Egypt Independent: Book

Kuwait author wins Arabic book prize for tale of foreign workers

Reuters — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:37:00 +0000

LONDON — Kuwaiti author Saud Alsanousi has won the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his portrayal of the lives of foreign workers in Gulf countries in "The Bamboo Stalk."

The 31-year-old Alsanousi became the youngest winner in the 32,770 pound-prize's six-year history for the story seen through the eyes of Issa, the son of a Kuwaiti father and a Filipina mother.

"All the judges agreed on the superior quality of this novel, both artistically and also in terms of its social and humanitarian content," the panel's chair Egyptian writer Galal Amin said in a statement on Tuesday.

On returning to his father's homeland as an adult, Issa finds himself in a difficult position.

Rather than the mythical country his mother has described to him, he discovers he is caught between the natural, biological ties he shares with his father's family and the prejudices of a traditional society, which views a child of Kuwaiti-Filipina heritage as socially unacceptable.

Alsanousi's work has appeared in a number of Kuwaiti publications, including Al-Watan newspaper and Al-Arabi, Al-Kuwait and Al-Abwab magazines and he currently writes for Al-Qabas newspaper.

His first novel "The Prisoner of Mirrors" was published in 2010 and in the same year won the fourth Laila al-Othman Prize, awarded for novels and short stories by young writers.

Alsanousi beat five other finalists for the prize. Each finalist, including the winner, will receive 6,555 pounds.

The other finalists were Iraqi Sinan Antoon for "Hail Mary", Tunisian Houcine El Oued for "His Excellency the Minister", Lebanese author Jana Elhassan for "Me, She and the Other Women", Saudi Mohammed Hasan Alwan for "The Beaver" and Egyptian Ibrahim Issa for "Our Master."

The prize is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by the Abu Dhabi Tourism & Culture Authority, which marks its first year as the new sponsor in 2013.

‘Dogs Don’t Eat Chocolate’ offers little beyond catchy name

Amany Aly Shawky — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:15:00 +0000

Only a few months after the launch of “The Time of Beautiful Melancholy,” author Omar Taher graced his avid readers with another collection of his articles from 2012.

The satirical writer and journalist celebrated the launch of his latest book, “Dogs Don’t Eat Chocolate,” at a cozy gathering at Shorouk Bookstore in Zamalek last month.

Taher explained that years back, he wrote an article in Ehna Magazine with the same title, and has since wanted to reuse it for one of his books. “Dogs Don’t Eat Chocolate” is another collection of articles about Berma, Taher’s imaginary friend and alter ego.

Those who regularly read Taher’s work would know that this is his second Berma book after his 2011 “Berma Meets Rayya and Sekina.” At the time, Berma was clearly a fictitious character or alter ego — a two-dimensional being that preaches and advises Taher on various topics.

Now, the young writer has upgraded the character, adding a third dimension to Berma that makes him almost human. He now eats, drinks, plays music and travels to Aswan.

As a reader, you start thinking that maybe Berma does exist after all.

In this book, Berma shows signs of maturity and wisdom; he is still impulsive and sarcastic, but Taher made sure to infuse some character development into his protagonist. This time around, Berma teaches his readers to appreciate the small things in life: the simsimiya musical instrument from Ismailia, an orange or a taamiya sandwich.

“Taamiya is magical. I don’t know where its name originates,” says Berma in the book. “But I believe it is derived from taam al-aama [food for the common people]. If both words are merged together, you will get taamiya.”

He continues to relish the moment.

“I am proud to be a commoner in this specific moment, standing in front of the humble fryer, holding a paper leaf awaiting these golden delights,” Berma says.

“Dogs Don’t Eat Chocolate” is like an informal gathering with a group of friends or a 15-minute cab ride with a talkative driver who opens a new window for you. The language is simple and raw; Berma’s words are familiar and close to readers’ ears, minds and hearts.

As Berma departs on his journey in the book’s closing chapter, he advises Taher that life’s hurdles are what make us who we are.

“My friend, life is extremely simple ... it feels hard because you refuse to believe in its simplicity,” says Berma.

But Berma and Taher are two faces of the same coin: one is impulsive, the other is rather reserved. Taher asks and Berma answers.

