Place: Palestine

Blog Editors’ Highlights: Winter 2021

February 3, 2021  |  in News  |  by Sarah Moore and Xiao Yue Shan

Dive into our wide-ranging tenth-anniversary issue with our blog editors.

In ten years of Asymptote, we’ve brought you a stunning array of texts, from writers familiar to those brought out newly into the light, words of conviction, ardor, invention, and precision have graced our pages, and our history-making Winter 2021 issue is no different. Featuring three new languages—Cebuano, Kahmiri, and Marathi—and deploying works from thirty-one countries in total, we are additionally featuring a curated selection of writings in our Brave New World Literature feature, which presents a myriad of talented voices navigating and graphing the changing landscape of world literature. Here, our blog editors are rounding up their selections of the pieces of the Winter 2021 edition that ignite and inspire.

The notion of a brave new world literature indicates—beyond the trepidations upon coming towards the unknown—the writer’s own, omnipresent fears about their own craft. In writing, one is always fighting against the futility of the word, how it falters to encompass even a single sensation, let alone the impatient fabric of the milieu. Each piece of writing is measured up against its time to determine its true subject, and the works included in our landmark Winter 2021 issue has to bear the comparison to a moment in history that comes close to being immeasurable, both in the frenzied proceedings of markable events, and in the psychic tracks it has carved across the globe, as each person was forced to consider—in distinctly unequal polarities of rumination or emergency—what it means to have lived through, to be living through, such a time.

This seamless interchange between writer, reader, and the present shared between them—the writing must level all three terrains while insulating its cargo of ideas. As I move through this marvelous gallery of texts that the latest issue of Asymptote gathers, I was struck by the various and telling constellations they formed with this precise moment.

In Jan Němec’s excerpts from Ways of Writing About Love, there’s a beguiling—and somewhat precious—self-conscious tone, rendered with grace by David Short, that runs through the three proses, almost as if the writer has already recognized that the bold display on the awning of the text—those two feared and wasted words, writing and love—has already pushed the language deeply into that murky deluge where only those two most indulgent peoples, writers and lovers, would willingly submerge themselves. But as the oral rhythm of the story taps itself out (Němec and Short are to be commended for their preternatural sense of how the voice paces itself), and the symphony of the mind conducts its singular cacophony, one comes to decipher its inner textures, in which writing and love are scrutinized for the particularly heightened quality one achieves during such occupations—attention to how time, and knowledge, and sensuality congregate. READ MORE…

A Quivering Disquiet: Karim Kattan Interviewed by MK Harb

February 1, 2021  |  in Interviews  |  by MK Harb

Time coalesces again into something dense; something, perhaps, boring at times. It’s a real pleasure, to feel time again.

Karim Kattan is a writer and researcher who lives between Bethlehem and Paris. In 2014, he cofounded el-Atlal, an international residency in Jericho for artists and writers. His first collection of short stories, Préliminaires pour un verger futur, was published in 2017 by Elyzad. His first novel, Le Palais des deux collines, is forthcoming in January 2021.

Karim’s writing is like a rupture. He has the ability to discuss uncanny and often uneasy topics with a literary beauty. It would be limiting to categorize him solely as a “fiction writer,” as his writing spans across genres from nonfiction to academic, with works published in The Funambulist, +972 Magazine, and The Maine Review. I first discovered his writing on The Paris Review, in an essay about an abandoned and haunting yellow building on the road from Jericho to the Dead Sea. In it, he blurs the lines between fiction and reality, all while intertwining elements of storytelling and oral history. Karim weaves worlds together, creating a tapestry of ideologies that often seem on the verge of colliding, yet somehow converge. For Karim, the personal can be political, and he often skillfully uses oratory and intergenerational stories to address the fraught subject of erasure. A particularly alluring quality to his writing is his ability to play with transience, often expanding brief moments into larger and absorbing experiences.

