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  • A revolution awaiting its name

    A revolution awaiting its name

    Seven years on from the Arab Spring, Egyptian writer Basma Abdel Aziz wonders what has happened.

    People used to call it the ‘Arab Spring’: the Egyptian revolutionary movement, which started in January 2011, following the Tunisian one, spread to other nearby countries, and constituted a huge unexpected mass uprising.

    Seven years on from this movement, the flowers have gradually faded, the sunrise we once thought permanent has been replaced with a sunset, and hundreds of thousands of smiles have disappeared into the cloudy atmosphere.

    The situation has changed dramatically. Egypt is unfortunately suffering signs of an aborted revolution, or at least a frozen one. Instead of making wide leaps – or even small steps –  towards a better future, one jump back follows another. Having the military in power again is not exactly a good sign for a new democracy. Extremely repressive measures are being taken; new restrictive laws and decrees are introduced in order to restrict the public domain. In comparison, the former president Mubarak’s era now looks far more flexible and relaxed.

    Intellectuals, writers, actors, singers, poets and novelists are crudely punished for their opinions, frequently put in prisons, and asked to declare their admiration for the authorities publicly. The political system refuses to hear any dissenting voices, whatever they would say. Criticism is not allowed anymore, dissidents are stigmatised whenever they speak up. They are called traitors.

    A few weeks ago, a famous singer, Sherine Abdel Wahab, was sentenced to six months in prison, having been convicted of insulting the river Nile. Sarcasm is not enough to describe the situation. She was talking to one of her fans in a public venue and mentioned that they might get parasites from drinking Nile water. A silly joke, perhaps – but not a crime that deserves arrest.

    Recently, the number of prisons has shown a notable increase. Over the last three years president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has ordered sixteen new prisons to be built, so as to compensate for the rising number of detainees. It seems important to mention that people can be arrested, kept ‘under investigation’, in custody, for weeks, months and years, without trial. The law is not in their favour. It allows endless detention, based on legislations produced during the era of Adly Mansour, the former head of the supreme court, who took office temporarily (mid-2013 to mid-2014) after ousting the first and only civilian president to run Egypt, Mohamed Morsy.

    Speaking to older Egyptians, who used to be politically active in their youth, one can but listen to them, sadly, when they describe the current situation as being incomparable to any other era they have lived through. Many of them say that the current state aggression and violence exceeds even what they witnessed during the totalitarian regime of the fifties, when Gamal Abdel Nasser was in power. Actually, as Nasser had a large popular base, a strong social bond with the poor and the middle class, well designed public goals and a desire to achieve real progress on social and economic aspects, his dictatorship never looked as dark. National projects were designed for the sake of the majority of people, and not accompanied by dodgy luxury business deals.

    According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Egypt had the third highest number of arms import in between 2013-2017[1]. This continued weaponisation is particularly questionable at  a time when poverty is widespread, and severely affecting people’s lives. Even though the government talks about economic recovery daily, there is hardly any evidence for it. Over the past four years, inflation rates have risen significantly, following a devaluation of the currency. There is a 75% rise in external debt, 74% in internal one. There was no significant change in the skeleton of production, no improvements in the medical or educational systems, no job creation[2]. This helps explain why the country is ran with an iron fist. It is the only way to control the oppressed citizens: using violence instead of providing for their basic needs.

    The 2018 presidential elections showed the usual decorative trends: a lot of banners, songs, interviews and talk shows, all calling for the current president to be elected for another four years. Scenes of people dancing in front of the polling stations, DJs carried on cars in the streets, flags of Egypt and photos of Al-Sisi emerging from the windows; all signs of happiness are there, if one decided to stay home and watch it all unfold on TV. But going out into streets, it is quite a different picture.

    In an absurd twist, the only other candidate standing for elections, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, expressed his unconditional support to Al-Sisi, and declared he had voted for him. This was not the only stunning statement he made. On multiple occasions, the only counter-candidate stated that he considered Al-Sisi the best guy for the presidential position. The question to be asked now is: was the ruling system in need of all the propaganda it made? I guess the answer is ‘yes’. A dictatorship such as this one grows up with propaganda, nourishes itself on shaping people’s consciousness, and fades when they stop believing it.

    And also: it lives on because of those who prefer to stay in safe and secured spaces, no matter the price, those who suffer from nostalgia for the patriarchal figure, ever ready to protect them –  they all agreed on changing the previously chosen name, and now it is not a ‘spring’ anymore, but an autumn or winter. For those who associate themselves with the totalitarian authority, no matter the crimes it commits, the Arab Spring is a fake, a conspiracy, a big disaster from which God saved the country. The Arab Spring has been turned into an insult, which is how it will remain, as long as the current situation remains unchanged.

