احتفالية فلسطين للأدب | Palestine Festival of Literature

Alaa Abd El Fattah

Alaa could have been an important scientist or a famous computer programmer, but whenever he got started he got distracted – by chasing butterflies, or he’d meet interesting people and they’d talk until he forgot his intended career path.

Right now, he spends most of his time in front of a computer screen protesting and fighting for his rights. When questioned about what he does with his time his reply is a lengthy monologue about the coming revolution, his efforts to keep her flames burning. He sees her future unfolding through new technologies, her open source nature, her bloggers and citizen journalists, her manifesto carved in ever-changing wikis and her brightening skies of emails and ideas.

Ghada Abdel Aal

Ghada Abdel Aal is a pharmacist and regular columnist for the Egyptian daily newspaper Al Shorouk and the Saudi magazine Rotana . Her satirical novel Aiza Atgawez [ عايزة أتجوز] has been translated into Italian, German, Dutch, English and French and turned into a popular television series, for which she won Best Comedy Script at the Arab Media Cairo Festival.

She curates the humorous online blog www.wanna-b-a-bride.blogspot.com.

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.

Selma Dabbagh

Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer of fiction based in London. Her short stories have been included in a number of anthologies including those published by Granta and the British Council. She was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Award 2005 and has won and been nominated for various international short story awards. Her first novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, December 2011) that follows the lives of the children of the former exiled leadership who returned to Gaza with the peace deals of the 1990s was recently published to widespread acclaim and reviewed positively by The Independent, the Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mirror, the Times Literary Supplement as well as other British and Middle Eastern newspapers with The Times describing it as “A punchy first novel… beautifully observed… the plot races and the voices are strong.” Dabbagh has lived in various Arab countries including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt, Bahrain and the West Bank. She has recently been working on the script and dialogue for a fiction feature film by the Director Azza el Hassan.

Selma Dabbagh

April 19, 2012

Taking literature to where shit happens

First published in BookBrunch here.

There can be few literature festivals in the world that are as controversial or as difficult to get to for the participants, the audience and the volunteers as the Palestine Festival of Literature. There are also few literary festivals which are as appreciated.

There has been a blockade on Gaza since Hamas were elected in the 2006 Palestinian elections. Tunnels have been built on the Southern border to bypass restrictions put in place by this illegal blockade. As the Gazan joke goes, don’t worry, at the end of the tunnel, there is a tunnel.

The types of products we witnessed being “smuggled” through the Rafah borders by the rather pernicious economy that has developed as a result of these unnatural restrictions were truckloads of Tide washing powder and disposable nappies. It is a cruel and arbitrary closure that is causing malnutrition, through restrictions in food supplies, bad housing, through restrictions in the importation of building materials, and death, through banning the importation of essential medicines.

The worst, worst thing about being in Gaza, one student told me, is not being able to get the books we want.

Earlier this month, I was part of a delegation breaking the siege on Gaza by crossing the Egyptian border. We thought at one point that we might have to resort to the tunnels to get in, as the Egyptian authorities held up the permission-granting process for Egyptian participants until the day before our departure date and, even then, it was only through drumming up international media pressure that these permits were granted. We were again stalled at the border trying to get in, this time for over four hours in the hateful carcinogenic capsule that is the Rafah border crossing. In previous years, participants in the West Bank have been strip-searched at checkpoints by the Israelis, tear-gassed at readings, filmed and threatened by settlers, and female writers have been slapped in the face by soldiers.

A sign,”Welcome to Palestine”, greets the visitor to Gaza with the emblem of the Palestinian National Authority above it. “FREE GAZA!” demands the graffiti lower down on the opposite wall, and on some levels it feels there is a stand-off going on between the two statements. A shelled-out building staring out to sea then reassures the visitor that they are in the right place.

Night had fallen when we arrived and Gaza for us was velvet darkness, a swollen moon and a gentle sea. On that first drive into Gaza, I thought that the route up from the border was uninhabited and I wrote that I felt as though we had journeyed into a secret garden, a forbidden city. But that was only because I had not realized the extent to which Gaza was being literally blacked out.