Like most of Taher’s writing, this book is an interesting read, but it drags a little, especially in articles that tackle politics and the consequences of the 25 January revolution. They offer nothing new, and Taher had more than covered these issues in his previous book, “The Qasr al-Aini Ambush.”

Although “Dogs Don’t Eat Chocolate” shows a high level of maturity in Taher’s writing, the collection of articles is unfortunately boring and redundant in a number of ways. The book has glimpses of humor and beauty, but the bigger picture is dull and blurry.

Still, Berma would make an excellent protagonist for a future novel.

Putting together pieces of Egypt’s militarized past

Mohamed Elmeshad — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 20:10:00 +0000

One might not agree with Hazem Kandil’s “Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt” that the competing roles of the military and security apparatus have been some of the main agents and causes for change in Egypt.

But as a lecturer on revolution, wars and militarism at Cambridge University, Kandil provides in his book a compelling case that in the upper echelons of corporeal, regime-forming power has been a tug of war between these “centers of power.”

The power of statesmen and civilians, on the other hand — though very real — tends to take form vis-a-vis one of its armed counterparts.

The focus of the book, as its subtitle suggests, is to explain the power changes from the 25 January revolution within this context. Kandil would agree with many that the regime has essentially not changed, and that there is a “deep state” behind the scenes manipulating events and politics.

However, the book’s main point of contention is that while people become mobilized, their power is still mostly secondary — that in the end, the revolution created a political vacuum that would only be filled by the easily co-opted.

“The only real game-changer is that [of] the empowerment of the people,” Kandil said.

The book focuses on the direction and potentials of the power struggles, how the many protracted power plays by the military and the police occurred in a race to see who would retain supremacy. Kandil describes a politically naive military that saw an opportunity to regain supremacy after being weakened during the Hosni Mubarak years in favor of a police apparatus that had become the main and only guarantor of power.

As for the police, Kandil portrays them as an entity separate from power that was momentarily defeated on 28 January 2011. It was, however, sufficiently empowered previously to be able to weather the storm and eventually re-emerge intact and again in a position of absolute power.

They are essentially two states within a state that have been in a constant strategic battle — the 25 January uprising being its latest chapter.

The rise of the Brotherhood and the role of the post-revolutionary parliamentary elections, according to Kandil, are more or less a subplot to the military-security rivalry. And his book gives a sense that it would ultimately be an insignificant one in the grand scheme of things.

Kandil uses the protests and manifestations since the 18 days in January to show how the civilian population was in constant limbo, not knowing who to trust. During the 18 days, the people’s fight was initially against the security apparatus and Mubarak regime. Chants of “the people and the military are one hand” gradually shifted, however, to “the police and the military are one hand,” and “down with military rule.”

Whether or not one agrees with his present outlook, what Kandil expertly does in the book is provide a profound historical account and analysis of the formation of these centers of power looking back from the time of former President Gamal Abdel Nasser until the present day. It is the only way one can truly understand the present position of military and security forces. And Kandil does a fantastic job in providing a well-researched and contextual text.

“I had offers from other publishers to do this book, but most of them were only interested in publishing the present day situation. I chose Verso because they were the only ones interested in the history that led to today,” Kandil said.

The book’s 20-page bibliography is evidence that as a historian, he left no rock unturned in an attempt to make sense of this relationship. The 1952 revolution was initially an attempt at mass military reformation by the Free Officers Movement. In time, the rifts within the Free Officers, especially between the charismatic President and the chronically militarily inept but politically savvy Chief of Staff Abdel Hakim Amer planted the seeds of discord between political power and the military.

The growing role of officers such as Zakariya Mohy Eddin and a coterie of officers-turned-security men during the same period in the late 1960s played to counter both civilian and military dissent, essentially forming the security apparatus that would grow in stature progressively until Mubarak’s term.

And just like the Nasser-Amer feud, former President Anwar Sadat and Mubarak had major run-ins and essential victories over two other wildly popular chiefs of staff who threatened the less-popular president’s grip on power. The former had to subdue 1973 war hero Saad Eddin al-Shazly, and appointed him ambassador to Britain. The latter accused Abdel Halim Abu Ghazala of smuggling weapon parts from the US, and also implicated him in a sex scandal in the early 1990’s.

Many saw Abu Ghazala as the only man popular enough to run against Mubarak in the 2005 presidential elections. He never did, and eventually laid low until his death in 2008.

