Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		Al-Ahram Weekly Online 2 - 8 August 2001 Issue No.545
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Gathering of swans
PALESTINIAN poet Mahmoud Darwish will be the focus of an international writers' conference to be held in November at Columbia University, New York, home to the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said. In recognition of his status as the leading poet of the resistance, Darwish will receive the award of Columbia's Centre for Studies in Cultural Freedom.
The Intifada thus tops a Third World- oriented agenda that probes the politics of race in a cultural context, examining oppression and resistance across nationalities and histories.
The conference boasts an impressive parade of world-class participants, many of whom have stakes in the realm of the disinherited and the dispossessed. They include six Nobel laureates (Toni Morrison, Wole Soyinka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney and Nadine Gordimer), ten Arab writers (Sonaalla Ibrahim, Radwa Ashour, Salwa Bakr, Al-Tayib Saleh, Abdel-Rahman Mounief, Elias Khouri, Hanan El-Shiekh, Hoda Barakat, Adonis and Anton Shammas) as well as literary celebrities like Gore Vidal and Isabelle Allendi.

Hail, auteur
THE UPCOMING, 58th round of the Venice Film Festival (August 29 -September 8), which opens with Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenbar's Los Otros (The Others), has made provisions, alas, for only two Arab films. The festival director Alberto Barbera insisted that very few Arab submissions were made; Mohamed Khan's recently released Ayyam Al-Sadat (Days of Sadat), for example, was not submitted for screening. Besides Tunisian film-maker Mahmoud Ben Mahmoud's full-length documentary, Alf Sawt wa Sawt: Mousiqa Al-Islam (One Thousand and One Sounds: The Music of Islam), only Youssef Chahine's as yet unreleased feature, Sukout Hansawwar (Silence, We're Shooting) will participate. The latter is part of a special programme entitled "Homage to three masters," in which Chahine is honoured alongside the 92-year-old Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira and the well- known Japanese film-maker Seijun Suzuki.

Decapolis of tragedy
LAST Wednesday Mahmoud Darwish dominated the opening of the 20th Jarash Festival in Jarash, Jordan. Darwish was present in person while his poster image, adopted as "the icon of the festival," served aptly as a reminder of the Intifada. His recent poem, Jidariyya (Mural), was read to an enraptured audience by the Syrian musician Bashar Zarqan. The opening ceremony thus set the tone for this entire round, in which Jarash has witnessed an expansion of poetic space at the expense of theatre, music, the plastic and performance arts. And, as the festival director, poet Gries Samawi told the press, it is as if the Intifada has taken over the amphitheatre of the Roman town, casting its tragic shadow on the festival and informing many of its activities. The critical symposium, for example, is on "The literature of resistance;" and participants include the Syrian critic Nabil Soliman, the Egyptian critic Mahmoud Amin El- Alim and the Tunisian critic Mohamed El- Youssufi.
As an expression of national resistance poetry overwhelms the festival, with poets from Tunisia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Palestine and over 20 Jordanian poets taking part; among the Egyptian participants the vernacular poet Sayed Hegab stands out. Performances include the Egyptian dramatist Osama Anwar Okasha's play El-Nas elli fil-Talit (The third-floor neighbours), which has been well-received in both Cairo and Jordan.
Out of hiding
THE BAIT Al-Din Festival, taking place in Lebanon this summer, became a regional highlight last week when Lebanon's greatest singer, Fairuz, announced that she would contribute a performance with her son Ziyad Rahbani, a musical luminary in his own right. For years, prior to her unexpected appearance in the Bait Al-Din Festival last year, Fairuz had been leading a secluded life, eluding media and fans and rejecting, in the words of one commentator, "the television interview, video clip and any contact with the press."
On announcing her intention to perform this year, Fairuz was said to be appearing in two consecutive rounds of the same festival for the first time since the mid-1970s. Many are grateful for Ziyad's compositions and his jazzy reworkings of classic Rahbani tunes, but it is his ability to inspire Fairuz to appear before the public that has solicited the most praise.
Despite the Rahbanis' time-honoured tradition of secrecy, of the three new songs Ziyad composed for Fairuz, two have been identified: "Khaberni An Akhbaru" (Tell me about him) and "Shu Bkhaf" (Afraid of what); they are both light-hearted love songs.
Fairuz will also perform a new version of the classic resistance song "Zahrat Al- Mada'in" (The flower of cities) in solidarity with the Intifada, to which Ziyad will pay homage, having paid homage to the Lebanese resistance following the liberation of the south last year.

Life savers
THE INDISPENSABLE discourse of the literati crescendoed to a new pinnacle last week when the latest censorial crisis at the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (GOCP), concerning the scholar Mohamed Abdel- Hafez's 1995 masters dissertation, Popular Sufi Poetry, witnessed an attack on the cultural authorities by enraged proponents of the freedom of expression.
GOCP chairman Mohamed Ghoniem, in particular, came under fire for approving the motion to cut certain examples of popular Sufi poetry cited by Abdel-Hafez and said to promote the drinking of wine and to implicate the figure of Prophet Mohamed.
Writers and artists signed a petition directed at "administrative acts of aggression on the part of the Ministry of Culture," citing recent victims -- works by Helmi Salem, Hassan Teleb, Amina Ziedan and Safaa Abdel- Men'em as well as the canonical Diwan of Abu-Nawwas -- and delineating the circumstances of Abdel-Hafez's book and taking issue with "the unequivocal act of censorship" that was undertaken against it. The petition described GOCP administrative decisions as illegal and declared the need for "an immediate and decisive pause, lest we should ultimately enter a dark tunnel from which we might never re-emerge."
Compiled by Youssef Rakha

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