Culture and activism

I have a new piece up at the Middle East Research and Information Project about cultural production and cultural activism in Egypt. There is so much different kinds of cultural activity going on these days that it's hard to categorize, and there are many more artists and projects I could have referenced.  I've tried to make some general observations:

It is not easy to combine aesthetic and political ambitions in order to creatively address the revolutionary moment. For one thing, many artists and writers have continued to be active in the protest movement itself -- they have little detachment from the events of the last year, and their energies are depleted by their participation in protests, organizing meetings and advocacy campaigns. In their political work, they can face significant personal risk, like their fellow citizen-activists. In late December, at a press conference convened to deny army responsibility for the horrific violence visited by soldiers upon protesters near the cabinet, a blustering member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces suddenly denounced Muhammad Hashim -- head of the independent and widely esteemed publishing house Merit -- as one of several conspirators being investigated for instigating attacks upon the army. (His crime, it appears, consisted of supplying protesters with blankets and helmets.)

For another, it is too early for artists or anyone else to map the contours of the current juncture with any clarity. In late January 2011, there was a rupture in the reality Egyptians had known for so long. Many artists and novelists, returning home elated if exhausted from weeks of protesting, simply scrapped whatever work they were doing. Since then, the rapid pace of events -- or, many would say, of reversals -- has rendered it nearly impossible to fix a vantage point from which to consider developments. The Egyptian revolution is not yet a subject of art; it is an ongoing experience.

And I only just saw the trailer for this cool-looking documentary, "The Noise of Cairo," -- on artists and their relationship to the revolution. 

The Noise of Cairo (Trailer) from scenesfrom on Vimeo.

The uprisings and the arts in the Arab world

One of the key people to follow for Middle Eastern news — particularly analysis of the media and cultural scenes — is Andrew Hammond, who works at Reuters. He also has a blog where he posts the occasional non-Reuters article, the latest of which is about the arts scene after the uprisings. After first discussing worries in arts circles about the rise of Islamists, Hammond writes:

However, I think a more pertinent issue to raise here is the general state of the al-wasat al-fanni, or the arts scene, as it is often referred to in Arabic, since this is what exercises the minds of these new players on the political scene. It is utterly corrupt. The arts were and are an intimate part of the rotten structure of Arab state politics. To rise to the top in Mubarak’s entertainment world you had to play the game with the regime, because the state placed itself at the centre of artistic production, giving the more sordid aspects of fame familiar anywhere a more sinister turn.

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Cultural revolution

Since Mubarak's ouster, I've been trying to follow some small portion of the many creative reactions to this time in Egypt's history. Many of the artists and writers I know personally were in Tahrir Square, and have since been struggling to make sense of their experience; to balance their work and their political commitments; and to take advantage of new opportunities for collective action, free speech, and making use of public space. 

A mural in Downtown Cairo (since painted over) created as part of an art awareness campaign

For the design magazine Print, I put together a selection of images that speak (or spoke, a few months back -- these things change quickly) to the visual legacy of the revolution.

And I just wrote a piece on "cultural revolution" for Foreign Policy looking at some of the many grassroots cultural initiatives taking place now; at artists' efforts to contribute creatively to the revolution (and their many acts of opposition, well before it, to the Mubarak regime); and at how the cultural landscape might be changing. There is also an accompanying slide show. 

Book review: The Puppet

I just reviewed The Puppet, by Libyan novelist Ibrahim Al-Koni (recently translated by University of Texas Press). I'm a great admirer of Al-Koni's work but was not particularly impressed with this book:

Perhaps one of the reasons The Puppet disappoints is that, for the most part, it doesn't take place in the desert. The novel is the middle instalment of a three-part trilogy al-Koni penned in the late 1990s, charting the decline and moral corruption of a nomadic tribe after its settlement in an oasis and the subsequent shift towards more sedentary and commercial ways. The puppet of the title is the would-be leader Aghulli, who is manipulated and betrayed by the tribe's noblemen and traders.

In his introduction, the translator William M Hutchins (who has translated al-Koni's Anubis and The Seven Veils of Seth, as well as Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy) connects al-Koni's work to the medieval Arab sociologist Ibn Khaldoun's theory of cyclical social expansion and disintegration. The book is also reminiscent of the Saudi writer Abdul-Rahman Munif's masterful Cities of Salt trilogy, which charts - with much greater nuance and historical specificity - the disorienting transformation of a nomadic population into a sedentary work force.