The craft of writing is of tantamount importance for Karim. He often talked to me about the importance of humility both in writing and in general practice. He holds a devotional importance to editing and crafting sentences that both have a purpose while retaining an aesthetic beauty to them. He approaches the written text like a precarious manuscript that needs to be made relevant. In this interview, we discuss the craft of writing, desert landscapes, and the language of belonging.

—MK Harb, Editor-at-Large for Lebanon

MK Harb (MKH): Karim, tell me more about your writing process. How do you navigate writing for multiple audiences? You once said your PhD training has positively influenced your writing as a novelist. How is that? I view literary writing as expansive and breathable, while academic writing as compact . . .

Karim Kattan (KK): The best academic writing I have encountered is both compact and expansive. I used to be worried that academic writing, specifically the long-term process of a PhD, would have a negative impact on my fiction—that it would dry it up, as it were . . . Perhaps it has. But I don’t see a contradiction between the two, except insofar as they fall within different professional fields or industries.

Academic writing is a beautiful thing: at its best, it is concise, straightforward, and elegant. My fiction writing tends to be rather rambling, a bit all over the place. I think the discipline of academic writing has helped shape this into something that is at least readable.

It’s true that academic writing seems to have bad press in some circles (circles that, themselves, tend to value nonsensical, elitist writing—in much of the art world, for instance), as if it were an oppressive force or something, when it is the exact opposite of that. It is a process of liberation. Academic writing should make thought available to all, hence its simplicity and its demonstrativeness. Now, the university as an institution—especially the North American for-profit model—surely is oppressive in many ways. But not research.

Now the question of audiences is different; it has more to do, in my opinion, with the languages that one chooses to write in. I do not write the same thing for an English-speaking audience than I do for a French-speaking one. Especially as a Palestinian, I know that, whether I want it or not, my writing will be taken as representative of Palestinians in general (It’s not! It shouldn’t be!). For instance, I usually steer clear from some subjects when I write in French, because I know how they can be recuperated. However, that is a whole other debate. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 15, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Carol Khoury, and David Boyd

The latest news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine!

This week our writers bring you exciting news from Argentina, Japan, and Palestine! In Argentina, the legalization of abortion has been celebrated and supported by many, including renowned feminist writer Nora Domínguez; in Japan, leading women writers and their translators will be in conversation for the Japan Foundation New York, whilst translator Yukiko Konosu shared her recommended new reads from Japan, including Rin Usami; and in Palestine, four great new works of Palestine literature are soon to be published in English. Read on to find out more! 

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina 

Two days before 2020 slid into history and memory, an anxious crowd gathered outside Argentina’s Congress in Buenos Aires. They watched the Senate debate on big screens and the summer heat dissipated as day turned into night, Tuesday turned into Wednesday. Many—though not all—of those who stood outside wore green scarves, the symbol of a yearlong movement to legalize abortion in the historically conservative country. In the small hours of Wednesday morning, after a long and suspenseful Senate session, they found out that their work had paid off: Congress legalized voluntary abortion through the fourteenth week of pregnancy.

Several of the pro-choice activists who advocated for this major legislation were writers. The day before the senators took up the bill, a collection of Argentina’s most notable writers, including Claudia Piñeiro, Florencia Abbate, Agustina Bazterrica, and Gabriela Saidon, released a statement and video expressing their support. “The green wave puts an end to hypocrisies, inequalities, injustices and replaces a long dark violence with dignity,” they wrote. “Like the deep and living heartbeat of the sea, it instills in us a pulse to continue fighting.”

