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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 17 - 23 August 2000 Issue No. 495
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Mediterranean poetics
By Youssef RakhaIt was Taha Hussein, Egypt's leading 20th- century literary luminary, who first pointed up the Mediterranean connection. Decades later, his call for establishing a positive cultural link with Mediterranean Europe echoes in complex and various ways -- more so, at least, than anything he could have envisaged during his own lifetime.
For one such echo, all over Lodève, the French composer Georges Auric's birthplace in the south of France, Arab poets found venues and audiences during the last round of the annual Lodève Festival -- Voice of the Mediterranean, as it is called. According to Al-Hayat of 14 August, 24 Arab -- as opposed to 23 French -- poets participated, along with "three or four poets from each Mediterranean country represented." It is remarkable that so many Arabs had so much to say to the French (Lodève's inhabitants include a significant proportion of Maghreb immigrants who were as eager as their white counterparts to accommodate the Arab visitors), in that it suggests that contemporary Arabic poetry in translation is at least as accessible and pleasing to non-Arabs as its Western equivalents, the Arab predilection for engaging oratory no doubt playing a significant part in drawing audiences to readings that were held in the city's public spaces, "in major and minor squares, near the cathedral, at crossroads, on ancient sites," drawing ever larger clusters of listeners eager to discover how the Mediterranean inspired their Arab neighbours. "The entire city was a poetic flare, everyone celebrating poetry."
The participants (Egypt had Helmi Salem and Farid Abu Se'da to offer) included all kinds of poets -- both young and old, traditionalist and progressive -- who sometimes recited their poetic compositions accompanied by music. Alongside the festival's many musical performances (in which the Arab presence was equally notable), the kind of profound, ponderous cultural exchange undertaken by Hussein was replaced by a more immediate, spontaneous and mutually engaging responsiveness, in which even the bad impromptu translations of poems, undertaken on the spot by Levantine poets like Katherine Farhi, Jumana Haddad and Khaled Al-Najjar were deeply appreciated, with European listeners frequently asking for transcriptions of what they had heard in order to reflect on it at leisure. Lodève's anarchists and other subversive groups had marked the walls in protest, "Poetry is not the answer," to which poet Abdel-Qadir Al-Janabi would respond by pointing out that there was no problem (that poetry might be the answer to) in the first place, but only "an attempt to give poetry back to people." And what even the most classicist of poets gave people was poetry in prose -- a definite sign that Arabic prose poetry, until recently a vexed issue, has established itself as the norm.
Amin Maalouf
More in line with Hussein's approach, Al-Wasat's celebration of the Lebanese, Paris-residing novelist Amin Maalouf (14 August), on the occasion of the publication of his Le périple de Baldassare, provides another example of the Mediterranean connection. One of contemporary world literature's most celebrated cross-cultural prophets of tolerance and understanding across difference, Maalouf started his career in fictional (Middle Eastern) history with an investigation into the Crusades from the viewpoint of the Arabs, making his name with Leon l'africain (1986), and consolidating his success upon receiving the coveted Prix de Goncourt for Le rocher de Tanios (1993), a temporary departure from his usual trademark style -- more autobiographical and less concerned with the nooks and crannies of Oriental history, concentrating instead on the modern-day Lebanese predicament -- and, in Le premiére siecle aprés Beatrice (1992), trying his hand at literary science fiction as well.
Le périple de Baldassare, his seventh novel, thus merely sustains a personal but broad-ranging literary achievement -- and one that, in its own way, confirms the veracity of Hussein's early prophecy about the future of Arab culture. Maalouf, after all, is respected in both the West and the Arab world although, in his designation as "the Arabs' ambassador to the West," one sometimes catches a whiff of the Orientalist and the exotic, the adjuncts most frequently employed to explain Eastern success in the West. But in so far as it is an accusation, "I don't care about it, to be honest," Maalouf told Al-Wasat's Nagwa Othman. "It's true that I hold on to my cultural belongings, and am proud of the various components of my identity, which I wholeheartedly adopt. I am careful to retain all connections to my early cultural genesis -- my links with Lebanon, the Arab world, Mediterranean civilisation. But at the same time I uphold my intimate relationship with France, Europe and the Western world."
It is just such a duality that has characterised the progeny of Arab "enlightenment" throughout the world. By dint of positioning himself firmly within the scope of the more active and prosperous cultural pole, Maalouf's impact has undoubtedly been more pronounced than, say, Salem or Abu Se'da's. Then again, it is the fact that he speaks about "the East" that makes him vigorously relevant. Writing about the East, Maalouf insists, "is an expression of my pressing need to know the history of that East and make it known, to fragment and deconstruct its various components and elements, in order to... understand myself."