The rot of society, the temptations of settled and "civilised" life - as opposed to the purity of the traditional nomadic existence - is a recurring theme in al-Koni's work. In The Bleeding of the Stone, the shepherd Asouf lives as a hermit in the mountains. The arrival of two modern hunters represents the eruption of human evil into his innocent natural world. In Gold Dust, the hero chooses his camel companion over his family and reputation. The opposition between the corrupting demands of society and nomadic freedom is romantic and sometimes simplistic, but al-Koni imbues his characters' longing for the desert as a spiritual homeland with pathos and urgency.

The Puppet unfortunately retreads this familiar territory without adding anything new. There is no tension about the oasis' future, no ambiguity over the characters' natures and motivations. One of the general charms of al-Koni's work is that his characters are both archetypal and sui generis. Here, they are just archetypes: the puppet, the hero, the merchant, the lover.

Nonetheless, this is a writer very much worth discovering. There are several other works by Al-Koni available in English and I'd recommend starting there (in particular with The Bleeding of the Stone). 

Six cool things about Morocco

 As most readers of the blog know, Issandr and I spent the summer visiting and reporting from Morocco. What follows is a belated, personal and haphazard list of some cool things I discovered there. 

1. Music. Hindi Zahra, a Berber-Moroccan-French singer-songwriter. 

Hindi Zahra - Stand Up
Uploaded by EMI_Music. - Watch more music videos, in HD!

2. The online magazine Mithly, the first Arabic magazine by and for gay men (Click here to hear my interview with the editor).

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Safinaz Kazem has a blog

Safinaz Kazem — Egyptian essayist, cultural critic, columnist, anti-Nasserist, anti-Sadatist, anti-Mubarakist, anti-Saddamist, feminist, nationalist, Islamist, ex-wife of poet Ahmad Fouad Negm, and all-around terrifying woman — has a blog. Her daughter made her.

Sonallah Ibrahim, taking stock

Sonallah Ibrahim in his home, June 2010 (Victoria Hazou)

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing the great Egyptian man of letters Sonallah Ibrahim. The interview--and discussion of his novel التلصص (Stealth), recently translated into English--was fascinating. Ibrahim is one of Egypt's most formally interesting and politically uncompromising writers and although there was a melancholy note to a lot of our conversation, he is a kind, charming and funny man. 

Also as it turns out, Stealth--an affecting, autobiographical novel that deals with Ibrahim's unusual childhood--is a story he has been turning around in his mind for the last forty years. 

It was while in prison that Ibrahim self-published his first book. Financed by his cigarette allowance, the hand-written volume had a cardboard cover of flattened food boxes, chapter titles in red ink made from mercurochrome, and a spine held together by bread paste. It included the introduction to a novel, Khalil Bey, the never-finished forerunner of what would become Stealth. After his release, Ibrahim wrote novels that were published in more traditional, less painstaking ways. But the subject of his childhood haunted him. All along, he says, “I was thinking of it, of how to deal with it.”

You can read the piece here.

When I went back a few days after the interview, with photographer Victoria Hazou, to take Ibrahim's pictures for the article, I brought along the Proust Questionnaire to entertain us while Victoria snapped away. We got through most of it. 

What is your favourite virtue? Telling the truth.

What is your favourite quality in a man? Tolerance towards women.

What is your favourite quality in a woman? Beauty (laughs)...and mind. 

What is your chief characteristic? Being very fond of women. And persistence. When I start something--whether it's washing the dishes or writing a novel--I  have to finish it.

What do you appreciate the most in your friends? That we can understand each other quickly and laugh together.

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Culture links

I've been traveling and then had trouble logging into the blog, so it's been a while since I posted. But here's a collection of interesting culture links from the last weeks. 

1. Beirut 39 -- an event that selected 39 writers under 39 from the region, and aimed at raising the profile of emerging Arab writers -- came to a close. I'm eager to read the anthology that came out of it (even though I am not really a fan of anthologies...) Here's an article about the event in the Daily Star, but I haven't found many reviews yet. 

2. The latest edition of the  Palestinian Literary Festival -- a literary festival that travels around the Occupied Territories, because it is so hard for audiences to all gather in one place, and whose participants regularly face long waits at checkpoints and harassment by Israeli security forces -- also came to an end. Not before Ethan Bronner could lament, in the NYTimes, that it hadn't held some joint events with a concurrent Israeli festival. 