Nora Domínguez was among the writers who endorsed the statement. She’s one of three directors of an ambitious project to publish the history of Argentina’s literature through a feminist lens. The first of six volumes, En la intemperie: poéticas de la fragilidad y la revuelta (In the Open: Poetics of Fragility and Revolt) was published by Eduvim late last year, but it’s chronologically the last in the series, focusing on the period between 1990 and 2019. The work features a collection of analysis and criticism from Argentina’s leading feminist thinkers—part of the project’s larger effort to give form to “certain absences, not to build a counter-canon but rather to provoke detours, scandalous stops, fissures, divisions, and contradictions” in the existing canon. In a December interview, Domínguez confirmed that Argentina has experienced a boom in recent years of new voices in the country’s literature, not just women but trans writers and young people as well. This century’s feminism is a culmination of both feminist and literary genealogies. The work to interrogate and revise a patriarchal canon and the work to advocate for laws that respect women’s autonomy go hand in hand. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 25, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Allison Braden, Carol Khoury, and Eva Wissting

At home or not, travel the world with the latest in literary news.

This week, our editors from Argentina, Sweden, and Palestine have plenty to report. In Argentina, readers have paid homage to writer Rodolfo Fogwill on the tenth anniversary of his death, and a new imprint has been translating classics of Argentine noir into Greek; in Sweden, the annual Göteborg Book Fair is taking place online; and in Palestine, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail has been nominated for a US National Book Award, whilst a new exhibition at the Palestinian museum has hosted a series of authors, including Mahmoud Shukair. Read on to find out more!

Allison Braden, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Argentina

Ten years ago, Argentina’s literary world was stunned at the news of Rodolfo Fogwill’s death. The writer, whom The Guardian called “loud-mouthed, provocative, and downright rude,” loomed large in Argentine letters, by dint of both his literary accomplishments and outsize personality. (His anti-war novel Malvinas Requiem was written in one cocaine- and whiskey-fueled week, and remains the only novel of his translated into English.) Last month, the country commemorated the decade since Fogwill’s death with a slew of virtual tributes: The National Library of Argentina’s YouTube channel featured a playlist of interviews and other audiovisual artifacts of his career; his publisher, Alfaguara, hosted Fogwill Week on their social media channels; and readers and writers paid homage to a writer whose works have remade the literary landscape. The enfant terrible lives on.

In Greece, classics of Argentine noir are finding new life with Carnívora, a new imprint dedicated to translating and publishing Latin American crime fiction in Greek. “In Argentina, literary talent abounds, and we could say that the reading public in Greece has had a kind of literary love for Argentina since the Latin American boom,” Carnívora editor and translator Aspasía Kampyli told La Nación this week. “That’s why it’s no coincidence that the first two writers we published, Guillermo Orsi and Raúl Argemí, have been Argentine, and the reception from critics and Greek readers has been especially warm.” In less than a year since its launch, the imprint has also won design awards for its logo and book covers. You can’t judge a book by its cover, but Carnívora’s positive coverage bodes well for Latin American noir in Greece.

More recent works are also getting buzz in foreign markets. Asymptote’s own Sarah Moses translated Agustina Bazterrica’s novel about a cannibalistic future for the human race, Tender Is the Flesh, for Pushkin Press (UK) and the Scribner (US). The book, recently reviewed in The New York Times, is available now in the US. Though it’s not traditional noir, Bazterrica’s book seems to fit Carnívora’s description of the genre: “crimes wrought by history or tragedy.” Perhaps we’ll soon see the novel in Greek. READ MORE…

Weekly Updates from the Front Lines of World Literature

September 11, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Edwin Alanís-García, and Jovanka Kalaba

This week’s latest news from Palestine, Serbia, and the United States!

This week’s literary news comes from our writers in Palestine, Serbia, and the United States. In Palestine, the winners of the Najati Sidqi Competition have been announced; in Serbia, the annual KROKODIL festival has welcomed an array of authors, with a particular emphasis on regional female poets and prose writers; and in the United States, the University of Notre Dame’s reading series began with a reading by Paul Cunningham and Johannes Göransson, in addition to the launch of a new program focusing on “Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance.” Read on to find out more! 