Kandil lays down in detail how after the 1967 defeat dealt a major blow to the military’s morale, Nasser and then Sadat were able to wriggle power away from the generals. Even after the 1973 Suez war, which was viewed as a victory in Egypt, Sadat still sidelined many of his former colleagues in the military and established the tradition of offering exorbitant perks to security men who helped him maintain his power.

Essentially, Egypt under Sadat and moving onto Mubarak became neutralized to any external enemy or threat that would have empowered the military. It thus moved to combating “the enemy within,” turning the country into a security-state par excellence.

In the process, both personnel and funding of the Interior Ministry ballooned relative to the military. The police also began receiving an allotment of military conscripts.

Today, Egypt has the highest per-capita security personnel in the world. There are 25 security personnel to 1000 civilians; 2.5 percent of the society works in security. At its height, the KGB in Russia did not employ more than 150,000 servicemen. Egypt in 2012 had about 2 million.

“What Mubarak essentially did was hold steady and keep the regime structure he inherited on track,” the book says.

“Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen” is riddled with compelling narratives backed by numerous first-hand accounts and communiques. Facts are laid out in a very readable and comprehensive way, so that even if one does not agree with Kandil’s final assessment of the current situation, it is important and easy to come to our own conclusion thanks to his rigorous academic and historical research.

This is a worthwhile read for anyone wishing to enhance their knowledge of the historical progression of power in Egypt in the 20th century.

“Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt” was published by Verso in November 2012.

Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim has too many stories to tell

M. Lynx Qualey — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 12:29:00 +0000

In Hassan Blasim’s “The Song of the Goats,” hundreds of Iraqis “were waiting in queues to tell their stories. The police intervened to marshal the crowd, and the main street opposite the radio station was closed to traffic.”

“The Song of Goats” opens Blasim’s new collection, “The Iraqi Christ” (2013). It is not the only piece in which Iraqis are eager to tell their stories. It is a theme that is prevalent not just in Blasim’s work, but elsewhere in contemporary Iraqi fiction — each Iraqi now has something to tell, and many are bursting to get their stories out. “The Iraqi Christ” is Blasim’s second collection, following on the heels of his “Madman of Freedom Square” (2010). His first collection, which was also translated by Jonathan Wright, was longlisted for the UK’s International Foreign Fiction award.

Blasim, who left Iraq in 2004 for Finland, has been a vocal and visible proponent of finding new ways to tell Iraqi stories. He helped found the website iraqstory.com, which features dozens of Iraqi writers. He is also spearheading an “Iraq 2103” project along with the UK’s Comma Press. In the collection, Iraqi authors will share stories set 100 years after the start of the occupation. Blasim also works in film and theater, and has called for a “revolution against classical Arabic.”

Blasim’s stories are still written largely in classical Arabic, although he said in a UK appearance last December “that one day I want to write just in colloquial,” adding that, “When you write in fusha you are like something from history. How can you write like Ibn Arabi about car bombs?”

The most prevalent theme in Blasim’s new collection is not car bombs, but the nature of storytelling. In the opening work, “The Song of the Goats,” Iraqis gather outside a radio station, hoping to win a spot on a program called “Their Stories in Their Own Voices.” A number of stories will be chosen to run on the program, and the station’s listeners will choose the top three, with each winning a prize.

After the first batch of contestants is ushered into the building, the radio producers play a sample story for the waiting crowd. The story is told by a woman whose husband was tortured and decapitated and is certainly tragic. But no one in the studio is moved. Indeed, after the story concludes, “Everyone was talking at the same time, like a swarm of wasps.” A woman close to ninety mutters, “That’s a story!? If I told my story to a rock, it would break its heart.”

“The Song of the Goats” ends abruptly. We never hear the stories of the narrator, nor the others who have lined up to tell theirs — only the two official stories chosen by the radio station. We do not know if the others got to tell their stories, or who “wins.” Blasim’s short stories are often like this: They drag you into a surreal, rocky, emotionally difficult place, and then they leave you there, blinking, without resolution.

Most of Blasim’s stories are in the first person, told by a character who seems rushed to get the words out, to unburden himself. The characters hallucinate. Stories shift and turn back on themselves. The line between the real and the bizarre is frequently violated, kicked aside—as though the conflict is re-making the borders of reality.