    Maybe the Egyptian spring has left the squares early, but I still remind myself of a simple fact: spring comes every year; it never stops coming.

    I keep telling those who became desperate that even if the mouths which chanted once for liberty are being quieted for now, even if the political authority has regained its holy mission of reproducing the ’state of fear’, we shall continue the struggle against dictatorship. We shall keep fighting for freedom, justice and dignity, as long as the echo of freedom resonates inside our hearts.

     

    Basma Abdel Aziz is a psychiatrist, writer, and sculptor. A long-standing vocal critic of government oppression in Egypt, she is the author of several works of nonfiction. In 2016 she was named one of Foreign Policy‘s Global Thinkers for her debut novel, The Queue, translated by Elizabeth Jacquette, which was also named to the longlist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. She lives in Cairo.

     

    [1] https://www.sipri.org/news/press-release/2018/asia-and-middle-east-lead-rising-trend-arms-imports-us-exports-grow-significantly-says-sipri

    [2] https://www-madamasr-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.madamasr.com/ar/2018/03/25/feature/اقتصاد/كشف-حساب-السيسي-ملخص-للأداء-الاقتصادي/amp/

  • January 25th: from a revolution, to a conspiracy, to a forbidden call

    Translated from Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette.

    On the fifth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, many of those who were at its vanguard are absent from the political arena. They are absent from their homes, workplaces, and universities, and even from their schools – because the walls of prison hold young students as well. We know that the revolution will only have succeeded when those who began it arrive in the halls of governance and take over the country’s affairs; we also know that when revolutionary movements fail, all too often their heroes are cast into the darkness of prison, or even lose their lives.

    The current situation in Egypt is cause for great concern. Those responsible for the revolution face every manner of persecution, while the military establishment maintains a tight grip on power, as it has for over five decades, since 1952. In 2011 the revolution arose in protest against the police system’s constant violations, but today police brutality is on the rise, as are cases of forced disappearance and torture. Against this backdrop, the state is preparing to celebrate the anniversary of the revolution.

    The media loyal to the regime attempts to promote the idea of an archenemy, embodied, of course, by the Muslim Brotherhood. Hardly a day goes by without a news piece being published about its members being arrested and charged with ‘plotting’ or ‘inciting’ a protest. Yet, in reality, most members of the Muslim Brotherhood sit in prisons and detention centers. There are no longer enough cells to hold the detainees crowded in there without trial; work is in full swing on the construction of new prisons, in readiness for even more citizens.

    The media has completely ignored that there are citizens in the ranks of the opposition who do not belong to religious groups. Day after day, it stresses that whoever disagrees with the current system of rule is necessarily an enemy, who must be dispensed with. It insists that anyone who calls for protest – whether a vigil, demonstration, sit-in, or even silently raising a banner – is a threat which must be eliminated.

    Looking back at the revolutionary movement which began on 25 January 2011, we see that it has stumbled on its path. This can be encapsulated in three terms, which have been used successively to describe the movement over the past five years.

    The first is revolution, a word present from the start. Some people have held on to this term, mostly young men and women still committed to achieving the slogans they once chanted: bread, freedom, social justice. Slogans which at this point – deeply regrettably – are no more than unrealized hopes.

    The second term is conspiracy, one which appeared shortly after revolutionary mobilization began and then gradually spread, gaining a strong foothold over the past two years. It was adopted by a section of the public plagued with frustration and fears about transfer of power during a difficult year in which the Muslim Brotherhood ruled the country. People who supported the continuation of military rule insisted on this term; these included – quite unfortunately – certain leftists and intellectuals, as well as those who had belonged to former president Hosni Mubarak’s regime. They wanted to reproduce the past by all means possible, and tirelessly defended it, forgetting – or ignoring – how staggeringly corrupt, ineffectual and authoritarian it had been.

    The third term is forbidden call, one which emerged no more than a few weeks ago. It was first used by certain religious figures working with the state – not about the January 25th
    revolution itself, but to describe calls to go out and protest on the anniversary of the revolution. The term appeared in fatwas issued by the Sheikh of al-Azhar and the Ministry of Religious Endowments, both official institutions, and was circulated widely in newspapers. Not only did al-Azhar officials forbid protests, they also gave the revolution a legal dimension; some stated that joining demonstrations in January of this year, 2016, would definitively be ‘a crime’.