Carol Khoury, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Palestine

Out of eighty-nine applications from different parts of Palestine and the diaspora, the three winners of the Najati Sidqi Competition for Short Story by Young Writers (2020) have been announced: “al-Barzakh” (The Isthmus) by Muhammad Atef Ghuneim from Nuseirat Camp in Gaza; “al-Toot al-Faased” (Rotten Berries) by Dunya Yusef Abdullah from Salfit, which is published in Arabic here; and “al-Khalaas ka Dam’a: Seeret Bukaa’ al-Sayyed Meem” (Salvation As a Tear: Crying Biography of Mr M.) by Majd Abu Amer from Gaza. According to the jury (which consisted of three renowned Palestinian writers: Safi Safi, Ziad Khadash, and Amani Junaidi), the prize “comes in recognition of the importance of the role of youth in cultural life and building a national society capable of preserving the history and memory of place and man,” as well as to honor the legacy of Najati Sidqi.

In a new venture between Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line, Tibaq Publishing in Ramallah published Qalaaqel Jameel wa Hiyaam (Jamil and Hiyam’s Turbelences) by Hani Salloum from Nazareth. The play is about a romantic relationship, taking place between the two cities of Nazareth and Haifa, which sheds light on the social transformations that have affected Palestinian Arab communities in Israel. This is the second literary work by Salloum, after his novel al-Khuruuj min Halaqat al-Raaqisseen (Exiting the Dancers’ Circle) was published in 1997.

Five Palestinian authors have been selected for the new Arabic Stories by emerging writers, published bilingually in Arabic and English by adda. adda is an online magazine of new international writing, which supports and promotes stories and literary talent from the Middle East. Arabic Stories is part of the project Short Stories by KfW Stiftung in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut and Commonwealth Writers. The five selected stories are: Mai Kaloti’s “The Madman of Almond Hill,” translated by Basma Ghalayini; Majdal Hindi’s “Fly,” translated by Katharine Halls; Eman Sharabati’s “A Story from the South” —her first published story—also translated by Halls; Huda Armosh’s “Walking on Quicksand,” translated by Nariman Youssef; and Mira Sidawi’s “The Story of Nasr,” translated by Basma Ghalayini. READ MORE…

Textual Echoes: Elisabeth Jaquette on Translating Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail

June 25, 2020  |  in Book Club, Interviews  |  by Daniel Persia

In the novel, social and political commentary operate at the level of events, as well as at the level of language.

As thousands of Palestinians protest against Israel’s newly announced annexation plans for significant parts of the West Bank and Jordan Valley, Adania Shibli’s haunting, persistent novel, Minor Detail, seems especially potent as our May Book Club Selection. The text is written in two parts: the first is set in 1949 and details a horrifying act of violence committed by Israeli soldiers, while the second takes place during present day, in which another young woman discovers the crime and makes a place for it within her own life. As Palestinians continue to struggle in turmoil, Shibli’s masterful language transposes the past into now, in a profound recognition of violence and its intricate legacies. In the following interview, Daniel Persia speaks to the translator of Minor Detail, Elisabeth Jaquette, about how she has rendered this powerful narrative for English-language readers.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page!

Daniel Persia (DP): Time seems crucial to our understanding of Minor Detail, both in terms of its historical context and the passing of events. Can you talk a little bit about time in translation—how it’s expressed in the Arabic language, and whether this presents any challenges when thinking about English tenses or ways to recreate stillness and movement?

Elisabeth Jaquette (EJ): Time often poses challenges for me as a translator working from Arabic to English, but oddly enough this book didn’t pose particular conundrums in that regard. With other books, I’ve found that English publishing has a greater expectation that readers be able to place events on a precise timeline in relation to one another, whereas that’s somehow less crucial in the Arabic book. In Minor Detail, I felt that the reader’s sense of time was constructed less through events or tense, and more through repetition, pacing, and tone. In Part I in particular, there’s a somewhat paradoxical contrast between dates being directly stated: “9 August 1949 . . .Before noon, 10 August 1949,” and so on, and the way that the officer’s repetitive, enumerated actions make one day bleed into the next, creating stillness even though the passing dates are marked. In Part 2, I also felt that tone and voice, and especially narrative digression, were central to the reader’s sense of movement.

