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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Levantine contradictions
By Youssef RakhaIf he is to be held responsible for his mother's appearance in the Bait Al-Din festival, one of Lebanon's many newly resurrected cultural events, Ziyad Rahbani (currently, perhaps, the Arab world's most luminous musician) deserves a lot of credit -- so much, in fact, that Lebanese poet Abdou Wazin testified to his "dominating the atmosphere of the concert." Completely reworking old favourites from the Fairouz repertoire (composed by his father, the late Assi Rahbani, and written by his uncle Mansour), Ziyad also offered more recent features of his own -- in his capacity as, among other things, "Fairouz's current monopoliser."
The concert was attended by no less than 12,000 seasoned and other listeners longing for contact with the singing phenomenon and Lebanese and Arab icon. Fairouz's status, in fact, is comparable only to Umm Kulthoum's, except that the former celebrity has lived through the Lebanese civil war, and frequently played a national role through her concerts and songs. "Ziyad gave voice, in these Rahbani tunes, to aspects that were latent or secret," Wazin wrote in the London-based daily, Al-Hayat (6 August). But when Fairouz, "at the end, performed Ziyad's new masterpiece, Sabah we Mesa (Morning and Evening), she effected an emotional revolution in the audience, even though the song is very recent and belongs to Ziyad's own school of composition; and he accompanied her -- solo -- on the piano."
Elsewhere Wazin describes that school as "thoroughly live and modern" (as opposed to the records of old songs broadcast in the course of the Baalbek festival, leaving a phenomenally large audience, according to Wazin, "thirsty for the live"). By jazzing folk Lebanese, classic Western and traditional Arabic music, Ziyad seems to have emerged as the only contemporary Arab composer who has competently assimilated and reflected the national experience -- he is said to have gone on performing his weekly concert in a Beirut bar even during the most risky phases of the war, often unaccompanied and without an audience. Vital, relevant and inventive (some argue that his lyrics alone are an achievement of modern Arabic literature), Ziyad has managed to be profoundly moving, acquiring the unique status of renegade Rahbani. It was him, says Wazin, who engineered the long-awaited reunion between Fairouz and her audience, boldly and successfully melding the "old and the new, the technical and emotional" qualities of sound, sight and comprehension.
In the meantime, in Syria, the more overt "intellectuals" (of, among other things, the national and Leftist struggle) finally seem to be acknowledging defeat. Perhaps it is the atmosphere of newness that has encouraged what Khalil Swailih of Al-Wasat (7 August) calls "an awakening." This week, at any rate, an impressively large group of Syrian and Palestinian writers organised a seminar to honour Haydar Haydar (of the notorious Banquet ) in a "defence of culture" that was all the more resonant for what the participants actually said. At the initiative of the Palestinian Cultural Library in Damascus, which hosted the event, statements such as those of poet Mamdouh Adwan, film-maker Mohamed Malas and Palestinian literary critic Faisal Darrag might point to a new spirit of determination and freedom spreading in the light of political developments.
Sectarian attacks that target the creative writer, Adwan was perhaps the first Arab to point out with sufficient clarity and force, "begin with a complacent censure of creativity, and end with the declaration of writers as traitors or apostates... The price the creative person pays begins with a messing up of his life, and ends with emigration or prison or murder..." Implicit in Adwan's censure, moreover, is the often reiterated idea that Muslim culture cannot be reduced to the ridiculously simplistic dichotomy of good (for Islam) and bad (against Islam). Nationalist and Islamist claims against creativity can thus be identified as the pointlessly destructive moves that they predominantly are, and the position of the writer as an agent of freedom and progress can be more firmly established. Indeed, as Adwan added, in Arab societies the writer suffers enough as it is. As writers, due to our continued silence, our lack of weight, and our being deprived of our most basic rights, "we suddenly discover that we are martyrs, but in the course of it we forget what we were martyred for."
In a statement entitled "The Language of Dialogue," Malas likened the realities of current Arab creativity to "a wedding of blood" that places the creative agent in the midst of two equally operative possibilities of sudden demise. The "ping-pong game" he envisaged relates to Darrag's indication that, according to sectarian discourse, the very concept of imagination has been called a lie -- an identification not only unfair but also impossibly destructive. As Haydar himself explained, "in the course of the storm blowing across my Banquet for Seaweed, I have learned two lessons that cannot be forgotten. The first is that culture and literature play a necessary part in helping people step over the threshold to mental and aesthetic enlightenment, and transcend the circle of the individual for that of the group. The second is solidarity, that people should support each other, standing up for what they value in times of crisis."
