Posts filed under 'Palestine'

Asymptote at the Movies: Men in the Sun and The Dupes

October 9, 2024  |  in Asymptote at the Movies  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou, Junyi Zhou, and Mia Ruf

. . . the film refuses to downplay their suffering and invites us, the spectators, to partake in their anguish as something fundamentally embodied.

1962 saw the publication of Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a striking novella that depicts the fates of three Palestinian refugees as they seek to make their way out of an Iraqi camp, hoping to find work in Kuwait. From a committed revolutionary and visionary documentarian of liberatory futures, Men in the Sun was one of Kanafani’s most powerful and symbolic tales—a narrative that at once elucidated the precarious liminal position of the exiled, and criticized passivity and silence in the face of injustice. Ten years later, the story would be adapted and released as The Dupes by Egyptian director Tewfik Saleh, who repudiated Arab cinema at the time as being woefully ignorant, stating: “No one ever proposed a serious political analysis of [the Palestinians’] situation as victims of an imperialist machine.”

That same year, in 1972, Kanafani was assassinated by a car bomb placed by the Israeli Mossad; his seventeen-year-old niece died along with him. He would be remembered as a comrade who had never lost faith in the Palestinian cause, continuing to insist that the future, with all its hardships and destructions, was still a site of hope: “I knew, however, that a distant homeland was being born again: hills, olive groves, dead people, torn banners and folded ones, all cutting their way into a future of flesh and blood and being born in the heart of another child. . .” In this vein, him and Saleh were united in the necessity of persistence, with the latter explicating: “. . . I think, even if this isn’t everyone’s opinion, that a film like The Dupes is extremely mobilizing. Under what conditions can we say a film is mobilizing? When it inspires the overthrow of a situation.”

In this edition of Asymptote at the Movies, we take a look at Men in the Sun and The Dupes, the way these two master storytellers intersect, diverge, and speak together of human dignity—how it has been undermined by the world. When Men in the Sun was published, there were 1.1 million refugees registered with UNRWA; today, there are approximately six million. The persistence to live continues, and the resistance along with it.

Christina Chatzitheodorou (CC): In these two narratives, Tewfik Saleh and Ghassan Kanafani grasp the meaning behind the Nakba as an ongoing event and a transgenerational trauma, focusing on three generations of Palestinians who, after being expelled from their homeland after 1948, find themselves living in temporary shelters. Yet the fact that Kanafani uses three generations of Palestinians to tell the story symbolizes how the temporary experience of exile has been transformed into something permanent, with dispossession being at the heart of the Palestinian experience. The protagonists each have their own flashbacks—living off their memories—and though they are products of different Palestinian experiences, their commonalities are found in betrayal and despair, the material implications related to the loss of the homeland.

Mia Ruf (MR): I was also struck by the frequent use of flashbacks, both in the novel and the film. Each character enters the story with his respective memory burden. I thought that the montage interweaving Abu Quais’s experiences with shots from the broader “historical record” (diplomatic summits, etc.) was particularly impactful—it really gave us a sense of the scope of Abu Quais’ life, in both general and personal terms. Over the course of the narrative, though, as Abu Quais, Abbas, Marwan, and their smuggler Abu Khaizuran make their way toward Kuwait, all these individual memories converge, in a way. There’s a line in the text: “their thoughts seemed to run from one head to the other”—it’s almost like the men have come to share a collective consciousness, the heat melting their minds into one. In Saleh’s film, this is evoked through shots of swirling dust on the barely-perceivable road toward Kuwait—objects in the physical world become less and less individuated.

Screenshot 2024-10-09 at 7.06.06 PM

Although the men share in one another’s misery, they die in utter isolation, in darkness, baking to death inside a sweltering water tank. Though it’s not included in the book, the film has the men banging on the insides of the tank for help in their final moments, unheard by Abu Khaizuran, who has been held up at the customs desk. This is a broader theme in the film and text: the exiles’ repeated pleas for help, the world’s failure to respond, and the crushing sense of isolation and betrayal that results.

READ MORE…

The Ghost of Coexistence: On a Narrative of Jewish-Muslim Kinship

May 20, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Moumita Ghosh

A Land Like You is a historical rendition . . . but it is also, much more, a testament of a multicultural homeland that no longer exists.