Again, it seemed like the two groups of writers could benefit from hearing one another’s reflections. Should the festivals meet? Should Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, A. B. Yehoshua and Daniel Mendelsohn, all of whom were speakers in Israel, join Geoff Dyer, Victoria Brittain and Raja Shehadeh, the writers on the other side?

Yes, said Anthony David, an American biographer and professor at the Bard Honors College of Al Quds University in East Jerusalem. “It is ridiculous to have writers from all over the world in the same city and not meeting each other,” he said as he waited in Ramallah for a reading to begin. “The boycott thinking here among Palestinians is so entrenched that people are threatened by meeting people from the Israeli side. Building networks is the only way to undermine nefarious forces.”

But Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian-British author who runs the Palestinian festival, disagreed. “I feel that Palestinians are too often seen as an adjunct or reverse side of another coin,” she said. “Palestine is an entity in its own right and it deserves its own festival. If the day comes when Jerusalem is a shared capital, then we can reconsider.”

Yeah, the Palestinians don't get to keep their olive groves or their home in "contested" East Jerusalem, can they  have their own literary festival, for #*@*'s sake? 

3. At the Guardian, Jack Shenker gave the Cairene publishing house Merit the kudos it so amply deserves.

Mohamed Hashem's office seems an unlikely home for Egypt's nascent literary revolution: to find it you have to ascend a shabby set of stairs in a downtown Cairo apartment block shared by, among others, the Egyptian Angling Federation and an orthopaedic surgeon. It's a far cry from the slick headquarters of Egypt's biggest publishing houses. Yet on any given day it's here on Hashem's threadbare sofas that you'll find the cream of young Egyptian writing talent, chain-smoking cigarettes, chatting with literary critics and thumbing through some of the thousands of books stacked from floor to ceiling.

4. At the National Kaelen Wilson-Goldie reviewed the latest edition of the home-grown Lebanese art event Home Works, and wonders if it hasn't fallen victim to its own success: 

And this is the thing. Home Works was never meant to be a sprawling international art event, a spectacle divorced from its context. When Ashkal Alwan began in 1994, its mandate was to engage the city and create artworks that tackled urgent social, economic and political issues inextricably linked to the experience of Beirut and its relationship to the region and the world. 

Home Works was an alternative to big-budget biennials and splashy arts festivals well before either of those models was even plausible or desired in a place like Beirut. For better or worse, in its fifth incarnation, Home Works became the very thing it never needed or wanted to be: an art-world power summit, an occasion for lavish lunches, dinners and after parties, an event with little to no local audience or consequence that rolls into town, makes a lot of noise, blows a lot of hot air and disappears.

5. At Al Ahram Weekly, novelist and critic Youssef Rakkah reviewed AUC Professor Samia Mehrez's just-out-in-English Egypt's Culture Wars: Politics and Paradise. 

By juggling straightforward political commitments with bookish frameworks in which they do not always obviously fit -- freedom of expression and gender awareness, for example, with Pierre Bourdieu's notion of literary autonomy -- Mehrez manages, for better or worse, to bring depth to arguably shallow cultural products like Alaa Al-Aswany's phenomenal bestseller, The Yaqoubian Building ; by the same token, she takes purely academic topics -- the family in Egyptian literature of the 1990s, say -- out of the narrow parameters of literary criticism. And the vitality with which she does this, her insistence on weaving in her own experience as both producer and consumer is, more than any theoretical or "intellectual" achievement, what makes Egypt's Culture Wars an important and versatile stroke.

6. And at Al Masry Al Youm English, I reviewed the latest collection of short stories (actually written before his novels) from Hamdi Abu Golayyel and the recently translated Drumbeat by Mohammed El Bisatie. 

In the margins

* Great newish blog alert! As the title says, it's about Arabic Literature (in English). Check out the "Forthcoming in 2010" section. 

* My review of Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. A very subtle, rigorous and affecting work. You can see more panels from the book here. 

In the margins

Worth noting:

* Geoff Wysner, at Words Without Borders, reviews the memoir Algerian White, by Assia Djebar.

Algerian White was written as a tribute to three men. Each was a friend of the author. Each was a writer himself, in addition to his regular profession. All three were killed in the space of less than a year, and the stories of each of their deaths are at the emotional heart of the book.

Read more. 