Through the combined effect of the Israeli bombing of the power station in 2006 and the blockade, which also inhibits the importation of fuel, electricity is limited to eight hours a day, backed up, if inhabitants can afford it, by generators that are unstable and fume-producing. Most petrol stations stand empty, but queues that can last all day of cars, tractors, motorbikes and pedestrians begin on the basis of a rumour that petrol has finally arrived.

The sea, previously the only unlimited visible expanse for the fenced-in, crowded, predominantly young inhabitants of this strip of land, has recently been lit by Israeli floodlights that illuminate the darkened population at regular intervals, to prevent Palestinian fishermen from fishing the fish they have harvested for generations.

The students we lecture and hold workshops for are as students in an ideal world should be: ballsy and bright. “Why,” they ask, “should Palestinian writers only write about politics? How do you write from a child”s perspective? Does revolutionary writing go stale? Why is Gaza so misrepresented?” “Why,” one student asks a prominent Egyptian blogger, “did you tweet that you were scared to be visiting Gaza? What were you scared of exactly?”

At night, some cafes are lit by bare candles stuck on white tiles and shisha coals glow in small mounds as men inhale, in silence, in the dark. But our crowds cheer as the lights go out, Ha! It”s done it again! is the tone of it as the power cuts out again, and again, before generators kick in, if they do. Security men stand around in suits with small guns and little work, occupied only with duties of watching and waiting and informing on others who watch wait and inform in defense.

A taxi driver shows us where the Israeli prison was (it was bombed along with thousands of public institutions, factories, farms homes and other buildings during the January 2009 attacks), he spent four years there in the 1970s for not having his ID card with him when stopped by Israeli soldiers. The mother of a prisoner at the sit-in held in solidarity with the hunger-striking prisoners who are protesting against administrative detention, solitary confinement, the lack of family visits and demanding other very, very basic human rights for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, tells me that a letter she sent to her son, who she has been unable to see for eight years, took two years to reach him via the Red Cross.

We meet visual artists, theatre producers, poets, novelists, filmmakers and actresses. We bring a music festival to a room which seems fit to explode with a jerky, moving energy even before the music starts. “I had never been to a music concert before, one girl of 19 says, I had no idea what they were like.”

I meet one man who had been trying for seven years to finish his studies in Cairo, but has been denied an exit visa. “The Israelis say I am Hamas,” he says, “I say I am not Hamas. They say I am. I say I’m not. What can I do? They are the enemy.”

“You have quite a fearsome enemy,” I say.

“Yes,” he replies, looking up, “As the Americans say, shit happens.”

“They will come again, and again,” a lawyer tells me, speaking of Israeli F16 strikes of the type that killed over 1,500 inhabitants of Gaza in 2008/9. “We just need one of these prisoners on hunger strike to die and Islamic Jihad will send one tiny rocket [he indicates three quarters of the length of his finger] “and that’s it. They are just waiting for an opportunity. And again, and again they will come. And we are here. Waiting.”

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.

Sahar Elmougy

Sahar Elmougy is an Egyptian novelist and short story writer. She has written several books including Daria, Aliha Saghira (Little Gods), Noon – which won the 2007 Cavafis prize.

She is also a gender and creative writing trainer and published the gender training manual Developing the Emotional Intelligence in Children in 2004.

Eskenderella

Eskenderella was formed in 2005 by Hazem Shahin. The band started by singing covers of Sheikh Sayyed Darwish, Sheikh Imam and Ziad Rahbany songs. Later the band formed their own repertoire of songs composed by Hazem Shahin with lyrics by a number of poets such as Fuad Haddad, Salah Jaheen, Naguib Shehab al-Din, Amin Haddad, Tamim al-Barghouti, Ahmad Haddad and others. The name Eskenderella is taken from a poem by Khamees Ezz al-Arab which carries the same title.

The band consists of oud players: Hazem Shahin, Ashraf Nagaty, Hassan al-Manialawy, Islam Abdel Aziz; pianist Youssef al-Shere’i; percussionists Hany Bedeir and Amir Ezzat; and singers: Hazem Shahin, Ashraf Nagaty, Hassan al-Manialawy, Islam Abdel Aziz, May Haddad, Aya Hemeda, Salma Haddad, Alia Shaheen and Samia Jaheen.

