احتفالية فلسطين للأدب | Palestine Festival of Literature

Meena Alexander

Born in India and raised there and in Sudan at eighteen Meena went to England to study. Her cycle of poems `Letters to Gandhi’ was composed in 2002 in the aftermath of violence in Gujarat. She has published six volumes of poetry including Illiterate Heart (winner of the PEN Open Book Award), Raw Silk and Quickly Changing River. Her memoir Fault Lines was selected as one of the best books of the year by Publishers Weekly. She is the editor of Indian Love Poems. Her volume of essays Poetics of Dislocation appeared in 2009. She has received awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry and her work has been anthologized and translated into several languages.

Meena Alexander

March 18, 2012

The last day of Palfest 2011 — it started quietly. Our trusty bus, the fat bellied one in which we all sat together, rolled out of Ramallah. As I stared out of the window, I could see the wild flowering yellow sprays in amongst the rocks on the hillside, and on a knoll where we stopped for a minute, a whole cluster of the delicate red anemones. The ones with the dark hearts that leap up on the frail green stalk.

At Palfest we have come as visitors, well wishers, writers come to a land that is undergoing great difficulty. I thought of the stumps of olive trees, a scarred field glimpsed out of the bus window one morning near Nablus. The Israeli soldiers had cut the trees because they were deemed to be a security risk. Whole families depended on the livelihood from the trees.

We got into Hebron a little later than planned, There was a tour of the embattled city, where settlers had come into the very heart of the city and terribly disrupted the lives of Palestinians. The glorious city of sandstone and carved trellis work, an ancient city was being depleted of its inhabitants and The Hebron Rehabilitation committee which we visited was involved in helping rebuild the houses, stone by stone, millimeter by millimeter as someone there put it. In the street of the Gold market there were international observers. One of the them told me that there job was to watch the school children, both boys and girls had their bags checked by soldiers and were also subjected to body searches. The gentleman at the Hebron Rehabilitation Center who was speaking to us about the experience of the children had said: `These things come in the blood, they are bloody things.’

We walked in the street and above our heads was netting – the settlers who lived above the street had flung garbage and all manner of waste, onto the heads of the shopkeepers there. There were soldiers everywhere, on rooftops, at street corners. I thought of the students in the workshop at Hebron University. How attentive they were to the music of poetry. What were their daily lives like? I thought back to the child in Balata refugee camp who had made a picture of barbed wire, knotted around a flag, and a huge lock on the barbed wire and a creature that looked part bird, part woman flying down. In its beak was a key.

We passed Beit Jala in our bus and on the walls of the check point at Bethlehem, those enormous dirty grey walls that cut the air and sky, someone had painted a hand, on the palm a red heart, but the fingers missing – with the caption Five Fingers of the same Hand. Elsewhere on the wall there was huge and colorful graffiti, animals with huge tails and wings, trees, people gathering, a celebration of life and resistance. Inside the checkpoint we were in a large empty shed. No soldiers were visible, but there was a very loud voice that came on from time to time, barking out orders. Ahead of us was a Palestinian family with two tiny boys. One of the boys held onto the bars of the swivel gate and tried to poke his head through, the sort of thing a child would do. Behind us was a multicolored poster of the church of the Holy Nativity. `Come and feel the glory’ it said and under it, in elaborate letters – Israel. It took us a while, but we were able to find our way to the right gate, the one that suddenly had a light flashing. One by one, passport in hand, we made our way through.

The evening started with a reception for Palfest in the American Colony Hotel. After the wine and canapes we set out in a bus for Silwan. We were to read that night in the solidarity tent. Silwan is where houses are being demolished and the people are resisting as best they can. Earlier that evening the Israeli army had lobbed tear gas at the tent, trying to get rid of the people in it. Close to Silwan the bus stopped. We left the bus and walked in a group. The acrid scent of tear gas was everywhere. The dark was illuminated by lights from a few shops, and we could see the glowing lights in the houses nearby. A cluster of people stood there, as we figured out what to do. Onions helped, cut onions that were passed around, scarves, scraps of tissue, anything to ease the tear gas. There were broken stones on the road, and from the houses nearby the people were chanting Allah u Akbar’ Whistles came in the dark. There were soldiers on the hillside nearby, though we could not immediately see them. Our destination was close by. How dark the tent was as we stumbled in, a cheer went up as the lights came on. Plastic chairs were rearranged quickly. Fekhri Abu Diab from the Silwan Solidarity Committee who welcomed us spoke in very moving fashion. `We had wanted to welcome you’ he said `in our own way and with the poems of a thirteen year old poet, but see we now welcome you with tear gas.’– One of the signs in the tent – `Israel wants to demolish the houses of 1500 years. We will not give up our houses — Bustan Committee.`

Several of us read, poems and prose pieces and Ahdaf did an amazing job of on the spot translation. There was supposed to be an open mike so the people of Silwan could read and share their work, but because of the tear gas, the parents had taken their children to the relative safety of home. The Palestinian rap group DAM brought the house down with their songs. The first rap was in English, for the benefit of Palfest, since many of us did not know Arabic. An amazing piece about being in an elevator with a beautiful woman who could well aim her machine gun at you. The lead singer had a T shirt with a teddy bear. The bear had an eyepatch. When I asked him what it was. He looked at me and said `Just like that.’

So ended our last evening all together.

Impossible Grace

1.
At Herod’s gate
I heap flowers in a crate

Poppies, moist lilies –
It’s dusk, I wait.

2.
Wild iris,
The color of your eyes before you were born

That hard winter
And your mother brought you to Damascus gate.

3.

My desire silent as a cloud,
It floats through New gate

Over the fists
Of the beardless boy-soldiers

4.
You stopped for me at Lion’s gate,
Feet wet with dew

From the torn flagstones
Of Jerusalem.

