Tag: The arts

Big books

This week, I’ve come across two newly published overviews of Arab culture–one dealing with literature and one dealing with contemporary art. This is a long post looking at reviews of both. 

“A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature”  (published by Saqi books) is reviewed in the Al Ahram Weekly by Denys Johnson-Davies. The book is by David Tresilian, a literature professor who has lived in Cairo and written for the Weekly, and has been at the American University in Paris since 1999, in the English and Comparative Literature Department (he does not appear to be a specialist in Arabic literature). Color me cynical, but given that Tresilian has a relationship with the Weekly and that his book highlights many authors that Johnson-Davies himself has translated, I’m not surprised the review is a positive one. 

While several books have been written that seek to give the ordinary reader a background to the Arabic novels that are being made available today in English translation, none does the task better and more entertainingly than David Tresilian’s A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature.

I found the review interesting, mostly for the insight it gives into the thoughts of one of the most established and prolific translators of Arabic literature. Continue reading Big books

New York encounters

So I apologize again for my recent lack of writing…

I’ve been couch surfing and (then) moving into a new place.

The cultural highlights of my last month in New York, however, have been seeing Tariq Ali and Norman Finkelstein, among others, talk at the Brecht Forum a few weeks back about Barak Obama’s foreign policy. The general consensus was that his foreign policy, despite his hopeful rhetoric, was a continuation of self-defeating imperialist American tendencies. Also, an interesting and inevitable discussion opened up over whether one should vote, nonetheless, for Obama (the panel was split). There was also quite a bit of discussion of the situation in Pakistan. Ali said that war in Pakistan was being pursued “as an alibi for the failure of the Afghanistan war.” 

Last week, I had the thrill of meeting the great poet Adonis. Unfortunately, I didn’t hear him read his own poetry, which he did at an event in honor of Edward Said. I was told by people who attended that it was fantastic–Adonis read his long poem on New York, “قبر من اجل نيو يورك” (“A Tomb for New York”). A few days later, I attended an informal talk he gave about Islam and literature. Adonis talked about the historic divide between literature and religion, between poets that celebrated the joys of wine and caliphs who used religion to shore up their political power. He posed a few provocative questions: he asked, for example, how one can explain the fact that if Arabic is the language of God, it was nonetheless an existing language, spoken by pagans, before God’s revelation? But overall his talk was replete with simple oppositions (perhaps expecting a US audience that wasn’t that familiar with the subject)–it posited a historic separation between art and religion, and set modern Arab writers up as the descendants of rebellious, hedonist medieval poets, small creators competing with the big Creator. 

On a side note, I was shocked and dismayed by my utter failure to find a book of Adonis’ poetry in New York. I looked for his work at three or four bookstores, hoping to get a copy for him to sign, and found nothing.

Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: Why is that a Culture Clash?

The New York Times yesterday had a long, kind of strange article that was (I guess) about cultural life in Gaza. It had two main points. The first, which gives the article its title “Watching ‘Friends’ in Gaza: A Culture Clash” is that people in Gaza, despite being–I’m not sure exactly, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, under a Hamas government?–are into Western pop culture. The first half of the article elaborates on this false clash despite the fact that the very first quote in the story actually lays it to rest. 

Do Gazans living under Hamas buy much Western music or many Western movies? Mr. Kihail [the owner of a video store] looked baffled, and maybe even a little annoyed, by the question.

“Of course,” he said.

The article ends up discussing, in its second half, Hamas’ alleged censorship of cultural life in Gaza. This is more interesting to me, although I don’t necessarily trust the Times’ coverage entirely. For example, the article states that:

[..] Gallery Mina, a Ministry of Culture art space that for years hosted poetry readings, films and Western-style art exhibitions, was among hundreds of organizations recently raided by Hamas, with the excuse of flushing out Fatah links; now Mina has been turned into a home for Hamas-approved events.

This is a bit vague and makes me wish the author had given a few examples of the difference between “Western style art exhibitions” and “Hamas-approved events.”

The piece goes on: 

The Culture and Free Thought Association, a nonprofit organization in Khan Yunis, a town in southern Gaza, with a theater, a summer camp and a variety of arts programs, was looted not long ago by Hamas security forces who held the woman in charge at gunpoint and later went to her home. Leaders of Hamas in Khan Yunis apologized afterward, claiming, like Mr. Taha, that the raiders were renegades.