DP: The scene in which Israeli soldiers capture and hose down the young Arab woman is, I think, one of the novel’s most haunting. What was it like to translate this kind of trauma? Does a scene like this demand more of you as a translator—not only technical skill, perhaps, but something like emotional resilience?

EJ: In the face of such traumatic scenes, should we understand readers as bearing witness, or as implicated onlookers? Translators, like writers of course, are more intricately involved: a translator recreates the scene word-by-word in English, actively crafting it. The scene where the soldiers hose down the girl, and her subsequent rape, were certainly the most raw for me. There is tension between the emotional trauma of the actions and the matter-of-fact way in which they is narrated, and I consciously worked to maintain that impassivity at the level of language, following the Arabic’s choice of neutral words, even though the emotional impact of these scenes is high. In some ways I felt that the distanced style of narration amplifies the horror, because the girl is all the more isolated in what she endures. READ MORE…

Announcing our May Book Club Selection: Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

May 28, 2020  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Daniel Persia

This is one of Shibli’s greatest strengths as a storyteller: she trusts her readers to fill in the gaps.

One of the most powerful responsibilities of literature is to ascribe human voices to the momentous, overarching events of our world. This month, Asymptote has selected Adania Shibli’s unflinchingly powerful Minor Detail, a novelistic reflection on the violent and painful consequences of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, from the War of 1948 to present day. With an astutely visual language and an unwaveringly intelligent morality, Shibli’s work is an impeccably crafted totem of resistance and justice. 

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD15 per book; once you’re a member, you can join the online discussion on our Facebook page! 

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette, New Directions (US), Fitzcarraldo (UK), Text Publishing (Australia), 2020

The smell of gasoline, the sound of a dog howling, the taste (or distraction) of a simple stick of chewing gum—these are only a few of the motifs surrounding trauma and pain in Minor Detail, by Adania Shibli, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette. It is August, 1949, and a group of Israeli soldiers have set up camp in the Negev desert. As they patrol the nearby areas, they encounter and ambush a group of Bedouins, returning with a single survivor: a young Arab woman. Shortly after, she is hosed down and raped by the officer in charge. Over half a century later, a woman living in the West Bank crosses the border into Israel, looking to uncover the details of the case. Her journey reflects a changed Middle East.

As a literary project, a historical record, and a translation, Minor Detail is, simply put, brilliant. My knowledge of the Arabic language is limited, and so my goal here isn’t to compare the translation to the original text. Instead, I want to focus on narrative structure and style—two elements clearly on the minds of both Shibli and Jaquette, whose collaboration proves a success on all fronts.

READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: September 2019

September 16, 2019  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Alyea Canada, Ben Dreith, Chris Power, and Daniel Persia

Looking for what to read next? Our staff share their latest discoveries in new translations.

It is another month bringing us various gifts in the form of translated literatures, and our editors have selected the finest. Read below to find reviews of a short story collection detailing the various and complex natures of India, a haunting and poignant Swedish novel, unsettling tales from Israel, and a poignantly feminist work from Palestine.

ambai

A Kitchen in the Corner of the House by Ambai (C.S. Lakshmi), translated from the Tamil by Lakshmi Holmström, Archipelago Books, 2019

Review by Ben Dreith, Assistant Editor

C.S. Lakshmi, who writes in English and Tamil under the pseudonym Ambai, is a scion of post-revolutionary Indian feminism and women’s studies researcher who was raised and educated in Mumbai, Bangalore, and New Delhi. Of her work, the most recent to appear in English is A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, a mellifluous and courageous work translated by Lakshmi Holström, a dedicated scholar who passed away in 2016. She will be missed, and her efforts, evident in the enduring legacy and themes of A Kitchen in the Corner of the House, may inform the concerns of Indian feminism in the English-speaking world for generations.