5.
Love, I was forced to approach you
Through Dung Gate

My hands the color
Of the broken houses of Silwan,

6.
At Zion’s gate I knelt and wept.
An old man, half lame,
– He kept house in Raimon’s café –
Led me to the fountain.

7.
At Golden gate
Where rooftops ring with music,

I glimpse your face.
You have a coat of many colors — impossible grace.

c. Meena Alexander 2011

April 4, 2011 – Composed late at night, Indian Hospice, Jerusalem
(Actually early the next morning, 12:38 am; continued writing very early morning April 5)

April 20, 2011 – Performed in Silwan

Suad Amiry

Suad Amiry is a Palestinian writer and architect. She is the director of the Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation – sponsored by Sida, the Swedish Agency for International Development Cooperation, and the Ford Foundation. In 2006 she was appointed vice-chair of the Board of Trustees of Birzeit University. Her book Sharon and My Mother-in-Law has been translated into 11 languages and was awarded the prestigious 2004 Viareggio Prize. Her latest book is Murad, Murad. Amiry lives in Ramallah with her husband, the academic and political activist Salim Tamari.

Asmaa Azaizeh

Asmaa Azaizeh received her BA in Journalism and English Language from Haifa University in 2006. She has worked as a journalist and presenter in various local newspapers and radio stations. Currently, she is a news editor and presenter at Raya FM radio station and a presenter on Palestinian television. She is also active in several cultural activities including editing the poetry section on www.qadita.net.

Asmaa won the Young Writer Award from the Abdel Mohsen Qattan Foundation in 2010 and first volume of poetry, “Liwa” will be published later this year. She has also contributed to and participated in various journals, anthologies and poetry festivals. Her work has been translated into English, German, Persian and Hebrew.

Bidisha

A writer and broadcaster who began her career at 14, as a critic for various arts publications. She signed her first book deal at 16. She currently presents arts shows and documentaries for BBC Radio 3, 4 and the World Service and writes for The New Statesman, the FT, The Guardian and The Observer. She judged the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2009 and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2010. Her latest book is Venetian Masters.

Bidisha

March 18, 2012

“You will go and see for yourself – just see how it is. They have ethnic roads. Certain roads for one ethnicity, other roads for another ethnicity. It is not just about the wall. It is about how people live – how people have to live.”

These were the words of a London-based Palestinian academic and activist when I told him I’d be attending the 2011 Palestine Literary Festival – Palfest for short – founded by the internationally bestselling and highly respected Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif and supported by a group of trustees and various cultural and educational institutions internationally. I told the man that I was ignorant, that reading briefly about the history of Palestine and Israel was nothing like experiencing its reality in the long term, that despite the best will in the world I wasn’t sure how a group of writers could change anything after only a week of touring, reading and speaking. I told him that I have never appreciated non-specialists and dilettantes who weigh in on matters of combined international social, ideological, political, economic, historical and cultural importance after a brief dip in troubled waters. Such experiences can be distorted by a sense of privilege, voyeurism, touristic objectification or simple ignorance. I told him that it is contemptibly easy for those whose lives have never been touched by oppression to have big opinions about the lives of those whom they regard as small, weak, oppressed and outgunned. I told him that Palestine wasn’t on my roster of issues, that I have never thought much about it or taken any stance other than (or more nuanced than) a distanced distaste for the Israeli occupation. I had never been an activist about this issue and I did not plan to become one.

But the man’s answer was wise: since I am a journalist I should participate in Palfest and observe what is around me, without sentimentality or editorialisation. He joked in return that my ignorance could be moulded into neutrality, indifference into impartiality, disinterest into balance, flippancy into black humour.

For the next week I’ll follow his advice. I am in the company of more than a dozen writers as well as various people who are filming, fixing, presenting, organising and documenting the experience. The participants include Gary Younge, Lorraine Adams, Mohamed Hanif, Ursula Owen, Ghada Karmi, John McCarthy, Alice Walker, Ala Hlehel, Asmaa Azaizeh and Anne Chisholm, all of whom are internationally renowned as thinkers, writers and speakers. We will be discussing everything from life writing and autobiography to diaspora and orientalism. Palfest is not overtly political, but it is about combining ideas, people, power, culture and creativity to make something which has a lasting effect on the attendees, the speakers and the wider society in the cities we visit. We will be in Jerusalem, Nablus, Nazareth and Ramallah, the refugee camp at Balata and the university at Bethlehem, with the aim of doing nothing more (and nothing less) than celebrating the written and spoken word, sharing stories and ideas, honouring survival and resilience, deepening our perspective, widening our understanding, examining history and envisioning a future.

Anne Chisholm

Anne Chisholm is a biographer and critic who has worked in journalism and publishing in the UK, the USA and Australia. As a journalist, she has worked on Private Eye, Time Magazine, The Sunday Telegraph and the Observer and written for the New Statesman, the Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement; in publishing, she was a reader and editor for Jonathan Cape and Bloomsbury.

Her first book, Philosophers of the Earth, published in 1972, looked at some of the pioneers of the environmental movement; her most recent, published in 2009, was a biography of Frances Partridge, the diarist and pacifist who lived through the entire 20th century before dying at the age of 103. Other books include Faces of Hiroshima (1985) an account of some of the survivors of the bombing, and a biography of the press baron Lord Beaverbrook (1992)

She has taught courses on Life Writing for the Arvon Foundation and been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas, and judged many literary prizes including the Booker Prize .

Formerly on the management committee of English PEN, she has been a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1988 and became Chair of Council in 2008. The RSL, founded by George IV in 1820, awards fellowships to writers of distinction, holds public talks and debates, administers prizes, runs master classes and supports the celebration of good writing and the community of writers both national and international .