The theme of Iraqis who cannot help but tell their stories is echoed in other Iraqi fictions, such as Muna Fadhil’s “Sandstorm.” In that story, civil servants, each of whom “would have seen at least one murder or bomb site within the past 24 hours,” compete to tell the most horrific story of the day.

Blasim’s narratives crowded against one another, one shoving against the next. In, “Why Don’t You Write a Novel Instead of Talking About All These Characters?” the landscape is jammed, much like the Hungarian quarantine it describes, with “Afghans, Arabs, Kurds, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Bangladeshis, Africans, and some Albanians.” In the story, memories and stories are confused. Is the protagonist “Hassan Blasim” or is he someone else?

The stories are loud, sometimes uneven, sometimes rambling. They are sometimes like sitting on a bus beside a crazy man who pulls out one fascinating, thought-provoking anecdote after another, but rarely finishes one before he leaps headlong into another. Blasim also has a cutting dark humor, as when a young Finnish novelist asks the protagonist of “The Dung Beetle” “with a genuine look of astonishment and curiosity, ‘How did you read Kafka? Did you read him in Arabic? How could you discover Kafka that way?’ I felt as I were a suspect in a crime and the Finnish novelist was the detective, and that Kafka was a Western treasure that Ali Baba, the Iraqi, had stolen.”

“The Dung Beetle,” also an examination of the nature of stories, opens in what could be Blasim’s own voice:

“Doctor, there are stories for children and very short stories for sick people who no longer have much time. There are stories for the beach, that is to say, summer stories for women reclining in the sun topless, lazy stories about the excrement of reality, stories for the elite, for boring times, for pregnant mothers, for prisoners. I can’t write a story but I can tell a story. I crave incessant talk … I have a flock of sparrows inside me … ha!”

Certainly, Blasim can write a story. But he may also have a flock of sparrows inside him, each struggling in its own direction, needing to tell its individual tale, to peck its way out into the light.

Chinua Achebe, grandfather of African literature, dies at 82

Reuters — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 13:00:00 +0000

Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe, widely seen as a grandfather of modern African literature, has died at the age of 82, publisher Penguin said on Friday.

Achebe made his name more than 50 years ago with his novel "Things Fall Apart," about an African tribe's fatal brush with British colonialism in the 1800s. It told the story of colonialism for the first time from an African perspective.

A spokeswoman for his publisher, Penguin, confirmed his death but had few other details. She said the family would be releasing a statement shortly.

Artists and writers search for a common street in Iraq

M. Lynx Qualey — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 12:55:00 +0000

Baghdad’s Al-Mutanabbi Street is perhaps the longest-lived book-selling neighborhood in the world. According to scholar Muhsin al-Musawi, the current bookshops on Al-Mutanabbi Street exist where, hundreds of years before, there was an Abbasid-era district of scribes’ markets and booksellers’ stalls.

This area was thriving at least by the time of the historian Ibn Tayfur (819–893). In this spot, books and book lovers were available in abundance until the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258.

The neighborhood eventually reclaimed its place at Baghdad’s cultural heart, and a number of important booksellers established shops once more on Al-Mutanabbi Street. Stores began to blossom in the 19th and 20th centuries, when the saying “Cairo writes, Beirut publishes and Baghdad reads” came into vogue.

But things sharply changed for the street in March 2003, when US forces entered Iraq. The street’s first major explosion occurred in October 2003, killing a tea seller named Bassem and setting numerous stores on fire.

The life of the street grew narrower and narrower. In his essay “Escape from Al-Mutanabbi Street,” bookseller Muhammad al-Hamrani writes about the death squads that “spread into the narrow alleys around Al-Mutanabbi” and how “no one was buying books anymore.”

The city’s literary culture was further ravaged on 5 March 2007, nearly four years into the US-led occupation, when a car bomb exploded on Al-Mutanabbi Street. It killed at least 30 souls, wounded more than a hundred, and destroyed countless books, hopes and livelihoods. The street was officially opened once again in 2008.

The bombing at Al-Mutanabbi Street particularly shook US-based poet Beau Beausoleil, who began a project called “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here.” The project called on artists around the world to respond with handmade letterpress broadsides, art books, and later essays and works of poetry.