On May 12, Egypt joined South Africa in its International Court of Justice case accusing Israel of genocide. As one of the first countries to recognize the Palestinian Declaration of Independence in 1988, Egypt has continually occupied a close position in this ongoing catastrophe; the nation opposed Zionism in the 1930s and accepted tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba but, in more recent decades, the government has worked to covertly “normalize” relations with Israel. This seeming contradiction culminates from the complex, multi-cultural, and syncretic history of the region, in which Jewish and Muslim peoples lived with intertwined fates, and it is that increasingly implausible reality which the French writer and psychologist Tobie Nathan explores in A Land Like You, an absorbing, panoramic narrative of Egypt in the twentieth century. In the following essay, Moumita Ghosh looks at how the nation of Egypt formed out of an overarching Ottoman unity, and how Nathan’s stirring novel of this tumultuous period can inform our understanding of the region today.

We live beside the Arabs the way a man might live beside his innards. Our tales fill their Qur’an, their tongue fills our mouth. Why aren’t they us? Why aren’t we them?

—Tobie Nathan, from A Land Like You (translated by Joyce Zonana)

In Ottoman Brothers, Michele U. Campos writes about how objective distinctions between empires and nations are often murky, especially as demonstrated in the late Ottoman context. In the years before the First World War, the rise of ethno-nationalist sentiments such as Zionism and Arabism were essentially in negotiation with the responsibilities of imperial citizenship in a multi-ethnic and multi-religious Muslim empire. Rather than separating from the Ottoman empire, there were attempts to preserve its existence. As familiar calls for a two-state solution re-emerge in Palestine, now undergoing a second Nakba, this history of collective identity and a shared homeland in the Middle East—though short-lived, incomplete, and within the context of imperialism—has gained a new relevancy.

In the wake of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution and the collapse of the old Hamidian absolutist state, the new epoch of democracy linked the individual Ottoman citizen—irrespective of ethnicity, religion, or mother tongue—to the reforming constitutional state, and citizenship to the “Ottoman-nation” became a distinct socio-political identity. Palestine, even under rule, somewhat differed from the other Ottoman provinces in terms of being a site of worldwide religious devotion, as its daily life involved a mutuality whereby local Muslims, Christians, and Jews came together—especially in Jerusalem—to execute the vision of a “modern” urban city.

Sephardi Jews in particular were grateful to the Ottoman Empire for being their historical saviors, and were consistently mediating between the ideological commitments of multicultural, civic Ottomanism and the European import of particularistic Zionism in the years following the 1908 revolution. Shaped by cultural Hebraism, the Sephardi Jews of Palestine believed in the compatibility of Ottomanism and Zionism; they thought that the socio-cultural and economic rebirth of the Jewish community would be enriching for the Ottoman Empire and, most importantly, that such a revival would be taking place within the Ottoman body-politic. However, such views were not free of contentions—especially due to the continual forces of territorial colonialism. READ MORE…

From My Palestine: An Impossible Exile

April 24, 2024  |  in All Eyes on Palestine  |  by Mohammad Tarbush and Nada Tarbush

Others who survived the venture of returning . . . spoke of deserted houses, some perhaps with a half-finished meal on the table . . .

Beit Nattif, between Bethlehem and the Mediterranean Sea, was one of the four hundred-plus villages depopulated during the 1948 Nakba, which turned hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into refugees. Mohammad Tarbush was then a child amongst them, hearing whispers of massacres, passing through the ruins, and witnessing the real-time erasure of Palestinian presence. In the years that followed from that formative memory, he would hitchhike his way to Switzerland, study at Oxford, build an incredibly successful career in banking, and continue to use his profound infrastructural and economic experience in advocating for peace, autonomy, and the accurate historicisation and depiction of his native country. 

In his final years, Tarbush would work on a memoir that coalesced this remarkable life with his incisive perspective on Palestinian liberation and development; the resulting text, My Palestine: An Impossible Exile, details this lifelong pursuit by contextualising the events and conflicting agendas that followed the devastation of 1948, along with the intimate recollections that harboured always—in the words of his daughter and translator, Nada Tarbush—“a mini-Palestine in exile.” Casting his critical gaze on land agreements, international pacts, closed-door deals, and public calls for resolution, Tarbush precisely delineates the Zionist apparatus, indicts ethical and political failures, and substantiates his ideal of a one-state solution—all stemming from the events of this excerpt, set in the days of the Tarbush family’s displacement. Here, one sees that the impossibility of exile is in its unreality; home is never truly left behind.