Susannah Clapp

Susannah Clapp is the author of With Chatwin (Cape 1997, Vintage 1998), a portrait of Bruce Chatwin. She helped to found the London Review of Books, has worked as a publisher’s reader and editor, as the radio critic of the Sunday Times and as the theatre critic of the New Statesman. She has reviewed novels and non-fiction for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the Observer, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman and the Independent on Sunday. She is a regular contributor to Radio 3’s Nightwaves, and has been the theatre critic of the Observer since 1997. She is currently working on a book about postcards.

Geraldine D’amico

Geraldine D’Amico was born in France from a Romanian mother and Ukrainian father, both Jewish. She studied English which she tought in secondary schools and at university and became a literary translator (Martin Amis, Hanif Kureishi, Sam Fuller…). She left Paris with her Sicilian husband to live in Boston where she started teaching French (at Harvard and Babson college). After five years in the US and one in Italy, they finally moved to the UK. She taught French at King’s College, was Cultural Attachee at the French Embassy for five years, worked two years in publishing and has been the director of Jewish Book Week for the last 6 years. The speakers discuss all sort of themes - identity, exile, the Holocaust, Israel, Palestine – and come from all over the world.

DAM

Da Arabian MC’s (Suhell Nafar, Tamer Nafar, Mahmoud Jreri).

Heralded by the major French newspaper Le Monde as “the spokesman of a new generation,” DAM, the first Palestinian hip hop crew and among the first to rap in Arabic, began working together in the late 1990s. Struck by the uncanny resemblance of the reality of the streets in a Tupac video to the streets in their own neighborhood of Lyd, Tamer Nafar, Suhell Nafar, Mahmoud Jreri were inspired to tell their stories through hip hop.

After their timely song “Min Irhabi” (“Who’s the terrorist”) was downloaded over a million times shortly after its internet release in 2001, DAM became a household name among youth throughout the Middle East. Rolling Stone in France distributed the song free in one of their issues, and the song has been featured in various compilations.

Ten years of performing all over the world has strengthened DAM’s commitment to continue living in their hometown of Lyd – fifteen minutes from Tel Aviv – working to provide the youth of the city and neighboring communities with programs and opportunities that have otherwise been denied to Palestinian citizens of Israel. In addition, they have conducted workshops for young people from the West Bank to the US, Canada, and Europe.

DAM’s music is a unique fusion of east and west, combining Arabic percussion rhythms, Middle Eastern melodies, and urban hip hop. Their work has been influenced by artists as varied as Ghassan Kanafani, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Mahmoud Darwish, Naji al Ali, Tupac, Biggie, Public Enemy, MBS, K’naan, and Pharoahe Monch.

“IHDA” (“Dedication”), DAM’s long-awaited first international album, was released in 2007, and DAM has seen its songs and members featured in films such as “Ford Transit” (Dir. Hany Abu Assad) “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?” (Dir. Morgan Spurlock), “Salt of this Sea” (Dir. Annemarie Jacir), and “Local Angel” and “Forgiveness” (Dir. Udi Aloni). DAM’s history and influence on the Arab hip hop scene is detailed in the feature-length documentary “Slingshot Hip Hop” (Dir. Jackie Reem Salloum). The group has also been featured in Vibe, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Q, Basement, Reuters, and The New York Times, and has appeared on MTV, CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera.

www.damrap.com

Najwan Darwish

Najwan Darwish is a poet, critic and literary editor. He lives in Jerusalem, Palestine. He is the literary advisor of the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). He has published five books, and his Selected Poems, translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, will be published in 2014 by the New York Review of Books.

In 2009, the Hay Festival Beirut39 named him one of the 39 best Arab writers under 39.

Mark Gonzales

(Poet. Scholar. Lover of Life.) | An HBO Def Poet with a Master’s in Education, a Mexican and a Muslim, a Khalil Gibran meets Pablo Neruda in a lyrical break dance cypher, Mark Gonzales lives in the center of intersections. From Palestinian refugee camps, universities in Beirut, foster homes in Portugal, to cities across the Americas, he transcends citizenship identity to break borders and wage beauty across continents through culture. He is respected internationally for his creative approaches to suicide prevention, human rights and human development via performance, photojournalism, and narrative therapy.

Tarik Hamdan

Tarik Hamdan, 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.

Suheir Hammad

The author of breaking poems, recipient of a 2009 American Book Award, and the Arab American Book award for Poetry 2009.Her other books are Zaatar Diva (2006), Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996) and Drops of This Story (1996). Her work has been widely anthologized and adapted for the theatre. Her produced plays include Blood Trinity and breaking letter(s), and she wrote the libretto for the multi-media performance Re-Orientalism. An original writer and performer in the Tony award-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appears in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selections, Salt of The Sea.

