Kelani 




Jordan-born filmmaker Amin Matalqa

The Arab British Centre has been playing an increasingly prominent role in promoting Arab culture in Britain, and in April it won the UNESCO-Sharjah Prize for Arab Culture,. The Centre's £2,500 Culture Award celebrates the individual who is judged to have made the most constructive contribution to British understanding of Arab culture in the past two years. It is the successor to the £5,000 Arab British Culture and Society Award, which ran from 2008 to 2011.While the Arab British Culture and Society Award was open to both organisations and individuals, the revamped award  has been tailored to celebrate individuals only. This year's shortlist was chosen by a panel of five judges from more than 40 applications from the world of arts and culture - including actors, musicians, curators, authors, playwrights, filmmakers and artists.

The members of the panel are distinguished experts with knowledge of the cultures of the Arab World and of the UK. The panel is chaired by Baroness Helena Kennedy QC who was previously a chair of the judges of the Arab British Culture and Society Award.  Kennedy has served as Chair of the British Council and of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT), and is a Trustee of the British Museum and the Booker Prize.

The other panellists are: Maxime Duda, CEO and Founder of Arab New Trends; Rose Issa, a curator, writer and publisher who for the last 30 years has been promoting contemporary art and films from the Arab world and Iran; Deborah Shaw, Associate Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and Director of the World Shakespeare Festival 2012, and Brian Whitaker, journalist and former Middle East Editor of the Guardian newspaper.

BIOS OF THE SHORTLISTEES:

DANAH ABDULLA Over the last two years, as both an individual and representing Kalimat, Abdulla has participated in numerous conferecnes, panels, organised events, and exhibitions. As well as this, Abdulla has produced a publication entirely dedicated to providing an open space for Arab creative to showcase their work. Since launching Kalimat in November 2010, the project has grown to incorporate an expanding network of contributors worldwide, and a series of events that seeks innovative ways of bringing the project to wider audiences. A designer by trade, Abdulla is currently enrolled for her PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she focuses on integrating locality in design education in Amman, Jordan, and the development of design policy. In September 2013, Abdulla organised and curated In The City, a graphic design and sound exhibition showing at P21 Gallery, London. The exhibition invites graphic designers and sound artists to reinterpret and reimagine four overlooked cities in the Middle East; Alexandria, Algiers, Baghdad and Nablus. As well as this, the exhibition will feature a number of talks, readings and screenings throughout its run at the gallery.

HASSAN ABDULRAZZAK A playwright of Iraqi origin, the plays Abdulrazzak has written thus far have all been about the Arab world. In 2012, Abdulrazzak’s second full-length play The Prophet premiered at the Gate Theatre, London. The play’s events take place during a single day, January 28th 2011, the start of the Egyptian revolution. The Prophet has been described as “a vivid picture of the way public corruption invades private life”, Michael Billington, The Guardian; “Visceral, verbally dextrous, edgy, exciting, darkly humorous and downright riveting”, What’s On Stage; “Abdulrazzak’s script is laced with witticisms and colourful symmetry”, The New Statesmen; “a gripping non-stop ninety minutes that mixes humour with visceral excitement”, The British Theatre Guide; “bright, sexy, dirty, critical, sarcastic and beautifully wrought. It buzzes with psychological insight and radical references; Abdulrazzak’s confident storytelling is faultless, and this play about betrayal and moral courage comes in the guise of a thriller…[the] play is immensely satisfying”, Alex Sierz, The Arts Desk. Abdulrazzak is currently working on a feature film, a TV film and two plays.