Amr Ezzat

Amr Ezzat is a blogger, journalist and political activist. He records his impressions in his blog, What Seems to Me, writing about politics and daily life, attempting to be philosophical, recording his tastes in art, his thoughts. Or a mix of the above.

He studied philosophy after engineering. He worked as a journalist for a couple of years after working as an engineer for a couple. He moved between several newspapers – al Badil, al Shorouk and al Masry al Youm. He tries to keep his writing a blend of information, impressions, experiences and cultural and social analyses.

He’s a founding member of Rabta: the Progressive Revolutionary Youth from February 2011. Before that he was a member of the group, Al Bosla (Compass), who published a magazine of the same name. In 2005 they began thinking about founding a democratic socialist group in Egypt. Right now he works as a researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights and is particularly interested in the relationship between religion and social and political issues.

Amin Haddad

Amin Haddad is an Egyptian poet. He has published several collections of poetry: The Scent of Loved Ones (Reehet el Habayeb 1990), The Sweet Taste of Life (Halawet el Roah 1998), In Death, We Will Live On (Fel Moat Han’eesh 2003), Replaced Identity (Badal Faqid 2008) From Homeland to Heaven (Min Al Watan lel Ganna 2012). Island of the living (Gezeeret El Ahyaa), Time passed us by (Elwaqt Saraqna), Freedom Comes From the Martyrs (El Horreya min El shohadaa) are all forthcoming.

He is the founder of El-Share3 (the street) – a group of poets and musicians – which h both manages and participates in. He edited Ibn ‘Aroos – a magazine dedicated to Egyptian colloquial poetry in the nineties as well as writing the dubbing scripts for several major Disney films. During the revolution he has written several songs that have been performed by revolutionary bands and he was award the Kavafis prize for poetry in 2011.

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.

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.

Manal Hassan

Bio coming soon.

Jafra

Bio coming soon

Jamal Mahjoub

Jamal Mahjoub’s stories and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Die Zeit and other publications around the world. His novels have been widely translated and won a number of awards including, the Guardian/Heinemann African Short Story Prize, the NH Vargas Llosa prize and the Etonnants Voyageurs Prize. He is a contributing editor at Guernica Magazine and has recently begun a new life in crime fiction as Parker Bilal – The Golden Scales was published by Bloomsbury in 2012.

Jamal Mahjoub

March 31, 2012

Tuesday 8th May

On the hotel terrace in the morning, The Godfather has replaced Titanic as theme music of the day. Instead of mushy romance we now have eerie menace, punctuated by a series of sonic booms rolling in over the sea. Somewhere out there, invisible in the clear blue sky, are Israeli fighter planes breaking the sound barrier. It adds to the strange sense of being trapped in a huge oen air camp. Unlike in the West Bank, where the Israeli presence is clear and present in the form of watchtowers and surveillence as well as armed soldiers and checkpoints along with the omnipresent wall. From the hotel terrace at night, banks of fierce white floodlights emerge over the water, shining out of the darkness. These are a reminder of the three miles limit. The fish are beyond that, of course, and yesterday two fishermen were picked up and taken away by an Israeli patrol for trying to catch sardines.

Around midday we head along the coast to Rafah. The road runs alongside a thin strip of sand fencing off the sea. The water here is not clean enough to bathe in. At Museirat the river is choked with raw sewage. Water is a serious issue in Gaza. The Coastal Aquifer is not replenished sufficiently to provide enough clean water and the blocade means materials needed for repair to the system are not available. As a result large quantities of untreated sewage are released into the water system which in turn brings health problems.

The Israelis cleared some 21 settlements out of this part of Gaza in 2005. It is rich, fertile land filled with palm trees which give the name to the Deir al-Balah refugee camp. In Rafah, we visit the Rachel Corrie Center named after the 23 year old International Solidarity Movement activist who was killed there in 2003. Rachel was acting as a human shield, trying to protect Palestinian homes from being demolished by Israeli bulldozers. The centre provides activites for children. Many have nowhere to go outside school and here they have the chance to act in plays, to draw and to paint. There is a library and films are shown. Children with behavioural problems are provided with conselling by child psychologists.

