12 - 18 April 2001
Issue No.529
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 12 - 18 April 2001 Issue No.529 |
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A newspaper-book: Literature for All
A real triumph: Ferial Ghazoul * attended the most recent kitab-fi-jarida conference in Beirut
One can extend what Salman Rushdie said about the Somalis in his Imaginary Homelands to the entire Arab people: To be Arab is to be a people united by language and literature and divided by maps and borders. Strife between Arab nations, notwithstanding occasional get-togethers, has prevented Arab unity from materializing on the political level, yet culturally the Arabs share a literary heritage based on a common language and a contemporary flowering in the verbal arts. The project of a newspaper-book, spearheaded by UNESCO, is based on this linguistic and literary homogeneity. Every Wednesday of each month some twenty major newspapers in the Arab world provide freely an entire Arabic literary work in the form of a newspaper supplement. This innovative project, which started four years ago, was modeled after Periolibros -- a Hispanophone UNESCO venture offering prominent narrative works as newspaper monthly supplements in Spain, Portugal and Latin America simultaneously. When adapted to the Arab world the project came to include poetry, plays, and seminal works from Arab literary patrimony, beside novels. The project started with al-Mutanabbi -- the most illustrious medieval poet -- and the most recent newspaper-book featured Nazik al-Malaika, the Iraqi poet who radicalized modern Arabic poetry in the late 1940s with her innovative poems and poetics. The list of some fifty authors whose works have appeared in this project include Naguib Mahfouz, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Adonis, and Gibran. Each work distributes two and a half million copies gratis.
Though UNESCO provides the infrastructure for the project, Arab cultural foundations including Owais, Hariri and Sakhr as well as the Lebanese ministry of culture contribute generously towards its support. Newspapers who undertake the publication of the newspaper-book, kitab-fi-jarida, receive a camera-ready disk with a text illustrated by an Arab artist. Each newspaper undertakes to print at its own expense the newspaper-book supplement. In the case of Egypt, al-Ahram, with its million-copy run, brings out on the first Wednesday of each month this marvelous free gift to its readers. The twenty-some newspapers which participate in this innovative project of literature-for-all include the London-based al-Quds paper, and newspapers in Haifa and Ramallah in Palestine. Thus practically all Arabs, including those living outside the Arab world and those under occupation can have access regularly to major works in their literature. Sixteen Arab countries from Mauritania to Yemen participate in this project; the two Arab countries who are conspicuous by their absence are Iraq and Algeria. The lack of paper in Iraq due to the embargo and economic sanctions has made it impossible to participate in this pan-Arab cultural project.
The project is run efficiently in Beirut from the headquarters of UNESCO by the Iraqi poet and administrator Chawqi Abdelamir and his competent assistants. Since the newspaper-book is a hybrid medium combining the newspaper form with a book content, it was deemed important to add suitable illustrations by Arab artists to add visual dimension and pleasure to the text. The prominent Egyptian artist Muhiy al-Din al-Labbad provides artistic supervision to the project. Biannual conferences bringing together the editors of the relevant newspapers and the Advisory Board are occasions to discuss ways of improving accomplishments, publicizing the project and selecting the list of authors whose works are to be published in the following two years.