    We know, of course, that history is defined by the victors, and that the defeated are subjected to those definitions. Yet these three terms, revolution, conspiracy and forbidden call, are all in use simultaneously, without any one of them displacing or dispelling the others. This indicates that none of the camps behind these three narratives has achieved a complete victory, and that the fate of Egypt’s revolutionary mobilization has still not been decided. Some people following events in Egypt may view the country’s return to military rule as evidence that hopes of democracy and civil society have been thoroughly defeated, but I believe we should not surrender to this view so easily. Many Egyptians who supported Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the Minister of Defense, when he ran for and became president after the Muslim Brotherhood’s rule ended now think differently. They have reconsidered their views given deteriorating economic conditions and the security services’ widespread abuses, which are now at a level far surpassing the worst periods of political tyranny in the middle of the last century. Former Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi lost popularity rapidly in 2013, before he had completed a full year in office. Now, nearly a year and a half since taking power, current president el-Sisi is suffering a similar significant decline in popularity – despite the fact that he enjoys the full assistance and support of all state institutions, which had all allied themselves against Morsi.

    Which of these three narratives will prevail in the end? I believe the battle is still long. The revolutionary movement which began on 25 January 2011 has endured the regime’s multiple attempts to quash it, and is now subjected to fierce and organized campaigns against it, in rhetoric and in action. But resistance exists, and continues. The younger generations refuse to submit and surrender: there are detainees under the age of eighteen facing political charges in Egypt’s prisons and detention centers, and this is the greatest proof that the movement is growing.

    English PEN is asking our supporters to take a moment to send Alaa Abd el-Fattah and other imprisoned Egyptian activists messages of support. Find out more about the Season’s Greetings initiative here. Thank you.

    English PEN is increasingly concerned by reports that Egyptian poet Omar Hazek has been prevented from leaving the country. Read a statement from PEN International.

    Find out more about The Book of Gaza and other great books in translation on the World Bookshelf.

    Life From Elsewhere: Journeys through World Literature, a collaboration between English PEN and Pushkin Press celebrating 10 years of the Writers in Translation programme, is available now.

  • Turning up the volume

    Yasmine El Rashidi, contributor to the PEN-award-winning title Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus, tells PEN Atlas about growing up learning English: exile and community, being alienated and finding her voice

    I am asked, frequently, what it means to be a woman in the Arab world; what it means to be a woman writing, expressing herself, making statements – often contrarian – in a context so dominantly male. I often choose not to respond, not to write those pieces people ask of me, not to feed an assumption of difficulty and struggle associated with gender. But occasionally, I succumb – offering editors and audiences a response to what, from their view, must be the most pressing question, the greatest struggle, for me as a female writer in Egypt.

    It’s not easy being a woman in the Middle East, and much less so today, in Egypt, with all the tumult and rising conservatism that has come to pass in the months – or years now – after the uprising. It’s not easy, but one finds ways to deal with the challenge, of the invasion of privacy, of space; of the objectification and the patriarchy that interferes and takes liberties on both the superficial and intimate levels of one’s life. There are challenges, but we find ways of tending to them and after a lifetime of it, waste little energy lamenting; we either carry on with our lives and put on blinders and trudge along, or, we take up the rights of women as a cause and calling. I know many women who take up this fight each day.

    The greatest challenge, and struggle, for me is a different one – it is the one of language, of voice. I made the decision years ago, as a teenager, to be a writer, and my parents had made the decision even years before that their children would go to an English school. It meant, without any choosing of my own but merely fluke – default – that I found my writing voice in a language not native to my country, and I struggle, often, almost daily, with this – with the sensation, or sense, of being muted.

    “It is the cause of significant disquiet.”

    “Feeling I’m on mute.”

    (excerpt from panel discussion – Berlin Festival of Literature, 2012)

    In ways, I am not the only one – I watch my generation of young Egyptians grapple with trying to find their form, their language. The product of a flawed and less than adequate school system that gave you either a foreign language, or a sub-par schooling in your own native language along with one or two others of your choice, we seem to be a generation whose volume is turned down, to varying degrees; a generation without a real mastery of any single language. Or that is, many of us at least – our Arabic is okay, our English is okay, our French comes in bits and pieces.

    To write in English, in particular at this moment of change and possibility, is to sever myself from community – from the people who matter, who affect change, who are building – or rebuilding – the country. To write in English, is to be exiled in the place in which you are from. To write in English is to write for the world, and to be subjected to the standards and expectations of editors, and readers, who demand something particular from writers of, and in, that language. To have written that same text in Arabic and have had it translated into English, would be to have it received with an alternative eye, with more space for “difference” – difference of style, difference of syntax. The “difference” of being “foreign”, a non-native speaker of the English language, a writer of a language perhaps more florid, more hazy, more idiosyncratic by its very nature of difference, of the so-called “other”.