Suheir Hammad

March 19, 2012

….h, i, j, k, l.
between “k” and “l” no thing. air. space.
a walk. a wall. a walk.
raja shehadeh is a walker and a trail blazer, but not a tour leader. we walked and climbed and slid and sometimes crawled through the hills in our city slicker clothes. we held each other’s hands as we made ways up and then down. thorns everywhere. settlements on highest ground, and the sun behind clouds. sumac and zaatar and maramiya growing. terraced hills.
the israeli settlers from nearby colonies get to walk in these hills unmolested. the palestinians do not. the beauty and energy of the land, i imagine, has no political motivation, unless the desire to be loved and appreciated is political. it is here.
i wonder if soil has heart. i wonder if blood, sweat, and tears do feed roots and flower fruit. if the earth itself has memory, and can she remember, somehow, all those who came and planted and ate here. especially, as i struggle through the climb, i think of the women in traditional gear, expected roles, climbing with broad steady feet these steps in the hills. i wonder if some people are walking phantom limbs looking for home.
*suad amiry this evening talks about how she gets lost in the west bank, when once she knew it like her hand. so many checkpoints and detours where once there were open roads. “space and time here is not what you think,” she says and i understand. what once took 20 minues now takes ten times the time. where there was space to plant and even bbq and picnic, there is now…the space is still there but it’s no longer accessible. so “here” and “now” mean different things in this place.
*in ramallah i get to see many friends who come out for the festival’s evening event. i ask them each, how has the year been, and the answers are the same, and in an order. first they respond, “alhumdilallah” or something like it, meaning “thank god/all good”. then they ask how i am. then i ask again and the answer is something along the lines of “not bad”. ask again, and the truth comes, and the truth here, now, is beautiful and hard, like the land we walked.
*there is a wall.
here is a land.
now is the time.
the people are here.
still.

Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal is an award-winning poet, playwright, and editor. She has lived in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America and the Arab world. She teaches and lectures nationally and internationally, most recently in Africa, at Columbia University and as Picador Guest Professor, Leipzig University, Germany. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and she has been featured on PBS The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NPR, as well as The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Mail & Guardian, The Jordan Times and Il Piccolo. Her most recent books include: the landmark anthology, Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond (W.W. Norton) and Love and Strange Horses (University of Pittsburgh Press), an Honorable Mention at the San Francisco Book Festival and the New England Book Festival. The New York Times says it is “a book that trembles with belonging (and longing).” Her work has been translated into more than 15 languages, and some of her awards include: Lannan Foundation Fellow, Honored Finalist for the Gift of Freedom Award, Recipient of La Orden Alejo Zuloaga (Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature 2011), and the AE Ventures Fellowship, Shortlisted for The Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, Winner of the Menada Literary Award, and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles National Book Award. Handal writes the blog-column, The City and The Writer, for Words without Borders magazine.

Mohammad Hanif

Mohammad Hanif’s first novel A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. It won the Commonwealth Best First Book Award and the Shakti Bhatt Award in India.

Hanif was born in Okara, Pakistan. After graduating from the Pakistan Air Force Academy he quit to pursue a career in journalism. He worked for Newsline as a senior reporter. Later he joined the BBC and became the head of its Urdu Service in London. He has contributed to The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post and the Urdu literary journal Aaj. He has written plays for the stage and screen, including a critically acclaimed BBC drama, the feature film The Long Night and the stage play The Dictator’s Wife. Hanif is a graduate of the University of East Anglia’s creative writing programme. He is currently a special correspondent for BBC Urdu and lives in Karachi.

Alaa Hlehel

Alaa Hlehel was born in 1974 in the village of Jish. He lives in Acre. He completed a BA in Communications and Fine Arts at Haifa University and has a diploma in Screenwriting. He is the editor of www.qadita.net, an Arabic website for culture and politics.

Hlehel has published one novel, The Circus (2001), and two collections of short stories: Stories at the Time of Need (2004) and The Father, the Son and the Lost Ghost (2008). His stories have been translated into English, French and German.

Hlehel has written and directed two short films, Confessions with Chocolate andCome to the Hummus, and wrote the screenplay for The Inheritance, currently in pre-production. He is working on a mockumentary about the Transfer.

Hlehel’s plays include Breaking News; DYAB, Johha & El-Bahlool, The Sultan Boot and Haidestan. His play The Absolutely Devoted Soldier was presented in Germany in 2008. He has translated plays by Pinter, Goldoni and Levin into Arabic.

Hlehel was selected as one of the Beirut 39 in 2009. He has won a number of awards, including the Theatre Award from the Qattan Foundation; The A-Safir Newspaper Prize for short stories; the Young Writer award for The Circus in 2001 and again for Stories at the time of Need in 2002; The Inheritance won first place in the “Adam Flint Script Competition” at the 2004 International Student Film Festival in Tel-Aviv.

Rachel Holmes

Rachel Holmes most recent book, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Times of Saartjie Baartman, was published by Bloomsbury in 2007. She is currently writing a life of Eleanor Marx. Rachel is Head of Literature and the Spoken Word at the Southbank Centre, London, and runs the annual London Literature Festival. She is a founder and patron of FOTAC UK, which supports the Treatment Action Campaign in the fight for HIV and AIDS in South Africa, and Chair of Africa Beyond, celebrating African artists in the UK.

She was named as one of the 50 women to watch by the Arts Council’s Cultural Leadership Programme.

Ghada Karmi

Ghada Karmi is a leading British-Palestinian academic and writer. Currently she is a Research Fellow and lecturer at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter in England. She is a frequent media commentator on Middle Eastern issues.

A physician by training, she became an expert on medieval Arabic/Islamic medicine, which involved her in teaching and research at two universities in Syria and Jordan.

Her memoir, In Search of Fatima; a Palestinian story (Verso Press, 2002), has gained wide acclaim, and was re-issued in 2009. Her most recent book is Married to another man: Israel’s dilemma in Palestine (Pluto Press, 2007). She is currently working on a history of medieval Arabic medicine to be published by Bloomsbury in 2012.

John McCarthy

John was born in 1956 and raised in Hertfordshire. He read American Studies at Hull from 1979. His first foray into journalism was at Worldwide Television News (now APTN), where, within a year, he had progressed from a temporary job in their London newsroom, via freelancing as a script writer, to editorial roles on various desks.

In 1986 he was sent to Lebanon on his first foreign assignment. His life was changed forever when he was abducted, along with teacher Brian Keenan and held hostage until August 1991. He endured 1,943 days of squalid captivity and had to deal with physical and mental torture, boredom, self-doubt and despair. The film Blind Flight was subsequently made based on his and Keenan’s experiences.

