Nothing personal?
Novelist Bahaa Taher is the last in a string of important Arab writers who will not participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair's guest-of-honour presentation this October. No more than three months were allotted to preparations for the Arab world guest-of- honour presentation at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and for him, along with many potential participants, the time limit alone was reason enough not to take part.
In an article published in the Cairo-based Al- Musawwar magazine last week, Taher mentioned inadequate time for preparations among the reasons for his decision to decline the Arab League's invitation to participate. It was but one aspect of the organisation that he did not like.
"Three months ago I was informed by Mohamed Ghoneim," he wrote, "the presentation coordinator, that my name was on the official list of Arab writers. Since then, I haven't heard of any meetings in which writers and intellectuals gathered to draw up a plan, nor do I know of any concrete procedures for translating Arabic literature into different languages. Until the time of writing this article, I have not received any official information regarding the content of the fair or my role as a representative novelist."
Taher was also resentful of the fact that many official participants are not Arab writers at all, strictly speaking, but authors of Arab origins who publish in foreign languages.
"With all due respect to these writers," he explained in Al-Musawwar, "I believe that Arabic [literary] culture comprises the work of those who write in Arabic. The work of those who choose to write in a foreign language should be seen as a distinctive literary declension within the culture of the countries where such writers reside."
Others were purposely excluded from the official list of participants. Prominent critic Ezzeddin Ismail, chairman of the Egyptian Society for Literary Criticism and a man with plenty of experience in planning international literary events, is one such. "I thought it was a mistake," he told the press. "But the mistake was never to be corrected..."
Whether out of discontent with the organisation or as a result of being ignored by the presentation administrators, many significant names will be missing.
Novelists Sonalla Ibrahim and Mohamed El- Bosati were both ignored as a result of previous clashes with the Egyptian Ministry of Culture: the former made a spectacle of his decision to decline the award of the Culture Council's Conference for Creativity in the Novel; the latter, as the editor-in- chief of a General Organisation for Cultural Palaces series of books, Ibda'at (Creations), opposed the ministry's decision to withdraw from circulation three novels that were the subject of a sectarian Islamist campaign in the late 1990s, refusing to condone the ministry's failure to endorse the authors' right to secular, creative expression.
Poet Iman Mersal, the (now former) official representative of "young writers", also decided against taking part in the end.
"I was planning on taking part in this significant event, which promised to boost Arab cultural presence in the West -- until I could no longer accept the way the whole thing was organised," she said. "For the organisers, literary texts are the least important consideration..."
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