    My struggle, then, is as a writer, to be aware that my audience is dominantly a global one, aware that my work has less of an impact in affecting change in my home country as it does in perhaps altering perspectives and shedding light and nuance on Egypt for readers around the world. This particular point – this reality – I agonize over. I wish, at this moment, that I were writing for my own community – locally – rather than for the world.

    My struggle, is also about freeing myself, creating time and space to write about things beyond the borders of my own country; liberating myself from the consciousness of “audience” and “expectation” and “validation” and “publication”. My struggle as an Egyptian female writer is, then, ultimately not about gender or nationality or place, but of motive – of intent – regardless of outcome.

     

    About the Author

    PhotoyasmineYasmine El Rashidi is a Cairo-based writer. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and a contributing editor to the Middle East arts and culture quarterly Bidoun. Her writing has also appeared and is forthcoming in publications including Frieze, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, Le Monde Diplomatique, and The Happy Hypocrite, to which she contributed a work of fiction in an edition guest-edited by Lynne Tillman. A collection of her writings on the Egyptian revolution, The Battle for Egypt, was published in 2011, and her essays feature in the anthologies Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus and The New York Review Abroad: Fifty Years of International Reportage. She is currently a fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, working on a nonfiction book about Egypt, as well as a novel set in Los Angeles.

    Additional Information

    Writing Revolution is a winner of an English PEN Award 2013

    You can catch writers, editors and contributors to Writing Revolution: The Voices from Tunis to Damascus at the following events.

    Monday 27th May: Guardian Hay Festival, 2.30pm
    Tuesday 28th May: Frontline Club, 7.00pm
    Wednesday 29th May: Mosaic Rooms, 7.00pm
    Thursday 30th May: Oxford Student PEN, 5-7.00pm
    Fri 28th June: The Rich Mix, Shubbak Festival, 7.00pm

     

     

  • Translation, Revolution, and Pedagogy

    Following her appearance at the Literary Translation Centre for London Book Fair 2013, Samia Mehrez writes about working collaboratively on the book Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, which uses multiple perspectives to translate the linguistic and cultural meanings of the recent momentous events in her country

    One of the most remarkable accomplishments of the revolutionary spirit in Egypt has manifested itself in an unprecedented production and proliferation of cultural materials, whether written, oral, visual, or performative, all of which have decidedly remapped and redefined the contours and meanings of both public culture and public space. Since January 2011 there has been a radical transformation of the relationship between people, their bodies, their language, and space; a transformation that has enabled sustained mass convergence, conversation, and agency for new publics whose access to and participation in public space has for decades been controlled by an oppressive, authoritarian regime. This newfound power of ownership of one’s space, one’s body, and one’s language is, in and of itself, a revolution. Indeed, the ongoing culture of revolt and its new forms and media of expression continue to inspire a plethora of publications, both locally and globally.

    Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir (AUC Press, 2012) is one such example, representing the collective work of graduate students in a seminar that I taught at the American University in Cairo in Spring 2011, immediately following the fall of Mubarak. The seminar was part of an important university-wide initiative that attempted to respond to an urgent pedagogical need to sustain the students’ engagement in and with the revolutionary moment. The largely improvised seminar attracted Egyptian and non-Egyptian students whose linguistic abilities and cultural competencies and experiences complemented each other in ways that were important and helped them maintain an informed comparative perspective on their task as translators. The participants, here future authors of the collective book, came to the task of translation with their own histories, understanding, and perspectives on translation all of which intersected throughout: there was the poet, the musician, the technical translator, the journalist, the photographer, the security translator, the activist, the creative writer, and the teacher. They had all experienced and lived through the revolution in Egypt and were all motivated by their  desire to engage the layers of revolutionary narratives and to translate these fields of meaning to each other and for each other in an attempt to understand, situate, and contextualize the historic events that enveloped them.