KHYAM ALLAMI Allami’s critically acclaimed 2011 debut album Resonance/Dissonance, was a profound and honest work representing his attempts at the process of “individuation” which was marked by the 2003 US/UK war on Iraq and directly questioned his relationship with himself, his country of origin, his past, present and future. Since its release he has toured across the UK, Europe and the Arab world. Allami was chosen by Scottish director Anthony Nielson to compose new music and re-set all the songs in his revival of Peter Weisse’s seminal play Marat/Sade as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 50 Year Anniversary programming. His 2011 collaboration with the London based acapella trio Voice, was a new work commissioned from British composer Marcus Davidson for three voices, oud and cello, using the poem The Ziggurat Builders by Iraqi-Assyrian poet Sargon Boulus (translated by the author himself). This was the first time ever that Sargon Boulus’s work was set to music. In 2012 Allami dedicated all of his UK based opportunities to creating new projects with contemporary musicians from the Arab world; Double Duo with Ahmad Al Khatib (Palestine), Youssef Hbeisch (Palestine) and Andrea Piccioni (Italy), and the Alif Ensemble with Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (Palestine), Maurice Louca (Egypt), Khaled Yassine (Lebanon), and Bashar Farran (Lebanon).

DANIEL GORMAN Over the past six years, Gorman has developed several large-scale festivals and long-term exchange and translation projects which have focused on his goal of fostering dialogue between communitis in the UK and Arab world. In 2007, Gorman co-founded Reel Festivals which now takes place on an annual basis and in 2012, Reel Syria took place in London and Edinburgh. Artists such as Ali Ferzat and Samih Choukeir were brought to the UK as well as independent documentary films courtesy of DoxBox; The National reported that ‘Reel Syria gives British audiences a look beyond the conflict’. In 2013, Gorman coordinated Reel Iraq, a wide ranging project showcasing a range of contemporary Iraqi arts which included over fifty events in nine cities in the UK. In 2011, Gorman also organised a number of poetry exchange projects involving Arab and British poets which included a workshop where a series of short films by British-Iranian director Roxana Vilk were created. These films led to the development of a six part ‘Poets of Protest’ series which was aired on Al Jazeera.

REEM KELANI For over 20 years, Kelani has been putting herself out into communities across the UK and connecting with people, through her concerts, lectures, workshops and her radio work. In July 2013, Kelani delivered workshops in Egyptian song to some 180 Year 3 and Year 5 children at two schools in Kent. In April 2013, as part of Kelani’s tour in Seattle and Vancouver, she gave a master class at the prestigious Cornish College of the Arts. In May 2011, she gave a master class to over 70 students and tutors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Closer to home, Kelani has been a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths College for the past decade. In 2012, Radio 4 broadcast ‘Songs for Tahrir’, which was researched, written and presented by Kelani, about her experiences in Cairo from the beginning of the revolution in 2011. BBC figures suggest that over 1 million people will have listened to Kelani’s analysis of the songs and their musical and political components, and the broadcast was in ‘Pick of the week’ for online programmes. Kelani’s work on introducing Arabic music to British listeners took another edge, when she contributed her arrangement of an anthemic Tunisian song as part of the Anti-Capitalist Roadshow.

AMIN MATALQA In 2003, Matalqa quit his successful corporate career to pursue filmmaking fulltime, an act he deems “mad”. Ten years on, Matalqa has graduated from the American Film Institute, directed three feature films, 27 short films and written over twenty screenplays. When Matalqa set out to make Captain Abu Raed in Jordan in 2007, there was no Jordanian film industry and most thought it would be a failed experiment. Matalqa and his team raised $2 million from private Jordanian investors, hired a cast of non-actors (apart from the lead, played by Nadim Sawalha), taught local crews as they went along and ended up making a film that not only had critical and festival success, but went on to play in theatres internationally which is a rare feat for an Arabic language film. Matalqa’s second feature film, The United was due to take place in Egypt pre-revolution, 2010, but when the Egyptian producers failed to deliver their promises, Disney slammed the brakes on the film and stopped the entire plan. Matalqa therefore, rewrote the script, set the film in Jordan but retained the pan-Arab cast led by an Egyptian star and Disney agreed. Although the uprisings in the Middle East pushed Disney to threaten shutting down the production, Matalqa and his team kept convincing everyone to keep going and the film is currently rolling out to 80 countries across the world.