The broadsides and books have been collected into a traveling exhibition that will come to the American University in Cairo in March 2014, and will eventually be on permanent display at the Iraqi National Library in Baghdad. The poetry and essays have been collected into the book “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here.”

The project began with the letterpress broadsides, Beausoleil said. This led him to the book artists, as he was “struck by how deeply a book artist could move into the interior of an idea and make it visual.”

Book-arts researcher Sarah Bodman said art books have a history of responding to events, adding that the books were sometimes “given away in the streets if an artist had something they wanted to say to the public.”

A number of the handmade books draw on the long history of Al-Mutanabbi Street. Iraqi-American artist Tania Baban, in her collaboration with American poet Jim Natal, attempts to connect the US invasion and 2007 bombing with the Mongols’ 13th-century sacking of Baghdad.

Baban’s “Street of the Poet” is cloth-covered and illuminated within with gold ink and calligraphy, evocative of ancient manuscripts. The edges of several pages are burnt, as though these texts had survived a fire.

Natal has written fitting poetry for a time of destruction: “When books become smoke, the words tend to drift. They crumble into vowels and consonants, letters find the upper atmosphere and jetstream global distances, disrupt flight patterns, thought patterns, cover al-alaam.”

The book artists came from around the world. In addition to several contributors from the US and UK, there were also book artists from Peru, Iraq, Argentina, Australia, Turkey and elsewhere.

Some of the artists’ works give a simplified reading of the bombing, as in “Al-Mutanabbi Street: A Vicious Circle” by Mette Ambeck. Here, there is a circular cutout of buildings and people, all in white with occasional burnt edges, seeming to indicate a closed circle of violence without input or change.

Other artists connect their own experiences and bookselling streets with Al-Mutanabbi. In the three books by Iranian artist Azadeh Fatehrad, titled “Enghelab Avenue,” Fatehrad prints large photos from a major bookselling street in Tehran.

But instead of photos of books and readers, Fatehrad uses images of mostly industrial-looking spots that are often dilapidated, rusted or crumbling. The effect is of a loss — books that once existed but are now hidden or overbuilt by a rusty modernity.

One of Fatehrad’s photos shows a roof where trash has been stuffed in a corner. From the text on the opposite page: “when we clean the flat we would usually put / them somewhere, to hide them / hide the dirty old things / didn’t have a heart to throw them out / but hide them somewhere, / to not seeing them any more / hide them.”

The works use a variety of forms: Mike Nicholson’s “The Physics of Violence: Part I” looks like a graphic novel, while Pauline Lamont-Fisher’s books appear alternately as abstract, red-themed paintings or as blood-soaked bandages.

Lamont-Fisher, a UK-based artist, said that at first she did not want to take part in the Al-Mutanabbi project.

“As time went on I felt the tragedy and significance of the situation more intensely,” she says. “I also started to reflect on how sanitized death has become as it is seen so frequently on film and television.”

The collection of written work includes dozens of poems and essays in response to the 2007 bombing. There are also earlier works by poetic luminaries such as Saadi Youssef, Etel Adnan, Adrienne Rich, Mahmoud Darwish and Fadhil al-Azzawi.

The poems and essays connect Iraqi, UK, US and other writers around the world. But the result of this cacophony of voices is not that something feels fixed or resolved.

“I always emphasize that this is not a ‘healing project,’” Beausoleil said over email. “[H]ow can it be when we don’t even understand the wounds that we have left on the literal and metaphorical body of Iraq?”

The following poem by Khaled Mattawa is reprinted with permission from “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: Poets and Writers Respond to the March 5, 2007 Bombing of Baghdad's Street of Booksellers.”

Adolescence of Burnt Hands

Suddenly I found my sorrow among

strange trees, on dusty squares

I thought yes,

yes,

I knew it had come.

I had seen it on men's faces.

But too early, too soon.

I said,

“Sorrow of the distant mother,

Ghosts of schoolyard friends,

Father broken backbone

I am too young to live without anger.”

Then everywhere I went

It was the valley of God’s absence,

the forest of the cold bosom,

the deserts where children raised children.

And I cradled my flame.

This piece appears in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.

'Arabian Nights' has a smaller sibling

Mai Elwakil — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 10:14:00 +0000

Almost every reader on the planet is familiar in some way with the epic “1,001 Nights.” We know of Sultan Shahryar, who, heartbroken by his wife’s infidelity, remarries every night only to kill his new bride at the first break of dawn.