And still, no one knew for sure what had become of Beit Nattif and the men left behind there. Everyone hoped that they had either managed to hold out or that their deep knowledge of the countryside, its hidden trails and lairs, had allowed them to escape. And the days dragged on through a tunnel of despair. Mother was seized with restless anxiety, unable to sleep at night, her eyes oddly transfixed in the daytime, constantly peering into the distance.

After the ordeal of the journey to Bethlehem, Grandfather recovered a kind of determined energy that would flare up at times. Almost recovering his old spirit, he would wander off, confident that this time he would get to the truth, would find out for sure when we would be allowed back to Beit Nattif. A figure of nobility back home, here he was merely another shuffling old man, liable to be knocked and jostled in the crush.

‘Let’s go back, Granddad,’ Yousef would whisper when he took him along. READ MORE…

Sounds Like Fiction: Traversing Minor Detail Again, in the Time of Genocide

February 5, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Alex Tan

Amidst the ruins, I want to read Shibli's writing ... as a pedagogy of hope, of waiting, and of revolutionary becoming.

After the shameful decision to cancel Palestinian writer Adania Shibli’s LiBeraturpreis award ceremony at the 2023 Frankfurt Book Fair, everyone in the Global North flocked to read Minor Detail (translated into English by Elisabeth Jaquette), as thousands of writers, intellectuals, editors, and others in the literary ecosystem rightly condemned the cancellation. It was a symptom not only of Europe’s routine silencing of Palestinian voices but, more perniciously, of Germany’s particular brand of virulent anti-antisemitism, its Holocaust memory culture metastasised into a total interdiction on critiques of Israel.

Adania Shibli cites Samira Azzam—a writer whose seemingly unthreatening short stories describing everyday life in Palestine managed to pass the censorship bureau’s checks—as a formative influence. Azzam “contributed to shaping my consciousness regarding Palestine as no other text I have ever read has done”, Shibli writes, for it cultivated in her “a deep yearning for all that had been, including the normal, the banal, and the tragic”. For many of us, grappling with what solidarity and hope can mean in the light of Israel’s ongoing genocidal violence against Gaza, Minor Detail might be such an essential touchstone. How might we (re)read Shibli’s work today, not only as a prescient source of information about Palestine but also as a text that theorises and maps its own aesthetic possibility? With what voice does it continue to address us, reverberating through silence and the distortions of language?

One day, a splotch of black ink bloomed on my well-thumbed copy of Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail. I didn’t know where it came from. The blemish, to my consternation, appeared in the light-grey region of the cover, which depicts an undulating terrain. Misted waves, perhaps, or the volatile sands of a desert. Obsessed with keeping my books as pristine as possible, I took an alcohol swab and wiped the black dot right off.

The smudge was dispatched as swiftly as it had arrived. Days later, I noticed the alcohol had also dissolved the matte surface of the cover where I had rubbed it. A tiny glossy archipelago emerged, its lustre and its jagged edges visible only at an angle, under the light.

Now the sheen reproaches me for thinking I could make something disappear with no trace.

*

Desert / الصحراء

 I want to juxtapose without asserting equivalence; the unnamed Israeli military commander in Minor Detail, too, believes in the seamlessness of disappearance. In the novel’s first half, he helms a Zionist platoon in a mission to conquer the Negev desert. This ruthless assertion of sovereignty takes place in 1949, a year after the traumatic Nakba dispossessed most Palestinians of their homeland. It is also a rearguard response to Egypt’s invasion of an Israeli kibbutz a year prior.

