Tuesday, December 18, 2018

PEN Translates award goes to 'Palestine +100' among tittles from 15 countries

The latest batch of Pen Translates awards includes one book - with multiple authors and translators - to be translated from Arabic: Palestine +100 due to be published by Manchester-based Comma Press in May 2019.

Comma Press said in a statement: "We're delighted to announce we've won a PEN Translates Award for our forthcoming anthology Palestine +100, which will fund the translation of a number of the stories from Arabic into English.


"The collection is the sequel to our hit Iraq +100 anthology, which went viral on social media, selling out in advance of publication and featuring on BBC News and The Guardian website. The rights were sold to Tor (Pan Macmillan) for a North American edition shortly after in our biggest rights deal to date.

"This time we asked Palestinian writers to imagine their country 100 years after the Nakba;  in the year 2048, what will have been the repercussions of the displacement of more than 700,000 people after the Israeli War of Independence, and how might Palestine have finally escaped it, and found its own peace, a hundred years down the line?

"Palestine +100 will be released in May 2019 and will feature established and emerging authors from Palestine including Selma Dabbagh, Nayrouz Qarmout, Ahmed Masoud and many more.. Huge thanks to the team at English PEN! Congrats to the other award winners."

Nayrouz Qarmout 

Press Release from English PEN 

A diverse list of books make up the latest round of PEN Translates award winners. These include new novels by László Krasznahorkai and Marie Darrieussecq; the debut short story collection by politician Selahattin Demirtaş, currently imprisoned in Turkey; a memoir by legendary Belgian filmmaker Chantal Ackerman; Spanish poetry for children; as well as novels from Bosnia, the Comoros Islands, and Indonesia.

Ros Schwartz, co-chair of the Writers in Translation committee, said:
'The list of award-winning titles is more diverse than ever, with translations from 15 countries and 12 languages, including Bosnian, Indonesian, Slovenian and Tamil, with the first ever novel from the Comoros Islands to be translated into English. English PEN is thrilled and proud to be supporting such an exciting range of outstanding titles.'

Books are selected for PEN Translates awards on the basis of outstanding literary quality, strength of the publishing project, and contribution to literary diversity in the UK. The award-winning books are featured on the English PEN World Bookshelf website, in partnership with Foyles.

PEN Translates award-winning titles in autumn 2018

Mountain That Eats Men by Ander Izagirre, translated from Spanish by Tim Gutteridge. ZED Books, May 2019. Country of origin: Spain

My Mother Said by Chantal Ackerman, translated from French by Daniella Shreir. Silver Press, June 2019. Country of origin: Belgium

An Orphan World by Giuseppe Caputo, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes and Juana Adcock. Charco Press, October 2019. Country of origin: Colombia

The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, translated from Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein. Harvill Secker, March 2020. Country of origin: Indonesia

Poems That the Wind Blew In by Karmelo C. Iribarren, translated from Spanish by Lawrence Schimel. Emma Press, September 2019. Country of origin: Spain

A History of the World with the Women Put Back In by Kerstin Lücker and Ute Daenschel, translated from German by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp and Jessica West. The History Press, September 2019. Country of origin: Germany

The Baby by Marie Darrieussecq, translated from French by Penny Hueston. Text Publishing, July 2019. Country of origin: France

When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back by Naja Marie Aidt, translated from Danish by Denise Newman. Quercus, March 2019. Country of origin: Denmark

Dawn by Selahattin Demirtaş, translated from Turkish by Amy Marie Spangler and Kate Ferguson. Hogarth, April 2019. Country of origin: Turkey

A Drop of Happiness by Selvedin Avdić, translated from Bosnian by Will Firth. Istros Books, March 2020. Country of origin: Bosnia

Palestine +100 by various, translated from Arabic by various. Comma Press, May 2019. Country of origin: Palestine

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, translated from Chinese by Jeremy Tiang. Tilted Axis, May 2020. Country of origin: China

Baron Wenkheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, translated from Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet. Tuskar Rock Press, November 2019. Country of origin: Hungary

Dreams by Rajathi Salma, translated from Tamil by Meena Kandasamy. Tilted Axis Press, October 2020. Country of origin: India

A Girl Called Eel by Ali Zamir, translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins. Jacaranda Books, 2019. Country of origin: Comoros Islands

The Fig by Goran Vojnović, translated from Slovenian by Olivia Hellewell. Istros Books, October 2019. Country of origin: Slovenia


English PEN's Writers in Translation programme has been promoting literature in translation since 2005. The programme includes translation grants, events, and PEN Transmissions, an online zine for international writing.
English PEN's major publisher grants programme, PEN Translates, awards grants to UK publishers for translation costs and is supported by Arts Council England. Over 200 books in translation have been supported by English PEN grants since 2005.
English PEN, a registered charity, promotes the freedom to write and the freedom to read in the UK and around the world. The founding centre of a worldwide writers' association, established in 1921, we work to identify and dismantle barriers between writers and readers, whether these are cultural, political, linguistic or economic.

report from London by Susannah Tarbush

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Saqi to publish Raphael Cormack's book on women who created Egypt’s modern culture


Saqi to publish story of Cairo’s female cultural trailblazers in the early twentieth century

Saqi Books has announced that it has acquired the world rights to Martyrs of Passion: The Women Who Created Egypt’s Twentieth-Century Culture from debut writer Raphael Cormack. Publication is set for spring 2020. 

