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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 June 2000 Issue No. 487
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Summer is a festival. Or so the Ministry of Culture will have us believe. The Sheraton Cinema saw the sixth round of the National Festival for Egyptian Cinema lurch forward yesterday, the Festival of Children's Theatre took the Puppet Theatre by storm on Thursday 15 June, and the eleventh round of the "Reading for All" festival (18 June) has already crept into libraries, bookshops and beyond, assuming the form of performances and seminars as well as printed matter. The latter event has had both Ali Abu-Shadi, head of the Organisation for Cultural Palaces, and Samir Sarhan, chairman of the General Egyptian Book Organisation on their toes for the past few weeks. Gaber Asfour, head of the Supreme Council for Culture, meanwhile, was busy staging the first official canonisation of novelist Abdel-Hakim Qasem (1935-1990), a unique (and difficult) voice of the 1970s and 1980s whose achievement --Ayyam Al-Insan Al-Sab'a (The Seven Days of Man) is deservedly his most famous book -- has often been ignored. The seminar held in Qasem's honour on Wednesday 14 June was the first of its kind, and novelist Mahmoud El-Wardani made it all the more remarkable by publishing (in the 18 June issue of Akhbar Al-Adab) a conversation undertaken between him and Qasem by correspondence on Qasem's novel, Qadar Al-Ghoraf Al-Muqbida (The Destiny of Stifling Rooms), following its publication in 1982. As well as illuminating the text in a unique, stimulating way, the letters offer a perspective on Qasem's extended stay in Germany (1974-1984), initially as a PhD student.
An odd assortment
By Youssef Rakha
Still from Heine Sorour's 1970s Liberation Hour, a documentary of the Dhufar armed struggle-- a source of inspiration for Son'allah Ibrahim
Egypt Region International Economy Focus Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Elsewhere the immanent publication of novelist Son'allah Ibrahim's Warda -- the latest in a series of novels that juxtapose a fictional narrative with real-life documents to set the scene for the characters and incidents -- has given rise to much literary hype, with preview chapters and an extended conversation between the author and the young columnist Wael Abdel-Fatah published in the 11 June issue of Akhbar Al-Adab. In an attempt to "discuss what happened over 30 years throughout the entire region," Ibrahim is publishing the journals of an Omani girl, and member of the long since defunct Front for Liberating Oman and the Arabian Gulf, who came to study at Cairo University in the late 1950s. It seems the narrator is not only first-person but a reflection of Ibrahim himself. The book opens with the vision of a woman invading an aging man's dreams. As he sets out to discover who this woman is, collecting the pages of her journal, he enters a labyrinth of detective adventures that force him to revise his own political history. Warda was the student's alias in underground political activities. The novel is the product of "five entire years [of] reading and meeting people and looking for anything, however small, about the [Omani] Dhufar revolutionaries," Ibrahim told Abdel-Fatah. "Political gateways are necessarily also dramatic gateways... There is a certain nostalgia concerning these experiences [the politically charged atmosphere of the late 1950s and early 1960s, in which Ibrahim grew up] which I have largely avoided, checking myself once I gave in."
Warda aside, however, the one major publication of interest in the last two weeks (8-22 June), it seems, is the first Arabic issue of the American weekly news magazine Newsweek (20 June), which first appeared on news stands nearly a week before the date on the cover (the Middle East edition of the English Newsweek is dated 19 June). The Arabic version is essentially a Kuwaiti endeavour, a collaboration between The Washington Post and the Kuwaiti Dar Al-Watan, with Mohamed Abdel-Qadir Al-Jassem heading the Kuwait headquarters.
The idea is to translate each issue of Newsweek word for word, then publish it in Kuwait in the same format (with variations in the ordering and content of articles, mimicking Arabic magazines) and a more regional focus. And while the former task (of adequately translating the material) is impressively accomplished --in order to do this, of course, Newsweek has had to stretch the concept of "word for word" -- the latter (of attempting to appeal to an Arab-speaking readership in particular) is categorically not. Newsweek's superficial eagerness to please is rather reminiscent of the absurdly self-righteous Arabic notices one frequently encounters in Egyptian branches of McDonald's, to the effect that the meat served there is invariably halal. Instead of a composite art review on current highlights throughout the Western world, the Arabic Newsweek provides its readers with the inevitable politically-correct piece on a black American photography exhibition entitled, as is the article, "Black on Black."