    Given the revolutionary context of the seminar itself, its content and pedagogical format, as well as the projects undertaken by the participants, were decided upon jointly at the beginning of the semester. The participants read, and collectively translated material ranging from chants, banners, slogans, jokes, poems, and street art to media coverage, interviews, blogs, as well as presidential speeches and military communiqués. They predominantly worked in groups and as partners, not as individuals. This is to say that their translations, even in the chapters undertaken by a single author, are the outcome of this collective and perpetual conversation and understanding. The class blog that they had created at http://translatingrev.wordpress.com chronicles the processes of translation in which they were collectively engaged, the myriad of problems, issues and challenges they encountered, how they resolved them, and why they chose such solutions.   Some of their comments addressed the division of labor among participants in each group and how, in working together, they had developed an awareness of the translator’s subjectivity, an appreciation of their difference and diversity that lay at the forefront of decision-making, and the interactive process of translation that remained incomplete without a profound appreciation and navigation of audience. They did all this with the full conviction that they had collective ownership of the translated text and that their collaborative endeavor was not at all final, but, like the revolution itself, was open to more conversation and more reflection. More importantly, they came to confront their task of translation as one that implicated them in an ethics of selection: what gets left out, what is brought in, and why; how does one justify such choices, and how their “visibility” as translators implicated them in the politics of translation. 

    Given the scope of the material and its different linguistic registers, and referential worlds, these documents and manifestations presented a great challenge to any translator not just at the immediate linguistic level but more importantly – and herein lay the real challenge – at the discursive, semiotic and symbolic meanings of revolution at both the local and global levels and contexts. As the participants continued to work as groups they came to realize that behind each text they were translating lay a myriad of other texts that had to be translated before that singular text in the source language could be carried across to the target language. Here, the task of the translator(s) is to “carry across” the different narratives and layers of the revolution as part of a complex set of dialectical relationships with other texts (political, economic, social, and religious) that exist outside its immediate “readable” boundaries. This is what I call thick translation. All the chapters in Translating Egypt’s Revolution engage thick translation in ways that have not only compelled the contributors to re-think the limits of their own disciplines but have equally empowered them in their role as translators re-writing across boundaries and beyond borders, whether these be linguistic, cultural, or disciplinary. Furthermore, the very choices of topics and texts they have translated bear testimony to the politics of selection that implicate them (as individuals and as a group) in a very particular “version” of the revolutionary text in translation, one of many more that have yet to be translated.

    Contributors to the volume: Amira Taha, Chris Combs, Heba Salem, Kantaro Taira, Laura Gribbon, Lewis Sanders, Mark Visona, Menna Khalil, Sahar Kreitim, Sarah Hawas, Samia Mehrez.

    About the Author

    Samia Mehrez isProfessor of Arabic Literature and Director of the Center for Translation Studies at the American University in Cairo.She has published widely in the fields of modern Arabic literature, postcolonial studies, translation studies, gender studies and cultural studies. She is the author of Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim and Gamal al-Ghitani, AUC Press, 1994 and 2005 and Egypt’s Culture Wars: Politics and Practice, Routledge 2008, AUC Press 2010. Her edited anthologies A Literary Atlas of Cairo: One hundred Years in the Life of the City and The Literary Life of Cairo: One Hundred Years in the Heart of the City in which she translated the works of numerous Egyptian writers are published by AUC Press 2010, 2011 and in Arabic by Dar Al-Shorouk, Cairo. She is the editor of Translating Egypt’s Revolution: The Language of Tahrir, AUC Press, 2012. She is currently working on a translation from Arabic into English of Mona Prince’s memoir, Ismi Thawra (Revolution is My Name), forthcoming in 2013, and a book-length manuscript tentatively titled The Making of Revolutionary Culture in Egypt.

     

     

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 3

    In her third PEN Atlas despatch, British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh reflects on Palfest, dealing with criticism, and what freedom feels like

    The Palestinian Festival of Literature must be the most controversial literary festival in the world. In 2011, the Festival was tear-gassed, venues were closed down, and settlers filmed participants in Hebron saying ‘We have a record of you, we have you on tape, we know who you are.’ That was the Israelis. This year, Egyptian authorities stalled on the permission-granting process for its nationals to travel to the Festival until media attention embarrassed them into granting permits on the eleventh hour.Then Palestinian security disrupted and closed down the poetry reading by a teenager at an event in Gaza City and gave us a message by filming us, that was not unlike the settlers’ message. There are few peoples who Governments are less keen to give a voice to and there are few people, confirmed on my recent visit, more urgent to have a voice, than the Palestinians.

    I recently came across the term PEP, an acronym used in the US for Progressive Except Palestine, to describe those individuals who advocate adherence to human rights principles and will espouse all sorts of liberal, possibly even radical views of world politics supporting freedom of expression, but who hit a blind spot when it comes to the Palestinians. This is all too often due to the lazy conflation of  ‘anti-Semitism’ with anti-Zionism and criticism of Israeli policies.