Charged with purging the land of “infiltrators”, the Zionist soldiers massacre a band of Arabs. They capture a Bedouin girl, humiliating, gang-raping, and murdering her. The horror of these bloodthirsty actions is continually evaded: “Then came the sound of heavy gunfire.” The narrative camera, as it were, turns its back on the moment of life’s desecration. Landscape itself seems to consent to these crimes. The desert, an aggressive mouth, collaborates in the erasure of evidence, each occasion with a different attitude: “languidly”, “greedily”, “steadily”, the sand sucks blood, moisture, substance into its depths. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Olivia Elias

October 31, 2023  |  in Translations  |  by Jérémy Victor Robert

tongue like ground/ riddled with holes/ words unwilling to take/ shape

Today is Halloween, so here is a Halloween-related story: eleven years ago, after launching our Halloween-themed Fall 2012 issue, we heard that the cover (by guest artist June Glasson) hadn’t gone over well in some corners of the Internet. Despite their clearly (or so I thought!) childlike proportions, its ghoulish trick-or-treaters reminded some readers of the Ku Klux Klan. We learnt a valuable lesson about spelling out editorial intentions, especially when a lot is at stake. This Translation Tuesday, as we present two heartbreaking poems by past contributor Olivia Elias in Jérémy Victor Robert’s lucid translation—poems that were written before the October 7th attack, but which nevertheless speak to the ongoing humanitarian crisis—I want to make clear that we stand against Hamas’s brutality as well as with innocent civilian Gazans who are now being drawn into the war. We call for a ceasefire—which the U.N. overwhelmingly voted for three days ago—to be enacted immediately. We also chose to publish these poems against the backdrop of Palestinian voices being silenced—such as when the Frankfurt Book Fair recently canceled its prize presentation ceremony honoring Adania Shibli for Minor Detail—incidentally, our May 2020 Book Club pick. It is especially during such fraught times that we should listen to and read one another. 

—Lee Yew Leong, Editor-in-Chief, Asymptote

floating everywhere, the white shadows

often pain wakes them
in their severed limbxxxa brain area
lights upxxxneurologists say

phantom limb pain (named)

/
likewise on the world map
& in the cortexxxxthe indelible print

as if it could be enough to replace
with a pen stroke plus a few
statements/vetoesxxxa country’s name
to erase it

isn’t there always in our homes
at our tablesxxxa place for ghosts

floating everywhere, the white shadows

Tongue like Ground

tongue like ground
riddled with holes
words unwilling to take
shape
keep escaping through
holes

all I do is repeatxxxrepeat
xxxmy Name
xxxxis not
xxxNo One
xxxxfrom
xxxthe Land
xxxxof
xxxNo One

against burying under screedxxxrepeat
mantra
xxxxam fully alive made of silt & clay from this Mount

overlooking the same seaxxxupon which shines the same sun
as in the early stages

Translated from the French by Jérémy Victor Robert

A poet of the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. She lived until the age of 16 in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montréal, Canada, before moving to France. Characterized by terse language and strong rhythms, her poetry shows a deep sensitivity to the Palestinian cause, the plight of refugees, and human suffering. Her work, translated into English, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Japanese, appeared in anthologies and numerous journals, including Arablit, Asymptote Journal, Plume Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry London, The Barcelona Review, Circulo de Poesía, Nayagua, Arablit, Al Araby-Al- Jedeed and, in France, Apulée, Poezibao, Poésie première, and Phoenix. With Chaos, Crossing, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, she made her English-language debut, probing deeply into the upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Published in November 2022 by World Poetry, the collection was reviewed by Poetry Foundation and figures among World Literature Today’s 75 Notable Translations of 2022 and onWords Without Borders’ November Watchlist. In September 2023 appeared, in a limited illustrated edition, Your Name, Palestine, a chapbook translated by Sarah Riggs and Jérémy Victor Robert (World Poetry Books).

Jérémy Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Chibuihe Obi Achimba’s poem, “a sonnet: a slaughter field,” which was published on Poezibao’s website, and Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

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Read more from Translation Tuesdays on the Asymptote blog:

 

Reading Palestine in French: In Conversation with Kareem James Abu-Zeid

May 11, 2023  |  in Interviews  |  by Tuğrul Mende

The translation on its own should be so powerful or important that it serves as its own aesthetic justification.