Raphael Cormack

"Martyrs of Passion tells the exciting, little-known story of Egypt’s entertainment industry in the inter-war period through the lives of its most prominent women," says Saqi. "In what was then the cultural centre of the region, singers were pressing hit records, new theatres and dramatic troupes were springing up everywhere, and Cairo’s cabarets were packed – a counter-culture was on the rise. In the bars, hash-dens, music halls and theatres of the roaring ’20s, people of all cultures, classes and backgrounds – Muslims, Christians and Jews – came together. A passionate group of eccentrics, narcissists and idealists strove to entertain the broad spectrum of Egyptian society.

"Women asserted themselves on the stage and behind the microphone like never before. Some of the biggest stars of Cairo’s stages were female. Two of the most famous troupes of the 1920s were run by women. It was in the 1920s that Oum Kalthoum, the legendary singer, first won her fame. And in the 1920s, the casino and dancehall owned and run by Badia Masabni became the hottest nightspot in town, and one of the early pioneers of Egyptian cinema, Aziza Amir, came up through the stage. These were women who were not afraid to fight for their rights."

Cormack's book is set among the theatres, cabarets, music halls and cinemas of Cairo, It will present a unique view of the cultural, social and feminist movements in early twentieth-century-Egypt, and show how this global scene laid the foundations of Arabic popular culture.

Raphael Cormack says, ‘I’m very excited to be able to tell the compelling and captivating stories of the women of Cairo’s interwar nightlife and entertainment industry. It is a world full of eccentric characters, revolutionary ideas and provocative art, that is little known among English readers. For me, Saqi is the perfect publisher to work with; they have long experience of publishing books on the Middle East and we share an understanding of what makes this history so important.’

Lynn Gaspard, publisher at Saqi acquired world rights directly from Raphael Cormack. She said, ‘Raphael has been a friend to Saqi for many years. I am thrilled to be working with him on Martyrs of Passion, which tells the riveting story of modern Cairo as we have never heard it before. Now is the time for Arab women to reclaim their place in herstory, and I’m very proud to be working with Raphael who in this book is celebrating these female cultural icons’ triumphs.’

Raphael Cormack has a first in classics from Oxford and a PhD in Egyptian theatre from the University of Edinburgh. He co-edited the first collection of Sudanese stories translated from Arabic, The Book of Khartoum (Comma Press). One of the stories in this collection won the Caine Prize 2017. He is also currently editing for Comma The Book of Cairo, which will appear next. He has written on Arabic culture for the London Review of Books, TLS, Apollo, Prospect and elsewhere.


Saqi says that for all rights outside the UK, enquiries should be addressed to  Elizabeth Briggs elizabeth@saqibooks.com


Thursday, December 06, 2018

Saqi Books announces that Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela wins Saltire Award

press release from Saqi Books

Elsewhere, Home by Leila Aboulela wins
Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award

We are absolutely thrilled to share the news that Leila Aboulela has won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2018 for Elsewhere, Home.

The winners of Scotland’s most prestigious annual book awards were announced on Friday 30 November at Dynamic Earth in
Edinburgh. Sarah Mason, the programme director for the Saltire Society, said: ‘This year’s awards are a testament to the outstanding calibre of modern Scottish literature in all its varied forms. Every one of the awards was hotly contested, making the judges’ decisions particularly challenging.’ Our extended congratulations to all the award winners.

A Guardian Summer Read, Elsewhere, Home deftly captures the search for home in our fast-changing world, offering a rich tableau of life as an immigrant. It is the most recent work by British-Sudanese writer and playwright Leila Aboulela, whose novels have been translated into more than fourteen languages.

To celebrate,
we’re offering 20% off Elsewhere, Home when ordered direct from the Al Saqi Bookshop. Simply enter Saltire2018 at checkout to claim your discount.
‘A lovely collection about love, loneliness and spirituality’
Nadiya Hussain, Good Housekeeping

‘A beautiful collection … There is so much quiet brilliance.’

The Observer

 
‘Thoughtful, wry, funny …
The deceptively quiet tales in Elsewhere, Home are barbed with tension and conflict.’
Scotland Herald


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Copyright © 2018 Saqi Books, All rights reserved.

 

Thursday, August 30, 2018

Karl Sharro tweets and maps his unique brand of Middle Eastern satire in debut book

Since this blogpost first appeared, it has been announced that Karl Sharro will be appearing in a panel discussion on Satire In Surreal Times as part of the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre at 3pm on Sunday 28 October. Tickets can be booked here
On 4 October he appears at the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival in London.


The Lebanese-British satirist and architect Karl Sharro’s debut book And Then God Created the Middle East and said ‘Let There be Breaking News', published recently in London by Saqi Books, defies categorisation. It is primarily a book of humour, but it arguably also deserves a place in other sections of a bookstore or library, such as the Middle East, politics or media studies.

The book is authored in the name of Karl reMarks, Sharro’s “Middle East political and cultural online commentary, with frequent forays into satire.” Sharro founded his blog in 2007 and the @KarlreMarks Twitter account two years later. His trademark avatar, a bearded figure with a conical hat against a red background, is taken from his cartoon series “The Phoenicians Invented Everything". The figure also appears on the cover of Sharro's small format book, which is in a striking palette of bright blue, mustard and white. "My own colour scheme is red, so the blue was a change, but we wanted a nod to Twitter" Sharro says in the Q & As below.



Sharro is a master of the Twitter form, with his pithy one-liners and tweeted diagrams. The book provides many examples of both (the Karl reMarks Twitter self-description includes "Director of the Institute of Internet Diagrams"). The @KarlreMarks Twitter account has 135,000 followers and its witticisms and sharp commentary are essential daily reading for many.