He relived his experiences in Lebanon in the number one best-seller Some Other Rainbow, published by Bantam Press, which was co-authored by Jill Morrell, who had campaigned for the hostages’ release. His other books are Between Extremes, his and Brian Keenan’s account of their journey to Patagonia in 1998, which was another best-seller, and A Ghost Upon Your Path: An Irish Journey, published in 2002.

In 2004, John returned to Beirut to make Out of the Shadows for ITV: a personal and emotional journey documenting his quest to confront the ghosts of his past. He has also presented the six-part ITV series It Ain’t Necessarily So (which found him travelling across the Middle East in search of archaeological evidence for key Bible stories) andFaultlines, which explored the roots of conflict.

Recent television includes a major series for Al Jazeera International, which aired throughout 2007. God’s Business examined the financial realities of the world’s major religions. Art of Faith, which examined the architecture and art of the three Abrahamic faiths aired in spring 2008 on Sky Arts. Art of Faith II, looking at the art and architecture of the eastern traditions aired in 2010.

He is currently writing a book about the experience since 1948 of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, the one in five Israelis who are Arabs.

He is Patron of the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, and has been awarded an Honorary D.Litt from Hull and the CBE.

John McCarthy

March 18, 2012

The day started brilliantly with breakfast on the terrace and most of us are feeling restored after a good sleep. “We are Family” is playing over the restaurant loudspeakers. The track seems to speak to the rapidly growing bonds of friendship within in our group. But then again the song’s refrain is ironic, to say the least, in terms of the ‘relative values’ displayed by Israeli officialdom.

Heading north from Jerusalem, we re-entered the West Bank and followed winding roads through steep valleys, past olive groves, Arab villages and Israeli settlements. The Israeli settlements are mainly very neat, uniform developments, approached by neat spur roads. In the stark, wild beauty of this landscape such trim suburbs look very out of place behind their perimeter fences. The Arab villages were more organic, rougher around the edges.
And there are checkpoints of course. The one just outside the town of Nablus has been left open for some years now, but nevertheless an Israeli flag still flies above it, just to remind everyone that Israeli might is never far away.

Nablus was buzzing. Immediately you had the sense of a thriving community – an economic and social centre for the area. Wandering the narrow alleyways of the souk with Ursula and Gary, I felt the surge of warmth and excitement I’ve come to associate with being in an Arab town. Although I’ve but a pittance of Arabic, somehow I get the vibe and feel at home. But then why wouldn’t you feel at home in a place where every few metres someone greets you with “Welcome!” It seems amazing that the welcome for strangers – even the smiles and banter for each other – remains such a constant part of Palestinian society. The souk has everything on sale, small stalls selling spices, clothes, hardware. I’ve got to say though that a bucketful of sheep heads beside a butcher’s shop has me hurrying on.

After lunch in a little cafe we rejoined the group and headed north again. The horizon opened out; the landscape more gently rolling than it was near Jerusalem. There seemed to be fewer settlements.

North of Jenin the country opened out even more, acres of farmland surrounding small towns with distant low hills off to the west. It gives you a feeling of how the land would have been right across old Palestine. Then we hit a traffic jam. Not an accident or road works but a checkpoint, a big one, the border. Beyond this we will go “into the ‘48”; that is, into Israel.

The oppression of Israel’s obsession with ‘security’ hits home at places like this. It is a crude industry of humiliation. The security people walk about very slowly chatting noisily to each other as they rudely wave some drivers on, others to stop. They barely look people in the face as they demand to see ID papers. It’s the rudeness, the ritual quality of the degradation that is so obvious and so distressing.

Suddenly we were in the thick of this nonsense again. A plain clothes policeman took exception to one of us taking pictures. We all had to get off the coach to have our passports and bags checked. The racism was rampant. Anyone with a brown skin did not get their passport back – even though they were citizens of America, Britain or Canada.

Most of us were then told to get back on the bus and wait. Around our bubble of detention, cars stood half emptied as sniffer dogs and border guards rifled through them. Their human cargo went through the hall for ID checks and questioning. Some are taken into a small room, for more detailed questioning, perhaps a full body search. Talk on the bus turned again to wondering how the Palestinian people keep so level headed, apparently letting it wash over them.

After more than an hour we went on. Most of us anyway Ahdaf, Omar, Murat and Mohammad were kept there for a couple more hours to answer pointless questions. (Omar and Murat suffered the indignity of a body search.)

Eventually we gathered together again at the Arab Cultural Association in Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel. After supper there we enjoyed an evening with a panel – and much discussion from the floor – on the theme of how the experience of Palestinians can best be expressed to the world through literature.

At the start of the event, the chair of the Arab Writers’ Union, who bore a surprising resemblance to a youthful Danny Kaye, said a few words. He spoke of the importance of literature in the development of the Palestinian liberation narrative. And, touching Ahdaf’s note from yesterday’s blog, he spoke of the importance of building connections: between Palestinian communities in Israel, the Palestinian territories and beyond, and with the wider world.

Sitting in the packed room, looking around at audience and the Palfest group, I was touched by the sense of connection between us all. I don’t know how to say “we are family” in Arabic, but I know I felt it tonight.

Taha Muhammad Ali

Taha Muhammad Ali was forced with his family into a year-long exile, when their village was destroyed by the Israeli army in 1948. He was seventeen. They eventually managed to come back and settle just five kilometres away from Saffuriyya, in Nazareth, where he has lived ever since. For the next fifty years, Ali would sell souvenirs during the day to tourists from his shop in Nazareth. At night, however, he would study poetry; everything from classical Arabic to contemporary American free verse. In the 1950s Ali published his first short stories, but his poems did not begin to appear in Arabic periodicals until the 1970s. Muhammad Ali’s books of poetry include Fourth Qasida (1983), Fooling the Killers (1989), and Fire in the Convent Garden (1992).