Born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias is a poet of the Palestinian diaspora  writing in French. During her childhood, she lived as a refugee in Beirut, but later moved to Montreal and then to Paris in the early 1980s. While she started to publish her poetry quite late in comparison to other poets, she has authored several collections since 2013. Her poetry is characterized as precise and rhythmic, and the Palestinian cause is a recurring theme throughout her work. Elias’ poem “Flame of Fire” opens:

I was born
In this
Eruptive time
When my country’s
Name was changed

Though Olivia Elias began writing poetry at a later stage in her life, she quickly gained maturity in the craft. With her third collection, Chaos, Crossing she reached an artistic peak, which has been brought into English in Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s translation. While the collection contains previously published poems, it also features  poems which haven’t yet been published in French before. In this interview, Kareem James Abu-Zeid discusses his introduction to Elias’ work, the influences and intricacies of Elias’ poetry, and the process of bringing Chaos, Crossing into English for the first time.

Tuğrul Mende (TM): You studied French literature in the past. Can you tell me what drew you to the subject and what drew you to translate Olivia Elias?

Kareem James Abu-Zeid (KJAZ): It’s funny, because I did study French literature and poetry—French was my major as an undergraduate—but that wasn‘t how I discovered Olivia‘s poetry. She was introduced to me by another Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish, in May 2020, and I immediately wanted to translate her work.

I wasn’t reading a lot of French poetry at the time, and I was mainly translating Arabic. All of the literary projects I had done up to that point were in Arabic. I do a lot of academic and professional translations from French and from German, but I hadn’t done many literary texts. Up until 2003, when I graduated from college, I was reading a lot of French poetry, but then I began translating Arabic and French literature dropped away a little bit in my translation life. So this project somehow felt like it connected those disparate parts of my life.

TM: What do you do differently when translating from those various languages?

KJAZ:  I don’t consciously do anything differently. There are different things that happen and different challenges that arise with different languages, of course. For me, it always starts with understanding the source text, whatever its language. Then, hopefully, you develop a more empathetic connection to the source text, you really connect with it on a deeper level. The goal is to have the translation work as poetry in English.

There are different challenges with each language, and certainly with Arabic. When translating from Arabic to English, for example, the way the two languages work is so different that anything resembling a word-for-word translation is pretty much impossible. You’re forced to get very creative in terms of syntax, rhythm, etc.

With this project in particular, what I noticed is that I felt (for a little while) that I was going to be able to produce a translation that looked, at least on the surface, more like a mirror of the original French. I got lulled into a false sense of security, because the two languages are so close to one another in so many ways. But later on, I realized that the English wasn’t quite ”clicking” in the way I wanted, and that I couldn’t always mimic the French syntax or rhythms, or go with English cognates for French words—I had to step back a bit and really allow myself to recreate the texts as English-language poetry. I learned that there are unique difficulties when the languages are so close to each other as well. There were several times when I thought I had something good in English, and I was pleased, because in many ways it looked very close to the French. But then, when I managed to forget about the source text and just consider the English on its own, I realized that something was definitely sounding a bit “off” in my translation. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Front Lines of World Literature

February 17, 2023  |  in Dispatches  |  by Carol Khoury, Rubén López, and Sofija Popovska

The latest from Guatemala, Palestine, and Macedonia!

This week, our editors-at-large report on a celebration of a beloved poets, a controversial change to a major literary award, the last chance to see a powerful museum show, and more. Read on to learn more about current events in world literature!

Rubén López, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Guatemala

On January 26, the Ministry of Sports and Culture of Guatemala announced several changes regarding the National Literature Award. The award, given yearly since 1988, honors the exceptional careers of writers like Augusto Monterroso, Rodrigo Rey Rosa, Carmen Matute, Gloria Hernández, Eduardo Halfon, among others. However, the Ministry has now announced that the award will be presented every three years. Christian Calderón, Vice Minister of Culture, said that the decision is part of a “strategy to give an opportunity to develop young writers.” Gloria Hernández, who was granted the award in 2022, expressed criticism of this new policy in a local newspaper. She argues that the Ministry’s motivation for the change is only saving the monetary grant for three years and that this will not benefit local writers. She added that Guatemala should emulate Mexico’s National Literature Award, which grants a lifetime pension so that the creator can devote to writing. In her opinion, this would be more valuable to Guatemalan literature. In the same interview, Gerardo Guinea, who received the award in 2009, said that it is absurd to grant the award every three years and argues that the only effect of this change is to limit the number of laureates.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

January 27, 2023  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and MARGENTO

Literary News from Palestine, Central America, Romania, and Spain!