As noted in a recent interview with Qantara.de Sharro was in conversation at the launch of his book with senior lecturer in International Journalism at City, London University Dr Zahera Harb She said  he manages to say in 140 characters what may take hours to explain to her students. It seems the book will be put on her studentsʹ reading lists and it looks a safe bet that other academics will do the same.

Sharro told Qantara.de: "I know that several professors do include my blog and tweets on some syllabuses already, and having the tweets in book form will "make it easier for students to find them." He wanted to collect the tweets into a book "so as to give them a more permanent home, beyond Twitter where they eventually get lost".


Asked by an audience member at the launch whether he welcomed and felt "liberated" by last year's doubling of the permitted length of a tweet from 140 to 280 characters, Sharro said: "I think 280 characters is really awful. Seriously, the greatest thing about Twitter is learning to express yourself in a very short medium. If anything, they should have introduced 'Twitter extreme' with only 70 characters!"



                                                               Karl Sharro   Photo credit James Berry 

Sharro's book is divided into 10 sections, such as Geography for Dummies, War and Peace, Extremism: A Study and Democracy for Realists, and ending with a selection of his Bar Jokes. His best-known bar joke is probably the one about Umm Kulthum, the legendary Egyptian diva: Umm Kulthum walks into a bar. Walks into a bar. Walks into a bar. Walks into a baaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. On Fairouz, the famous Lebanese singer, we have Fairouz walks into a bar. The moon caresses the olive tree."

Sharro often lampoons Western journalists and analysts: in fact the full Tweet from which the title of his book is taken is "And Then God Created the Middle East and said 'Let There be Breaking News and Analysis'." The final two words had to be dropped from the title for reasons of space.

One tweet runs: “A telling Western phrase about the Middle East is ‘borders were drawn without regard to ethnicity’, as if it’s a bad thing. I mean, if they had divided states by ethnicity, my grandmother’s old neighbourhood in Baghdad would have been four different countries.” Also,"I'm deeply grateful to Westerners who, despite being in the midst of a historic crisis of their own, still take the time to lecture us."

Tweets in the "Geography for Dummies" section include: “People often ask me ‘where is the Middle East?’ It’s the area between Egypt, Iran, Yemen, Turkey and the British Museum." The "Sykes and Picot Go Out for a Pizza" diagram shows a pizza hacked into a crude jigsaw with the characteristic straight lines of imperial borders.

The book would have been incomplete without Sharro's classic "Simple One-Sentence Explanation for What Caused ISIS" - which extends over two pages. In 2006 his video of the endlessly convoluted sentence went viral and had 1.6 million views on Facebook alone. He recently posted on YouTube this new video of the "Simple One-Sentence ..." recorded on the banks of the River Thames:





"You want the Simple One-Sentence Explanation for What Caused ISIS? Here goes...." 

Western journalists covering the Middle East may well identify with the following tweet: “We Arabs are like, ‘You can’t report on Arab countries without learning Arabic.” Learns Arabic. ‘Why do you know Arabic? You must be a spy'.”

Sharro's satirical eye often focuses on Arab politics. "After the Arab awakening comes the Arab siesta", "An Arab dictator is like a matryoshka doll in reverse, Every time you remove one, you get a bigger one" and "Many people are asking me why I'm not commenting on the Arab Summit. Not into them anymore, I preferred their early work." The section on "Extremism: A Study" pokes fun at ISIS, through tweets such as "I personally don't think we should worry about ISIS. Launching a magazine was a fatal mistake. It will bankrupt them within years" "I love statistics like 'bees have killed more people than ISIS'. True, but bees aren't a death cult" and "How many ISIS jihadis does it take to change a lightbulb? ... What's wrong with eternal darkness?" 

The pages of Sharro's book are liberally sprinkled with diagrams. His endearing Phoenician characters Abdeshmun and Hanno appear in two cartoon strips  - "The Phoenicians Invent Speech Bubbles" and "The Phoenicians Invent Polytheism".

  The Phoenicians Invent Speech Bubbles © Karl Sharro

He uses maps to make powerful points. The "Map of Western Invasions of the Middle East vs The Other Way Round" shows numerous coloured arrows pointing from Europe and America towards the Middle East and North Africa - contrasted with a few arrows the other way round. The maps in "Six New Ways to Divide the Middle East and North Africa" use different colours to divide the region in terms of eg "Jeans / Traditional" "Olive oil / Oil" "Kings / Generals / Other", reminiscent in style of maps of the Middle East in Western publications.

Western Invasions of the Middle East vs The Other Way Round
© Karl Sharro

Q&As with Karl Sharro

Karl Sharro was born in Zahle, Lebanon, in 1971 to a Lebanese father and Iraqi mother, and is from a Syriac Christian background.  According to his blogpost "I Wrote My Own Wikipedia Biography" while at school he used to pass short funny messages to his schoolmates, “acquiring a skill that would be useful later in life on Twitter.” He moved in 2002 from Beirut to London, where he still lives and works as an architect.

In addition to his blog posts and tweets, Sharro's work has been featured in many print and online publications, from the Wall Street Journal to the Guardian and POLITICO, as well as on broadcast media such as the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera and Channel 4.  He sometimes gives lectures and TedX Talks. Earlier this year he presented the BBC radio documentary "Skiing Mount Lebanon."

The book's design is very appealing. Did you always envisage a small format book that could be slipped into a pocket (and that could make a good, affordable present), and how was the colour scheme decided? 

Sharro: Yes, the idea from the beginning was for a small format book which would be practical and affordable. I am grateful to Saqi’s team for the great work on the design. It was particularly challenging to get all of the title on the cover and I think it looks brilliant. My own colour scheme is red, so the blue was a change, but we wanted a nod to Twitter.