The book is a collection of stories, told from multiple voices and perspectives, which centers on the travails and aspirations of women across a broad socio-economic and linguistic spectrum. The voices in A Kitchen in the Corner of the House reflect the varied cultural expectations and norms that simultaneously thrive and jostle for distinction within the Indian nation, which can be too easily regarded as a seamless whole by outside observers. What unites the characters in the stories, though, is a keen sense of subjective solidarity amongst women who are draped in desperation—and hope.

READ MORE…

Documenting Translators: The Political Backstage of Translation

October 29, 2018  |  in Essays  |  by Denise Kripper

These films make protagonists out of the ultimate supporting actors in history, the translators.

Translators are often represented as mediators, actors in the communication of a text who are subordinate to the author. However, translators have often played crucial roles in politically pivotal moments. Denise Kripper tells us more about these translators, and the films in which their stories feature.

Coming soon this year is Les Traducteurs, directed by Regis Roinsard, a high-profile French thriller inspired by the true story behind the translation of Dan Brown’s novel Inferno. During this process, several international translators were shut away in a bunker in an effort to avoid piracy and illegal editions while aiming to launch the book simultaneously in different languages, all over the world. In real life, the book ended up generating $250 million, but in the action-packed film, “when the first ten pages of the top-secret manuscript appear online, the dream job becomes a nightmare – the thief is one of them and the publisher is ready to do whatever it takes to unmask him – or her” (IMDb).

READ MORE…

In Conversation: Ghayath Almadhoun

March 19, 2018  |  in Interviews  |  by Ghayath Almadhoun and Sohini Basak

My poems are full of death, but that’s because they are also full of life.

Describing Ghayath Almadhoun’s poetry in Adrenalin is anything but easy. The blurbs on the book call the collection ‘crucial political poetry’, ‘urgent and necessary’, ‘passionate and acerbic’, and ‘our wake-up call’, although we find out that Almadhoun’s own views on his poetry are slightly different. Written in the wake of the Syrian war, the refugee crisis, and a personal loss of his homeland, the poems in Adrenaline are formally experimentally and emotionally explosive. In a voice that is, in equal measure, full of wonder and irreverence for the turn the world has taken, Adrenalin dwells on war, empathy, displacement, suffering, love, and hatred unapologetically. Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham, and released by Action Books last November, this is the poet’s first selection of poems to be published in English.

The collection starts with the poem ‘Massacre’ (which can be read at our Guardian Translation Tuesday showcase), with the unforgettable lines: “Massacre is a dead metaphor that is eating my friends, eating them without salt. They were poets and have become Reporters With Borders; they were already tired and now they’re even more tired.”

Born in Damascus, the Palestinian poet Almadhoun has been living in Stockholm since 2008. The following interview was conducted over email and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sohini Basak (SB): As a point of departure, could you tell us which writers you have been reading these days? And are you working on something new?

Ghayath Almadhoun (GB): I am now re-reading Tarafah ibn al-Abd. He was so young when he died, in the sixth century (around twenty-six years old). He is a great poet and could be described as pre-postmodern as he was ahead of his times. I’m also reading Closely Watched Trains by Bohumil Hrabal.

About my work, I have begun a new project—my fifth poetry book. I find myself in front of the question that I faced when I started writing more than twenty years ago: will I survive this time? Will I be able to write something new? And, like always, I punch the world in the face and continue writing.

READ MORE…

My 2017: Poupeh Missaghi

December 27, 2017  |  in Essays  |  by Poupeh Missaghi

We, as writers and translators, cannot afford the luxury of separating ourselves from the sociopolitical contexts of our work.

Today, we hear from Editor-at-Large for Iran, Poupeh Missaghi, who played an instrumental role in assembling our Spring 2017 issue’s Banned Countries’ Literature Showcase, even translating one of the pieces herself. Not unexpectedly, she reminds us of the need to be politically engaged, whether as readers, writers, or translators.  

I want to focus on a few timely, essential titles that remind us all that politics infiltrates every layer of our existence.