For further information contact: Ruba Asfahani | ruba@arabbritishcentre.org.uk | 020 7832 1310

Anissa Helou's 'Levant': a compendium of Middle Eastern recipes and memories

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In her prolific career as a cookery writer, the acclaimed Syrian-Lebanese food expert Anissa Helou (of whom this blog published a  profile last year) has written authoritative books on Lebanese cuisine, Mediterranean savoury baking, modern mezze, offal cookery, and the street food of Morocco and of the Mediterranean more generally.

Helou's latest, seventh, book Levant: Recipes and Memories from the Middle East (Harper Collins, in hardback and on Kindle) is a wide-ranging and ambitious work covering an entire region and a lifetime of food memories. Helou draws on her long experience of Middle Eastern food from her early childhood to her recent travels in the region.

The book has an attractive cover design based on patterned classic tiles with the shades of blue so characteristic of the Middle East.  In her introduction Helou explains the term Levant and why for the purposes of her book she defines it as comprising her two home countries, Lebanon and Syria, plus Iran, Turkey, Jordan and Palestine. She acknowledges that some may find the inclusion of Iran controversial. But Iran has had a "sweeping influence" over the cookery of the Middle East and North Africa and she feels justified in including some of its classic northern dishes.

Another possibly controversial choice is the exclusion of Israel. Helou explains: "As everyone knows, Israel is a very young state and many dishes that are now described as Israeli were, and still are, originally Palestinian, Lebanese or Egyptian, and I prefer to give the original rather than the assumed version of a dish where I can."

There are few pictures in the 346 pages of Helou's book. This is unusual in an age when cookery books tend to be ever more lavishly illustrated, but Levant does not suffer as a result. The few photographs in Levant are in black and white. One shows Anissa standing in front of one side of al-Dar in Mashta el-Helou, the ancestral home in Syria of her late father. She and her family would spend their summers there.

Another picture is of Helou's maternal grandmother and aunt in action in their kitchen in Beirut. helou also includes a photo of a "sexy ambulant green grocer in Beirut", his stall groaning with fresh produce.

Anissa's interest in food and cookery began as a child, when she watched her mother and other women of the family preparing dishes. Her mother, Laurice Helou, comes from the lovely Lebanese village of Rechmaya perched above a dramatic valley in the Shouf mountains and is "an invaluable fount of knowledge as far as the country's cooking is concerned."

Levant is a  treasure trove of insights and tips and Helou is refreshingly opinionated. She states: "The Silver Shore in Tripoli is another of my favourite fish restaurants. and Tripoli is my favourite city in Lebanon now because it hasn't lost its character like Beirut has." And she is always open to experimentation. Her recipe for Samkeh Harrah - Spicy Fish - is a hybrid of the recipe of her of mother (with no tahini sauce) and the Silver Shore (which has tahini sauce, and less coriander).

As regards tabbuleh, the iconic parsley, burghul and tomato salad, it may have "gone global" but it is rare to find it made properly in the West with the correct ratio of parsley and herbs to burghul. "Somehow it is not natural for Westerners to regard parsley as an essential ingredient when they are used to it as a garnish." Helou is convinced that the Turkish version of tabbuleh is at the root of how tabbuleh came to be misinterpreted in the West as a grain salad. Whereas it is a herb salad. 

During her culinary travels Helou has made numerous friends, who have offered her hospitality and invited her into their kitchens: the acknowledgements at the end of the book run to three pages. I was pleased to see a couple of recipes from a mutual friend, the Palestinian singer Reem Kelani (on whose traditional Palestinian food Anissa wrote in the Financial Times).   One is Mutabbal Qara' - Pumpkin dip made with tahini, garlic and lemon (both Helou and Kelani have separately concluded that butternut squash is preferable to pumpkin). The other is Mussakhkhan - Sumac Chicken Wraps.