* Interesting cyber-publishing venture: An Iranian novella is translated thanks to a collaboration between three websites, excerpted and put on sale online. The translator writes about the process here. The story has a stream-of-consciousness, Kafkaesque quality: 

When I get to the hotel, the smiling deskman portends bad things and I am right. He gestures to a woman sitting on the couch in a corner of the lobby. And from here, I see only her salt and pepper hair and when I can almost see her profile, she sees me. There is no time to run away. Although I am really tired. I didn’t talk to a woman on the phone and I was not waiting for a woman. My thoughts are lining up. I see her hand come toward me and with no choice I shake her hand and start to say how are you, with no choice, and that is the way of life no choice, apparently. Automatically, without thinking, we go and sit down where the woman had been seated. So quickly you got to know the city. 

Arab literature in the New Yorker

A couple friends have forwarded me this article in the latest New Yorker, about the increasing availability of Arabic literature in translation. This is how it opens:

What do you know about how people live in Cairo or Beirut or Riyadh? What bearing does such information have upon your life? There are, of course, newspapers to keep responsible Americans up to date when trouble looms, and public television or even the History Channel to inform us about the occasional historic battle or archeological discovery or civil war. What else do we need? The ways that people think and work and suffer and fall in love and make enemies and sometimes make revolutions is the stuff of novels, and Arabic novels, while not yet lining the shelves of the local bookstore, have been increasingly available in English translation, offering a marvellous array of answers to questions we did not know we wanted to ask. On such subjects as: the nature of the clientele of the elegantly crumbling pre-Islamist bars in downtown Cairo, straight and gay (“The Yacoubian Building,” by Alaa Al Aswany); what it felt like to live through the massacre in the Shatila refugee camp, in 1982, and how some of the people who still live there have been managing since (“Gate of the Sun,” by Elias Khoury); the optimal tactics that a good Saudi girl should use to avoid being married off, which appear to require that she study either medicine or dentistry (“Girls of Riyadh,” by the twenty-something Rajaa Alsanea, who has herself completed an advanced degree in endodontics).

The article analyzes Mahmoud Saeed's Saddam City, Sinan Antoon's I'jaam, Elias Khoury's Gate of the Sun, Ghassan Kanafani's short stories Men in the Sun and Return to Haifa; Emile Habiby's The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, and, briefly, a few others. The discussions of the individual works are interesting; I particularly liked Pierpoint on Kanafani--whose talents ignite her own writing--and on Khoury--whose ambitions and shortcomings she deftly sketches. But as usual trying to discuss the simultaneously broad and sparse category of "Arabic literature in translation" is nearly impossible to do with resorting to some awkward transitions and generalizations.

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The labourer

My review of Hamdi Abu Golayyel's newly translated novel just came out in The Review. A Dog with No Tail is his second book, after Thieves in Retirement, and it won the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature last year, given out by AUC Press (part of the award is to be translated and published by the press).

Abu Golayyel emigrated to Cairo from his Bedouin village in the early 80s, and worked in construction. This experience informs the book and inspired its original Arabic title, as I note:

Yet in the years spent lugging sacks of cement, smashing walls, pouring foundations and sleeping in empty buildings at night – building the residences of others without a home to call his own – Abu Golayyel found both material and metaphor. The novel’s resonant title in Arabic, Al Fa’il, is derived from the verb “to do”. It means “the doer”, “the actor” or, used as an adjective, “the efficacious, efficient”. In a grammatical sense, it means “the subject” – but in common parlance the world simply means “the labourer”. The English title is derived from a quip in the story, and works well enough. But the original Arabic title is particularly fitting for a book about the unstable edifice that is identity and the constant act of construction that is writing.

The novel was translated by our good old friend, and one-time member of the Arabist household, Robin Moger. Mr. Moger did an above-par job, his translation is a pleasure to read, and I expect we'll see more from him soon.

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Translate this!