The fact that one of the titles on the cover of the very first issue reads "Palestine: A State Or A Mafia?", for one thing, can only be considered an unfortunate blunder. One can surmise that the article, which is not included in the English edition, is Newsweek's attempt to extend the scope of its Arab coverage. Yet it also happens to be a relentlessly preemptive attack on the alleged corruption of the Palestinian Authority. The lead article, on the death of Syrian president Hafez Al-Assad, too, addresses both the death of the man (10 June) and the eventuality of his son succeeding him to power (the Syrian constitution was amended to make this possible hours after Al-Assad died) from the vantage point of "the peace process" alone. In Newsweek and Time the term is practically synonymous with the Israeli position, and the article thus mostly condemns Al-Assad for being an obstacle to peace, i.e. an obstacle in the way of Israel. Nowhere is it even hinted at that such were the dictates of a position that defends the rights of Arab states, including Syria, to their land. Bashar Al-Assad is similarly assessed not as the future leader of Syria, but as an important player in the "peace" game of the next few years. It must be added that photographically, Al-Assad fares far better on the cover of the English than that of the Arabic edition of Newsweek .
Speaking of which, since Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon (24 May), cultural life has kept a low profile, eclipsed by the ongoing saga of the Assads. On the former occasion, the Arab literati noisily expressed their joy and support for Hizbullah, voicing the need for an "enlightened" and politically aware religious community in the wake of the narrow-mindedly Islamist campaign against the Ministry of Culture's publication of Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's A Banquet for Seaweed. Judging by the last two issues of Cairo's most popular cultural weekly, Akhbar Al-Adab (11 and 18 June), which contained no reference to the event, Al-Assad's death has prompted less commentary on the part of the intellectual community. Such silence is surprising considering that the 1960s' tradition of political engagement, evident in the response to both the campaign against Haydar and Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, should evince the need to join in the posthumous assessment of the Syrian leader's achievement.
On the evening of Tuesday 13 June (during the literary community's weekly get-together), at any rate, the open-air salon of the Cairo Atelier saw much subversive commentary and wry humour regarding Syrian politics; yet it all remains oral and undocumented. Only the more politically-oriented publications, in which the status quo was predominantly affirmed, took stock of the event. It is the fact that Bashar Al-Assad succeeded his father to power, it seems, that will resonate the longest. The opening article of Al-Musawwar (16 June), by former head of the Press Syndicate and chairman of Dar Al-Hilal Makram Mohamed Ahmed, expressed concern about "the difficult questions posed by the Arab street regarding the kind of transformation that might occur in a republican regime that [nonetheless] permits a form of inheritance of [the right to] rule." Here as elsewhere the tone was cautious and inquisitive.
The past fortnight was heavy with sorrows -- not only over Al-Assad's death. 7 June was the fifth death anniversary of the blind oppositional composer and singer Imam Eissa (1918-1995), icon of the student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s and long-time collaborator of the colloquial Arabic poet and lyricist Ahmed Fouad Negm, whose words Sheikh Imam set to music and sang directly after the 5 June 1967 defeat -- a memory, incidentally, that goes unnoticed and un-commemorated this year. Staged by Al-Tagammu Party, a relatively small gathering belonging predominantly to the Generation of the 1970s (students who used Imam's songs as an added incentive in their leftist struggle) shuffled quietly to the Russian Cultural Centre on the evening of 6 June. So fully appropriated by the left was Imam, and so clandestine was his musical career as a consequence, that to this day he remains unknown to a vast portion of the Egyptian people. However moving, alas, celebrations like this do little to alter that fact, and the clandestine composer remains largely clandestine. "If the sun sinks in a sea of clouds," Imam sang, "If a wave of darkness covers the world... The only eyes you have are the words."