From the centre we walk up to a tattered tent with an armed guard which marks the frontier zone. Many of the houses along this side of the town were destroyed by the Israelis in 2009. Some kids trail alongside and cheerfully point out which houses have been rebuilt. To them, everything happened ‘zamaan’, as in a long time ago. Such is the memory of a young child. It all blurs into the distant past. One day they will learn all the details but for the moment it is all just a game.

The street ends abruptly in a storm of fine sand whipped up by heavy lorries that grumble out of the cloud and disappear down into the streets beyond. The guard post is a shelled ruin of a building occupied by disgruntled police officers whose meal we have have just disturbed. A tin bowl of beans and a handful of round loaves lie on a bare table. There are no walls, no doors, nothing to stop the dust blowing through. Some fuss is made over our cameras which are duly put away. The lorries continue lumbering through, cutting their way through much less robust vehicles – cars, taxis, motorcycles all struggling through the mayhem.

Beyond you glimpse a cluster of shelters, some of them collapsed buildings, others flimsy shelters of flapping canvas. Grinning phantoms emerge from the shadows; men coated from head to foot in white powder that paints every eyelash and wrinkle, earlobe and hair. Tunnel diggers come to stare at us. We are the spectacle. A group going by on the back of an empty lorry wave as they bump past, to be swallowed up by the billowing sand.

After much to and froing, the guards accompany us across the soft sand to a shelter where we are invited to peer down into a well of darkness. It is twenty four metres deep and the only way down is on two bits of wood looped together into a seat that is winched up and down with an electric motor. ‘The power has gone,’ one of the men explains, without saying if there is anyone stuck down there waiting to come up. The ground beneath our feet is honeycombed with tunnels. There are rumoured to be a thousand of them, varying in length from 200m to almost a kilometre. There used to be five times that number. Some are only a metre square, while others are tall enough for people to walk through. Cars are brought through in sections although apparently there is rumoured to be one tunnel big enough to drive a car through at 20,000 dollars a go. Of course, they collapse on a regular basis. It is an indication of how desperate people are that there prepared to risk their lives and those of their sons. Young boys working the smaller tunnels earn a hundred dollars a day. The men operating the winches earn half of that. They bring in everything from medicine to cement. As if to prove this an articulated lorry loaded high with potato crisps goes by.

Opinion is divided about the tunnels but many Gazans are against them. They earn money for people on both sides, one reason why they are not closed. They also give people an excuse to attack, under the pretext that weapons are being smuggled in. There are aso those who argue that if the tunnels did not exist to alleviate the effects of the blocade, the world would be forced to take action to bring it to an end.

Gaining popular support for the Palestinian cause is also the subject of the meeting we hold with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions coordinators in Gaza later that afternoon at the hotel. Inspired by the anti-Apartheid campaign in South Africa as well as earlier movements such as India’s struggle against British rule, BDS group is determined to raise awareness here and abroad about the importance of boycotting Israeli products, academic institutions and participation in sporting events. There are suggestions about what Egypt can do to aid the boycott, like providing goods that are currently only available from Israel. In the U.S there is growing support for the divestment campaign as well as the boycott. Articles on the subject in the press have multiplied in recent years. Gradually, more and more people are beginning to realise that it is one of the few avenues open to try and bring about real change by non-violent means. The longer Israel is allowed to present itself as a normal country on an equal with any democracy, the longer the illegal occupation and the oppression of the Palestinian people will be allowed to continue.

On our way back from Rafah we pass by the remains of Yasser Arafat Airport. Once a symbol of progress being made along the road to Palestinian statehood the opening in 1998 was a fanfare event attended by people like Bill Clinton. Three years later it was bombed by the IDF and the runways bulldozed. The ruins remain a testimony to that failed dream. The local coordinators are nervous as we wander around. In the distance the Israeli watchtowers can be seen.

