Posts featuring Ghassan Kanafani

Towards a Greater Social Consciousness: Persa Koumoutsi on Translating Arabic Literature Into Greek

November 4, 2024  |  in Interviews  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou and Persa Koumoutsi

If a text is written simply to express our personal wants or concerns, it is not literature, in my view, but a form of self-centered expression.

Born and raised in Cairo, Persa Koumoutsi is a literary translator and a writer. Having returned to Greece after completing her studies at the Faculty of Arts at Cairo University, she began focusing solely on translating Arabic literature into Greek in 1993. She has since worked on the works of many distinguished authors, including fourteen novels by the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, as well many Arab poets. Her bibliography includes the first Anthology of Contemporary Arabic Poetry in Greek, for which she received the First Prize of the Hellenic Society of Literary Translators in 2017. Among her other works, the Αnthology of Modern Arabic Female Poetry was also widely lauded in 2022. She has also published the Αnthology of Palestinian Poetry and the Anthology of Egyptian Poetry.

In this interview, originally conducted in Greek, I spoke with Persa about the renewed interest in Palestinian literature in times of genocide, the importance of translation as a means to make struggles known and build solidarities beyond human borders and language barriers, prison literature, as well as the future of Arabic translation in Greece. The latter concerns not solely translation for the sake of itself, but as a powerful tool to bring forth voices of those marginalized.

Christina Chatzitheodoru (CC): Since October 7 and the ongoing genocide, several young Arab writers and poets have been translated into Greek, including your recent translation of Najwan Darwish. There is a renewed interest in Palestinian literature in particular. Can you tell us more about this?

Persa Koumoutsi (PK): Of course there is a renewed interest, not only in Greece but all over the world, especially in Europe. The tragic events in Gaza have brought to the fore an unspeakable tragedy, and thus many of my colleagues and translators around the world—and in Greece—have devoted themselves to translating works that highlight this problem and its dimensions, as well as its impact on our collective and individual consciousnesses—especially those of whom are concerned with contemporary Arabic culture and its literature. One such work is a collection by the renowned Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish entitled, in Greek, I Kourasi ton Kremasmenon (Exhausted on the Cross), which, as the title suggests, alludes to the enduring pains of the Palestinian people, the irredeemable trauma, and the grievous injustice they have been inflicted upon them. Poetry, in my opinion, is the most powerful literary genre in these cases, since everything can be said and highlighted through the condensed word of poetry. . .

CC: The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani once stated: “My political position springs from my being a novelist. In so far as I am concerned, politics and the novel are an indivisible case, and I can categorically state that I became politically committed because I am a novelist, not the opposite.” How does this view relate to your own approach to translation? READ MORE…

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.

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From Palestine to Greece: A Translated Struggle 

January 10, 2024  |  in Essays  |  by Christina Chatzitheodorou

. . . utopias are not solely objects of fantasy but are objectives to be built and lived . . . at the intersection of art and revolution.

Palestine and Greece have long enjoyed a strong relationship of solidarity and friendship, fortified by mutual assistance during political tumults, expressions of recognition, and profound demonstrations towards peace and independence. In this essay, Christina Chatzitheodorou takes us through the literature that has continually followed along the history of this connection, and how translations from Arabic to Greek has advocated and enlivened the Palestinian cause in the Hellenic Republic.

Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut in 1982, the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) was forced to leave the city. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, then fled Beirut for Tunisia, and, in fear of being captured or assassinated by Israel, he asked his Greek friend Andreas Papandreou for cover. The two had previously joined forces during the dictatorial regime in Greece known as Junta or the Regime of the Colonels, in which Arafat supported the Panhellenic Liberation Movement (Panellinio Apeleutherotiko Kinima/PAK) founded by Papandreou, and had also offered training in Middle Eastern camps to the movement’s young resistance fighters. 

Arafat arrived then from war-torn Beirut to Faliron, in the south of Athens. He received a warm dockside reception by the then-Prime Minister Papandreou and other top government officials, as well as a small crowd consisting mostly of Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) members and Greece-based Palestinians, who stood by chanting slogans in support of the Palestinian cause. Papandreou called Arafat’s arrival in Athens a “historic moment” and assured him of Greece’s full support in the Palestinians’ struggle; after all, while Arafat was coming to Athens, accompanied by Greek ships, pro-Palestinian protests were taking place around the country almost every other day. 

Although our support and solidarity with the Palestinian cause neither began nor stopped there, that day remains a powerful reminder of the traditional ties and friendship between Greek and Palestinian people. But more importantly, it comes in total contrast with the position of the current Greek government. Now, despite the short memories of politicians, it is the literature and translations of Palestinian works which continue to remind us of Greece’s historical solidarity to Palestine, particularly from left-wing and libertarian circles. 