That was at least his plan until he marries his vizier’s daughter Scheherazade. Gifted with an unmatched ability to create exciting story plots, Scheherazade succeeds in saving her life and that of other women.

She tells the sultan exciting stories over the course of several nights until she bears him a child, and hence, as mother to the heir of his throne, asks for Shahryar’s mercy. Throughout the 1,001 nights, readers are entangled in thrilling stories of the East.

But how many of us have heard of the collection’s smaller sibling? Only 17 stories long, “101 Nights” offers tales replete with flying horses and every kind of miracle that one could imagine, each so exciting that it creates “a whole cosmos of its own into which we and listeners alike are drawn,” explains Claudia Ott, the translator of a recently discovered manuscript of this medieval Arabic story collection, in a lecture held earlier this month.

“Who, centuries before Leonardo da Vinci, described to us a wooden flying machine with a takeoff and landing propeller, and with what are certainly the oldest motion detectors in the history of literature?” asks Ott.

Where else can one learn about what the merchants of Qayrawan and the cannibals of the Camphor Island have in common, or catch cunning wives at love play with their passionate lovers, and, in the next moment, witness battles with knights and warriors?

Ott — a scholar, musician and professor at the Institute for Non-European Languages and Cultures of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany — says the answer is “nowhere.”

She has previously translated the oldest surviving manuscript of the “1,001 Nights.” But in 2010, when her eyes fell on a beautiful Andalusian manuscript, adorned with red ink that read “The Book with the Story of the 101 Nights,” she was mesmerized.

She was playing the flute at the opening reception of “Treasures of the Agha Khan Museum: Masterpieces of Islamic Art” in Berlin, and saw the 1234 manuscript exhibited in a vitrine with other objects from Andalusia. The handwriting was legible, and all 39 pages, except the final one, were well-preserved.

She asked for permission to take a closer look when the exhibition was being dismantled, and, after verifying it was an original, began translating it the same day into German. Prior to her discovery, other reports and manuscripts of the collection dated back to the 17th century at the earliest.

This discovery is a great enrichment to world literature, she says.

“101 Nights” is not simply an abridged version of the well-known “1,001 Nights.” In fact, Ott explains, the collections have only two stories in common — “The Ebony Horse” and “The King’s Son and the Seven Viziers,” popularly known as “The Book of Sinbad.”

What is most exciting about the “101 Nights” is its geographical origin and the fantastic setting of its tales. All seven preserved manuscripts of the collection come from North Africa and Andalusia, and some of the characters point to the history of the Western part of the Muslim world.

In the first tale of the “101 Nights,” we meet a trader from Qayrawan, Tunisia, and Umayyad caliphs are repeatedly referenced throughout the collection. In fact, Caliph Abdel Malik bin Marwan and his three sons enjoy a similar status in the “101 Nights” as that of the Abbasid Caliph Haroun al-Rashid in the “1,001 Nights.”

This, Ott explains, is due to the historical role played by the Umayyads in the history of Andalusia, and the emirate of Cordoba being considered the successor dynasty of the fallen caliphate of the Umayyads in Damascus.

So, even though the “101 Nights” is set in the faraway kingdom of India, the fascinating setting comes off more like a stereotypical backdrop rather than possessing any geographical or historical magnitude, says Ott.

“It is certainly not by chance that this backdrop has something Oriental about it when seen from an Arabic perspective. It is an image of an Orient that is far away, unfamiliar and exotic — for this reason, particularly attractive,” Ott says.

This was the farthest and hence most exotic setting imagined at the time. And part of the popularity of the “101 Nights” in its era, argues Ott, is that it took its readers and listeners, as they were commonly told out loud by a storyteller, from the furthest West in Andalusia to the extreme Eastern point of the Islamic world.

“If this play of ideas is permissible to the Orient of the Occident of the Orient,” says Ott, “this opens a whole new set of possibilities in the research on world literature.”

For now, the collection is available in German, translated and edited by Ott so as to have readers and listeners alike see the narrator standing before them on a street corner, in a coffeehouse or in an orange grove, the way they were meant to be. In fact, she checked the viability of her translation by reading it out loud to a group of friends and children and getting their feedback. The collection may soon be available in translation to readers worldwide — and better known even in the Arabic-speaking world, where only a few copies remain available. That is how it was meant to be, part of popular culture rather than just being confined to the circles of academia and conservationists, explains Ott.