The literary criticism web site the Quarterly Conversation runs a feature called "Translate This!" It lists publishers' and translators' suggestions. There were only three from Arabic, copied below:

Translator KAREEM JAMES ABU-ZEID: The single Arab author I believe to be the most in need of translation is the Lebanese novelist Rabee Jaber, born in 1972. He has published a host of novels in Arabic, several of which have been translated into French, yet none of which have been translated into English. He captures the life and spirit of the city of Beirut in unforgettable ways. Darwish translator FADY JOUDAH: I’d like to see the poetry of the Palestinian Ghassan Zaqtan in English, especially his latest collection, Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me. He has been one of the leading Arab poets for the last decade or so, and has been hailed by Mahmoud Darwish as an important figure in Arab poetry. Zaqtan is also a recognized novelist, but perhaps that would come later, after we have come to appreciate more completely his first love, poetry. Also, the poetry of Syrian Muhammad Maghut and Egyptian Amal Donqul should be made more available in English (I don’t know of any book-length translations of their work); as well as the novels of Palestinian Ibrahim Nassrallah (especially “The Birds of Caution”). Poet and translator JEFFREY YANG: I’d recommend Kitab al-Hayawan (”The Book of Animals”) by Al-Jahiz. From the ninth century, it’s a multi-faceted, multi-volume book about animals that begins with a passage in praise of books and, as Paul Lunde describes it, “is by no means conventional zoology, or even a conventional bestiary. It is an enormous collection of lore about animals—including insects—culled from the Koran, the Traditions, pre-Islamic poetry, proverbs, storytellers, sailors, personal observation, and Aristotle’s Generation of Animals.” But this is by no means all. In keeping with his theories of planned disorder, he introduces anecdotes of famous men, snippets of history, anthropology, etymology, and jokes.

Do you have suggestions of your own? Tell us! (link found at the Words Without Borders).

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The Time That Remains

Yesterday I saw Elia Suleiman's latest, "The Time that Remains," at the European Film Festival at CityStars (the festival runs through Tuesday), and really enjoyed it--better than his last, "Divine Intervention." The film chronicles Suleiman's own family's experience of the Nakbah and the Israeli occupation of Nazareth, up to the present. It's largely filmed in the house he grew up in, and based on interviews he conducted with his dying father. It is a very touching tribute to his parents, among other things. The film has Suleiman's typically deadpan humour (a foul-mouthed, alcoholic neighbour who--ever since getting a job at a gas station, and hence access to copious amounts of gasoline--regularly threatens to set himself on fire; a school principle who scolds the young Suleiman: "Who told you America is Imperialist?"). But it's dominated by sounds and silence, more than dialogue, by wittily orchestrated scenes, poignant and hilarious visual gags. Rendering Palestinian history as a stripped down, stylized tragi-comedy, a series of personal/historical vignettes, turns out to be particularly effective. There is a great attention to visual and auditory details, which accumulate to create increasingly moving patterns and rhythms. For me the film faltered a little in its third half, when Suleiman himself entered the scene. The way he acts--as a cardboard cutout of himself, basically--suggests his total alienation, his current position as a "mute observer," as one critic observes, but is also so disaffected it drains the scenes of any emotion. His take on contemporary Palestine--as opposed to that of his childhood--also seemed less specific and original. But it is a fascinating, moving, witty film. Here is a nice round-up of critical reactions. Suleiman was also on hand afterwards for a question and answer session. He noted that for him every time he can remove dialogue from the story it's a "victory," because silence is the most troubling thing for power--"even words of opposition comfort power," whereas "silence frightens it." He also mentioned that he had to get permission to use an Israeli tank for the film and that, ironically, the the only part of the film the Israeli authorities objected to was the scene in which Israeli soldiers rob a Palestinian house (there are more serious crimes committed). They also wanted a thanks in the film credits for letting him use the tank--now that sounds like something out of one of his films.

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Art events

An incomplete list of Egyptian art happenings: December 13 - January 14: Renowned cartoonist Georges Bahgory, at Mashrabia Gallery. December 14 - 6 January: Egypt, Land of Contrasts. Amateur photography exhibition/competition organized by the European Union. At the Townhouse Gallery. December 16: Performance art in Downtown Cairo! "Silence of the Lambs" by Amal Kenawy, at the corner of Champollion and Nabrawy Street, 4pm. December 16: "Invisible Presences: Looking at the Body in Contemporary Egypt." Big group exhibition featuring over 20 local artists, at Samaa Khaana, 31 El Siyufiyah St., in Old Cairo. (25107806) December 17 - January 31: Alexandria Biennale opens. The theme is مذا بعد؟ ("What next?"). (We will try to post more about upcoming events. If you have announcements you'd like to share, email: webmaster@arabist.net)

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Film festivals

The sixth Dubai International Film Festival has just started, with much star-wattage and fanfare. It will host the premier of the film Nine, a musical starring Daniel Day Lewis and Nicole Kidman, and of James Cameron's new sci-fi film Avatar. Meanwhile, here in Cairo, the Goethe Institute is putting on a more modest film festival of short independent work from the region. It starts today, and you can get the program here. The schedule I have only been able to find in German online, but Egyptian films are showing today at 1pm, followed the Algerian and Lebanese selection.

