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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Le temps du Maroc
By David Tresilian
"Morocco was a clear choice for this year's salon. For some time now the country has occupied a privileged place in the Parisian image-sphere, with a series of exhibitions taking place in some of the larger public museums...most spectacularly, a full-size replica of the Bab El-Mansour from Meknes erected in front of the Jardin des Tuileries in the Place de la Concorde"
The Fifth Euro-Arab Book Salon, which closed at the Institut du monde arabe (L'IMA, The Arab World Institute) in Paris last Sunday, could be considered the perfect expression of the Institute's cultural mission. Charged with developing Franco-Arab cooperation, cultural exchange and French public awareness and appreciation of Arab cultures, the Institute has, since it opened its doors to the general public a decade ago, energetically pursued its remit. In addition to the Salon, last week's activities at l'IMA included a large-scale presentation of the early history of Bahrain (Bahreïn, la civilisation des deux mers), smaller exhibitions of early photographs of the Hejaz and contemporary views of Jeddah, together with the Institute's permanent cultural fare: the teaching of Arabic, the Arab film series, the work of the library, videothèque and media centre. The Salon, however, which was founded in 1990 at the initiative of l'IMA and of the late Pierre Bernard, director of the French publishing house Sindbad, is one of the institution's larger permanent projects and is intended 'to create a more accurate idea of the Arab World's literary production' in the minds of interested European visitors. 'Our greatest wish', Mohamed Saad Eddine El-Yamani, one of the organisers, told the French newspaper Le Monde, is to present a literature "that should not any longer be the preserve only of Arabists".
The building that houses l'IMA on the left bank of the Seine is itself one of les grands travaux, that series of public buildings and redevelopments which transformed the face of Paris during the Mitterrand years and after. It is also one of the earliest. The fruit of a competition launched by President Mitterrand shortly after his election in 1981, it is best approached from the south, which allows the visitor to appreciate the building's single most celebrated feature. The flat, southern elevation is made up of 242 discrete panels, which, in turn, contain some 27,000 aluminium diaphragms. Shaped like eight-pointed stars, hexagons, squares or circles, these open and close automatically according to the intensity of the daylight in order to regulate lighting conditions within the building. The whole is controlled by photo-electric cells linked to a central computer. It is a wonderfully novel conception, which, though it is inscribed within a general tradition of civic and urban pride, also makes double reference to this particular building's function and provenance. On the one hand, this ingenious array of repetitive, geometrical design elements refers to the use of similar decorative schemes in traditional Middle-Eastern architecture. On the other, the whole effect is reminiscent of a glittering glass and aluminium sheet of mashrabiya some 2,000m2 in area. Inside, the building is constructed around a deep rectangular glass and metal shaft, up which run six glass and metal elevators in almost continual motion. Few people choose to use the double set of steel stairs that frame this, and the elevators are particularly popular with the school parties that infest the building. As far as the broad cultural mission of the institution is concerned, there have been, apparently, some financial and administrative problems of the sort that are perhaps inevitable when responsibility for its functions are shared between the French government and those of the 22 Arab states that are partners to the enterprise. These would not, however, have been evident to the visitor to the Salon, who would have been struck instead by the energy of the enterprise.
The 'guest of honour' at this year's salon was Morocco. Previous invitees have been Egypt (1994) and Palestine (1997) in a biannual tradition of which this year's events are the latest edition. Morocco was a clear choice for this year's salon. For some time now the country has occupied a privileged place in the Parisian image-sphere, with a series of exhibitions taking place in some of the larger public museums, a particularly successful retrospective of Moroccan film on the state television channel France 2, and, most spectacularly, a full-size replica of the Bab El-Mansour from Meknes erected in front of the Jardin des Tuileries in the Place de la Concorde. It is Le Temps du Maroc (the time of Morocco) in Paris, and the Salon du Livre featured, on its margins, a series of colloquia designed to spotlight intellectual production, distribution and consumption in the country.
To this end interested visitors to the salon could hear participants from the Moroccan publishing industry discuss the 'challenges' that faced them. Perhaps, though, these challenges are more general than the Moroccan theme might suggest. Panelists at the colloquium raised large issues concerning the sociology of intellectual production and consumption that could, with equal justice, be raised of any country of the developing world, and, in modified form, of the developed. What kind of rapport was there between publisher and readership, between publisher and society, between publisher and author? What kind of role did book publishing now play in communicating knowledge and cultural solidarity when the general environment was increasingly one of televisual and electronic culture? Did the state have a role in cultural development outside its activities through a ministry of national education? Should it intervene more directly, perhaps through a ministry of culture, to promote (and pay for) a particular kind of intellectual production with a view to solidifying a common national culture? In which case, which? Or should publishing be left predominantly to the private sector and the uncertain laws of the market?
Whatever the answers to these questions may be, other issues raised had a more specifically Moroccan flavour, though this was also one reminiscent of the challenges that face the publishing industry elsewhere, for example in Egypt. The speakers at the colloquium described a paradoxical situation: on the one hand there had been in recent years a general expansion in the range and variety of titles available and in the number of publishers willing to publish them, a situation helped by the general liberal climate. However, on the other hand, there had also been a palpable decline in readership, in the participation of the population in national cultural and intellectual life, and in their participation in written culture more generally (the ambiguous legacy of television). Various measures could be used to picture this decline (sales figures, general production figures), and there was in addition a pressing problem of distribution: outside the larger cities there were few commercial bookstores, and, though in themselves these things were banal, the sheer difficulty of access to books experienced by the population as a whole, the rudimentary system of advertising and promotion and the sheer cost, particularly of books in French or of imported books, went some way toward explaining the apparent general indifference. Indeed, the speakers were agreed that on the rare occasions that these obstacles had been overcome sales figures had increased sharply. There was a real public for written culture, but too often that public was given no guidance, or had too little real access to it. In general, though it was true to say that there was not at present a sufficiently developed tradition of reading in the country, such a tradition could be developed were it possible to develop a public space where cultural matters could be presented and discussed. As it was that public space was either fragmented or colonised by market values at the expense of the development of opinion or of public involvement in cultural affairs.