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Prose Against the City: Ibrahim Al-koni and the Matters of the Desert

October 31, 2019  |  in Essays  |  by MK Harb

Al-koni is . . . giving the desert an ideological value that he believes has been lost.

Emptiness, desolation, and thirst—these evocations of the desert are the ones most familiar to the bulk of us, but for some, this wild landscape resists such simple evaluations, holding instead a kingdom of history, knowledge, and narrative. In this essay, anthropologist and writer MK Harb takes us through the literature of the North African author Ibrahim Al-koni, whose sagas reveal the historic philosophy that these regions have preserved. Despite the othering hierarchical nature that has plagued literature, Al-koni’s writings invoke tender and human shapes from his landscapes, arising from that mysterious creature: the Sahara. 

MK Harb recommends listening to this playlist while reading this article and the works of Al-Koni.

The mahri convulsed and its skin turned bloody red. It jittered with pain, its stomach containing a fire burning within and howled “Aw-a-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

Ukhayadd had given the mahri a silphium plant known for its magical capabilities for physical healing, but also for its mind-twisting qualities. Ukhayadd himself began to convulse, through his emotions he felt every bit of the pain the mahri was going through. He pleaded to the various gods in the Sahara from Allah to those guarding the temples to transfer the pain on to him. He yelled “Lord, divide his share of pain. Let me be the one to lighten his burden,” but the mahri still jittered and yelled “Awa-a-a-a-a-a-a.”

Ukhayadd’s emotions then turned to anger. He pleaded with the mahri, yelling “do you think you can escape your fate? Brave men do not try to run from themselves. Wise men do not try to flee from fate.” Ukhayadd did not see the mahri as a horse. He shared with him a sort of otherworldly love and addressed him with the various emotional capacities you would with a human. 

This imagery ripe with lore and the transfiguration of pain comes to us through the words of the novelist Ibrahim Al-koni. Al-koni is a prolific writer, having penned over eighty novels, with his most famous being The Bleeding of the Stone (translated by May Jayyusi) and Desert Gold (translated by Elliot Kolla), from which this preceding passage of Ukhayyad and the mahri comes. Al-koni hails from Libya, though he does not identify as a Libyan author; while he comes from the land that is now nationally defined as Libya, he is unwilling to commit to nationalist or modern labels. Having grown up in the traditions of the Tuareg, an Amazigh group that inhabits the borders in and out of the Sahara and whose cultural and geographic traditions were heavily disrupted by the imposition of colonial and national borders, this nomadic upbringing seeps throughout his words. His writing is divorced from a need to construct urban environments or a sense of linear time and space; instead, it is imbued with a Sahrawi melancholy, which conjures up vast plateaus that are full of events as enthralling as those unfolding in cities.

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Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

May 12, 2017  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Jessie Stoolman, Omar El Adl, and Reverie Powell

Presenting literary news from Egypt, USA, Morocco, and Qatar!

We are back with your weekly dose of literary news from around the world. Our very own Jessie Stoolman takes you on a journey through the cultural landscape of Morocco and Qatar. Following, our editor-at-large on the ground Omar El Adl writes about the latest goings-on in Egypt, and last but not least, Reverie Powell brings you the latest from the buzzing literary scene in Texas.

Jessie Stoolman, Editor-at-Large from Morocco, reports from Morocco and Qatar:

The 21st Annual Salon International de Tanger des Livres et des Arts just wrapped up on May 7 after four days of roundtables, workshops, concerts (including the iconic Moroccan rock band, Hoba Hoba Spirit), and appearances from world-renowned authors like Mohamed Kacimi (featured in our latest issue), Sapho, and Tahar Ben Jelloun (Prix Goncourt winner).  In conjunction with the book fair, Darna Theater’s Dakirat al Mostakbal – Memoires d’Avenir presented “Nous Sommes”, a piece outlining the lives of two young Moroccans that asks “[s]ommes-nous condamnés à n’être que ce que l’on nous sommes d’être?” Darna Theater is a local non-profit situated outside Tangier’s old city that provides community members opportunities in drama education. “Nous Sommes” was presented in both French and Darija (Moroccan Arabic.)

Don’t fret if you weren’t able to attend the book fair because there is still a chance to see Abdellah Taïa at the Librairie des Colonnes in Tangier on May 9, where he will present a brand-new translation of his novel, Un pays pour mourir, into Arabic (بلد للموت).  At the book fair, Taïa gave a conference about his writing and the difficulties facing society today which was structured as a conversation between him and young Tangerines. Taïa’s letter “Homosexuality Explained to My Mother” and an interview with the author appeared in Asymptote’s July 2012 issue.

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