Al-Ahram Weekly | Culture

		14 - 20 November 2002 Issue No. 612 Culture	Current issue Previous issue Site map
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Noma to Sakkut
HAMDI El-Sakkut, professor of Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo, has just received the prestigious African book prize, the Noma Award 2002, for his achievement in editing the monumental work The Arabic Novel. Bibliography and Critical Introduction 1865-1995. In their citation the jury argued that "covering the most mature novels from Africa and across the Arab world, [The Arabic Novel] presents a spectacular amount of bibliographic information, unsurpassed in its scope. The scholarship is both rigorous and daring, opening new research agendas in the field... this work will be a major canon of the African continental literature, unlikely to be surpassed for many years to come."
The $10,000 award will be presented at a ceremony in Africa in 2003, details of which are still to be announced. Established in 1979, the Noma Award is open to African writers and scholars whose work is published in Africa. The award is granted annually for an outstanding new book in any of three categories; scholarly or academic, children's books and literature and creative writing.

Search for Shafi'i
A RARE manuscript of Al-Imam Al- Shafi'i's famous Risala in 75 folios has disappeared from Dar Al-Kutub, Egypt's national library. Three employees are currently under investigation. Early reports had claimed that the manuscript was part of a display staged during celebrations of The Arab Document Day. Security camera recordings of the event, however, show that the manuscript was never displayed and must have been missing before the celebrations. The Dar's manuscript collection is available on microfilm which prompted its director, Salah Fadl, to order that no originals be allowed out of their store houses to minimise the chances of loss or theft. He has also ordered an inventory of all rare manuscripts in an attempt to discover if anything else is missing.

Al-Uthman censored -- again
KUWAITI writer Laila Al-Uthman's latest novel Al-'Us'us (The Coccyx) published by Dar Al-Mada, has been censored in Kuwait. The authorities requested that the novelist omit some 35 pages of the book, a condition she categorically rejected. Such cuts would distort the novel and are against freedom of expression, she argued. This is not Al-Uthman's first clash with censorship; a previous controversy resulted in a four-year court case.

Pi and shadows
CANADIAN author Yann Martel won the 2002 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Life of Pi, published by Canongate. The fable tells the story of Pi, an unusual young Hindu Christian Muslim boy brought up in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to Canada but the ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker.
Martel is currently in dispute with Brazilian novelist Moacyr Scliar who claims the idea behind Pi is borrowed from his own Max and the Cats, in which a teenage Jewish boy is adrift in a boat with a panther after a shipwreck. Martel readily credits the story by Scliar as the inspiration for his novel but argues he only read a review of the book by John Updike published in the New York Times Book Review. The Times editors, however, cannot find a record of such a review and Updike himself does not remember reviewing the novel. Martel claims the supposed review acquainted him with a brilliant premise ruined by a lesser writer. "I saw a premise that I liked and I told my own story with it," he told the Guardian last week. It is still not clear whether Scliar and his publishers will take legal action against Martel.
Meanwhile, in Paris, the Goncourt Prize, France's top literary award, went to Pascal Quignard for his novel Les Ombres Errantes (The Wandering Shadows). The book, a collection of aphorisms, memories and reflections on the past, is the first in Quignard's trilogy of literary fragments, Dernier Royaume (Last Kingdom). Quignard is best known for Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World), about an 18th-century viola de gamba player, made into a film starring Gérard Depardieu.

Documenting war
DOCUDAYS, the Fourth Beirut Festival for Documentary Film, opened last Sunday at Madina Theatre with Christian Frey's Musawwir Harbi (War Photographer) which follows reporter James Nachtwey through the world's battlefields, from Kosovo to Palestine. It will close with Jenin ... Jenin, a Palestinian production about the battle in the Palestinian refugee camp last April.
The festival is honouring Cairo-based Lebanese filmmaker Nabiha Lutfi, screening a documentary on her life and works as well as a retrospective of her films.

Arabs at Amiens
THE 22ND Amiens International Film Festival opened on 8 November and will continue till the 17th with several Arab films participating. Marianne Khoury's two-part documentary Les Passionnées du Cinéma is the only Egyptian film in the programme. Also included are the Palestinian Rashid Mash'arawi's A Ticket to Jerusalem (which co-won the Silver Pyramid at the Cairo International Film Festival), the Algerian Yamina Bachir Chouikh's Rachida and the Tunisian Ridha Behi's The Magic Box.

Birds on film
IBRAHIM Aslan's novel Asafir Al-Nil (Birds of the Nile) will be made into a film directed by Magdi Ahmed Ali. It deals with the marginalised in Cairo and the problems rural migrants to the capital face in adjusting to new social and cultural contexts. The film is expected to star Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz and Fifi Abdou.
By Amina Elbendary

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