Anissa Helou beside al-Dar in Mashta el-Helou


Levant is organised differently from conventional cookery books which begin with starters, move on to mains and end with desserts. Her six chapters are named after locations and settings: En Famille; On the Farm; In the Souq; At the Restaurant; At the Bakery; and At the Sweet-maker's. This way of organising the book works well.

In the 'At the Restaurant' chapter Helou takes the reader on a tour of favourite restaurants scattered through the Levant.  Although Wild Chicory in Olive Oil with Caremelised Onions - or Hindbeh bil-Zeyt - is on the menu at most Lebanese restaurants Helou only orders it at Chez Sami on the beach north of Beirut "because theirs is almost as good as my mother's".

The book is highly evocative. Helou recalls a wonderful moment near Aleppo at Apamea, a stunning Roman site, where she came across farmers "burning" frikeh, green cracked wheat. "The last time I had seen farmers doing this was back in 1982, near Qalb Lozeh, a fabuouls Byzantine church now surrounded by ugly concrete modern houses". When frikeh is cooked in the broth of the boiled lamb or chicken it is served with, some cooks add a little rice to make the frikeh lighter but "I prefer it without as I love  the distinctive smoky flavour."  

When Helou was growing up, her father took the family only to elegant resaturants. As she grew older and became independent she was free to explore street food and simple cafes/restaurants specialising in one particular dish or a specific meal such as breakfast. One of her favourites is the basic El-Soussi, a simple breakfast cafe in West Beirut which specialises in fatteh. Fatteh is a composite dish made of different layers starting with toasted or fried pita bread and ending with yoghurt mixed with crushed garlic and garnished with toasted pine nuts. When it comes to ful medammes, the breakfast dish of boiled fava beans originally from Egypt, Helou would wait until she as in Alepppo and could go to Hajj Abdo, "a wonderful old man whose ful medammes is the best".

Helou says that although Damascus has many restaurants few of them are good. An exception is Khawali which was until recently the only excellent restaurant in town. Now there is also Naranj "the restaurant of choice for the top echelon of Syrian society", where Bashar  Assad entertained Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Helou used to love going to Naranj until she  realised it was the place of choice of the Syrian regime "who wined and dined their guests there while their army and shabbiha were killing the people." Regardless, the food "was, and I suppose still is, exquisite."

When Anissa wrote her first book Lebanese Cuisine (initially published by Grub Street in 1994), one of her aims was to address the needs of young Lebanese who had been displaced from their country by the civil war and had not had the chance to learn how to cook Lebanese dishes from observing their mothers in the kitchen.

Now it is her father's country, Syria, that is tearing itself apart in civil war. Millions of Syrians have been uprooted, taking refuge outside the country or in different regions of Syria. Cities and cultures are being destroyed.

In the years before the war in Syria erupted Helou used to take small groups to Syria on culinary tours. The members of such tours had the chance to get  intimately acquainted with Syrian cuisine in food markets, restaurants, homes and kitchens. Anissa's book is rich in recipes and food from Syria, and is a precious record of the food culture. It is of course the terrible loss of lives and material destruction that are the main concern in  the Syrian civil war. In the longer term it will become more evident what the toll has also been on culture, including the magnificent culinary traditions of for example Aleppo.
Susannah Tarbush

an evening of Arab literature at Maida Vale Library

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 Maida Vale Library

At Maida Vale Library in West London last Monday evening, the publisher of Arabia Books and Haus Publishing Barbara Schwepcke, the co-founder and publisher of Banipal magazine Margaret Obank, and translator, author and Banipal contributing editor Peter Clark were panellists at an event entitled Arab Literature Today.

Introducing the event, area manager of Westminster City Council libraries Ben Walsh explained that the library has only just returned to its home after having to be relocated in 2012 due to a major problem with the roof. The library moved temporarily down to the basement while the roof repairs were carried out. Since 12th August it has been moving back to its original home on the ground floor.

To mark its return, the library has been holding a series of free Super September events. "This is our largest attended event so far," Walsh said of Arab Literature Today.