I started my year reading Finks, a book by Guernica cofounder Joel Whitney about “How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers.” The book reveals the ugly side of the literary world during the Cold War, by delving into the blurred lines between literature, journalism, and “the needs of the state; between aesthetics” and “political requirements” of the times. In the present political climate, I found it an important reminder that literature cannot truly separate itself from politics and money; and that we, as writers and translators, cannot afford the luxury of separating ourselves from the sociopolitical contexts of our work and need to strive to continuously raise awareness—both our own and others’—about such contexts.

READ MORE…

Recipes for Peace: Arab Cuisine Garnished With a Message Of Coexistence

July 31, 2017  |  in Food and Literature  |  by Lindsay Semel

A bilingual feminist from an Arab village in Israel makes a potent appeal for peace—with food.

In the introduction to her vegan cookbook, Recipes for Peace, Kifah Dasuki describes her mission this way: “This is more than an ordinary cookbook, though. I wrote it in two languages—Hebrew and Arabic—side by side from a place of great love and with a real hope for change. A hope to fight fear and hostility and to nurture love and compassion.” For Dasuki, compassion is unconditional. Person to person, human to animal, language to language, compassion is fundamental to the building of a new world free of the “fear and frustration” she feels have been her lot. And this book is one building block she will contribute to the new world.

As she personalizes her recipes with anecdotes and reflections from her life, Dasuki isn’t shy about the challenges she has faced as a woman from the Arab village of Fureidis (which aptly means “paradise,” she notes, though in her darker moments she also calls it a “hellhole”) in Israel. She attributes her ambition and resilience to such challenges. Possibly her most vivid anecdote describes her first day of university in Tel Aviv, during which she encountered the word “proportzionaly,” a Hebraization of the English word “proportional.” As she didn’t know the word at the time, feeling inferior in her foreignness, she went crying to her dorm room. Later in the semester, she recognized for the first time how a difficult but honest dialogue between Hebrew and Arabic speakers can lead to mutual understanding. With this foundation, she began to actively bring people together for such conversations from all parts of the extremely diverse Israeli society. READ MORE…

In Conversation: Yousif M. Qasmiyeh on Language and Liminality

February 15, 2017  |  in Interviews  |  by Theophilus Kwek

Refugees and gods always compete for the same place.

Born in Baddawi refugee camp in Lebanon, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh is a Palestinian poet and translator who currently teaches Arabic at Oxford University. His poems, translations, and essays have appeared in Arabic in An-Nahar and Al-Ghawoon, and in English in journals including Critical Quarterly, GeoHumanities, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Much of his recent research, as the Writer in Residence for the Refugee Hosts Project, focuses on ‘writing the camp’ and the dialectics of hospitality in both life and death.

Last year, Qasmiyeh collaborated with the Oxford University Poetry Society, the Oxford Students’ Oxfam Group and Oxford University PEN to translate Arabic-language poems pertaining to the Syrian refugee crisis for a small anthology, Flight, subsequently sold to raise funds for the Oxfam Refugee Appeal and an Oxford-based charity, OXPAND. It was in this capacity that I first met Qasmiyeh. The following exchange took place in late January, 2017.

—Theophilus Kwek, Chief Executive Assistant at Asymptote

 

Theophilus Kwek (TK): You’ve just returned from Oxford to Lebanon for several weeks over the winter, visiting the refugee camps while you were there. Each of these journeys must involve a complex set of changes: not least in your immediate linguistic and cultural context. Was there an aspect of this most recent journey that was most compelling to you as a writer?

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh (YMQ): These journeys have become regular since I obtained my British passport in early-2012. Their regularity is largely initiated by a combination of familial and research commitments. I mainly visit Baddawi camp (my place of birth) and the Nahr Al-Bared camp in North Lebanon. We might say that I go to the camps ‘through Lebanon’ and never ‘to Lebanon’. Indeed, this has been a recurring theme in my and Elena’s research with new [refugee] arrivals in Baddawi, in so far as refugees’ “arrival in the camp” has become the ultimate dynamic that has punctuated many refugees’ understanding of the occurrence of arrival [in Lebanon].

