Autumnal sunshine

Rania Gaafar shares her Frankfurt Book Fair sketchpad

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Springtime weather unexpectedly takes hold of the city, replacing the cold and the rain typical of this time of year. It's Tuesday, and a vast number of people are awaiting the official opening of the 2004 Frankfurt Book Fair. But there is sunshine as we shuffle through the building, queuing up. Inside the heat becomes unbearable when an hour-long course of "security measures" immobilises us; we are sweating freely as we wait. At one point Mahmoud Darwish arrives at the escalator, where the queue starts; he looks about, ruffled and disconsolate. Hanan El-Sheikh sashays across wearing an interesting hairdo. Suddenly the official Egyptian delegation, thus far huddled quietly around Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, turn around and move off. Impatient with the wait, they go in search of an alternative, VIP entryway. Anis Mansour jumps the queue. Miral El-Tahawi makes a bold move, disappearing momentarily in the wake of the aforementioned delegation, only to return shortly afterwards, back at the end of the line: Sisyphus.

This is post-11 September Germany welcoming the Arab world, and it seems that all are equal before security, irrespective of literary merit or bureaucratic rank. The man behind me remarks that a bomb could have been planted already -- no one was checked at the entrance of the building, he notes perceptively -- and a German woman replies that it would be a very effective plot. "A high number of casualties guaranteed," she laughs. Later, in his opening speech, no sooner does Volker Neumann apologise for the inconvenience than he declares how delighted he is that the Arab world is Frankfurt's guest of honour this year, how urgently intercultural dialogue is required and with what excitement the media has anticipated it.

The need for critical dialogue was to lie at the heart of yet another speech -- Kerstin Mèller, minister of state at the foreign office and member of the Green Party, opening the International Centre. It was Joschka Fischer who was scheduled to perform this task, and one wondered whether his last-minute retreat had to do with news of the bombings in Sinai; on the same day he described the incident as "an act of terrorism contemptuous of humanity", while remaining as silent as ever on "collateral damages" in Iraq and ethnic cleansing in northern Gaza. Literature can hardly compete with realpolitik, by the look of it, book fair or no book fair. Soon enough one would be forced to concede that expectations had been somewhat too great.

Though it haunted the fair, for example, the word "dialogue" remained ambiguous, and not until Sunday, the closing day, did a discussion participant point out that if it is to be meaningful at all, it must be taken literally -- not as a façade for partisan standpoints. Only by acknowledging the complexity of one society does a commentator begin to understand the complexity of the other; exchange, in other words, must imply more than the "Sindbad strategy" of adaptability, a function of education and socialisation rather than cultural dialogue. Yet sadly this mode of engagement was seldom to be encountered through the five-day duration of the fair. But it was largely in the light of such ambiguity that one came to appreciate the hyper real plenitude of Arab images on the fair grounds, from national flags fluttering outside the building and hanging flaccid inside, to portraits of (mainly historical) cultural figures lining the entrance hall. (One passer-by was to comment that the almost expressionist aesthetic governing the execution of the latter lent them a vivid sense of contemporary immediacy.)

In contrast to ideas -- elusive, overabundant, in medias res -- images seemed to offer some solid ground to stand on, a sense of identity that transcended the carnage in Iraq and Palestine. Yet one couldn't help wondering whether the emphasis on Arab contributions to the sciences, all of which were made in past centuries, acted to suppress the subsequent horror of colonisation, humiliation and backwardness. "The Orient comes to you," said Amr Moussa in his opening speech, "bringing a taste of its culture, its literature, its art..." Not until the very end, almost as an afterthought, did he mention the liberation of Arab land, equality or "a Palestinian state on Palestinian soil". And as if to ironically frame Schröder's message to Arab nations -- calling on them to outlaw and fight not only terrorism but fanaticism -- Moussa's speech was replete with religious terminology, starting with bismillahi arrahmani arrahim and ending with "Let us pray for peace".

Equally interesting was the stress both Moussa and Schröder placed on nature, employing botanical imagery, with the latter ending his speech with a romantic Arabic quotation -- "A book is like a garden you keep in your pocket" -- and the former quoting Goethe, as if paying back in kind: "Know ye the land where the lemon trees blossom?" A slide show at the Arab Forum depicting Egypt in 2004 included a long shot of skyscrapers supposedly typifying Cairo today, and a black-and-white documentary-style still of fellahin accompanied by donkeys; smiling Egyptian faces rounded up the Arab League's idea of a "positive image" of the country, no doubt appreciated by Schröder. Yet notwithstanding such abstract notions of positive exchange, the German press was quick to demonstrate to what extent mere romanticism could miss the point. Writing in the daily Sèddeutsche Zeitung, Volker Breidecker pointedly picked on Moussa's (legitimate) demand for a Palestinian state: "During the first day of the fair, people behaved as if Israel didn't exist at all... Amr Moussa spoke about a Palestinian state on Palestinian land and left it to the audience to decide where that is."

Such a political (mis)understanding of discourse was to prove recurrent. Kristen Mèller's comment that "Cultural dialogue alone won't work" on Wednesday elicited a reticent response from Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, who had, while inaugurating the International Centre in Hall 5, spoken in glowing terms of "global peace and security", "the dignity of each civilisation" and Dar Al-Hikma (House of Wisdom). Taking her cue from the positive objectives the first lady sought to promote, Mèller insisted on criticising the persecution of writers in Arab countries, which frequently forced them into exile, pointing up "the overarching framework" of life under contemporary Arab regimes. And such contention was characteristic; many aspects of the fair were contradictory or incompatible -- something on which the German press frequently commented.