Barbara Schwepcke (L) and Margaret Obank

Arabia Books was set up in 2008, as an imprint of London-based Haus Publishing, with the aim of bringing to a British readership the best literature by Arab authors in English translation. To celebrate its fifth anniversary, Arabia Books has teamed up with the Reading Agency to offer sets of the thirty books it has published since 2008 to each of the 200 or so library services in the UK (including two prison libraries). The Reading Agency is a charity with a mission to inspire more people to read more. It work with many partners, but in particular with libraries because they offer everyone equal access to books and reading.

The 30 Arabia Books titles donated to Maida Vale Library were arranged in a colourful display at the Arab Literature Today event. Authors published by the imprint include Rafik Schami, Hoda Barakat, Radwa Ashour, Rashid Boudjedra, Habib Selmi and Samar Yazbek, winner of the 2012 PEN/Pinter Author of Courage Award.

Peter Clark

Peter Clark, who was for a number of years head of the British Council in Damascus, outlined the dramatic changes in Arab literature translation and publishing he has witnessed since his first translation from Arabic was published in 1980. He and Schwepcke both paid tribute to the pivotal role Banipal Magazine of Modern Arab Literature has played in helping transform the availability of Arab literature in English translation over the past 15 years.

Margaret Obank spoke on Banipal's mission to open a window on the literature of the Arab world, and on the changes in the magazine from its first issue published in February 1998 to the current issue, Number 47, which has a special feature on Kuwaiti fiction. She outlined Banipal's other activities including tours by visiting Arab authors, its data base of some 1000 titles, the establishment of the Saif Ghobash-Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and how she and Peter Clark were involved in the setting up of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Banipal has also founded the Banipal Arab British Centre Library of Modern Arab Literature (BALMAL), based, like the magazine's offices, in the Arab British Centre in London.




part of the display of titles from Arabia Books

Barbara Schwepcke recalled how the idea of starting Arabia Books arose from a conversation she had at the 2008 London Book Fair with the late Mark Linz, director of the American University in Cairo Press. In that year the Arab world was the LBF's Market Focus. At that time she was a publisher only of non-fiction, through Haus Publishing, and publishing translated Arab fiction was a new departure. She believes translation helps build bridges between cultures, and as regards Arab fiction "there is a wealth of literature out there that people should read." Her discussions with Linz led to Arabia Books having a co-publishing and distribution with AUC Press, with an initial list of nine titles. In her choice of titles she tried to show the variety of Arab writing in terms of genre (including crime fiction), and geographical spread from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Arabia Books has "not quite an even mix of men and women" writers.

Arabia Books forged a particularly strong link with the Syrian writer Rafik Schami, born in Damascus in 1946, "a firebrand who fell out in rather a spectacular way with Bashar Assad's father." He has lived in Germany since 1971 and writes in German. Haus Publishing published the English translation of his book Damascus: Taste of a City written with the "culinary help" of his sister Marie Fadel. Schami's novel The Dark Side of Love was the first book whose translation Arabia Books itself commissioned. The translation from German, by Anthea Bell, had the distinction of being shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2010. 
  
 
more titles from Arabia Books in Maida Vale Library

 
This prize is shared between author and translation. Schami had said that if his novel won he would put his share of the prize towards setting up a fund to help emerging writers in the Middle East get published in English. Even though he did not win he still went ahead and set up the imprint Swallow Editions. The first, and so far only, book to be published by Swallow Editions was Sarmada by Syrian writer Fadi Azzam which appeared in 2011 in translation by Adam Talib.

During the Maida Vale Library evening Schwepcke played a recording made at the launch of Sarmada at Haus Publishing's Bookhaus in Cadogan Place, Central London. (The recording is on YouTube). Given the terrible bloodshed Syria has endured for more than two and a half years, it was moving to hear the evocative recording, in which Diwan Foundation's Louai Alhenawi plays nay to a soundtrack of bird song and percussion, recreating the atmosphere of the Syrian village in which the novel is set. The extract from Sarmada read in English translation by an actress tells of a beautiful girl, Hela Mansour,  returning to the village five years after she fled it with her lover, knowing that her five brothers will butcher her to death. Her killing is graphically described.
report and photographs by Susannah Tarbush 

all aboard for the Nour Festival of Middle East and North African culture

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The Nour Tour Bus

On Saturday 9 November one of London's iconic Routemaster double-decker buses will travel the streets of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC) to the accompaniment of Middle Eastern music, courtesy of an onboard DJ.