    My novel, Out of It, was mainly set in Gaza and written from afar. I did not know how it would feel to go back to a place that I had been living in as a fictional world for such a long time. I only knew it fleetingly from a couple of visits that I had made in the nineties when the place was going through a building boom of institutions and authorities. Our enthusiasm for the Oslo peace accords was muted. We felt a keen sense of humiliation in the compromises agreed to by the Palestinian leadership and the professional incompetence that they were prone to display. But no one anticipated the horrors that were to come in the form of F16s raids on schools, UN institutions and homes, together with the use of white phosphorous and the seeping, debasing nature of the blockade.

    I have been mildly chastised by pro-Palestinian reviewers for ‘unflinchingly’ portraying the divisions within Palestinian society in my novel. I became more defensive over this point, than over the criticisms of it being anti-Israeli which were knee jerk in their nature and predictable in their existence. Learning how serious the divisions between factions has become during my visit to Gaza this time, confirmed my view that I had done the right thing by addressing them in Out of It. I do not believe that a writer should avoid writing about the failures that they would rather not acknowledge. The writer of fiction is not the PR agent for any government, nor even for any group of people. They should be free, within the bounds of responsibility, to write what they observe, feel and consider important. It is my view that when writing about a societal conflict which a writer of fiction has the power to create, a writer presents new representations of old realities and explains worlds seen frequently in a sensationalist way by the media, but they should not be tied down to partisan positions, nor be expected to uphold them unquestioningly.

    Going back to literature for answers, there is a line by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani where he says that no matter what our failures are, these do not excuse the conduct of our oppressor. This needs to be recognized as well. The old adage that two wrongs do not make a right is too often forgotten.

    Our Festival ends in Cairo, addressing a packed audience in a downtown theatre, where the walls of surrounding buildings are stenciled and spray-painted with revolutionary graffiti.

    I fly back to London, calculating that I have been in seven countries in two months, desperate to be back home after two weeks away from my children. My ex-husband has been staying with them in my flat. I go out the night after coming home, driving in a car with a full tank of fuel. A CD given to me by a Californian friend, ‘Happy New Year Selma, Funk Soul Divas,’ scribbled on it is on. It is a summery evening and the city glitters, almost burns as the lights come on. I discuss topics with my friends from the personal to the political in an unlimited, indiscreet way. The question, What does it feel like to be free? What does freedom feel like? whispers in my ear and I vow to find ways, to build on ways of sharing my relative wealth of freedom with those that I left behind, and I am grateful to PalFest for providing me with some means of being able to do so.

    About the Author

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

    In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

    Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

    Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

    Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

    Additional Information

    Ghassan Kanafani, (1936-1972) the famous Palestinian journalist, novelist, and short story writer, whose writings were deeply rooted in Arab Palestinian culture and inspired a whole generation during and after his lifetime.

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 2

    In this second PEN Atlas despatch from British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh, we are taken deeper into Gaza; into the streets, into darkness. 

    The combined effect of the bombing of the Gaza power plant in June 2006 by Israel and the land, air and sea blockade imposed on Gaza means that there is not enough electricity or fuel in Gaza. Eight hours of electricity a day from the grid is the norm. Those who can afford to do so, back up their supply with generators, which in turn need fuel to run, and almost all the petrol stations we see are roped off waiting for fuel. It only takes one person to generate a rumour that they might have a delivery on the way, for the petrol stations to become blocked up with queues of cars, tractors, motorbikes and pedestrians that stretch for miles and can last all day. ‘From the time I came to the Festival, until I left at night, they were there waiting; a long, long line,’ said one student volunteer from Deir El Balah refugee camp. ‘I could not even see my town as I approached it since everything was so dark. Only when the car’s headlights shone on it, did I realize we were at my house.’

    Light now also comes in the form of enemy surveillance. Ominous floodlights, spaced apart in the sea, shine inland enforcing the unilaterally imposed Israeli three-mile limit for fishermen at sea. At night, in Gaza city, men smoke shishas in cafes lit by candles stuck on tiled surfaces; small stacks of coals glow upon inhalation.

    Generators on pavements spread fumes into areas where people used to stroll in the evenings. Occasionally, these generators blow up. Badly made, ineptly used, in a country of chain smokers, they are hazardous. Because of the dangers, the mother of one Al Aqsa student refuses to have one in their apartment, ‘When the electricity is on, I use the internet, but I read books by candlelight,’ she says. Donkeys, camels, bicycles and horses are on the rise. Gaza, as the character Khalil says in Out of It, is being bombed back into the Middle Ages.