Akram Musallem

‏Born in the village of Talfeet in Nablus in 1971, recieved a BA in Arabic Literature and an MA in International Relations, both from Bir Zeit University is currently an editor at “Ayam” newspaper and at the Palestine Center for Israeli Studies, “Madar”. Is also Editor in Chief of the Periodical Siyasat

‏He wrote Alexander’s Premonitions published in 2003 and The Biography of a Sweating Scorpion which won the Abdel Mohsen Qattan Foundation prize for 2007 and which has been translated into French and Italian

Ursula Owen

Ursula Owen has been an influential figure in the worlds of literature and free expression since the 1970s. She was a founder director of Virago Press, was for two years Cultural Policy Advisor to the Labour Party, and, as Editor and Chief Executive, revitalised Index on Censorship. From 2003 to 2009 Ursula was Project Director for the Free Word Centre, taking it through from an idea to a concrete reality with premises in London. She is now Founder Trustee of Free Word She is on the board of the Southbank Centre and a Trustee of English Touring Opera and World Film Collective. She lives in London.

Richard Price

Richard Price, novelist and screenwriter, was born and raised in the Bronx.

From the early 1970’s, Price earned his reputation as one of New York’s preeminent writers with The Wanderers (1974), Blood Brothers (1976), Ladies’ Man (1978), The Breaks (1983), Clockers (1992), which was nominated for the National Book Critic Circle Award, Freedomland (1998), and Samaritan (2003).

In addition to his literary career, Price has also written numerous screenplays including “The Color of Money,” (1982) which was nominated for an Academy Award in Screenwriting, “Sea of Love,”(1989) and “Ransom” (1996). In his most recent book, Lush Life (2008), Price continues to peel back the layers of his beloved city to examine the crustier side of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, standing in direct opposition to the glamorous faux-bohos who recently put the area back on the trendy map.

Richard Price was the recipient of the 1999 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2007, he won an Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire, and in 2009 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in New York.

Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif is the author of the bestselling The Map of Love (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999 and translated into 30 languages), as well as the well-loved In the Eye of the Sun and the collection of short stories, I Think of You. Ms Soueif is also a political and cultural commentator. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004, as was her translation (from Arabic into English) of Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah. She writes regularly for the Guardian in the UK and has a weekly column (in Arabic) in al-Shorouk in Egypt. In 2007 Ms Soueif founded Engaged Events, a UK based charity. Its first project is the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). Ms Soueif has recently edited Reflections on Islamic Art (BQFP: 2011). Her account of Egyptian events, Cairo: my City, our Revolution, was published by Bloomsbury in January 2012. In 2010 Ms Soueif became the first recipient of the Mahmoud Darwich Award and in 2012 was awarded the Constantin Cavafis Prize in Cairo and the Metropolis Bleu Award in Montreal.

Ahdaf Soueif

April 18, 2013

So here we are at the end of Day One of the Festival and we’ve done it!

Our authors got through the King Hussein Bridge. Three were detained and questioned and questioned – and questioned. The rest waited for them and they all arrived in Jerusalem in time for some tea on the hotel terrace before heading off for our opening event at the African Community Centre in the heart of the Old City.

And in the heart of the Old City, surprise surprise, a new military barricade had sprung up just at the entrance to the African Community Centre. The armed Israeli soldiers as usual with their “forbidden, forbidden” – and the usual pretense that what they were doing was to protect the Aqsa Mosque. So we insisted that we weren’t going to the mosque and we kind of elbowed through. But the soldiers did manage to stop some of the audience and their presence meant that the reception and music that were meant to be on the street didn’t happen.

Never mind, we got on with the event: some great oud and songs by the terrific Golan musician Madar al-Mughrabi. You know, that’s a little indicator in itself: a Syrian musician with a Moroccan surname, performing Egyptian songs – Sheikh Imam and Sayyed Darwish no less – to a Palestinian audience – and it all totally normal and everyone knowing the songs and just about holding back from singing along. Anyway: then a great panel performance from Bidisha, Mohamad Hanif, Richard Price and Gary Young moderated by Najwan Darwish. The event was attended by many of our old friends including Wafa Darwish, Albert Agazerian and his two daughters, Suha Khuffash from the British Council and the new British Consul Sir Vincent Fean and many others.

I had to run off and do a BBC World interview – in an ENTIRELY empty huge television centre – and talk up the Egyptian Revolution – totally genuinely. How odd that the media still talks in terms of One Man: isn’t it a problem that the Revolution doesn’t have ‘A Leader’? (No, it’s not; it’s good that the Revolution is so broad-based and so authentic and so communally owned), how can you trust Field-Marshall Tantawi to deliver when he was part of the establishment? (Well, he is delivering, and he can’t act out of his personal will; he clearly has to act in negotiation – at least – with the wish of the people) and so on.

Ran back to the Festival in time for dinner at the amazing Jerusalem Hotel: maqloubeh and minty lemon and more Egyptian music. This time very loud and dancy. And who should come dancing in but our great friend, the irrepressible Munther Fahmi, owner and manager of the Bookshop at the American Colony, who is currently fighting a deportation order that would see him exiled from his native Jerusalem. If you’ve not yet joined the thousands of the great and the good who have signed the petition against his deportation please look it up on this website and SIGN.