The bus will stop at four of the borough's key venues related to Arab art: the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ismaili Centre, Leighton House Museum and the Mosaic Rooms. The bus will also stop at  Al Saqi - the capital's leading Arab literature bookshop. The £25 tour ticket covers private visits to the five venues. At midday passengers will be served with a complimentary drink and a mezze platter.

The bus - dubbed the Nour Tour Bus - is just one of the events on the programme of the two-month Nour Festival of Arts: Contemporary art, film, literature, music and performance from the Middle East and North Africa. The festival organised by RBKC in association with some 36 partners runs from 1 October to 30 November. It encompasses more than 20 venues across the borough. RBKC is home to a diversity of communities from the Middle East and North Africa, and its second language is Arabic.


from the Ferozkoh exhibition

This is the fourth year of the Nour Festival. One of the highlights of this year's Festival is the partnership with the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha, which brings to Leighton House Museum the remarkable exhibition  Ferozkoh: Tradition and Continuity in Afghan Art. Ferozkoh pairs priceless historical objects from MIA's collection with modern-day interpretations by craftspeople from Afghanistan. The exhibition is MIA's first-ever touring show, and is part of Qatar UK 2013 Year of Culture. Ferozkoh runs from 15 November to 23 February 2014.

Councillor Timothy Coleridge

The Festival was launched on Tuesday evening at a reception held in the splendid surroundings of Chelsea Old Town Hall on the King's Road, with live music performed by Parvaz Ensemble. In his speech Councillor Timothy Coleridge, RBKC Cabinet Member for Planning Policy, Transport and Arts, enumerated the events on offer during the Festival: six art exhibitions, 16 film screenings, 15 talks and debates, 14 performances across dance and drama music and poetry, four evenings of special events, three cookery classes, eight workshops, a Pop-up Souk, and the Nour Tour Bus.

Councillor Coleridge said: "The Royal Borough believes very strongly that arts and culture are an important part of our  borough's life. We want all our residents to have an opportunity to experience and enjoy the arts in their own communities. We believe that the arts can bring out the best in people and they can  help build together better neighbourhoods, encourage economic benefit and most important of all bring enjoyment to people's lives."

earrings from the Ferozkoh exhibition

The RBKC Council enables the Festival to happen by acting as an organiser and a catalyst. "But it is without doubt the partnership of all the organisations - you who are here tonight - and the artists represented that make it such a success."

Coleridge was sure those attending the opening would like to join him in extending thanks to Alan Kirwan, the Council's former Arts Officer.  Kirwan created the Nour Festival in its first three years. "We wish him well in his new role at the European Parliament's House of European History in Brussels," Coleridge said, adding jokingly "I expect he'll have to rewrite most of it."

Since its inception, Nour has grown and is rapidly becoming one of Europe's most significant annual showcases of contemporary arts and culture from across the Middle East and North Africa. Councillor Coleridge said:  "We always have an eye on the future, and our ambition is to make Nour year on year better and more successful. So I'm very pleased tonight that guests include representatives of prominent organisations which have not been part of Nour before but with whom we are beginning to discuss collaborations and partnerships. 



 Dr Shahidha Bari

Dr Shahidha Bari, lecturer in Romanticism at the Department of English at Queen Mary's University of London has research interests including the Romantic Poets, and Islam and Arab Culture. She said in her speech how excited she was to be at the Nour Festival  which is so obviously going to be "lively, challenging and engaging."