    On the first night in my hotel room, where a ghoul, in the guise of urine-saturated bedding, crouches shapeless in the cupboard (I lock him in), the power cuts out. Complete blackness: I can’t even see the edge of the bath. I think I hear the roar of a fighter plane above me.  Possibly it is a jet breaking the sound barrier, but that type of blackout distorts noise. My imagination, ever prone to swell uncontrollably with visions of possibilities, imagines a bombing. I remember the line from the Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, ‘We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal-dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes,’ and I, quite simply, don’t want to be there. I have the vulgar luxury of options and I feel self-conscious of this wealth in Gaza. It is rare to find someone there who has anything close to alternatives.

    ‘We are in a big prison. You know, sijun, prison. We. Are. In. A. Big. Prison.’ Everyone says this: students, boys at the Rafah crossing trying to get to Turkey for a couple of days, a short-story writer with a teething baby. ‘You don’t know how unusual that music concert at the Shawwa Centre was,’ they say, ‘Boys sitting next to girls on the floor, standing, dancing. That never happens. What does it feel like to be free?’ ask the students. ‘What’s it like?’

    One of the most talented (and modest) writers on the PalFest delegation, Tarik Hamdan, (‘He looks like the young Jean Genet,’ the novelist Youssef Rakha observes to me) reads poetry to a University class by the light of his mobile phone. At night, the city without electricity is a ghost town. During the day, its underutilized spaces – hotel lobbies, restaurants, cafes, shops – are populated by solitary men who appear to have been abandoned. There is a sense of unanticipated loss in these attendant figures, as though they have all been jilted and still reel internally with their heartache.

    People have taken to cheering as the lights go out, as if it’s a big joke, ‘Ha ha! It’s done it again!’      This happens on Thursday night when we pile upstairs into the fifth floor of our hotel after plain-clothes security from Hamas close down our closing ceremony. This is denied by Hamas Government officials later and multiple apologies are given both that night and the next morning. ‘Bullshit’, says a Palestinian writer, ‘That’s bullshit’. Whoever was behind the decision, someone obviously wanted a shot fired across our bow.

    We continue the curtailed event on the top floor of the hotel. ‘Let’s be constructive,’ says one young woman from Diwan Ghazza who obviously finds life too short to watch dust settle. ‘How do you recommend we set up this competition for bloggers?’ She asks this as we all still trying to find out what happened to the tiny girl whose phone was snatched, abruptly, vindictively, from her by ‘security’ as she sat in the audience while another girl read a poem of thanks to us from the stage. We had been gathered below ground level in the partially restored El Basha house, an attractive, rectangular pit of sandstone with arches and stairs that led down to it on the right hand-side of the stage. At the top of the stairs, armed men gathered, suited or shirted, legs apart with their phones held at arm’s length, scanning and photographing the protesting crowd with their phones. ‘You do this for Palestine?’ shouts Hamdan in a voice somehow bigger than him and the cage of my chest feels cleaved apart. Don’t tell me we’ve come to this. Is this what happens when authorities are empowered to crack down and disempowered from providing?

    From the moment of the rabid, random phone grab and the armed men shouting how it is forbidden to film security, the questions begin: ‘Where has she gone? Did they take her? Did she get her phone back? Why her? Was she filming the stage? Why did they say she was filming security? See how they spread fear? You see? It’s good that you saw this. This is what we live with every day. It is good you are here. If you weren’t, they would beat us all and destroy the building. I am sorry you saw this, we are not like this. The girl, a porcelain miniature figurine in skinny jeans and a pink headscarf, is finally tracked down, distraught, at home and persuaded to come back to the hotel for the poetry readings of Haddad and Hamdan, and the oud playing of Eskanderella. ‘It’s like a dream having you here,’ says a short-story writer, whose five-year old draws a picture for my five-year old in London, ‘and you’ll leave and we’ll be left to a nightmare, a horrible nightmare’.

    ‘We used to have one authority when the Israelis were here, one authority and one enemy, now with Fatah and Hamas, we have three authorities and this makes our lives hell.’

    And in the darkness, light.

    ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore about these tunnels,’ says one of the many students who has been in the tunnel industry, working the pulleys at the top of the well like openings for $50 per day ($100 if you go down, but you could get gassed or otherwise killed down there, as a friend of his was), ‘or about drugs’. (I am trying to find out more about the craze for a highly addictive upper, Trimadol, that has taken off since the relative ‘opening’ of the border with Egypt.) ‘I want to talk to you about literature,’ he says, ‘She walks in beauty like the night. Who wrote this?’ ‘Byron,’ someone says. ‘Ah yes, Lord Byron. I love this,’ he says with the most amazing smile, as though he wrote the lines himself.