Claudia Ott gave her talk, "The Hundred and One Nights and its Newly Discovered Andalusian Manuscript of 1234," as part of the "In Translation Lectures Series" organized by the American University in Cairo's Center for Translation Studies.

Image copyrights: Claudia Ott

This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.

The pick: ‘The Devil Rules’ urges readers to think critically

Amany Aly Shawky — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:23:00 +0000

Mostafa Mahmoud’s 2004 “The Devil Rules” is a book about hippies, rising drug abuse and Western supremacy over the Arab world. It is a book about the past and present, touching upon social, economic and political issues.

The book mimics the author’s own long journey in search of answers to the puzzling realities of this world. Mahmoud (1921–2009) was a prominent author who wrote on a number of different issues. Because of his background as a physician, he often adopted an inquisitive, scientific approach to interpreting the world in relation to religious faith.

In “The Devil Rules,” Mahmoud plays the devil’s advocate, trying to trace phenomena back to their “origins.” According to Mahmoud, the hippy movement was doomed to fail because peace can only be achieved once humans gain control of their whims and learn to give unconditionally.

Mahmoud touches upon the media’s control over the masses, describing it as a major weapon of mass destruction and calling it “modern time opium.”

The book also discusses social matters — such as addiction, smoking and crude sexuality — that have become normalized, as well as political issues such as the Israeli invasion and Zionist control over Western media.

For today’s readers, “The Devil Rules” may offer little in terms of information, but it offers something arguably much more important and relevant: The urge to think and analyze. As well as influencing many authors, “The Devil Rules” has helped many readers think for themselves, instead of blindly adopting what’s being presented to them.

For readers, the book is like a capsule of condensed material and thoughts, and a window for innovation. Although its general air is dark and gloomy, “The Devil Rules” is still somewhat optimistic, leaving every chapter open-ended for readers to place their own solutions or opinions.

This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.

Prominent fiction writer Mahmoud Salem dies at 84

Egypt Independent,Al-Masry Al-Youm — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:37:00 +0000

Prominent mystery fiction writer Mahmoud Salem died Sunday at the age of 84, after a life full of adventure, both in his real life and in his best-selling stories.

Salem was born in 1929 and spent his childhood moving between different cities around Egypt, before he joined military college, but left it and pursued a career in journalism.

He worked as a military reporter for the state-run newspaper Al-Gomhurriya during the Suez War of 1956. Later, he headed the crime section at the newspaper.

Before the 1967 Egypt-Israel war, Salem was working at Radio and Television Magazine. Writer Ragaa al-Naqqash and Salem together led a campaign to entertain soldiers in the field. The party kept being delayed due to the schedules of the participating artists, until they set its date to be, by coincidence, in June — the night before the Israeli attack, Salem had said, in an interview with the state-run Al-Shabab magazine.

The party was held until 2 am in the morning, and the nephew of the then Defense Minister Abdel Hakim Amer allowed alcoholic drinks inside the party, but none of the soldiers drank, Salem said.

After the attack, Salem faced many accusations regarding the party. Hosni Mubarak, then a leading Armed Forces member, interrogated Salem, but the writer was deemed innocent.

“I never thought while [Mubarak] interrogated me that he could be a president one day. He didn’t have any charisma,” Salem told Al-Shabab.

Salem also worked for the children’s magazine Samir, in which he started writing detective and mystery fiction.

His career as a mystery writer started when he thought of writing a small mystery story as a competition for readers. When the competition was successful, the section became steady.

In 1968, Salem started writing his most renowned work, “The Five Adventurers,” a monthly series of Egyptian novels for kids inspired by an English-language novel titled “The Five.”

The series tells the story of five children living in the Cairo suburb of Maadi who solve crimes with the help of their dog and two recurring characters, Inspector Samy and Officer Ali.

While in exile in Lebanon during President Anwar Sadat’s era for having Nasserist tendencies in 1972, Salem started writing “The 13 Devils,” another series of mystery novels for children. The main character was 13 children who came from different Arab countries and together faced plots led by foreign intelligence.

Through more than half a century of writing, Salem was celebrated as the pioneer of this genre within Arabic-written fiction.

