Author: issandr

Arabesque and Expat Arab literature

The other event I attended last weekend was the enormous cultural festival at the Kennedy Center in DC celebrating Arab arts and culture. I was simply shocked to see how well-attended the events were–many of them were sold out. The Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad, the Moroccan hip-hop group Hoba Hoba Spirit and the Somalian-Canadian rapper K’naan, among others, performed to full, overflowing houses.

And there were large crowds even for panels on Arab literature! I had the pleasure of attending one particularly good one, on expatriate Arab literature, moderated by my friend Moroccan author Laila Lalami, and featuring the regal Ahdaf Souief, the charming, charming Algerian writer Anouar Benmalek (his work is now on my ever-longer wish-list). Soueif told how she learned to read English at 5 because her mother, working on her PhD dissertation in London, needed to keep her occupied. She also mentioned how when her novel “In the Eye of the Sun” came out a British friend started his review with the words “Hated and reviled in her own country..,” thinking he was doing her a favour by suggesting she was a “dissident” writer!

In general, the panel addressed the very difficult position of Arab writers who write in other languages, and find themselves in a treacherous no-man’s-land, exoticized by the West and suspected  of traitorous tendencies in their homeland. Soueif mentioned how her efforts  to translate her work and her newspaper articles into Arabic, and to remain engaged with the Egyptian cultural scene, have defused many of these suspicions. Benmalek, who writes in French and left Algeria for France in 1992 after death threats, told of how one Algerian journalist asked him (“comme si c’etait une evidence”) how he had accepted to be manipulated by Western publishers? “Even if I chose to be manipulated, I couldn’t find anyone interested in manipulating me!” Benmalek joked. 

The panel dealt with complicated issues of identity and of the way post-colonial politics reverberate through cultural debates. The fact of the matter is that literature is often approached, both in literary studies and in publishing, on a national basis–we use geographical boundaries to classify authors and organize canons. So authors who don’t fit neatly into these categories are in a very interesting, sometimes challenging, position.

Arab Prison Literature

Over the past week I’ve been busy attending a whirl-wind of talks and cultural events and I’m just getting around to writing about them now. One of them was a symposium on Arab prison literature at NYU, which allowed me to finally meet Egyptian author Sonallah Ibrahim, who mentioned that his first writings were on cigarette papers while in prison between 1959 and 1964. (He also explained that his habit of saving newspaper clippings–on which his novel “Zaat” for example is very dependent–started when he was an adolescent and, he says, would clip pictures of “half-naked” ladies from the papers. “As my consciousness expanded other material made its way into my archive,” he said.)

I also got to hear Moroccan author Fatna Al Bouih read from her beautiful prison memoir حديث العتمة (My unsure translation is “Talk of Darkness”), as well as from dissident writers such as the Iranian Monireh Baradan and the Turkish Feride Cicekoglu. These women’s courage and grace cannot be overstated.

Shooting Film and Crying

I’ve already written about my reaction to the Israeli animated film “Waltz with Bashir.” If you’re interested in a more in-depth analysis, you can check out a longer piece I have just published at MERIP. Here’s the opening paragraph:

Waltz with Bashir (2008) opens with a strange and powerful image: a pack of ferocious dogs running headlong through the streets of Tel Aviv, overturning tables and terrifying pedestrians, converging beneath a building’s window to growl at a man standing there. It turns out that this man, Boaz, is an old friend of Ari Folman, the film’s director and protagonist. Like Folman, he was a teenager in the Israeli army during its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And the pack of menacing dogs is his recurring nightmare, a nightly vision he links to the many village guard dogs he shot — so they wouldn’t raise the alarm — as his platoon made its way through southern Lebanon.

The pack of growling dogs — animal Furies — is a striking embodiment of the violence of repressed memories, the fear and anger involved in confronting a shameful past. The rest of the film tries to answer the question posed by this opening nightmare — what memories is this former soldier, and by extension Israeli society, pursued by? What is he guilty of?

The economics of Egyptian media

There is a storm brewing among the biggest editorialists of Egypt’s press scene. It has been reported that a few days ago, Salama Ahmed Salama, the doyen of reasonable, non-partisan commentators at al-Ahram, had a violent clash with the chairman of the board of the august newspaper, Mursi Atallah. Atallah wanted Salama to stop his involvement in Shorouq al-Gedid, the new independent daily that, by going for a highbrow audience and staid style, is trying to place itself in competition to the flagship state-owned daily. Salama is said to have resigned immediately and walked out, depriving al-Ahram of one of its most respected icons whom for a long time ran the central desk (correct me if I’m wrong) that is so central to the way Egyptian newspapers tend to be run. (Although lately, due to illness, Salama had been a lot less present.)

Now Atallah has apparently issued a directive to some other frequent op-ed writers who are part of the al-Ahram stable asking them to stop freelance contributions to other papers. But these – for instance the good people at the al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies like Abdel Moneim Said Ali, Amr Chobaki and Dia Rachwan (who each come from quite different political trends, respectively NDP-liberal, left-liberal and Nasserist) – are rather pissed off about this. It would be rather odd, say for a British or American editor, to see the names of his employees appear in other papers. For instance Abdel Moneim Said writes for al-Ahram, Masri al-Youm and Nahdet Misr. But this practice is widespread in Egypt, offering these public intellectuals a platform across different media and of course diversified income. Considering al-Ahram still clings to a salary model that is highly reliant on bonuses (which themselves vary according to the chairman’s whim), I can’t say I blame them. This particular trio appeared on TV last night (on ‘ashira masa’an, Dream 2) to protest the new directive from Atallah, which comes in the context of a long-running feud between the chairman and al-Ahram editor Osama Saraya.