Journalists identified a fundamental difference between the principles informing the guest-of- honour presentation and the way it was ultimately received. "How come Arabs are criticising the West for constructing and reinforcing Orientalist images when they themselves [have internalised these images and] promote their books... in a folkloric and careless way?" asks Daniel-Dylan Böhmer in Der Spiegel. Iraqi writer Najem Wali, a popular media figure, one of the most prominent critics of Arab governments and a supporter of the war in Iraq, described the Arab League as "a political organisation adhering to the rules of the political game". An independent sponsor like UNESCO, he insisted, would have been far preferable. "There are only a few dissidents here and the fact that they are here can only be interpreted as an alibi. Arab countries are not interested in literature, what they are after in Frankfurt... is political self promotion."

I recall the illustrations I saw this morning while reading the newspapers on the train. German newspapers and magazines have all discovered the aesthetics of Arabic calligraphy, I realise, and they came up with special dossiers about the book fair. The repetitive ubiquity of such coverage reflected the same problem, however: Arab authors remain by and large unknown in Germany, and what the rare experts on Arabic literature have to say differs appreciably from the discourse of their counterparts working from within Arab societies and cultures. Once you step out of the fair grounds the contents of the books on offer are ignored in favour of a growing fascination with a new, exotic alphabet, with bookshops selling mugs inscribed with Arabic proverbs. Four graphics illustrating the daily Frankfurter Rundschau comprised Dhakira (Memory) -- to coincide with the opening -- followed by Watan (Homeland), Khawf (Fear) and Haneen (Longing). An interesting combination of nouns, I thought.

Commenting on the exoticisation and commodification of Arab culture in the course of an interview he gave at the ZEIT stand on the fair grounds, Taher Ben Jalloun announced that Arabs "really must go back to their roots and avoid negating them". He criticised "the functionalism of which literature has become a victim since 11 September". Yet, as if to endorse the exotic focus of the fair, the publishing house C H Beck produced a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights -- the Orientalist's central reference point. For the first time the oldest extant Arabic version of this classic is available to German readers in its unabridged entirety, a feat of translator and Arabist Claudia Ott.

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Arab culture notwithstanding, the Taba massacres were not the only news item that captured attention during the fair. The winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature was also announced, and it was a great surprise: Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian whose novels and plays display a "musical flow of voices and counter- voices which, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". Jelinek is an agoraphobic recluse who refused to travel to Stockholm to receive the award. "I never wanted to be a public figure," she told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, "but as Austrian artists we never had a second chance," she added cryptically. "Someone has to do the dirty work." Born in 1946 to a Jewish father, in her work Jelinek refers to war, fascism, pornography and language; she is among Austrian society's harshest critics, and her writing is infused with the notion of a people who have not come to terms with their past; especially after her novel Lust, she has been referred to as a feminist. A controversial figure, she attacked Jörg Haider in public and placed a ban on the performance of her plays in Austria for a while. Her work was popularised in Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's adaptation of her well-known novel The Pianist, in which a single woman in her late 30s suffers from a masochistic relationship with her mother, who continues to control her life. So called borderline afflictions from sadomasochism to self mutilation find expression in the character of the protagonist, who is unable to experience herself as a woman.

Last year Bambiland, Jelinek's play about the war in Iraq, premiered in Austria. A critique of war in the age of the media, the play endeavours to show how "embedded journalism" -- experience from the viewpoint not of the subjects but of the camera lens -- is a form of globalised censorship, transparency as surveillance. Reviews of the play stood side by side with reports on Seymour Hersh's Chain of Command: the Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, an account of systematic, institutionalised torture in the Abu Gharib Prison in Iraq. It seemed the fair could never escape the political framework in which it found itself entrenched. The death of Jacques Derrida during the proceedings brought deconstruction into the picture, underlining the contradiction between Derrida's widely admired practice of undoing texts in pursuit of an infinite circulation of meanings, and the ideas informing not only the Arab presentation but the German perspective on it: both sought to construct a definite and reassuring discourse of self and other in search of an accessible, "meaningful" and politically safe exchange -- a task that proved well nigh impossible.

Nor did the premiere of Lebanese filmmaker Danielle Arbid's Maarik Hubb (Battles of Love) contribute to a sense of security. Seen from the viewpoint of a pubescent girl, the Civil War in Beirut reflects a degeneration of emotion and morality not unlike that of Abu Gharib: sexual sadism, animal abuse and the futility of rage brought home the complacent luxury inherent in the very notion of a book fair, something that Sonalla Ibrahim pointed to in an interview with Sèddeutsche Zeitung -- the pathological consequences of a neo-colonial order.

The inevitable happened at least once during the fair when the Los-Angeles based Jewish Simon Wiesenthal Centre sent an open letter to Volker Neumann demanding the removal of allegedly anti-Semitic books published by Horus and Merit, small-scale houses said to rally against the existence of Israel. A visit by the German police found no evidence of anti-Semitism, however, and the presentation proceeded unscathed. Yet the episode remains telling in that it highlights the limitations inherent in any genuine attempt to transcend the aforementioned order.

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No doubt Europe has deconstructed itself, in the sense of breaking conventions and borders and creating new ones that benefit from a postmodern sense of self-irony in popular as well as highbrow circles. In so doing it has created all sorts of individual spaces, perhaps even a space for individual Arabs or an individually perceived Arab world. Yet if anything the fair demonstrates that any Arab presence in Europe today will be haunted by the colonial present, and colourful attempts to decorate the surface appearance of a reality that encompasses such tragedies as Palestine and Iraq can only go so far. What the fair lacks is overtly political debate, for which the Arab world still fails to provide a solid platform. But only through a "dialectic between my body and the world", in the words of Franz Fanon, will I know who I am as an Arab -- or, more to the point, as a representative of Arab culture in Frankfurt.