The most recent of these conferences took place in Beirut, March 17-19, where Lebanon hosted the visitors in the best traditions of Arab hospitality and Lebanese savoir faire. Present in the closed meetings were UNESCO representatives, Ahmad al-Sayyad and Milagros del Corral who contributed to discussions on effective modes of diffusion and publicity for the project. The idea of making these works electronically available was proposed. The opening session included statements by Ghassan Salama, the Lebanese minister of culture, and Talal Salman, the editor-in-chief of the Lebanese daily al-Safir. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was supposed to deliver a statement on behalf of the Advisory Board, but the Israelis prevented him from leaving Ramallah to join the conference. Adonis spoke instead pointing out with relish that more than a hundred million copies of these newspaper--books have been distributed in the Arab world. The conference ended its sessions in a press conference in which the representative of al-Ahram, Ahmad Youssef al-Qura'i and Yomna al-'Eid, the distinguished Lebanese critic, read the recommendations and the list of authors that millions of Arabs will be reading in the coming couple of years. It included five prominent Egyptians: the poet Ahmad Abdel-Moati Hijazi, the dramatist Alfred Farag, and three novelists: Ibrahim Aslan, Salwa Bakr and Jamal al-Ghitany. The list of selected Arab authors included five women writers: Beside the Egyptian novelist Salwa Bakr, the Lebanese novelist Layla Baalabaki, the Iraqi novelist 'Aliya Mamdouh, the Syrian poet Saniyya Saleh and the Saudi Arabian novelist Raja 'Alim. The criteria for selection are based on literary excellence, geographical coverage and variety of styles and genres. There has been a definite privileging of established figures and landmark works in the past, such as those of Taha Hussein, Tawfiq al-Hakim and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, in order to acknowledge seniority and the spirit of literary pioneers. But newer generations including those writers commonly associated with the1960s and the 1970s are coming along. The two classical works that were selected during the last conference are in prose, Nahj al-Balagha (The Path of Eloquence) by the fourth Caliph in Islam, 'Ali ibn Abi Talib, and Maqamat (Seances) of Hamdhani. Nahj al-Balagha is an eminent work in the cultural memory of Arab people. It has selections made by the poet al-Sharif al-Radi of sermons, counsels, exhortations, letters and sayings of Imam 'Ali. Maqamat of al-Hamadhani (the author known as the 'Wonder of the Age') on the other hand, is a string of narratives united by a picaresque hero who relates what he encounters in his travels in the abode of Islam. Descriptive and entertaining as these anecdotal stories are, they contain nevertheless social critiques. The tenth-century Maqamat is one of the finest expressions of Arabic belles-lettres.
Apart from the authors mentioned above the list of individual poets chosen for publication include Hasab al-Shaykh Ja'far (Iraq), Said Akl (Lebanon), Abdallah al-Baraddouni (Yemen), 'Umar Abu-Risha (Syria), Qasim Haddad (Bahrain), Muhamad al-Khammar al-Kinouni (Morocco), Habib al-Sayigh (United Arab Republic) and Mustafa Wahbi al-Tall, commonly known as 'Arar (Jordan). In narratives, apart from the already mentioned, the selection included Ibrahim al-Kouni (Libya), Rachide Boujedra (Algeria), Fouad al-Tikirli (Iraq), Yahya Yakhluf (Palestine) and Youssef Habashi al-Ashqar (Lebanon). Beside the Egyptian dramatist Farag, the Moroccan dramatist Abdel-Karim Birchide was selected. Furthermore, selections of Jordanian short stories, of Mauritanian poetry and of Sudanese poetry were recommended for publication in the project.
As some one who recently joined the Advisory Board, I was pleasantly struck by two things: (1) the quick consensus and agreement on the names of authors and (2) the absence of patronizing attitude towards the masses. There was no suggestion, let alone effort, to reduce the list to simple or simplistic works. If literature is to become as basic as bread, then no compromise in its quality can be considered. The project is indeed a triumph of sorts over disunity on one hand and over philistinism on the other. The real triumph comes when millions of Arab readers immerse themselves in these rich texts of literature, overcoming the boundaries that separate them while experiencing the joys of reading. Occasional letters from readers point to the value of the project and its significance in their lives; in some cases the whole family has read the same work and discussed it. While the newspaper itself is trashed after being read, the newspaper-book supplement is kept and even if not read by one member of the family it gets passed on to another.
The project was initiated in order to overcome a certain reluctance in reading among the people. UNESCO experts researching the issue of the decline of readership came up with three obstacles (apart from censorship) which prevent the ordinary person from engaging in book-reading: (1) financial, as the price of books become prohibitive for most people (2) the difficulty of choosing a book to read given the flood of printed books in various fields (3) the perception of the book as a sophisticated medium reserved for the intellectual elite.
Four years into this on-going and successful project, it is high time that a study addressing the reception of this monthly series of newspaper-books is undertaken. There is no doubt that this brilliant project makes a difference, but it would be most interesting to see, based on research and statistics, what kind of a difference and who -- in terms of age, gender, and location -- reads and benefits the most.
* The writer is professor of English and comparative literature at the American University in Cairo
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