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Links for Dec.08.09 to Dec.09.09

✩ Les voix de la nation : chanson, arabité et caméléonisme linguistique | Culture et politique arabes | Very interesting post on Arab singers adopting accents and styles of different countries -- has great clip of Abdel Halim Hafez trying out a traditional Kuwaiti song.

✩ Comment l’Algérie a exporté sa « sale guerre » au Mali : Algérie-Maroc | How Algeria exported its dirty war to Mali: AQIM conspiracies.

✩ Fatwa Shopping « London Review Blog | On Nakheel and Islamic finance.

✩ The women who guard other women in conservative Egypt | On female bodyguards.

✩ Yemen’s afternoon high - Le Monde diplomatique | On the drug Qat.

✩ US Congress frets over anti-Americanism on TV in Mideast | The leading inciter of anti-Americanism in the ME is Congress itself, when it keeps voting for wars for Israel.

✩ Baladna English | New newspaper launched in Syria, but nothing on its site yet.

✩ EU Action Plan on combating terrorism | Document on EU CT strategy.

✩ What the US Elite Really Thinks About Israel « P U L S E | Most Council of Foreign Relations members think US favors Israel too much - v. interesting analysis of foreign policy expert poll by Jeffrey Blankfort.

✩ ‘The Battle for Israel’s Soul’ – Channel 4 on Jewish fundamentalism « P U L S E | British documentary on Jewish fundamentalism.

✩ BBC News - Dubai crisis sparks job fears for migrant workers | On South Asians in Dubai.

✩ FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Israel must unpick its ethnic myth | Tony Judt.

✩ The Interview Ha’aretz Doesn’t Want You To See « P U L S E | Interview Ali Abunimah not published by Haaretz.

✩ Attention Christmas Shoppers: Top Ten Brands to Boycott | Sabbah Report | Brands to boycott at Christmas.

✩ FT.com / Middle East / Politics & Society - Egypt’s media warn ElBaradei off politics | On the campaign against ElBaradei.

✩ Flourishing Palestinian sex trade exposed in new report - Haaretz | Amira Hass: "Young Palestinian women are being forced to into prostitution in brothels, escort services, and private apartments in Ramallah and Jerusalem..."

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Assume The Position

An exhibition at the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, starting on Sunday 13 December 2009. “ASSUME THE POSITION” December 13, 2009–January 17, 2010 Opening: Sunday, December 13, 7–9 pm This group show takes as its starting point the loss of focus. Distraction as diversion. The offstage moment becomes central, the minor player the star, the prop the protagonist, the interior monologue the script. Attention gets shifted to the “wrong” thing, questioning what the main event actually is, and who, in fact, is the audience. In some works, the artist inserts her or himself to create a disruption; in others, events are reframed through different means. Participants turn passive and viewers become active, as politics and conflict receive a sidelong glance—a reality just outside the picture that influences everything that lies within it. Debord’s iconic spectators, transfixed in their 3-D glasses, have been replaced by actors and audiences who are continually sidetracked. Sanja Iveković and Jill Magid make use of police officers as cast and crew: Iveković sets them in motion via a trio of actions on her balcony; Magid’s romantic city tour is filmed entirely by public surveillance cameras. Reversing positions, Walid Raad imagines the point of view of a camera operator and a possible reason for his wandering eye. Peaceful landscapes become charged in Cyprien Gaillard’s film, where empty settings are interrupted by sudden clouds of smoke, as well as in Osama Dawod’s photographs, which capture protesters at the G8 summit in an off-moment. David Levine re-crops performance art documentation to show only the onlookers—some paying rapt attention, some talking among themselves—whereas the accident scenes shot by Enrique Metinides and Egyptian press photographers illustrate that nothing attracts our attention quite like a good disaster. Outside the gallery, Amal Kenawy’s performances mix an invited audience with an accidental one—the passers-by on the street. Curated by Nikki Columbus Artists: Osama Dawod Sanja Iveković Cyprien Gaillard Amal Kenawy David Levine Jill Magid Enrique Metinides Walid Raad . . . and press photographs from the collection of Amgad Naguib