Join us this week with a new batch of literary dispatches covering a new Palestinian literary and culture magazine, the 2023 PEN Open Book Award longlist, and more. From a Palestinian literary festival to the birthday celebration for the “national poet” of Romania, read on to learn more!

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

A first is always exciting, always an event; in fact, it’s called “a first” even if a second never comes. And when there is a second time, it’s an opportunity to celebrate and to remember the first.

This week the Palestinian literary community is anticipating both a first and a second.

The Palestinian literary scene is witnessing the birth of Fikra Magazine, an online Palestinian cultural and literary magazine – writing and art by and for Palestinians. According to partners and co-founders Aisha and Kevin, Fikra is dedicated to “high-quality content that doesn’t conform to stereotypes and old-fashioned ideas about Palestine. It’s original, it’s inspiring, it’s bold.” What is exciting about this new publication is that every piece is professionally translated from Arabic to English—or vice versa. Since “Palestinians in the Diaspora often don’t read Arabic as their mother tongue,” the creators say in their promotional materials, “we want our writers to become part and parcel of the international writing-guild as well.” In Fikra, the creators promise, “you’ll find Palestinian writers and artists from all corners of the word – from Gaza, the West-Bank, East-Jerusalem, 48, and the diaspora.”

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

February 26, 2021  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, Jacqueline Leung, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Malaysia!

This week, our writers bring you news from Palestine, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. In Palestine, the world has been remembering the renowned writer Mourid Barghouti, who passed away this month; in Hong Kong, Dorothy Tse’s first novel to appear in English, Owlish, will be released by Fitzcarraldo Editions and Graywolf Press; and in Malaysia, two new anthologies celebrate Malaysian writing. Read on to find out more! 

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

If it weren’t for COVID-19, the narrow streets of Deir Ghassana would have been jammed with mourners on Valentine’s day. Just like many other villages around the world, Deir Ghassana—the small serene village to the north of Ramallah in the central hills of Palestine— usually celebrates Valentine’s day, but not this year: for Mourid Barghouti passed away.

Born on a hot day in July 1944 in one of the village’s old houses, Barghouti grew to become a beloved Palestinian poet, performer, public speaker, and memoirist, albeit living most of his life in exile. He wrote the popular memoir I Saw Ramallah, which chronicled his return to the West Bank in 1996 and was translated by novelist Ahdaf Soueif. He also wrote a follow-up memoir, I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, which tells his story from 1998 to 2010, translated by Humphrey Davies. He published more than a dozen collections of poems, and a collection of his work, Midnight and Other Poems, was translated by his life partner, the great Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour (1946–2014).

In his foreword to the English version of I Saw Ramallah, Edward Said wrote of Barghouti’s treatment of loss experienced in exile that, “it is Barghouti’s extended rebuttal and resistance against the reasons for that loss that endows his poetry with substance and gives this narrative its positive valence.” The loss of such a writer is great, but Barghouti will always be remembered. His legacy is extremely rich, not only because he was one of the most articulate defenders of the Palestinian cause, but because his writing has encapsulated the collective agony and sumoud (steadfastness) of the Palestinian people everywhere.

In his memoir, Mourid writes about the loss of his private days—his birthday and his anniversary—as author Ghassan Kanafani was assassinated on the date of the first, and cartoonist Naji al-Ali on the second. It seems life is only determined to keep the legacy alive. Sadly for Mourid and Radwa’s only son, the poet Tamim Barghouti (b. 1977), February 14 will be a different celebration from now on.

To get a taste of his writings, a collection of his translated works is published on ArabLit and a wide-ranging interview by Maya Jaggi, published in The Guardian (2008). 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 Dispatches From the Front Lines of World Literature

November 27, 2020  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Carol Khoury, José García Escobar, and Kwan Ann Tan

The latest news from Central America, Palestine, and Malaysia!

