The Review writes up Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Embroideries, on the occasion of the paper-back’s re-issue, and ties it to a case in France that made the news: a Muslim husband discovered his bride wasn’t a virgin and a French judge annulled their wedding.
“What is currently taking place in southern Iraq,” Gil Stein, the director of the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, writes in the catalog to “Catastrophe!,” the institute’s disturbing new exhibition on the subject, “is nothing less than the eradication of the material record of the world’s first urban, literate civilization.”
The New York Review of Books has a long article on the looting and destruction of Iraq’s cultural heritage.
The Daily Star reports on a new initiative that has children and teenagers making their own short stories, children’s book and comic books [From the Literary Saloon].
They’ve announced the winner of the Saif Ghobash - Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation, and: The 2008 Prize is to be awarded to Fady Joudah for his translation of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry collections in The Butterfly’s Burden, published in a bilingual edition by Bloodaxe Books in the UK, and by Copper Canyon Press in the USA, the latter being short-listed earlier this year for PEN America’s poetry in translation award.
See the publicity pages for the bilingual (!) edition from Bloodaxe and Copper Canyon Press, or get your own copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. [From the Literary Saloon at the complete review - 11 - 20 August 2008 Archive]
“My Mother”
I long for my mother’s bread
My mother’s coffee
Her touch
Childhood memories grow up in me
Day after day
I must be worth my life
At the hour of my death
Worth the tears of my mother.And if I come back one day
Take me as a veil to your eyelashes
Cover my bones with the grass
Blessed by your footsteps
Bind us together
With a lock of your hair
With a thread that trails from the back of your dress
I might become immortal
Become a God
If I touch the depths of your heart.If I come back
Use me as wood to feed your fire
As the clothesline on the roof of your house
Without your blessing
I am too weak to stand.I am old
Give me back the star maps of childhood
So that I
Along with the swallows
Can chart the path
Back to your waiting nest.
(Mahmoud Darwish, translation found on http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Cafe/1324/darwish.htm)
Mahmoud Darwish died on Saturday. Many obits refer to him as something like “Palestine’s national poet” or “the poet of the Palestinian cause” which in a way is true but which makes this extraordinarily talented poet sound like something smaller than he was. He wasn’t just the voice of a particular state or people; he wasn’t a propagandist. What I found outstanding about his work is how–deeply and constantly concerned as he is with the problems of Palestinians–he manages to never be ideological, to always be free within his writing, open-eyed and even funny, a true artist. And therefore universal and all the more powerful when he does talk of the suffering and injustice of Palestinians. I still remember the shock of delight when I first read “Memory for Forgetfulness” (”what a book!”), of which an excellent English translation is available.
Al Jazeera English has a nice segment on Darwish. I also recommend his official site, which has a great selection of audio recordings (unfortunately seemingly without the transcripts to go with) of the poet reciting his work. And I’m posting more English translations of some of his poems after the jump.
“Identity Card is one of the first poems that made Darwish famous across the Arab world.
Identity Card
Record !
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the nineth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?Record !
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks…
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself
at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?
I packed several books in Arabic when I left Cairo on vacation. While I haven’t gotten that far with them, I’m greatly enjoying reading the classic “Maalak al Hazeen” (The Heron) by Ibrahim Aslan. I’d tried to read this book in English several years back and (as often happens to me when reading Arabic literature in translation) hadn’t really gotten caught up in it–something in the language seemed stilted, a song drained of its rhythm. But this time around, in Arabic, I can appreciate all the novel’s charm and humour, its nimble and inspired weaving of anecdotes and characters to give a picture of a neighborhood–Kit Kat–going through irreversible changes.
This is the novel that the classic film “Kit Kat” (a must-see) is based on. For an excellent in-depth discussion of Aslan’s work, see this post by Baheyya.
I quite liked this short essay by Sophia Al Maria in the last issue of Bidoun, about the proliferation of miraculous appearances of Allah’s name spelled in baby’s ears, fishes scales, etc. (sort of reminds me of the many appearances of Jesus in the vegetables and washing machines of suburban American moms, as reported by the News of the World). I haven’t gotten my hands on a hard copy of the magazine, and only a few essays are available online, but this issue–full of short essay about various “objects” in the Middle East–looks good.
Egyptian film-maker Youssef Chahine passed away the day before yesterday. You can find many elegies online. Personally, I consider “Bab Al Hadeed” one of the best movies I’ve seen–on a par with classic post-war Italian neo-realist films. His documentary on Cairo–”Al Qahera munwwara bi Ahlaha” (”Cairo Illuminated by its People”) is a lovely, subtle, complex tribute to the city. And he’s authored many classics, like “Al Ard” and others I have to admit I haven’t seen yet. But Chahine’s later career has always struck me as a story of talent somehow squandered–I’m not sure why. None of his later films are on a par with his early, brilliant work–some are positively bad. While I enjoyed “Heyya Fauda” (”Chaos”), his latest feature film, it had none of the insight, naturalism or originality of his earlier work. On the contrary, it bears all too much the mark of his protege Khaled Youssef, whose heavy-handed, sensationalistic and formally mediocre work has reaped a recent–and to me, utterly confounding–success.
Egyptian authorities have announced that the book hasn’t been banned.
Apparently the Egyptian authorities have banned a recently published book entitled “Inside Egypt: the Land of the Pharaos on the Brinkof a Revolution.” I don’t know anything about the book. But when is the government going to realize that (as this very post attests) there is nothing they can do to give a book better publicity and a higher circulation than ban it?