It’s noteworthy that the places raided by Hamas aren’t book stalls selling sex manuals or cafes showing sitcoms, but cultural centers promoting art that aspires to be more than an opiate for the people, implying an organized attack. “Hamas wants to create an impression in Gaza that they are not controlling individual life or suppressing cultural freedom, and they want that message to reach outside,” said Jamal Al Rozzi, director of the Palestinian Theater Association in Gaza, whose office was also attacked. “But at the same time, everything is under its control. Hamas doesn’t officially tell us that we can’t do anything, but you can be taken away to prison and beaten for 30 days and no one will even know where the hell you are.”

The article takes (disturbing) anecdotal evidence and suggests an “organized attack” against high-brow culture. I’d be curious to here from people who know more about the situation in Palestine than I do as to whether this is true.

Nina Berman photos

I know this isn’t work by a Middle East photographer, but I stumbled across Nina Berman‘s photographs recently and found them striking. She has an Afghanistan series, “Under Taliban,” (which raises all the usual questions about photographing women in burkas–is she exoticizing? or recording reality?). But more strikingly, she has a series of incredibly disturbing photos of US soldiers back from Iraq and Afghanistan with very serious injuries. The “Marine Wedding” series–which shows the wedding of a young marine whose face was basically blown off–has won her particular attention. It shows the price some American are paying for this war in a way that we usually avoid doing.

Props

The Review is the cultural supplement of the Abu Dhabi daily The National. They’re only about two months old (maybe three, time flies) and I’ve been writing for them this summer. I still haven’t formed an opinion on the daily paper; I simply haven’t been reading it often enough. But I read The Review online yesterday and was impressed–I feel like it’s really coming together.

Youssef Rakha, formerly of Al Ahram Weekly, reviews Sonallah Ibrahim’s new novel. Rakha emphasizes the importance and originality of Ibrahim’s debut autobiographical novel تلك الرائحة (translated as “The Smell of It”) and gives what strikes me as perhaps too short shrift to later works such as “Zaat” and “Sharaf,” but he has his arguments, and he’s very enthusiastic about Ibrahim’s latest, a historical novel set during the French invasion of Egypt and entitled “The Turban and the Hat.” 

Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, who used to write for the Daily Star and whose work I’ve been impressed with for years, writes about Palestinian conceptual artist Emily Jacir, whose latest work re-constructs and explores the assassination of Palestinian intellectual Wael Zuaiter in Rome in 1972; the work opens a discussion about the assassinations of many Palestinian artists, writers and intellectuals in that period. Wilson-Goldie also discusses previous works by Jacir, all of which show how relevant and thoughtful conceptual art can be.

Finally there’s a very nicely written piece by Suleiman Din about the homesick musical gatherings of Pakistani construction workers in Abu Dhabi. 

The missing “Metro”

My article about the confiscated graphic novel “Metro” came out in The Review, the weekend cultural supplement of The National, a new English daily based in Abu Dhabi. Below is the opening paragraph. You can see translated panels from the novel at Words Without Borders.

 

In a pivotal scene in the Egyptian graphic novel “Metro,” a blind old shoe-shiner stumbles upon an anti-government demonstration in the streets of Cairo. “Where can the oppressed find justice? Where can the hungry find food?” chant the demonstrators. The old man, almost without realizing it, starts mumbling along. A few frames later, he’s being carried on the shoulders of the demonstrators, having improvised a choice slogan of his own. A few frames further on, he’s being beaten by a gang of those young thugs routinely employed by the authorities to break up demonstrations. In two pages, the author of “Metro” has suggested the appeal and hopefulness of recent democracy movement in Egypt, as well as the severe consequences of any political activism.

 

 

$$ Egyptian Art $$

The cover story of the latest issue of Egypt Today is all about Egyptian artists who are making it big in the world art market. The story quotes some of the (rapidly rising) prices for which contemporary Egyptian art is selling, and suggests that both Western galleries and local collectors are increasingly interested in buying it.

The discussion of the art itself isn’t particularly insightful–I didn’t get much of a sense of what distinguished the work of the artists featured, other than the fact that they all could be sold internationally. And I was left wondering how Egypt compares to other countries in the Middle East, like Lebanon and Iran, and to Abu Dhabi–where the art market is by all accounts booming and the Louvre is opening a franchise. But it’s nice to see that there’s some hope of financial support for Egyptian visual artists.