Did you think of including some of your blog posts and articles in the book, in addition to the tweets?

Sharro: In the beginning I considered including some of the blog posts but ultimately they didn’t fit the format of the book and its small size. I also considered adding one or two of my Lebanese recipes as a bonus but that didn’t make it in the book either. However, I will offer to send the recipes to anyone who buys the book. Perhaps there will be another book in the future which will include the blog posts.

Many of your fans first got to know your satire and analysis through your blog as well as Twitter. You made a peak of 106 blogposts in 2013. But by 2017, the number had dwindled to just one post – on the first anniversary of the EU Referendum – and so far this year to zero. After initially embracing the blog form, why have you abandoned it so decisively? After all, you do still write longer pieces for a variety of media outlets and you contributed a substantial piece "The Joys of Applying for a US Visa" to the book Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic (Saqi).

Sharro: I decided in 2016 to stop writing on the blog, and the few posts written after that were one-offs. I had gotten to the point where the blog wasn’t receiving the same number of readers and the same level of interest. I think it was a combination of blogs suffering overall - I blame podcasts - and my writing becoming a bit repetitive. There were two factors that led to my decision. Firstly, it was getting harder to sustain the energy for writing so frequently - I have only my lunch break to write in - and after years it was exhausting. Secondly, I was considering other formats. I was doing a pilot for a TV show at the time and was thinking of other ways of doing satire. Two years later, I am still thinking.

The launch of your book at The Book Club in Shoreditch, East London, at which you were in conversation with Dr Zahera Harb, went down very well with the audience. You are due to appear at the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival in London on 4 October. Are other events in the offing?

Sharro: I am planning one other event so far, at Oxford University’s Middle East Centre in November, but hopefully there will be others.

Which humorists in the UK, US or elsewhere do you particularly rate, and perhaps see as influences?

Sharro: I think my first comedic influence was Woody Allen, particularly in his writing and stand-up comedy. I learned a lot from that. Technically I think Stewart Lee is one of the best, and I love Jack Dee’s early work in particular. Jerry Sadowitz is another influence, his comedy work was amazing for me. And in terms of style, I’ve always liked Mark Steel. I will probably be criticised for not including any women on this list. And the eternal wit of Dorothy Parker.

  
CNN interview with Karl Sharro shows  his "Diagram of Political Relationships in the Middle East" - one of the illustration in And Then God Created the Middle East and Said 'Let There be Breaking News' 

These days we often hear about the rise of Arab, Middle Eastern or Muslim comedy  in the UK and elsewhere.  Do you feel comfortable with such categorisations?

Sharro: A lot of my stuff is about the Arab angle, so that I don’t mind so much but I find it strange when it goes into religion, partially because in Lebanon this is just not done. It would be very strange for someone to describe themselves as a Muslim comedian or Christian comedian there. But ultimately I don’t want to be known just for that, if I ever decide to take up comedy I wouldn’t want to be known as the Arab comedian. My ideal stand-up routine is actually about the etiquette of space travel, nothing to do with the Middle East.

Your first stand-up performance, at Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, seems to have given you a taste for stand-up. Are you planning further performances?

Sharro: I enjoyed that a lot, although people thought I was crazy to do a 45 minute routine for my standup debut. I should do more, particularly that I took the trouble to memorise the routine, but I haven’t yet decided on the venue and the timing.

Given the variety of comedy genres in which you have been involved, what lies ahead for Karl reMarks?

Sharro:  I have for a few years been  thinking of doing podcasts or vlogging, but I seem to never find the energy or the time. Perhaps after my children grow up -  if the Middle East is still in the news by then.

report and interview by Susannah Tarbush


a clip from Karl Sharro's stand-up at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2017

Thursday, July 12, 2018

review of Rana Haddad's novel 'The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor'



English version of article published in Arabic in Al-Hayat newspaper on 12 July 2018.

Rana Haddad tells a Syrian love story in English

The Syrian-British writer and journalist Rana Haddad has worked widely in print media and TV as a researcher, editor, producer, and translator. At the same time, she writes poetry, and fiction. An illustrated book of her poems, The Boy Moon: Lost Love Poems Found in an Envelope, appeared in 2008.

Now her debut novel, The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor, has been published by Hoopoe – an imprint of the American University in Cairo Press As in her poetry book, the moon is a recurring symbol in Haddad’s novel.

Haddad has a degree in English literature from Cambridge University in the UK. She told Al-Hayat:“ I tried to write fiction in my twenties but it was impossible for me then, it always turned out too poetic. I needed to learn to become more practical. Journalism, and especially working in television I think helped me with that, especially the structure aspect of fiction over such a long canvas.” (See the interview with Rana Haddad on this blog).

Dunya Noor, the heroine of Haddad’s novel, grows up in the Mediterranean port city of Latakia in the 1980s. She is the daughter of Syria’s most famous heart surgeon Dr Joseph Noor and his glamorous blonde English wife Patricia.

Haddad herself grew up in Latakia, daughter of a Syrian father, and a Dutch-Armenian mother. She left Syria at the age of fifteen and has lived since then mainly in London, but also in Paris, Madrid and, for a short time, Beirut. She says the plot of her novel is “very much a fiction, but the settings and impressions are all mine. This is the Syria I lived in as a child and teenager and later visited over the years.”


She dedicates her novel to Syria and its children and also to her father Marwan, “whose love for his country was deep and unbreakable.”

The novel brings 1980s and 1990s Syria vividly to life. Haddad writes with candour and humour and, through satire shows the pressures and restrictions facing people living under a repressive regime.