Oh, and earlier today, while the other PalFestians were setting up in the Africa Centre I hopped off to Bethlehem to take part in the KidsFest that PalFest and Lajee Centre and the Hoping Foundation set up in Aida Camp. The 400 or so kids had reading workshops and singing and puppetry and face-painting and the grand climax was every child tying a message or a wish to the string of a helium balloon and everyone letting go at the same time and the balloons floating in a swarm of colour into the sky. One little boy said he hoped his balloon would get to Gaza. Rich Wiles and the leaders of the Centre there were exhaustedly happy and Rich can now go on a one-day holiday to Jericho with his Palestinian bride.

What’s also very heartening is to see how many of the volunteers there are young men and women who grew up in the Camp and who were themselves children at Lajee. Some have stayed within Palestine, others come back from universities and jobs across the world to volunteer at Lajee for a couple of months a year. Lajee says they bring energy and hope. They say the kids at Lajee give them energy and hope.

“Only connect,” famously said E M Forster. And that’s what we’re doing. All of us. Children and adults, artists and audiences, Palestinians, Arabs and Internationals. We insist on the dynamic and creative links between us, on maintaining them, enlarging and intensifying them. This is what matters, and this is what, across the world, will shape our future.

Ahdaf Soueif

April 18, 2013

It’s always a pleasure to go to Birzeit. That’s what we did this morning. Back to Kamal Nasser Hall and the buzzy, friendly students. We had an excellent panel with Dr Ahmad Harb of Birzeit university introducing Adam Foulds, Susan Abulhawa, Suheir Hammad, Rachel Holmes and Jillian Edelstein. I was embarrassed when it couldn’t go into question time because I had to be taken up to the stage to collect the Mahmoud Darwish Award. Embarrassed – but tremendously honoured by the Award and moved by the response I got from Birzeit and from my colleagues. I made a short speech and managed to get Gamal Abd el-Nasser into it!!

Into the coach and out of it we spilled into Tanya and Hanna Nasser’s courtyard where they gave us lunch and allowed us to wander through their amazing home. It’s a beautiful traditional Palestinian stone family home where every staircase is a delight and every room holds family treasure. On the piano were photographs of Edward Said and of a young and side-burned Mahmoud Darwish ‘baptising’ Tanya and Hanna’s baby daughter in poetry. We took away Tanya’s memoir, “A Family Room,” which she’d written for John Berger.

Time to go, and from the grace and graciousness of the Nasser’s home to the banalities and bullying of Qalandiya Checkpoint. There we raggled for an hour – to ‘raggle’: to move and hang about in a bedraggled manner or in a manner conducive to making you feel bedraggled. We got through and got ourselves back to Jerusalem and into our hotels then some of us sped out again to go to the British Council. The British Council was very kindly letting us use their video-conferencing facilities to talk with Dr Haidar Eid of al-Aqsa University in Gaza and some of his colleagues and students.

PalFest tried very hard this year to gain access to Gaza. But we failed. We needed to gain access from the Israeli side, from Erez, and so we needed to apply to the Israeli authorities besieging Gaza for permission. We could not apply for ourselves and, ultimately, we could not get any international organisation to apply on our behalf. Everyone we approached was friendly, everyone thought PalFest was a good thing and what it was doing was important, and maybe next year they could do something with us, but this year they must have been feeling the squeeze on permits was such that they could not afford to apply for anyone other than their own staff.

So Sheila Whitaker, Rose Fenton, Susie Abulhawa, Eugene Schoulgin and I sat in the British Council studio, and on the screen from Gaza we saw Haidar sitting at the head of a large table around which were ranged maybe 20 people, young and old, men and women, hijabed and not and they courteously thanked us for taking the trouble to come to the studio and talk to them and I, personally, was – as we Egyptians say ‘fi noss hdoumi’ – (only filling half my clothes) so diminished was I with shame. I won’t say who, but hardened campaigners from our side had to blow noses and wipe faces and the Gazans were, naturally, collected and eloquent and funny and passionate and they quoted our own work back to us and talked about ‘othering’ and about ‘writing back’ and they were just very politely keen that we should know that they do not think of themselves as suffering a ‘humanitarian’ problem and needing humanitarian aid; that what they wanted was recognition of the real nature of their problem and a fair and just solution to it. As the woman selling vine-leaves in the market in Jerusalem said to me back in November 2000: we don’t want rice. We want you to act politically.

************

Evening and there’s a stream of people walking in the dusk through the beautiful alleys of the Old City towards the African Community Centre. The Africans are one of the oldest communities in Jerusalem and their magnificent, vaulted centre has pride of place leaning companionably against the walls of al-Haram al-Sharif. They and our PalFest team had done an amazing job of dressing up the space: a brilliant two-winged auditorium had been created and we had lights, candles, a sound system and the excellent Jerusalem Ensemble for Arabic Music in place.

This was PalFest’s closing night and our participants stood up and spoke words not their own – words that had inspired them and that they wanted to leave behind in Palestine. You can watch thevideo of this superb closing event.

We went for dinner in Askadinya where we’ve now become friends with the two musicians (tabla and oud and vocals) who play Egyptian songs for us in between the Palestinian ones. We missed Mordechai Vannunu who’s now danced at the end of PalFest 2 years running but who’s now been re-arrested – possibly for consorting with us on the opening night.

Dear friends, colleagues, comrades, fans: PalFest 2010 is over. For PalFest 2011 to happen there has to be a way of raising £150,000 without it killing me. Ideas welcome.

Ahdaf Soueif

April 18, 2013

At the Allenby Bridge we sat down and waited.

Oddly, our Jordanian guide on the bus from Amman kept assuring us that we would hand over all our passports in one go, together with our ‘manifest’ (that’s the list of travellers with their passport numbers, rather like a bill of lading) and ‘our neighbours’ as he kept calling the Israelis would let us through in 3 minutes! Well, we were 21 people in the group queuing up at 11 am. Sixteen got through inside an hour but the rest were held behind. This being Saturday the bridge was due to close at 4.00. At 4.00 they let the remaining 5 through.