More generally, this kerfuffle involving some “big names” in Egyptian political commentary points to a wider problem in the industry: bizarre salary scales, and for ordinary journalists the fact that it is a poorly paid profession that offers for the most part little prospects of career and social advancement, which in tuns contributes to a tolerance of low-quality journalism and (especially in al-Ahram and state papers) pages filled with repetitive commentary by people just filling in their weekly allocation of column inches.

Several years ago, when Mubarak sacked most of the chairmen and editors (often they were the same person) of the big government publishing houses, it was noted that these would need serious reform to survive in a more market-centered industry. Salama was one of the most important advocates of this reform. That reform still has to come – no one wants to let go of some of al-Ahram 1400 journalists, a major voting bloc for the politically hyperactive Journalists’ Syndicate – but the distortions and wide-ranging freelancing of many of its writers suggests that many are simply taking matters into their own hands. The question will inevitably come: does Egypt really need al-Ahram, al-Akhbar or al-Gomhouriya? Or are these dinosaurs of Nasserism mostly serve today the function of keeping a large staff employed, providing the government with an outlet for its point of view, and perhaps slowing down the expansion of independent media by mopping up a lot of premium advertising income? The problem is, are we even sure that independent media can do better in terms of editorial quality and political independence? Not necessarily, and certainly not unless the everyday reporters are paid a living wage.


Links March 4th to March 5th

Links from my del.icio.us account for March 4th through March 5th:


Web 2.0 silliness

Unlike Hossam, I am slightly skeptical about Web 2.0 social software technology. It’s true activists in Egypt and elsewhere have made good use of Twitter and Jaiku to update each other about demonstrations and such, but I can’t quite shake off the feeling that over time using these things too much reduces your brain to mush. I’ve already given up on Facebook, never found Doppler very useful, haven’t used LinkedIn in months, and only keep up to date with Jaiku because Hossam forced it upon me, although I don’t really post myself (in any case it would be along the lines of “having sardine and toasted cheese sandwich LOL!” I’d rather spare people.)

But yesterday someone registered a State Security account on Twitter, and this morning I received this:

Hi, arabist (arabist).

Habib El-Adly (ElAdly) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Habib El-Adly’s profile here:
http://twitter.com/ElAdly

Habib al-Adly, of course, is Egypt’s interior minister.

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Bitter black coffee

The LA Times’ “Babylon and Beyond” blog writes about the Egyptian play قهوة سادة (“Coffee, no Sugar”–I would have translated it as “Black Coffee”), which was already a smash-hit in Cairo last summer. 

The play begins with scores of weeping men and women, all in black, walking in a funeral procession, laying photographs of Egypt’s prominent deceased economists, actresses and actors,  and political leaders on a sandy grave symbolizing the Egyptian past.

The play mocks a plethora of flaws, including bread queues, the chasm between rich and poor, corruption, unemployment and the failure of state institutions. By mocking businessmen, the play hit a sensitive nerve with large segments in Egyptian society that believe the rich survive on tight networks of corruption that drain national resources to serve the vested interests of the few at the expense of the many. 

“Coffee, No Sugar” offers a ruthless depiction of the sweeping social chasm. On one hand, it depicts a businessman who prayed to God to inspire him with a solution to his dilemma of whether to build a square or rouund swimming pool at his villa. On the other hand, the play shocks spectators with a scene of a bunch of young men who threw themselves into a deadly fight over few loaves of bread.

The show has been greeted with extreme enthusiasm. Seeing the play seems to be almost cathartic, like attending an uproarious funeral for the country. In Al Masri Al Youm, Sulayman Gouda writes that “the show sheds tears over our situation, and invites us to shed tears, and no play in 2008 has attracted people’s attention as forcefully as ‘Black Coffee’…. When you look around, searching for something to staunch your pain, temporarily, from the sorrows you see, in every corner […] you won’t find anything but this play to cling to! As if it were a life preserver, that maybe expresses what troubles you on the inside, your grief, regret, suffering and pain. (This is my own, approximate translation).  

Yet as my friend Sumita (who sent me the link, thanks!) points out, it is a little facile to throw all the blame on “businessmen” and the pernicious influences of the Gulf –it’s a typical left-wing analysis that allows one to feel indignant and superior without taking too many risks (by criticizing the government in detail) or responsibilities. Being nostalgic about Egypt’s “better days” also ignores the way the roots of many of today’s problems–authoritarianism, corruption, incompetence–were laid long ago. But what the success of the show says to me most clearly is how widely acknowledged it is today in Egypt that the whole country is at a low, low point. 

Anyway, I haven’t see the show and I’d love hear from those who have. I hear it’s the collaborative work of several young screen-writers, and is basically a collection of skits. This is what I’ve gleaned, because I wasn’t able to see it. As “Babylon and Beyond” notes, “In recent months, finding a ticket was a hopeless endeavor.”

Last summer it wasn’t easy either. A friend and I were kept standing in line for an hour, watching helplessly as several ladies–some associated with the government theater where the play was being shown–cut in line in front of us. By the time we got to the window, there were no tickets. The young functionary in charge of organizing the line, when asked why he hadn’t stopped the cutting, shrugged his shoulders and  then angrily said that it wasn’t his responsibility. It was all pretty ironically appropriate for a show about the ills of Egyptian society.