14 - 20 June 2001
Issue No.538
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 June 2001 Issue No.538 |
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Reading matter
David Tresilian rifles the shelves at the Euro-Arab Book Fair in Paris
The Sixth Euro-Arab Book Fair, which opened at the Arab World Institute in Paris last week and runs until 17 June, brings together 196 publishers, 105 European and 91 Arab, for an event that has been running biennially since its foundation in 1990, and this year has outgrown the Institute that hosts it. A large marquee has thus been set up for the duration, and inside stands representing publishers from some 23 countries, among them Egypt, but also most Arab countries and a good many European, present the full variety both of contemporary international publishing in Arabic and of publishing on Arab history, literature, art and politics in European languages. This year's guest of honour at the Fair is the United Arab Emirates and a number of special events have been programmed to make the cultural activities of this unique federal Gulf State better known to an international public.
Bigger than ever: with exhibitors too numerous to be housed in the Institut du monde arabe, many events will be taking place in a specially constructed marquee
In keeping with a tradition that has marked the Euro-Arab Book Fair since its inception, lectures, colloquia, poetry readings and musical events, have been planned for the full ten days of the Fair. A colloquium on the history and future perspectives of the United Arab Emirates brought together academics and specialists on Emirates' cultural affairs, who spoke on the cultural life and regional role of this federal state, born out of the union of seven emirates in 1971 and 30 years later one of the most successful economies in the region. Further success can be expected in the future, commented Mohamed Al-Assoumi, one of the speakers at the colloquium, as the Emirates pursue the task of economic diversification and cultural expansion, with the setting up of free-trade zones, of an enlarged banking sector and of a thriving information-technology sector, which would surely have an important impact on the already strong Emirates publishing industry.
At a further session on Arab women's writing, French academics met with Palestinian women authors to discuss this sometimes under-appreciated area of Arabic literature, this meeting in particular being notable for the enthusiasm shown by the very large audience. Lebanese author Soha Beshara, whose autobiographical account of the ten years she spent in the notorious El-Khiam prison is reviewed in this month's edition of the Al-Ahram Weekly Book Supplement [Soha Beshara: Moukawema; also published in French as Résistante by JC Lattès], spoke movingly of the suffering she endured there and how she had tried to render this experience in writing. The Franco-Egyptian academic Arlette Tadié gave an authoritative overview of Egyptian women's writing, concentrating her remarks on recent works by Salwa Bakr and Radwa Ashour, with Salwa El- Naimi posing questions as to the particularity of Arab women's writing and of women's writing more generally. Was women's writing a matter of the specific experience the writing described, or could one legitimately speak of a "female sentence" as a feature of women's written style?
Further colloquia are planned for the Fair's remaining days, which will include contributions from, notably, Egyptian writer Gamal El-Ghitani, the Moroccan writers Mohamed Shukri and Mohamed Berrada and the Algerian Yasmina Khadra. As befits the country's weight in the Arab publishing industry, Egypt was strongly represented at the Fair itself, with ample stands being present from Al- Ahram, the General Egyptian Book Organisation and Al- Shorouq, among others. Al-Ahram and Al-Akhbar also feature among the Euro-Arab Fair's sponsors. One intriguing new feature of this year's event was the presence at it of a number of multi-media and software demonstrations designed to make the learning of Arabic easier for children and for speakers of foreign languages. A Syrian publishing company, for example, had developed a programme that simultaneously "spoke" the Arabic word or phrase, while displaying it on a multi-coloured screen. Something for every parental shopping-list.
6ème Salon euro-arabe du Livre, Institut du monde arabe, 1, rue des Fossés Saint-Bernard, Paris, 8 to 17 June
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