This week, our writer’s bring you the latest news from Central America, Palestine, and Malaysia. Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA, has begun, whilst José Luis Perdomo Orellana received Guatemala’s most prestigious literary award; Palestine Writes Literature Festival has begun online, featuring over seventy writers and activists, including Angela Davis and Fady Joudah; and in Malaysia, readers have mourned the passing of prominent writer Salleh Ben Joned, whilst Georgetown Literary Festival has featured writers including Ho Sok Fong. Read on to find out more! 

José García Escobar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Central America

After many delays and obvious setbacks, Central America’s biggest book fair, FILGUA, started yesterday. As a virtual book fair, FILGUA will feature over 140 online activities, book presentations, and conversations among prominent authors, journalists, and activists, such as Daniel Krauze (Mexico), Olga Wornat (Argentina), Rigoberta Menchú (Guatemala), and Javier Castillo (Spain). They have also announced that next year’s FILGUA, as planned for this year’s, will be celebrated alongside Central America’s biggest literary festival, Centro América Cuenta.

In November, writer and journalist José Luis Perdomo Orellana received the Miguel Ángel Asturias National Prize in Literature—Guatemala’s most prestigious literary prize. José Luis is best known for La última y nos vamos, a collection of interviews with Gunther Grass, Nadine Gordimer, José Saramago, and others. Also in November, indie giants Catafixia Editorial announced they will reissue Eugenia Gallardo’s most famous novel No te apresures a llegar a la Torre de Londres, porque la Torre de Londres no es el Big Ben.

Finally, the famed Guatemalan author Eduardo Halfon recently revealed the cover of his upcoming new book Canción, shortly after The New York Review shared an excerpt. Canción is out in January with Libros del Asteriode.

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

If you are still searching for a silver lining of the dark COVID-19 cloud, here’s one to consider: five days of virtual readings, talks, and performances celebrating Palestinian literature.

Palestine Writes Literature Festival, originally scheduled to take place in New York City in March 2020 (with the postponement announced due to the pandemic), will now take place virtually 2–6 December 2020. 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…

Translation Tuesday: Two Poems by Samer Abu Hawwash

January 21, 2020  |  in Translations  |  by Huda Fakhreddine

But still; / what illusion always makes you / wait for something . . .

For this week’s showcase, we are thrilled to present two surreal, staccato zen koans by contemporary Palestinian poet Samer Abu Hawwash in Huda Fakhreddine’s concise translation. If you admire these spare lines that probe the relationship between appearance and reality, check out a recent profile of the author by translator Fakhreddine in the online portal Jacket2.

Kafka on the Beach

I hear the trees passing behind the window.
One of them, maybe a palm tree, opens the curtain, stares me down, and moves on.
At the corner, there’s a cat yawning, saying to the old man: “So . . . you can speak?!
The old man responds: “But I am not very bright.”

I think I am looking into a mirror. READ MORE…

Theatres of Conflict: A Conversation with Susannah Tresilian of Project ARIADNE

November 19, 2015  |  in Interviews  |  by David Maclean

"Because we all learn from role models, and these are women who are worth following and learning from and who are eager to pass that on."

Project ARIADNE is a revolutionary global arts movement promoting woman-led theatre in current and former zones of conflict. Their mission is to provide a stage to women across the world making theatre either because of the wars they have lived through, or in spite of them.

Susannah Tresilian is a founding member of the project and its current Artistic Director, collaborating with theatre-makers around the world, including Hope Azeda (Rwanda), Dijana Milosevic (Serbia), Frédérique Lecomte (Burundi), Iman Aoun (Palestine), Patricia Ariza (Colombia) and Ruwanthie de Chickera (Sri Lanka).

Her corpus of work focuses predominantly on the promotion of gender equity within international theatre. Recently, her work has seen her collaborating with the Belarus Free Theatre in London and Minsk on Soul Power: The Opera. The Belarus Free Theatre is an underground theatre troupe banned in their home country by the presiding Lukashenko regime, often described as the last dictatorship in Europe. The artistic directors of the group are currently in political exile in London, and are residents of the Young Vic Theatre. The Arts Council offers a bursary for actors and theatre-makers to travel to Minsk and work with the troupe in lieu of their exiled members. Tresillian is covertly working with them, enabling other actors and theatre-makers such as Jude Law, Michael Attenborough, and Sam West to make the journey.

*** READ MORE…