While there was agreement about the picture thus sketched out, the speakers were less in accord about how successfully to modify it. There was a strong party in favour of increased state intervention in the cultural sphere, particularly in order to facilitate distribution and popular access. The public library system needed to be developed, the media needed to be mobilised behind a project of cultural development, there needed to be increased state support for the publication of works that were vital in maintaining and developing cultural memory, but which could not, at present, be seen as commercially viable. On the other hand there was also a party of more liberal views. State intervention of this sort was a thing of the past. It was only recently that censorship had been thrown off (though there was some controversy about whether it had in fact been thrown off). For Leila Chaouni of the publisher Le Fennac, one did not develop a literary or aesthetic space by inviting the big guns of the state to blast one open. If the aim really was to develop an autonomous cultural sphere, autonomous that is with regard to the political projects of the state, then state intervention had to be kept to a minimum. The literary space was still fragile and insufficient, but its special contribution to national culture was in the development of ideas that had only an oblique, or as yet undetermined, relation to state projects, and Chaouni spoke interestingly of the recent staging of the female subject in the literary work. At a later session on 'New Departures in the Moroccan Novel', the novelist Mohamed Berrada spoke in similar fashion of the substitution of "the intimacy of the 'I'" for the 'ideological, populist' procedures of the 1960s or 1970s. In miniature what was being presented was the eclipse of projects of national construction by individual gestures of de-construction. But perhaps what was really needed was not so much deconstruction as reconstruction. In particular it was left unclear whether there existed any equivalent in Morocco of the Egyptian 'General Book Organisation' (GEBO), which explicitly aims to make available not only foreign works of recognised value in cheap Arabic translations (the 'Thousand Book' project), but also to keep the Arab heritage, and Egyptian national literature, in print in low-cost standard editions.
At the Salon itself Editions du Seuil and Actes Sud, which now publishes the 'Sindbad' list, put on excellent displays. Seuil has one of the larger Arab lists of all French publishers, publishing francophone Arab writers in particular, as well as works in translation. Actes Sud has long sponsored the translation of Arabic literature into French, and its catalogue includes works by the Egyptian writers Edwar El-Kharrat, Sonallah Ibrahim, Mohamed El-Bisatie and Nabil Naoum, as well as works by Hoda Barakat, Salim Barakat, Mahmoud Darwish and Saadallah Wannous, among others. There is also a new translation of 'A Critique of Religious Discourse' by Nasr Hamid Abu Zeid, a work that provoked some controversy when it was first published in Egypt some years ago.
Elsewhere the displays of French state organisations, such as the CNRS and the CEDEJ, showed the latest academic titles to emerge from these sometimes mysterious acronyms. Egyptian representation was patchy: Al-Ahram was there, as was the GEBO, but the other national publishers (Dar al-Ma'arif, Dar al-Hilal) were not. From the private sector, Shorouq was there, as, apparently, was Madbouli. Lebanese representation seemed low. Other countries were represented only by their ministries of culture, a fact which may, or may not, give an accurate picture of their publishing industries. Libya, mysteriously, was apparently represented only by a row of shishas, since the stand of 'The World Centre for Researches into the Green Book', was empty either of books or of personnel. The virtual absence of Algerian participation was striking; there seemed to be no one there from Iraq. Inevitably the book salon, and the work of the Institute, is affected by international politics.
In general, the Salon would have served as an excellent introduction to publishing in the Arab World, to French publishing on the Arab World and to the Institut du monde arabe for anyone needing it. Carefully interpreted, the comments of panelists at the various colloquia gave a suggestive picture of the challenges facing not only the publishing industry but also cultural development in sections of the Arab World. They also provided a report on social trends. And, having finished with all the books, there was still the exhibition on prehistoric Bahrain to take in. Who would have thought, before visiting this exhibition, that the Bahraini sahel was host to a vast bronze-age necropolis of 50,000 mound-like tombs, the largest prehistoric cemetery in the world?
l'Institut du monde arabe, Rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, Paris
THE SALON AT A GLANCE: The fifth Euro-Arab Book Salon brought together 255 publishers from 19 countries including Algeria, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Belgium, Egypt, Spain, France, Italy, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Palestine, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Syria and Tunisia. 157 European publishers were represented and 98 Arab. In addition to the 20,000 works on show, 52 Arab and European journals dealing with the Arab world were available, one special area was set aside for youth publications, and another grouped together the publishers of Arabic CD-ROMs, multimedia and computer and Internet software.
This year's guest of honour was Morocco, which was the subject of colloquia dealing with the country's literature, publishing industry and intellectual infrastructure (library systems, apparatuses of cultural diffusion and exchange). Various invitees, including the novelists Mohamed Berrada, Bensalem Himmich and Mohamed Azzeddine Tazi, spoke on developments in Moroccan literature.
A special session was set aside for a reading and discussion of the memoirs of Esmat Abdel-Meguid, secretary-general of the Arab League.