For me, as a person born in Baddawi, my arrival in that place has always been contingent on the presence of the camp. You may also say these are seasonal pilgrimages to one’s memories and traces, as I have argued in a co-authored piece titled ‘Refugee Camps and Cities in Conversation.’

When I am there I try to spend time with my elderly parents, my siblings and their families, but I also try to observe the changes that are occurring in the camps. The camps are no longer the same nor are their residents the same people. In order to acknowledge both the humane and inhumane repercussions of such places we have to see the faces in their absolute gift—the features and cuts that never lie about what is happening around them. These are the faces of those who are unsure about the definition of a place or the tenets that make a place a place. Everything in the camps seems to move both horizontally and vertically at the same time. People enter the place to contribute to the mass or masses therein but also to the verticality that has embodied itself in all these fragile buildings that are being (or in the process of being) built. Other refugees are entering their archetypal place, one might say. The city (at least in Lebanon) is no longer the only destination for all these new refugees.

In this process, I think the linguistic and dialectal dimension has become strikingly obvious. The dialects that are heard are now what avows the faces. Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi dialects are now uttered in the same space, in camps that have transcended the “gathering” sign to become the “gatherer”; the active participle, the doer whose main presence is dependent on being occupied and used. We hear the dialect to observe the face. This (dis)order has always attracted me to my camp. It attracts me for it is the dialect that we at times suppress to conceal who we are. It attracts me when such dialects are exaggerated or perhaps elongated to occupy a place that is neither theirs nor ours. The shibboleth has never been clearer.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

January 27, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by Flora Brandl, Maíra Mendes Galvão, and Sarah Moses

Updates from Brazil, Argentina, Germany, and Austria

Would you believe we have already reached the end of January? We’ve already brought you reports from eleven different nations so far this year, but we’re thrilled to share more literary news from South America and central Europe this week. Our Editor-at-Large for Argentina, Sarah Moses, brings us news of literary greats’ passing, while her new colleague Maíra Mendes Galvão covers a number of exciting events in Brazil. Finally, a University College London student, Flora Brandl, has the latest from German and Austrian.

Asymptote’s Argentina Editor-at-Large, Sarah Moses, writes about the death of two remarkable authors:

The end of 2016 was marked by the loss of Argentinian writer Alberto Laiseca, who passed away in Buenos Aires on December 22 at the age of seventy-five. The author of more than twenty books across genres, Laiseca is perhaps best known for his novel Los Sorias (Simurg, 1st edition, 1998), which is regarded as one of the masterworks of Argentinian literature.

Laiseca also appeared on television programs and in films such as El artista (2008). For many years, he led writing workshops in Buenos Aires, and a long list of contemporary Argentinian writers honed their craft with him.

Some two weeks after Laiseca’s passing, on January 6, the global literary community lost another great with the death of Ricardo Piglia, also aged seventy-five. Piglia was a literary critic and the author of numerous short stories and novels, including Respiración artificial (Pomaire, 1st edition, 1980), which was published in translation in 1994 by Duke University Press.

The first installments of Piglia’s personal diaries, Los diarios de Emilio Renzi, were recently released by Anagrama and are the subject of the film 327 cuadernos, by Argentinian filmmaker Andrés Di Tella. The film was shown on January 26 as part of the Museo Casa de Ricardo Rojas’s summer series “La literatura en el cine: los autores,” which features five films on contemporary authors and poets, including Witold Gombrowicz and Alejandra Pizarnik.

On January 11, the U.S. press New Directions organized an event at the bookstore Eterna Cadencia in anticipation of the February release of A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Argentinian journalist Leila Guerriero and translated by Frances Riddle. Guerriero discussed the book, which follows a malambo dancer as he trains for Argentina’s national competition, as well as her translation of works of non-fiction with fellow journalist and author Mariana Enriquez. Enriquez’s short story collection, Things We Lost in the Fire (Hogarth), translated by Megan McDowell, will also appear in English in February.

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