She had been invited to address the opening by John Hampson, the Strategy Officer behind the Arts and Culture programme at RBKC. She thought it worth noting "how hard he himself has worked on developing this very important festival, now in its fourth year, growing bigger and bolder."

Dr Bari said the festival is important for several reasons, not least because it brings something enriching and rewarding to the area: for two months it alters the complexion and nature of this particularly highly cultured part of London.

"But it's important too because it is representative of the way culture is in itself inestimably valuable. It is, of course, increasingly important that we continue to support and sanction ventures like this, providing platforms and audiences for practitioners, especially through moments of economic downturn and political tumult - even more so, in those circumstances. And the Nour Festival is an intellectual and political venture as well as a celebratory cultural one."

The Festival is freighted with the political and intellectual weight of what has happened and is happening in the Arab and North African world, Dr Bari observed. "But it's important to note that it is not simply the case that culture and the arts represent or respond to the complex social world we live in", they also "produce the world as well as reflect it. The arts not only represent but produce our world in powerful ways."


London Algerian Ballet

Dr Bari thought it important to remember that "this lovely festival, which promises to be full of inquiry and intelligence, is also a small but significant part of a serious engagement with ourselves in the present. It is an opportunity to articulate our global, collective selves, where the people of Kensington & Chelsea borough are not separable from the worlds that will be presented to them throughout the duration of his festival."

This year's Nour programme showcases the varied work of diaspora communities. The London Algerian Ballet promises to marry vintage, traditional and contemporary dance. "I don't know if we have any representatives, but in the programme you've also promised to feed us - 'A traditional Algerian meal will be served during the evening.' -  I'm there! It's at the Tabernacle on 8th Nov. It sounds amazing!

"I'm there because the ways that diaspora communities sustain, develop and transform their cultures in different places, is sacred and important and valuable work. And the programme is full of these great projects." Dr Bari also noted that the Council has made particular efforts to make the Festival genuinely participatory, as evidenced by the impressive number of open workshops, art, dance and calligraphy classes. "I think these are marvellous efforts at making our cultural engagement engaged."

The third speaker was Rose Issa of the Rose Issa Gallery, which has been a Nour partner from the start. This year the Gallery is sponsoring two events in the Nour programme. The first is the London debut of the Paris-based Tunisian artist Mourad Salem with his exhibition 'Sultans Are No Sultans' at the Leighton House Museum from 3 to 31 October.

 Beware of the Orchids by Mourad Salem, from the exhibition Sultans Are No Sultans

The second event sponsored by the Rose Issa gallery is Sajaya:Oud concert by the Egyptian composer and player Georges Kazazian at Leighton House Museum on 29 October. The recital will be Kazazian's first performance in London. 

 Rose Issa

Issa thanked the senior curator of Leighton House Museum Daniel Robbins, as well as John Hampson of RBKC. They had been extremely supportive generally, and in particular over the participation of Mourad Salem and Georges Kazazian in their events at Leighton House Museum. She said many of the artists who were promoted at Leighton House 10 or 20 years ago are now big names, thanks to this first  small-scale breakthrough in Europe.

Issa recalled how when the idea of  a Middle Eastern festival for the borough was first being mooted a few years back, Alan Kirwan - who was at that time working at  Leighton House - approached her to find a name for it. Issa is half Lebanese, half Iranian, and has been promoting for the last 30 years mainly contemporary artists and filmmakers from the Arab world, Iran and Turkey.  Nour means light, and enlightenment, and is a word that "links Arab culture with Iranian culture with Turkish culture with Kurdish culture, with many Afghans and central Asians: that was the word that linked us together." Nour opens the door for many to understand the region's cultures.

Isssa said she has always thought that "artists are our best speakers, whether it be visual arts, film or music. Giving  a platform to talented artists means opening new doors for the general public in Britain to our culture." The public is bombarded with media distortions  and this image needs to be balanced. "With  sNour and this enlightenment we can fight distorted perspectives. Nour is part of that struggle to open doors to understanding."
 by Susannah Tarbush
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