    About the Author

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

    In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

    Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

    Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

    Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

    Additional Information

    Tarik Hamdan is a Palestinian poet and musician, born in 1982.  His first poetry book Once When I was a Sperm was published in 2010. His poems have been translated into English, Spanish and Korean. He is the Editor in Chief of Filstin Ashabab – a monthly arts and literature magazine for young artists and writers. He is active in diverse media and art projects in Palestine, and the Arab world.

    Amin Haddad is an Egyptian poet. He has published several collections of poetry. He is the founder of El-Share3 (the street) – a group of poets and musicians – which he both manages and participates in.

    Youssef Rakha was born in Cairo in 1976.  Reporter, copy editor and cultural editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo-based English-language newspaper.  He has published seven books in Arabic and the eighth, his second novel, is forthcoming with Dar al Saqi in October, 2012

    You can read more about this year’s PalFest here. 

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 1

    This week the PEN Atlas hears from British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh. In the first despatch, Selma describes her journey into Palestine; the sights, sounds and people she encounters en route. 

    Up to two days before we leave we are not sure if we will get in, as permission has not been granted by the Egyptian authorities for their nationals to travel. There is mention, without any detail (steps and mud? possible collapse or attack?) of tunnels. A media campaign is launched, postponed by a day because of violence outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo. But then, “Yay!”, communicates the jubilance Tweeted and Facebooked from Cairo and Gaza, we get the okay and we are off. Slowly off: seven hours to the border and four sitting at it (electrocutory sounding buzzers going off with semi-official shouters calling out names, a man in a white uniform yelling from a desk stranded at the side).

    An oud player from Cairo from the revolutionary band Eskandarella starts strumming softly from one of the moulded plastic seats, next to the wheelchair bound women and the waiting, smoking, pacing crowd that we have become; and the holding station of the Rafah border crossing is momentarily transformed. It is as if a network of vivid magical circuitry runs now throughout that large, unloved space: a communication of something deep and connective that we feel for a transient moment, until it stops. The oud player must put the instrument away. He is not to get through the border. He and one other Egyptian, a blogger, are to be returned to Arish because they do not have the papers to show that they are exempt from conscription. Fruitless negotiations: logic on our side, rules on theirs.

    We move on without those who are to follow the next day.

    The swinging coach lurches and it’s a ‘Welcome to Palestine’ sign and we all cheer even though we are not so dim that we don’t know there is a sad, ironic disappointment in this proclamation. But it is a sign that was fought for, a forbidden word that is now writ high. I, for one, was once harassed and sent back to Cairo after seven hours with Israeli security because they found a Palestinian flag the size of a Smartie in my bag, back in the days when that alone was a statutory offence.

    Officials await us at the border, fruit juice with bits in it, references to the struggles of Mandela, celebration of the fact that this is the first delegation of that size from the new Egypt, national PR and emotion. Hard seats and handshakes.

    And then, Gaza.

    By now it is dark: dark in a deep, soft way that makes the sky and the moon, full within it, appear like a felt collage. We pass an abandoned missile-struck building, grinning toothlessly out to sea, and then, it is a meditative journey up the coast, where much of the land is agricultural, or fallow, with breeze from the sea catching in rushes and billowing in the walls of greenhouses shaped like modernist oriental tents, made of a translucent fabric glowing from within. I feel as though we have snuck into a secret garden, a forbidden city.

    We must be driving through the least densely populated part of the most densely populated strip of land in the world, as it takes some time before we see signs of habitation, but they come with rows of shops: solitary boys manning large desks in furniture showrooms, motorbikes parked up against walls, tractors in fields, umbrellas on fruit stands and paintings of Mickey Mouse on nursery walls. ‘It’s like Egypt,’ says one of the Egyptian writers, which is as it should be, since the countries neighbour each other, the shops, cafes, children are the same. Marriages with bands beeping through the streets take place, women lift their skirts to paddle in the sea and men sit under trees seduced by the moon.

    The global porthole for viewing Gaza is the news media and it shows us a place that exists only in times of crisis: at the moment of a missile strike, at times of political unrest and violence, depicting inhabitants as victims of attacks, as though this is a population brought up to suffer, rather than people who are desperate to just get on and do stuff  like everyone else.

    And this, to my mind, is where the fiction writer comes in: to introduce lives, relationships, aspirations beyond and against political events, or even in the complete absence of political events, to introduce a different truth, to say, there were people here first, before the violence of the missile, of the gun battle, before men were taken away to prisons and never seen again. Feel who we were loving, what we were hoping for, look at what we were doing and building before all this came, while this came, despite the fact that these horrors came, intruded and tried to muck it all up.

     

    About the Author

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

    In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

    Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

    Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

    Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.