Navigating the space between American readers and Iraqi writers

M. Lynx Qualey — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 09:55:00 +0000

The book about Iraq most well-known to English readers is perhaps Chris Kyle’s best-selling “American Sniper,” a memoir told from behind the barrel of a gun. Other popular English books set in Iraq have been written either by US soldiers (Kevin Powers’ celebrated “The Yellow Birds”), by foreign correspondents (Michael Totten’s “On the Hunt in Baghdad”) or by academics (Charles Tripp’s “A History of Iraq”).

Generally, US bookstores and bestseller lists fail to include the stories, poems and academic work of Iraqi authors. Some Iraqi writing has been published in English, but most has remained at the distant periphery, known by only a few readers and academics.

There have been exceptions: Rebecca Gayle Howell’s translation of Amal al-Jubouri’s “Hagar Before the Occupation, Hagar After the Occupation” won a spot on the 2012 Best Translated Book Award poetry shortlist. Hassan Blasim’s “Madman of Freedom Square,” translated by Jonathan Wright, received attention when it was placed on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist in 2010.

Later this year, a collection of Blasim’s short stories will reach an even larger public when it receives its US debut via Penguin Books.

But most Iraqi writing has remained far from the core of English-language readers. Those collections that have broken through have either had a translator or a publisher who worked hard to promote the work.

Gayle Howell, who is also a poet, was a vocal proponent of her bilingual edition of Jubouri’s poetry, saying in an earlier interview, “I love how the Arabic and English poems seem to stand side-by-side, as if in solidarity. ‘The opposite of war.’ Exactly.”

Late last year, Peter Money and Sinan Antoon also succeeded in piercing the nearer orbits of English-language readership with a new translation and collection of Saadi Youssef’s poetry, “Nostalgia, My Enemy.”

That book is notable because it collects work by one of Iraq’s greatest living writers, most of it written during the post-2003 occupation era. But “Nostalgia, My Enemy” has also received attention because of its affiliation with two US-based translator-poets.

The collection certainly deserves as wide an audience as it can find, far beyond the narrow strip of readers interested in the Anglo-Iraqi war.

“Saadi can turn any object, instant, or situation, no matter how seemingly banal, into a luminous poem,” Antoon said in an email interview. “He finds beauty and celebrates it.”

As a poet and lover of poetry, Antoon said he has long read Youssef’s work “religiously.” What interested him, after 2003, “in terms of poetry, was how a major poet, the major poet of Iraq, would write about a country that was disintegrating before his eyes.”

Money, meanwhile, found Youssef’s work in the fall of 2002, “when George W. Bush was making war rattles in Iraq’s direction.”

The collection is both intimate and enormous: It roams over five different continents and any number of poetic traditions, taking inspiration from Imru’ al-Qays, Shakespeare, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Amiri Baraka. Antoon said that Youssef “experiments more than poets 50 years younger.”

Youssef has been translated into many languages, as befits one of the world’s greatest living poets. But Antoon felt that, particularly in America, “the country that destroyed Saadi’s homeland, people should read him for all the obvious reasons. If not now, when?”

Baghdad-born Antoon has also worked on translating other important Iraqi poets, notably Sargon Boulus, in addition to writing and translating his own poems and novels.

A few other US-based poets also feel that this is the time to think, read, and write about Iraq. David Sullivan, for instance, writes about Iraq in his compilation, “Every Seed of the Pomegranate.” Sullivan also plans to co-translate Iraqi poet Adnan al-Sayegh. Another US-based project, “Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here,” engaged poets and book artists from around the world to create art in response to the 2007 bombing of Baghdad’s central bookselling corridor.

Meanwhile, short-story writer Hassan Blasim has been, along with Comma Press, working to bring more Iraqi authors into English. Recently, Blasim and Comma Press have begun to work together on a new short-story project, “IRAQ + 100.”

They are currently looking for stories set in Iraq 100 years after the occupation’s start, and plan to publish 10 stories set in 10 different Iraqi cities.

Comma Press hopes to publish the collection as an Arabic e-book and English print and e-book in 2014.

The “American Sniper”-style narrative may remain the most familiar in English. But many other types of stories and poems are around, in English or soon-to-be in English, and these works are much heartier and far more beautiful.

This piece was originally published in Egypt Independent's weekly print edition.