Though the novel is set in a system that curbs freedom, Haddad’s writing is full of light and is rich in poetry, songs, music, and engaging depictions of characters and places. Haddad wrote almost all the poetry in the book. An exception is a song made famous by Egyptian singer Abdel-Halim Hafez, “The Coffee Cup Reader”, the words of which Haddad translates. In the novel, a female fortune teller who reads coffee grounds plays a crucial part in the plot.

Dunya is a unique creation. Her father is well connected in the upper echelons of Syrian society, and the family lives in luxury. But Dunya does not comply with what is expected of a girl of her age and class. She has inherited her father’s mop of curly black hair rather than her mother’s blonde locks. She shows much independence of spirit and is endlessly curious about the mysteries she perceives around her.

When Dunya first falls in love, at the age of eight, the object of her love is an old-fashioned camera which she buys from a shop. The old shopkeeper tells her it “a box of light, a machine that can see. If you buy it I promise to teach you its secrets.” As an adult, Dunya becomes an art photographer whose work is shown at exhibitions. References to light and photography occur throughout Haddad’s novel.

Dunya is very interested in love, a subject she researches. Her parents are shocked when they learn from gossip that she has been seen hand in hand with a fisherman’s son who refers to her as his fiancée. Dunya discovered that real love was love at first sight, which “was produced when twin souls happened to look into each other’s eyes”, but in her relationship with the fisherman’s son she had done nothing but cause a scandal.

The concept of twins is entwined with the novel’s intricate plot. There are echoes of Shakespeare plays featuring twins and mistaken identities, such as The Comedy of Errors – which has two pairs of male twins - or Twelfth Night with its male and female twins Sebastian and Viola. Viola disguises herself as her brother by wearing men’s clothes.

At the age of thirteen, Dunya gets into serious political trouble after a woman school instructor in Youth Military Education orders the pupils to take part in a political demonstration. Dunya refuses to take part, and then refuses to apologise for her absence. Nor does she accept the punishment of crawling like a caterpillar along the cement playground.

Dunya’s defiance enrages the instructor Miss Huda, “a twenty-two-year-old despot with scary contacts in the Baath Party and extra-black kohl that she used to enhance her terror-inducing eyes”. When the instructor asks “is this because you are against the Baath Party?” Dunya nods her head. Miss Huda says “Yes? Did you say yes? Say it, say it to my face, say the word! Are you against our great Baath Party?” Dunya replies “Yes”.

Miss Huda rushes to the local headquarters of the Baath Party to inform them of Dunya’s grave offence. Patricia, realising the danger her daughter is in, rushes her to the airport and flies with her to the safety of her grandparents in England. Dunya’s parents decide it is safer for Dunya to stay in England, “for how could anyone be sure she would not open her mouth and tell the truth again?”

But despite being “50 percent English” Dunya finds it hard to adapt to life in England and is critical of English society. English teenagers appear to be fixated on sex, but never mention love. She had left her heart in Syria, but it would be ten years before she would see the country again.

One day Dunya sees and photographs a handsome young man sitting on a bench in London reading a book with the Arabic title “Biography of the Moon”. The pair are instantly attracted to each other: “Love came to them like lightning, the way they’d both heard it sometimes did.”

Hilal is a brilliant student, winner of the Aleppo University Physics Prize physics, which included a full postgraduate grant to study in London. He is studying the moon. His parents are tailors, his father Said a Sunni and his mother Suad an Alawite. Originally from southern Syria, they had fled to Aleppo from their families when they got married. But they remain unhappy. “The source of his parents’ unhappiness became more and more of a mystery to Hilal as the years went by.”

 Dunya secretly starts living with Hilal, without the knowledge of his or her parents. When Hilal does not hear from his parents for six months, and then receives a letter from his mother saying his father had died, he returns to Syria with Dunya.

Dunya’s father Dr Noor, a Christian, is furious that his daughter is in love with a Muslim from a humble family of tailors in Aleppo. He orders him to leave Latakia for Aleppo and to never have anything to do with Dunya again. Dunya tells her mother she will never give Hilal up. But the next day she finds he has vanished from the hotel where he was staying in in Latakia. The hotel [male] receptionist say he was taken away by two men in a Mercedes with darkened windows. To Dunya it is clear he has been abducted by Baath Party members or the mukhabarat.

Dunya travels to Aleppo in search of Hilal and sees in the street a young man who looks just like him. She follows him to an all-men’s café and finds he is a hakawati named Najim. He plays the oud, performs songs and engages in repartee with the customers. When he invites Dunya to his home, and he tears off his moustache and men’s clothes and reveals himself as a stunningly beautiful girl, Suha, a baker’s daughter.

Dunya is dazzled by Suha, and her rapturous infatuation with her overshadows even the memory of her beloved Hilal. Suha tries to helps her Dunya find Hilal, and gradually the mysteries within The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor are revealed.
Susannah Tarbush, London

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Q&As with Rana Haddad author of 'The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor'



Q&As with Syrian-British writer Rana Haddad, whose debut novel The Unexpected Love Objects of Dunya Noor was recently published by Hoopoe, an  imprint of the American University in Cairo (AUC) Press

How far is your novel autobiographical, for example in terms of Dunya's mixed Syrian-English parentage?
The plot is very much a fiction but the settings and impressions are all mine. This is the Syria I lived in as a child and teenager and later visited over the years. Dunya is very much a fictional creation but I share my 'mongrel' status with her and perhaps a little of her stubbornness. My mother is half Dutch and half Armenian and my father is Syrian. He is very different from Joseph Noor, except for his pride in Syria and his blue eyes.

At what point did you leave Syria, and where did you go? 
I left Syria at fifteen and a half. I lived mostly in London but also in Paris and Madrid and a short while in Beirut. I am now living between England and Crete.