Khaled Najar

Khaled Najar was born in Tunis in 1949. He is descended from a Bedouin family from the south of the country. At the end of the 1960′s he released his first poems and began to work as a journalist. He wrote for various Arabic newspapers and magazines, including Almostaqbal and Al Watan Al-Arabi, as well as Alhayat, and was a member of the editorial team of Akbar El Adab in Cairo. In addition to this he undertook journalistic work for UNESCO in Paris.

Najar is a knowledgeable connoisseur of Arabic as well as of Occidental culture and is recognised as the most lyrical poet of Tunisia’s francophone literature. As yet however he has only released one collection of poetry, the «Poèmes pour un ange perdu» (1990; t: Poems for a lost angel). While most definitely anchored in the Arabic tradition, the volume is influenced greatly by French literature and presents concentrated, melodious pieces of work. With their seminal utilisation of imagery from nature – sand, wind, sun, water, night are all regularly used terms – they would, through their lightness and harmonic alliance of opposites, call to mind haikus, were it not for their dramatically inscribed feeling of sacrifice and yearning. Najar’s poems have been translated into English, German, Spanish, Danish and Italian. He himself has emerged as a productive translator and, amongst others, he has translated poems by Lorca, Valéry, Ungaretti, Saint John Perse, André Velter, Lorand Gaspar, Michel Butor, Jean Marie Le Clèzio, Etel Adnan, Georges Schehadé and Etel Adnan into Arabic. Many of his translations have been released as monographs.

In 1991 Najar founded the Tawbaad publisihing house, which produces the bilingual newspaper «Le Livre des questions» and, with the help of renowned authors such as Adonis or Michel Butor, presents literary texts and cultural debates in Arabic and French. Without fear of polemic confrontation the publication presents Arabic and European perspectives next to each other.

The author has undertaken numerous trips throughout North America, Europe and the Orient, which he has catalogued in reports such as »Les solitudes de Coghnawagha« (t: Forms of loneliness in Coghnawagha), which deals with Native Americans. In addition to this he has conducted interviews with writers such as Alberto Moravia, Nagib Mahfouz, Jean Grojean and Yannis Ritsos. Najar lives in Tunis and Amsterdam.

Youssef Rakha

Born in Cairo in 1976, Rakha earned a BA in English and philosophy from Hull University, England. From 1998 to the present, he has worked as reporter, copy editor and cultural editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo-based English-language newspaper. On sabbatical for a year (2008-2009) he worked as a features writer at the Abu Dhabi-based daily, The National. He has published seven books in Arabic and the eighth, his second novel, is forthcoming with Dar al Saqi in October, 2012.

Al Salam

Al Salam made it their responsibility to push the development national and patriotic musical traditions of Palestine, to make it new, in both the music and the conception of the songs. Their first work was an operetta, al Salam, which received both national and international media coverage. It was performed in five languages and they hope to one day be able to perform it in all the world’s languages with artists from around the globe.

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.

Nariman Youssef

Nariman Youssef is a translator and researcher, currently writing a PhD thesis on the history of literary translation as a site of intersection between Arab and European projects of modernity in the early twentieth century. She has translated The American Granddaughter (Bloomsbury, 2010), a novel by Inaam Kachachi dealing with the war on Iraq, and contributed poetry translations to festivals and anthologies. Nariman’s personal response to the first days of the Egyptian revolution was published in October 2011 as part of the e-book series “Brain Shots: Summer of Unrest”. Having grown up in Cairo, and spent ten years from 2001 moving between various UK cities, she now lives in Cairo again while completing her PhD at the University of Manchester.

Khaled al Khamissi

Khaled al Khamissi is an Egyptian Novelist. Al Khamissi is a holder of BA Political Science from Cairo University and MBA in Political Science from Sorbonne, Paris. He has written two novels: Taxi, 2007 which was been translated into more than 20 languages, was a bestseller in Egypt and some European countries. Noah’s Arc (2009) was translated into French and German. Al Khamissi currently writes a weekly column for Al Shorouk newspaper in Egypt.