In Jerusalem we had a 45 minute turnaround time to shower and get into our heels and make-up – well, some of us, anyway, and head for our Opening Night at the Palestinian National Theatre. We walked down Ibn Khaldun Street. The weather was brilliant, it was 6 o’clock and the stone houses glowed in the dipping sunlight. The National Theatre is like treasure; it’s hidden behind a very ordinary-looking row of houses, you walk through a café, turn a corner and – there it is. Its courtyard always looked hospitable; tonight it looked festive. Our Palestinian partners, Yabous Productions, and our advance party, had done us proud: there was a long table with canapés, and all sorts of delicious goodies, there were fresh fruit juices, and a sumptuous bouquet of blue iris and white roses. Munzer Fahmi, from the American Colony Bookshop had set up his trestle tables and was already selling the works of the PALFEST authors.

I saw 10 old friends in the first minute, all the Jerusalem cultural and academic set were there, a lot of Internationals, a lot of Press. We stood in the early evening light, by the tables laden with books and food and flowers, nibbled at kofta and borek and laughed and chatted and introduced new friends to old.

Rania Elias and Khaled el-Ghoul from Yabous started calling us in. Everyone moved towards and into the foyer. Someone clapped for silence and Nazmi al-Ju’beh, Chair of the Board of Yabous gave a brief welcome speech. Then we started moving towards the auditorium and I heard someone say quietly “They’ve come.”
“Who?” Looking around – and there they were; the men in the dark blue fatigues, with pack-type things strapped to their backs and machine-guns cradled in their arms. I had a moment of unbelief. Surely, even if they were coming to note everything we said and to make a show of strength they still woudn’t come with their weapons at the ready like this? But then there were more of them, and more … “They’re going to close us down.”
“No!”
“Yes. They have. They’ve closed us down. Look!”
Some people were already in the auditorium. The Theatre manager was telling them they had to leave. People – our audience, our writers – were surging backwards and forwards:
“let’s go into the auditorium..”
“Let them carry us out each one ..”
“If they get you inside the auditorium they’ll close the doors and beat the hell out of you ..”
“Let’s go outside and start the event on the street ..
“What’s happening? What’s happening?”

Throughout all this the 15 or so Israeli soldiers held their positions and their weapons – how they, or their leader, made their will known to the Palestinians I did not see.

As we stepped outside and I started wondering whether we should just kick off right there on the courtyard of the theatre or whether we might actually get beaten someone said ‘we’ll go to the French Cultural Centre.” The French Cultural Attaché was in the audience and he had offered to host the event.

We started walking down Salah el-Din street towards the French Cultural Centre. I looked behind me and there was the Festival: a brightly-dressed, ornamented procession of authors and audience strolling along Salah el-Din Street, chatting and laughing and cradling in their arms trays of baclaveh and kibbeh and salads and bouquets of flowers.

We sat on the raised patio of the French Cultural Centre and our audience sat and stood in the garden. Henning Mankell spoke of how his involvement with Africa makes him a better European. Some workmen engaged on the first floor of the house next door paused to listen. Birds swept through their goodnight flight around us. Deborah Moggach spoke about children and the changing shape of the family. A cat shared the stage with us for a brief moment. Audience and authors were engaged and the energy flowed from the patio to the garden. Carmen Callil spoke about her Lebanese grandfather in Australia. A wedding party passed honking its horns outside. Abdulrazak Gurnah, M G Vassanji and Claire Messud read from their work. When the sunset prayers were called the audience started asking and commenting and suggesting. We could have gone on for hours – but we stopped at half past eight. We dispersed; energised, happy, shaking hands, signing books, promising to all meet up again.

Today, my friends, we saw the clearest example of our mission: to confront the culture of power with the power of culture.

Alice Walker

Alice Walker’s writings include several novels, volumes of poetry and short stories. Her most acclaimed work of fiction, The Color Purple (1982) won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a movie by director Steven Spielberg.

Walker is also widely known for her activism on feminist/womanist causes, environemtnal issues and economic injustice. In 1989 and 1992, she wrote two books, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, in which she discussed female circumcision in Africa.

Born on February 9, 1944, in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice was the eighth and last child of parents who were sharecroppers. At the age of eight, Alice lost her sight in one eye when an older brother shot her by accident with a BB gun. In high school, she was valedictorian of her class, and that achievement, coupled with a “rehabilitation scholarship” made it possible for her to go to Spelman, a college for black women in Atlanta, Georgia. It was there that she met Martin Luther King, whom she credits for her decision to start work as an activist in the Civil Rights Movement. After spending two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and during her junior year traveled to Africa as an exchange student.

Gary Younge

Gary Younge is an award-wining New York-based journalist and author who is a columnist for The Guardian and The Nation. In 2009 won the prestigious British James Cameron award for his coverage of the 2008 presidential election and the “combined moral vision and professional integrity” of his work. He has won several other awards for his reporting on issues of race in Britain and the US and been awarded two honorary doctorates. His third and most recent book, Who Are We – and Should It Matter in the 21st Century? offers a searing analysis and a timely overview of identity, affiliation and solidarity and a challenge to those seeking to build a politics that respect both universal humanism and human difference. His previous books include Stranger in a Strange Land, Encounters in the Disunited States, a compilation of his writings from the US and No Place Like Home, A Black Briton’s journey through the Deep South in which he retraced the route of the civil rights Freedom Riders. Formerly the Belle Zeller visiting professor of public policy and social administration at Brooklyn College, Gary Younge grew up near London and read French and Russian at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh before going on to study Journalism at City University, London. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.