Two obvious (and rhetorical) questions: Can we really not stop harassment? And does veiling really “protect” you?
Here’s one I found today, The Spell of Egypt by Robert Smythe Hichens (otherwise a relatively capable early fantastic/mystery writer). These are the first two paragraphs:
Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance, to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?
The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes—these will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of the heart and the imagination.
Yikes!
Perhaps Palestinian cinema cannot help but be ironic, when the most widely known cinematic images of Palestine are those that close Otto Preminger’s 1960 film Exodus and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. In Exodus, youthful Israeli forces win a decisive battle against the old-world savagery of Britain and Nazi Germany, before turning to fight the encroaching Arabs. In the Spielberg film, Holocaust survivors walk across a plain with Jerusalem in the background: a landscape that, given the location, can only be the Bethlehem wilderness. While Exodus reduces the life of the cities of pre-Israel Palestine to an image of marauding savages, Spielberg erases the local population entirely. These Hollywood histories depend upon their directors’ bullish confidence; Palestinian cinema, in contrast, is characterised by doubt and self-reflection.
This site appears to be the official home of the festival, which is held at SOAS and the Barbican.
✯ PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED – On religion and censorship for Egypt’s independent publishing houses.
✯ Pigs raid Sharqawi’s publishing house; confiscate books خنازير الداخلية تداهم دار Ù…Ù„Ø§Ù…Ø Ù„Ù„Ù†Ø´Ø± وتصادر كتب at 3arabawy – Hossam reports that blogger M. Sharqawi’s publishing house, which puts out among other the graphic novel Metro, was raided.
✯ Authors and critics on arabic literature | Review | guardian.co.uk Books – Ahmed Alaidy, Roger Allen, Amani Amin, Alaa al-Aswaany, Mourid Barghouti, Sulayman al-Bassam, Feisal al-Darraj, Sabry Hafez, Hala Halim, Denys Johnson-Davies, Hisham Matar, Amjad Nasser, Hanan al-Shaykah, Adania Shibli, Bahaa Taher, Hind Wassef, and Nabil Yassin on the state of Arab literature.
✯ British Council – New Arabic Books – Program to translate Arabic books
✯ Books | Cairo’s greatest literary secret – Profile of Bahaa Taher
✯ Is the Arab world ready for a literary revolution? – Features, Books – The Independent – Essay piece from the Hay Alhambra lit festival
✯ Arab book world challenges | theBookseller.com – Amr Moussa promises “decade of education” to encourage literature.
✯ Arcadia and Haus launch Arab imprint | theBookseller.com – London publishers launch project to publish Arabic lit in translation.
Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher has won the “Arabic Booker” . Here’s a 2002 profile of Taher, from the late lamented Cairo Times, after the jump.
The Winter 2008 issue of Bidoun, the Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine, has been out for a few weeks now. For some weird reason I can never access it directly from Egypt, it only works through a proxy like proxyfellow.com or hidemyass.com, but it’s worth the trouble to check out the striking cover (below) and some of the articles they put online, such as the essay on Moroccan counter-culture in the 1960s/1970s by Issandr El Amrani. Get the print issue (in Cairo from the Townhouse gallery, elsewhere at good magazine stores) to read about Ismail Yassin and much more.
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(No, I don’t think that building really exists.)
[Thanks, M]
Words Without Borders is running a series of excerpts from graphic novels from around the world this month, including two from Egypt and Lebanon. The fantastic Mazen Kerbaj, whose use of collage first surfaced during the Lebanon war of 2006, has an account of growing up during the Lebanese civil war:
For Egypt, I also like Magdy al-Shafee’s The Metro, which shows cynical unemployed youths planning a bank robbery. He lays it on a bit thick with the obvious political references (remember to read right-to-left, as it’s translated from Arabic):
Some great Cairo shots too, as well as use of the metro.
 I just saw the movie that everyone is talking about in Cairo these days: Heyya Fauda (It’s Chaos). It’s the latest by Youssef Chahine, but unlike a lot of his work lately, it’s eminently entertaining. It’s also very political. The film opens with actual footage of the many street protests and altercations between demonstrators and riot police that shook Cairo in the last few years. One of the main characters is a police officer who steals, bullies and tortures his way through the film. In one scene, the officer re-enacts a well-known joke about President Hosni Mubarak: he buys something and of course is told it’s free for him, but he says no, he insists on paying. “How much is it?� The scared storekeeper says: “25 piasters for you, ya-basha� (a few American cents). To which the officer replies: “No, no. Here’s a pound. Give me four.�
The movie also has the almost obligatory allegory of Egypt as a victimized young woman, as well as explicit nods to (if not outright mentions of) the president’s national party, the tension between the police and the judiciary, and what Chahine clearly views as the hypocrisy of the Muslim Brotherhood. It all ends with a cathartic scene in which a great throng of Egyptians attacks a police station. It’s as riveting as revenge fantasies generally tend to be.
The movie has been predictably championed by the opposition press and criticized by state hacks. It’s not a masterpiece—it has some pretty unconvincing moments—but it has strong performances and great momentum. What I found most interesting is the way it manages to be a commercially successful thriller (the screening I saw was packed) with some substantive political content. I was genuinely surprised that some of this stuff made it past the censors. People laughed loudly at all the jokes about police prevarication, clapped at some moments of revolt, and by the end were calling for the odious police officer to off himself, already.Â