You are a journalist of long standing, working in print and broadcast media. You  have also had a volume of poetry published (The Boy Moon Lost Love Poems Found in an Envelope - 2008). How long have you been writing fiction? 
I tried to write fiction in my twenties but it was impossible for me then, it always turned out too poetic. I needed to learn to become more practical and journalism and especially working in television I think helped me with that, especially  the structure aspect of fiction over such a long canvass.

I had the title, idea and general plot outline for this novel in the early 2000 but from first draft to final draft there were major stops and starts due to a number of reasons including health and moving countries and work. But during that time I also developed quite a lot of the plot and even the text for my second novel and third.



Photography and Dunya’s passion for it is a key dimension of the novel. Did you  have a previous special interest and practice in photography?
 I have never practiced photography myself and whenever I tried I failed because my mind does not work that way - I struggle with the technical element of it. But I had a deep and important friendship with a photographer which made me even more interested in it. Recently my mother told me, after reading the book, that I was always interested in photography as a child, though strangely enough I don't remember that at all. And I never had a camera like Dunya had, I was always interested in writing and wrote poems in Arabic and tried to make them rhyme.

Could you say something about your ongoing work in theatre and drama?
I helped during a Royal Shakespeare Company workshop of a play written by a long standing friend of mine, and this made me realise that Theatre comes naturally to me and is something I would like to pursue, but I feel that I want to pursue it with a strong element of music. Currently I am developing a small performance with a friend who is a Syrian singer - where we will mix scenes from Dunya with songs which she will sing live. We will try to develop this into a more extended performance and work possibly with actors and other musicians. I have also done quite extensive research for three BBC dramas. But they were factual dramas and even though it was a very interesting and educational experience for me, I know I am more interested in poetic and romantic ways of making things, not the hard factual approach.

How did your connection with Crete come about? 
I'm exploring living part-time in Crete, which is the most south Eastern part of Europe and  very near Syria. I can't imagine myself being able to spend all my life entirely in England as I miss Syria too much, and currently I feel Crete is a wonderful compromise and counter-point, and I am learning a lot about Syria's Byzantine and pre Islamic and even pre Christian roots from there. Crete and the Levant have a deep and important link, in myth and culture.

The novel has plenty of poetry in it, including song lyrics …. is this poetry your own, traditional, a mixture of the two?
All the poems and songs in Dunya are written by me, except for "Reader of the Coffee Cup" (of course!) The first song Suha sings which includes the words, Oh Night on Eyes, (Ya leili ya Ein), that expression is of course taken from popular mawals, but the rest is pure fiction.

Are there plans to translate the novel into Arabic and perhaps other languages?
No idea so far, I heard of talks to translate the novel into German and Dutch but so far nothing concrete. I would love it to be translated into Arabic of course, but also Spanish and French as I think it would particularly work in those languages.

Could you say something  about your next novel? Your LinkedIn entry mentions that it will be set in Indonesia in the 30s and 40s, and will also take in the Armenian diaspora and Persia.
My second novel which I am working on now is set in London and it will continue on from some of the major themes I explored in Dunya, but in a very different setting and the characters will be in their 30s. My third novel will be set in Indonesia, but I have already started research for it, as it will take me years to understand Indonesia enough before I can write anything that makes any sense about it. My maternal grandmother and mother and aunts were born and grew up in Indonesia actually. She was the child of the Armenian diaspora from Isfahan who moved to Java island around 1917, and my grandfather was Dutch who came there after the second world war. I want to take that time period and setting but then improvise, as I like to do, and as I did in Dunya.

Susannah Tarbush, London 

Tuesday, March 13, 2018

Writers' voices from the "banned" Muslim nations cross the Atlantic in Banthology



In January the UK publisher Comma Press published a unique and timely anthology of new short stories, by writers from the seven Muslim-majority countries named in US President Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations appeared on the first anniversary of Trump’s 27 January 2017 signing of Executive Order 13769 which imposed the US's first-ever Muslim ban. The Executive Order banned people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the USA for 90 Days. It also halted refugee settlement for 120 days and banned Syrian refugees indefinitely. 

Banthology is edited by Sarah Cleave, who writes in her introduction: “The idea for this book was born amid the chaos of that first ban, and sought to champion, give voice to, and better understand a set of nations that the White House would like us to believe are populated entirely by terrorists.” 

She adds: “As publishers, we are acutely aware of the importance of cultural exchange between communities, and have also seen first-hand the damage caused by tightened visa controls and existing travel restrictions, not just on artists but on their families – that is to say the damage that impacts on all citizens of nations targeted by prejudicial border controls.”

On 27 March Deep Vellum Publishing of Dallas, Texas, in association with Comma, is due to publish the US edition of the book under the title of Banthology: Stories from Banned Nations.

Since the ban was first issued, it has faced a series of legal challenges and has undergone various reformulations. Will Evans, director and publisher of Deep Vellum, says: “The collection was created in response to Trump’s hateful original order, and remains especially urgent in the wake of recent events resulting in the reinstatement of the ban, and as the world awaits the Supreme Court’s final ruling on its legality.”

Evans says literature offers a means “to bring cultures into conversation, to share stories, build connections grow empathy. The stories in Banthology reflect the shared experience of the human condition that unites us all, and no hateful political ban will ever be stronger than the bonds of our shared humanity.”

the US edition - Banthology: Stories from Banned Nations.

