Asymptote‘s Weekly Roundup is back for 2020 and this week our editors bring you news of theater adaptations and book fairs in Hong Kong, the continued struggle against freedom of expression in Morocco, and a novel examining Chile’s political activism amidst ongoing protests. Read on to find out more!
Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Hong Kong
Hong Kong is stepping into the New Year with a theatrical performance based on a short story by the late Yesi, or Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013), on January 11 and 12. Yesi was one of Hong Kong’s most renowned writers and essayists; as a literary translator, he brought works from Latin America—notably the poetry of Pablo Neruda—and Eastern Europe into the Chinese language, and was known for translating his own works into English.
“The Banquet at elBulli” hails from Yesi’s short story anthology Postcolonial Affairs of Food and the Heart (2012), featuring an intersecting cast of characters pondering on commonplace matters of love and food. Conceived as a semi-staged Cantonese cantata, The Banquet at elBulli is presented by Hong Kong Voices, the city’s resident chamber choir, in collaboration with theater practitioner Clement Lee and composer Daniel Lo. elBulli is named after El Bulli, a Michelin 3-star molecular gastronomy once run by chefs Ferran Adrià and Albert Adrià. Through the metamorphosis of molecular gastronomy, the characters reflect on life’s flavors and the essence of art.
The Banquet at elBulli follows after Hong Kong Poetica, another theater performance inspired by Yesi’s works these recent months, presented by Theatre du Pif in November last year. With sound and choreography, Hong Kong Poetica depicts Yesi’s deep sentiments for Hong Kong, expressed through his poetry.
January also sees the second edition of BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair, a platform for the diverse range of publishing practices probing into the form of the book and its possibilities for artistic expression. From January 16 to 19, over eighty local and international participants will exhibit in Tai Kwun, an art and heritage centre located at the former Central Police Station complex. Publications featured include artists’ books, zines, and art catalogs in various languages, as well as book art and book sculptures. There will be a program of talks, industry events, displays, and workshops, as well as a special project, OVERBOOKED, with the participation of nine local and international artists.
Hodna Nuernberg, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Morocco
Incredibly, Moroccan authorities saw fit to sentence a high school student to three years in prison for a Facebook post on December 24. Ayoub Mahfoud, an eighteen-year-old from Meknes, posted the chorus of “3acha ch3ab” by Moroccan rapper Gnawi. The song—whose title means “long live the people”—was a smash hit this fall, garnering over a million views on YouTube. Shortly after the song was released, Gnawi, a former military serviceman, was himself arrested and sentenced to a year in prison for committing “an offence against the king or the heir to the throne.” Aziz Ghali, president of the Moroccan Human Rights Association, denounced these arrests as the latest proof of the state’s “determination to lock down all spaces of dialogue after having muzzled our public spaces.”
Indeed, it’s not been a banner year for freedom of expression in the kingdom: after the much-publicized Hajar Raïssouni affair, a string of arrests followed in the final months of 2019. Last week, journalist Omar Radi was arrested for “insulting a judge” in a tweet that alluded to the Hirak protest movement in the Rif (the same movement Raïssouni was covering at the time of her arrest). Radi has been conditionally released and is currently awaiting sentencing. In November, Youtuber Moul Kaskita was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison for a video that was judged to be “injurious to Moroccan citizens and their constitutional institutions.” Adil Tchikito, president of the Moroccan League for Human Rights, has warned that “Morocco is witnessing a state of regression and a return to the past,” referencing the Years of Lead, during which dissidents were arrested, imprisoned, tortured, executed, and disappeared. Little wonder, then, that a survey carried out by the High Planning Commission found that nearly a quarter of Moroccan citizens hope to emigrate.
Scott Weintraub, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Chile
As the massive protests in Chile approach the three-month mark—with regular demonstrations by up to a million people taking place in Santiago’s Plaza de la Dignidad (and outside of the capital, of course)—I read Cardboard House’s recently-published translation of Alia Trabucco Zerán’s novel La resta (The Remainder, 2019). Featuring an introduction by noted Chilean writer Lina Meruane, this hermetic novel was brilliantly translated by Sophie Hughes, who was previously Editor-at-Large (Mexico) for Asymptote (among her many contributions I’d like to briefly highlight her interview with José Manuel Prieto and translations from nonfiction by Martina Bastos and fiction by José Revueltas. She also curated the multilingual tour-de-force “Say Ayotzinapa,” based on David Huerta’s powerful poetic tribute to the victims of the Ayotzinapa massacre in September 2014).
The Remainder—which was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2019—is a novel about the inheritance of trauma (and the trauma of inheritance) across generations and nations. Its plot revolves around several linked narratives: a politically divided Chile at the moment of the October 1988 plebiscite, the relationship between childhood friends Iquela and Felipe (whose parents were militant anti-Pinochet activists), a young Iquela’s relationship with Paloma (whose went into exile with her mother in Germany), Felipe’s obsessive counting of observed and imagined corpses in the streets of Santiago, and finally, Paloma’s return to Chile to repatriate her mother’s body upon her death. The Remainder quickly becomes a road novel rife with the phantoms of the past when the three protagonists set off across the cordillera to Argentina to recover the coffin containing Paloma’s mother’s body, which did not arrive at its destination of Santiago.
Zerán employs multiple registers in The Remainder in order to construct a claustrophobic, surreal narrative that explores new modalities of mourning. The novel presents a truly unique perspective on the historical memory of the dictatorship, rigorously examining several “inheritances” from both within and outside of Chile: political activism under dictatorship, the question of exile, and deeply personal narratives of trauma, remembrance, and forgetting. As the protagonists get farther and farther away from Santiago—and as they approach the missing body of Paloma’s exiled mother—they reflect on the legacy of the past from within and without, and must, obsessively, return to a past and a nation from which they never truly left.
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