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A wonder of a book

If you're still looking for Christmas presents, I recommend Daniyal Mueenuddin's quite amazing In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. The book is a collection of linked short stories (characters that are central in one, will flitter through the background of another). Two of them had appeared previously in the New Yorker, and they are both magnificent. Mueenuddin is a great talent: his writing seems to overflow with wonderful, memorable images; his stories take swift, striking turns. For example, describing a secondary character, an old man: "The oversized head had settled heavily onto the shoulders, like a sand castle on the beach after the sea has run in over it." The book has received many positive reviews. The stories are set in Pakistan, between the 1970s and the present. Mueenuddin presents a view of Pakistani society that is deeply divided between haves and have-nots, absolutely ruthless, and in which sex is a form of leverage and romantic love is often a delusion and the beginning of a downfall. Yet--despite the fact that almost everyone involved is fighting desperately for a foothold of some sort, and generally losing that fight--there are moments of beauty, hope and tenderness. In the Washington Post, Michael Dirda writes that "Because of Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Rohinton Mistry, to mention just a few of the most prominent authors, American readers have long been able to enjoy one terrific Indian novel after another. But Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is likely to be the first widely read book by a Pakistani writer." Yet as Amit Chaidhuri, in a review of Nadeem Aslam's latest book, points out, Pakistani writing has had a growing international audience for some time now:

What is Pakistani writing? Whatever it might be, it seems to have taken up newsprint lately. Things have been changing quickly and irrevocably over the last seven or eight years: a great symbol of American capitalism was destroyed by two aeroplanes; this was followed, some years later, by a crash in the market no less resounding and sudden; in South Asia, Pakistan (marginalised and nearly abandoned by post-Cold War politics) has been veering between being a frail democracy and becoming a basket case. In no obvious way connected to all this, a handful of Anglophone writers has recently been emerging from that country. Most of them are young, and have written one or two or three books; some, like Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, have successful careers and lives elsewhere. Their work is not part of the long 20th century; they are not a necessary component of a post-colonial efflorescence, as Indian Anglophone writing appeared to be in the 1980s; they are not in any clear way a part of a national literature; they do not bring with them the promise of offering to the reader the ‘sights and sounds’ of what used to be, in Kipling’s time, North-West India. They are a 21st-century phenomenon, appearing at a time when the new supposed fundamentals of this century – free-market dominance, the end of history, the clash of civilisations – suddenly seem frayed and ephemeral. Pakistani writers are interestingly poised: implicated in both the unfolding and the unravelling of our age.

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The Knowledge Holder Doesn't Choke on Cleverness

Words Without Borders has run a fascinating excerpt from a book by Turkish-German author Feridun Zaimoglu, entitled "Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak vom Rande der Gesellschaft." "Koppstoff" means "head material," and can refer both to the Muslim headscarf and the thoughts that pass through one's head. The rest of the title has been translated as "The Knowledge Holder Doesn't Choke on Cleverness." The book is the second in a series: The first contained the thoughts and feelings of 24 male Turkish narrators. This book purports to transmit the voices of 26 Turkish women living in Germany, each prefaced by an author's explanation of where this particular voice comes from--although as the introduction at WWB points out, the work's ethnographic framework cuts both ways, seeming to bolster verisimilitude but also injecting the suspicion that these voices have been crafted by the author. In any case, the work's accomplishment is that it sounds very fresh and very true. Here's a bit of the thoughts of Necla Hanim, "a 63-year-old cleaning woman:"

ı understand their eyes exactly, ı know all about their figuring me out: the fat uniformed cleaning lady, who does exactly as she's told: Don't use more than two capfuls of cleaning solution in the half full water bucket; so she did understand that after all; we can't really complain about our Turk. My sign is completely frozen. Even if other German women's smocks are colorful, ı'm the flowered auntie. Güzel oğlum, bunlar ıslah olmazlar. But we say, when we're together in a nice group amongst ourselves: ı have so and so much Almanya on my back, so and so many tons of Almanya dragging me down, and ı'll never be able to lose that weight: this is the lot of everyone, what you take from the hand into your mouth, what you eat of your lot, and this lot turns your cells into listless gummy animals, into Scheytanstuff in god-created soul, that turns more and more into a filth-feeder. We eat dirt and it has never tasted good to us.

As you can see, the book is written in a way that mixes Turkish and fluent but ungrammatical German ("Almanya" is the Arabic--and I guess Turkish--word for Germany; "Scheytan" must mean devil). The English translators have done a great job of maintaining this very alive, very expressive language.

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