The two men and five women contributors to Banthology are Najwa Binshatwan from Libya, Rania Mamoun (Sudan), Zaher Omareen (Syria), Fereshteh Molavi (Iran), Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (Somalia), Anoud (Iraq) and Wajdi al-Ahdal (Yemen). Two of the stories were written in English, while four were translated from Arabic and one from Italian.

Comma Press is, like Deep Vellum, a not-for-profit publisher. It is supported by the Arts Council England, and focuses on promoting new writing, particularly short stories. It takes a keen interest in translating and publishing literature by Arab authors, and prior to Banthology had published seven books of stories translated from Arabic including, in 2016, The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction edited by Ralph Cormack and Max Shmookler and Iraq +100: stories from a century after the invasion edited by Hassan Blasim. 

After Trump signed the Muslim ban, Comma declared it would stand in solidarity with those of its writers affected by the ban, including all 20 contributors to The Book of Khartoum and Iraq +100.

The contributors to Banthology were asked to develop "a fictional response to Trump’s discriminatory ban, exploring themes of exile, travel and restrictions on movement.” The publisher wanted “to showcase as many different experiences as possible, as the travel ban not only affects those living inside the so-called ‘banned nations’, but also those that have sought peace and freedom in exile.”

The writers approached the themes in diverse ways, often entering the realm of speculative fiction. Their accomplished and disturbing stories tell of attempts to transcend borders and barriers of various kinds. The elliptical narratives are frequently laced with irony, playfulness and a sense of the absurd. Though the authors’ protagonists show resilience, they are prone to a sense of loneliness and to psychological distress that on occasion tips over into breakdown.

Wajdi al-Ahdal 

The stories range freely over place and time. “The Slow Man” by Yemeni novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and dramatist Wajdi al-Ahdal, translated by William M Hutchins, transports the reader back to the year 100 according to the Babylonian calendar. Al-Ahdal explores what might have happened had the prophet Yusuf of the Quran, Joseph of the Bible, been barred from crossing the border into Egypt with the caravan that rescued him as a boy after his brothers tried to kill him and then abandoned him in the desert.

The Commander of the northern frontier of Egypt and Gaza – the “Slow Man” of the story’s title – has imposed a ban preventing the Babylonians and those they rule from entering Egypt. “He justified his ban as a temporary measure, designed to keep Egypt and its territories safe from the infiltration of enemies.” The High Priest persuades the Commander to waive the ban for the Israelite caravan carrying the boy Yusuf, and the Commander agrees, but after the Priest falls victim to an assassination plot the conspirators order the caravan to turn back.

Al-Ahdal sketches the disasters that befall Egypt and reshape world history, geography and spirituality in the absence of Yusuf over a series of time slots starting with the year 128 in the Babylonian era when more than 80 per cent of the Egyptian population dies in a famine, that Yusuf would have helped avert, and Babylon takes over the country and erases Egypt from the map by diverting the Nile to flow south into Lake Chad. In the Babylonian year 4000 previously unknown creatures slip through the cracked “space-time cone of four-dimensional existence”, claiming to be the planet’s primordial species returned to recolonise earth as “They Who Have Come to Retrieve the Earth from Mankind.”

Najwa Binshatwan

In Libyan author Najwa Binshatwan's adventurous story "Return Ticket", translated by Sawad Hussain, a woman tells her grandson about the only time she left her home village of Schrödinger. She was pregnant at the time with her grandson’s father, and travelled to meet her husband who had left the village for work. At every stage of her journey she encountered hostile airport officials. They imposed strict and baffling rules, forcing her to forfeit inter alia her headscarf and underwear. When she arrived at her destination her husband was so enraged by her partially unclad state that he divorced her on the spot. She was stranded in the airport for years, "selling tissues to travellers until I could buy a return ticket to Schrödinger".

The village’s name alludes to the Nobel Prizewinning quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger. It is “an open-minded village, where people, animals, plants, diseases and every type of wind pass through with great ease.” And it is a cosmic anomaly: "The name granted the village extraordinary powers; it could move through time and space, changing its orbit spontaneously as if it were the sun rising in one place and setting in another.”

'the Statue of Liberty and her bird-shit-splattered crown'


The only humans to visit Schrödinger were six American tourists, who got stuck there because the walls of their nation rose day by day until it was cut off from the world. Each attempt by an American tourist to scale the towering walls and return home was fatal. The walls were built higher and higher “until all that could be seen was the snuffed-out torch of the Statue of Liberty and her bird-shit-splattered crown.” From time to time the dead tourists speak from their graves in Schrödinger, and the eldest one comments: “It’s good that we died before America’s prison warder came to power.”

Rania Mamoun

In Sudanese author, journalist and activist Rania Mahmoud’s lyrical story “The Bird of Paradise”, translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp, the protagonist has longed to travel “ever since I realised that the world’s limits are not those of my city, Wad Madani; that the world expands so much further than the reach of my imagination”. She is oppressed by her tyrannical brother, who assaults here for daring even to spend the day in a nearby village. “I dreamed of becoming a bird of paradise, resplendent with colourful feathers, a beautiful head, black eyes and powerful wings.”

With the support of her girl cousin Ashwaq, who unlike her had been allowed to study at Khartoum University, she plans her escape. “Everything was arranged. I would have a seven-hour stopover then get on another place to another city, where Ashwaq’s friend would be waiting for me.” And yet when the moment comes to board the plane she finds herself nailed to the spot and unable to move forward in the queue. Like the protagonist of Binshatwan’s story she is marooned in an airport, stuck in limbo.

An earlier story by Mamoun, “Passing”, appeared in Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction. Comma is scheduled to publish her story collection Thirteen Months of Sunrise this year.

