A R T S & C U LT U R E » Beirut 39
BEIRUT 39
by Pádraig Belton
For this year alone, there is to be an Arab Booker. Hay-on-Wye- that
muddy annual bibliophile saturnalia in Wales which former President
Clinton once famously termed a Woodstock of the mind - was known
already for its international collaborations. Now in its 21st year, the
Hay Festival has spawned sister festivals in the Alhambra, Nairobi,
Cartagena and Belfast.
It goes now to Beirut. Beirut, for this year, reigns as World Book
Capital, and a short list of 39 Arab writers of 39 years or younger
is the centrepiece of Beirut 39, Hay's first Arab collaboration. The
39 include 24 novelists, and 15 poets; only 16 are at the moment
published outside the Arab world. Of the shortlist, organiser Cristina
Fuentes La Roche says, 'whilst we are familiar with second genera-
tion diaspora writers who have emigrated to the West, we've been
slow, until now, in finding illuminating voices from the Arab world
and celebrating them. What's thrilling for us at Hay is that the Beirut
39 judges are leaping over the writers already known in English and
French, and finding undiscovered genius all over the place.'
For Hay, this is following on the heels of Bogotá 39, which marked a
Columbian sojourn in 2007 for Unesco's book capital. It grows also
from its Andalusian festival, Hay Festival Alhambra, which in 2008
and 2009 made use of the Nasrid palace as a site for Arab-European
literary mingling. Miss Fuentes says, 'the best way to deepen your
understanding of a culture is through its writers.' For the 39 on the
shortlist, there were roughly 450 submissions.
One is Mohammed Hasan Alwan, a Saudi author born in 1979 and
author of three novels, presently at work on the fourth. Critics have
described him as an expressionist who endows inanimate objects
with the power of speech, and uses metaphor in ways new to modern
Arabic writing. His novels – Saqf al-Kefaya (Ceiling of Sufficiency),
Sofia and Touq al-Taharah (The Collar of Purity) - explore love in Saudi
Arabia, and the implications of heartbreak. His first novel begins with
the words, 'You were not an ordinary woman for my love to you to be
just another ordinary love.'
Alwan points to the accessibility, new to his generation of young Arab
writers, of literature and knowledge from all quarters of the world. 'Not
anymore are writers limited to what’s been offered in their geographi-
cal, political, and cultural boundaries,' he says. 'In a recent Writers’
Retreat, a few Arab writers and I agreed that despite the fact each of
us came from a different background, we all have Facebook accounts,
most of us speak a second language, and we all read the same books
and share a similar universal lifestyle. Each one of us knows some-
thing about each others’ backgrounds and cultures.'
28 Oasis Magazine
Manar Makhool, a Palestinian doctoral candidate at the University of
Cambridge, sees young Arab writing as growing more professional,
with plots that have become more complex and developed, and
novels which have tended to be longer as well. The addressing of
political issues is, in his view, becoming 'more subtle and Bakhtinian
in its discourse.'
Pursuing the young Arab writer of today, and how he or she differs
from writers emerging in earlier moments, for one the rising genera-
tion feels a freedom to be non-ideological - says Dr Otared Haidar,
editor of the journal Mokarabat and an academic at Oxford – without
the compulsion felt by his or her antecedents to side with nationalist
or leftist partisan camps. The plane of literature seems more de-
tached from the plane of politics at the moment, the writer's role less
interwoven with that of public intellectual and political conscience
than at the time of Salih, say, or Kanafani. The younger generation,
says, Haidar, 'can be thinkers and intelligentsia without feeling this
need to be under the umbrella of an ideology.'
A second trait of the emerging Facebooked generation of Arab writ-
ers is their sense of urge and need to integrate into world literature,
and as well as participation in prizes, and pursuit of translation into
Western languages. Translation of world literature into Arabic is vast;
traffic in the reciprocal direction is sparse. Contrast this with the writ-
erly model of Syrian short story writer Zakaria Tamer, now 78. Tamer,
a pioneer of magic realism within the Arabic short story (and latterly
a resident of Great Britain), is chased by publishers and translators
but reluctant to give readings, to follow what is written about him, or
even to improve his English. Says Haidar, 'he is a genius, but he just
wants to write, in Arabic.'
It remains to be seen whether, for young writers of the moment, Iraq
looms as large in the imaginary as Palestine, or whether it is ulti-
mately a sad but more episodic, limited event. The Beirut 39 long-list
included one novel by a 25-year old Saudi, Nisreen Ghandourah;
called al-Nahr al-Thalith (The Third River – being, after the Tigris
and Euphrates, the river of tears, but tears which are water and
therefore life), it featured a professor of history hallucinating Iraq
as Ishtar, queen of love, fertility and war, amidst her descent into
Hades. Has Iraq been a prism for refocusing the relationship with a
West which offers both literary models and broader audiences, but
also is one characterised by postcolonialism and, at times, occupa-
tion? It is too early to determine. Says Makhool, 'Trends in novels
tend to take longer times to formulate and stabilise. I think there is a
higher chance that Iraq becomes a “co-Palestine” and not a “second
Palestine.”'
The search within the Arab novel for, perhaps, the next Tayyeb
Saleh, or Abd al-Rahman Munif runs today through Beirut, with an
attentive Welsh audience as well. The crowning event of the festival
will be held in Beirut from the 15th to 18th of April 2010, to mark
the end of the city's reign as World Book Capital. Bloomsbury and
Bloomsbury Qatar will in the end publish an anthology of the young
writers in English and Arabic. Miss Fuentes perceives though a
longer commitment to the writers of the 39, one not only of identi-
fying but also of nurturing an emerging generation: 'Over the next
ten years,' she promises, 'we will work with them to promote their
writing around the world.'