A story by the Iraqi woman writer Anoud, entitled “Kahramana”, was published in Iraq +100. “Storyteller”, her story for Banthology, depicts an Iraqi woman driven to the edge by the serial traumas of Iraq and then of living in the UK as an asylum seeker.

While eating in an Indian takeaway in East London, Jamela recites her harrowing personal chronology to the staff, starting with her first experience in 1991 of an air raid, and moving on to describing her hunger under economic sanctions in 1996, the 2003 US and UK-led invasion, the torture, rape and killing of a friend, the murder of a cousin, and her own surviving a car bombing. As an asylum seeker in the UK she has drifted into alcoholism, drugs, dodgy sexual encounters and suicide attempts.

Jamela describes seeing a car wrecked by a bombing in Baghdad that she has seen as an exhibit “mounted on a clean white podium under a blinging spotlight at the Imperial War Museum in London … The slabs of dented metal were so mangled they looked like tens of human guts pressed together and left baking in Iraq’s burning sun until they were bone dry.” (Presumably a dig at the uncomfortable concept of the aestheticization of violence). Jamela erupts into uncontrollable fury when the TV in the  takeaway shows Trump’s notorious December 2015 campaign speech: “Donald J Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s’ representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Zaher Omareen 

The protagonist of Zaher Omareen’s blackly comic “The Beginner’s Guide to Smuggling”, translated by Perween Richards and Basma Ghalayini, is an illegal migrant from Hama, Syria. A former prisoner in his mid-twenties, he is travelling across Europe to his hoped-for destination, Sweden, “where I will press the RESTART button”. Omareen’s story is well-observed and witty, its narrator given to wry asides such as “When in Rome do as the Romans. When in Greece do as the Syrians do.” He had travelled on a boat with other refugees from Turkey to Kos had capsized. He grumbles to himself about the “XL sized family who got overly excited when they saw the land of dreams getting closer. The boat had tipped over with everyone in it.”

The migrant constantly curses Kalimera, the Kos-based people smuggler from Aleppo, with “ten mobile phones in front of him, all ringing and falling silent in chorus.” Carrying a mobile phone is essential for those making their perilous journeys to Europe. “Oh god of mobile phones, master of the luminous dawn, carrier of fertility to our barren lands, patron saint of the tired and hungry,” the narrator muses.

Kalimera has provided the narrator with a fake passport of the Hungarian ambassador to Turkey’s husband, throwing in a Greek ID as well for free. The narrator manages to pass himself off as Hungarian during his flight from Greece to Paris, and then masquerades as Greek. From Paris he arranges a lift in a car to Denmark from where he will travel to Sweden. To the narrator’s horror he finds the driver of the car has brought along a giant Doberman: the narrator is terrified of dogs. The Doberman’s barks remind him of interrogations by prison guards.

Fereshteh Molavi 

The enigmatic story “Phantom Limb” by Iranian writer Fereshteh Molavi is set among a group of artistically-inclined exiles in Toronto, where Molavi herself lives. The first-person narrator is an Iranian who came to Toronto on a student visa with dreams of becoming a theatre director. He and his three roommates, who are aspiring actors, perform plays at home after dinner. But in the day they have to work at mundane jobs.

The story focuses on the narrator's observations of the elusive Farhad, an Iranian Kurd whose Persian cat stalks from room to room. The narrator is fascinated by two pictures Farhad has hung on the wall: an old map of Iran "covered with intricate painted patterns, much like a Persian cat's coat" and an old black-and-white photo of a woman on horseback, dressed in Kurdish men's clothes and a turban, and carrying a gun.

The roommates speculate on whether the photo is of Farhad’s mother or of the girl he had loved years before. The girl would sing to him from the prison cell next to his before she was executed.

After Farhad learns in a phone call from his father back home that his mother has had to have her right leg amputated he starts to develops pains in his foot and leg and eventually his leg is badly injured in an accident. The story is suggestive of the bonds between those in exile and their homeland and family. Their pain is carried like a phantom limb, and the difficulties in realising one’s dreams in a new environment.

The roommates work for an exiled Iranian entrepreneur of an older generation who had served in the Iranian Air force under the Shah. While he interviews the narrator for a job he tucks into a  gargantuan display of Iranian delicacies lovingly provided by his wife, “As he ate, he spoke endlessly about his journey from lowly immigrant to top-class businessman. His story didn’t interest me. I’d heard it before…”

Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

Somali writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah was born in Verona, Italy, to an Italian father and Somali mother. Her exquisite story “Jujube” is translated from Italian by Hope Campbell Gustafson. The dreamlike story becomes increasingly chilling as the reliability of the narrator Ayan, who has lived through horrific violence in Somalia, is called into question.

Farah starts her story by evoking the traditional way of life in the village, where Ayan's mother is a healer using medicinal plants. The mother tends the hair of  her two daughters with extracts from the leaves of the Jujube tree. People flee to the village from the city, which "burns and glows like a brazier, a filthy firework under the full moon", before the village itself is attacked.

Ayan becomes separated from her mother and sister and we next find her in freezing Italy where she is nanny to an Italian woman’s young daughter. Ayan has filed a request for family reunification with her mother and sister whom she says are in the US. But her narrative is interspersed periodically with brief notes by an interpreter. The interpreter states that Ayan’s account, while making a request for asylum, is full of omissions and incongruences.

Comma Press should be applauded for commissioning and publishing this powerful collection of original stories, as should Deep Vellum for being Comma’s co-publisher of Banthology in the USA. The stories shine a light on collective experiences through individual stories and might help bring about an understanding that runs counter to the demonisation of a religion and of entire nationalities through a crass, unjust and discriminatory ban.

Susannah Tarbush, London