BULAQ | بولاق

Ursula and MLQ look back at notable books from 2018 and at reads they are looking forward to catching up on over the holiday break.

Show notes

• ‘Tis the season for “best of” lists. Ursula wrote about Notable Books of 2018 From and About the Arab World in Al-Fanar; a number of them are books we have discussed on the show. One that we haven’t is Casablanca, Nid d’artistes, ed. Leila Slimani and Kenza Sefrioui.

• Marcia was still working to compile the “Arab Authors’ Favorites” list that ArabLit runs every year. Early favorites included Mohamed Kheir’s Afalaat al-‘asabie, Muhairi Huwaidi’s Wa Kan al-Bayt Akhi al-Saba’a, and Mohamed Shoair’s Awlad Haretna: Biography of a Forbidden Novel.

• We talked about Shoair’s Biography of a Forbidden Novel, which focuses on Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of Our Alley, and the intimidation of other public intellectuals, particularly Nasr Abu Zeid and Farag Fouda. Shoair’s book is dedicated to Taha Hussein and Nasr Abu Zeid.

• Yasmine Rashidi wrote in the New York Times about “How Egypt Crowdsources Censorship.”

• Nawal Nasrallah was one of the winners of the $2M Sheikh Hamad Award for Translation, based in Qatar, for her translation of the fourteenth-century Egyptian cookbook Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table.

• And, on December 11, Saudi writer Omaima al-Khamis was announced as the winner of this year’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature, for her historical novel Voyage of the Cranes over the Agate Cities.

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This episode is almost entirely dedicated to the work of the Moroccan film-maker, novelist, artist, and poet Ahmed Bouanani – much of which has yet to be released, and much of which was censored or destroyed in his own life.

Show notes

• Bouanani’s cult-classic novel L’hôpital was re-published in 2012 by DK Editions in Morocco and Editions Verdier in France. Muhammad al-Khudairi’s Arabic translation was published in 2016. Two of Bounanai’s books have been released this year in English translation: The Shutters (translated by Emma Ramadan) and The Hospital (translated by Lara Vergnaud), both from New Directions Press.

• A fragment of Bouanani’s filmwork can be seen online: his film about Casablanca in the 1960s, “6 et 12”, is on YouTube, as is a section of As-Sarab / Mirage. The film-maker Ali Essafi’s documentary about Bouanani is entitled Crossing the Seventh Gate.

• Touda Bouanani, Ahmed Bouanani’s daughter and a visual artist, has conserved his work and featured it in her own.

• Ursula’s piece on Bouanani in the New York Review of Books is unfortunately pay-walled now.

• Marcia should have a piece about the discovery of Naguib Mahfouz’s “lost” manuscript, set to be published December 11 by Dar al-Saqi in Lebanon, forthcoming soon in LitHub. An extended Q&A with translator Roger Allen, agent Yasmina Jraissati, and manuscript-discoverer Mohamed Shoair will follow on ArabLit. The English translation of what’s being called The Whisper of Stars is forthcoming from Saqi Books in 2019.

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We overcame communication blocks and interrupting children to speak to the poet Zeina Hashem Beck about how she’s given herself permission to write poems that move between English and Arabic. We also discuss James Montgomery’s heart-breaking essay on grief, memory, trauma and translating a 7th century Arabic poet famous for her elegies.

Show notes:

• Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet who lives in Dubai. She won the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize for her second full-length collection, Louder than Hearts (April 2017) as well as the 2016 Rattle Chapbook Prize for There Was and How Much There Was, chosen by Carol Ann Duffy, as well as many more prizes you can read about on her website.

• The first of her new “duet poems,” which weave together separate and distinct threads of Arabic and English, appeared in The Lifted Brow, with more forthcoming in The Adroit and Modern Poetry in Translation.

• She read the poem “Blue / أزرق.”

• James Montgomery, author-translator of Loss Sings, is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge. This collection of Montgomery’s meditations is twined with translations of seventh-century poet al-Khansa’. It is part of The Cahier Series published by Sylph Editions in collaboration with The American University of Paris.

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In this episode we talk about recent developments in Cairo, kids’ literature in Arabic, Naguib Mahfouz, and the launch of Marcia’s new project, the literary magazine ArabLit Quarterly.

Show notes

• It was at the October 22 outreach symposium in Cairo that MLQ launched “ArabKidLitNow!” – a collective for the promotion of Arabic children’s literature in translation. The website is arabkidlitnow.com.

• We mention the extraordinary work of the Egyptian Mada Masr news site, including this ground-breaking story.

• At the website, you can learn about the titles that won this year’s Etisalat Award for Arabic Children’s Literature, the top regional award for Arabic kid lit, including Koozy (about losing your kitty), Think of Others (an illustrated version of Mahmoud Darwish’s famous poem), and Mama, My Classmate, a chapter book about the narrator’s mom coming to learn English with her in class. The YA prize went to Walid Daqqa, a 57-year-old Palestinian writer who’s been behind bars since the age of 25, called The Secret of Oil.

• Ursula’s long-awaited essay “The World of the Alley: Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo,” finally appeared in The Nation. Ursula talked about reading Gamal al-Ghitani’s Meetings with Mahfouz, how al-Ghitani brought her to meet the master, and Mahfouz’s iron habits.

• MLQ talked about the Fall 2018 debut of ArabLit Quarterly, set for a November 15 release. The theme of the first-ever ArabLit-affiliated magazine is “beginnings.” Those who want to be subscribers can do so through Patreon; otherwise, a storefront will be ready on November 15.

• Finally, we circled back to Cairo and the lovely coffee-table book Khatt: Egypt’s Calligraphic Landscape, out in September from Saqi.

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This week we talk to an old Cairo friend, acclaimed Egyptian artist Ganzeer, about art, propaganda, publishing and how much damn work it is to put out a graphic novel.

Show notes

• The work of artist and writer Ganzeer can be found at ganzeer.com, thesolargrid.net, and timesnewhuman.com. You can sign up for his newsletter at restrictedfrequency.com and follow his YouTube channel, Ganzeer Says.

• The first four chapters of The Solar Grid are available for download at thesolargrid.net, and his earlier collaboration, The Apartment at Bab El-Louk (written by Donia Maher, co-illustrated by Ahmed Nady, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette), is available from Darf Publishers and online.

• The new Epic of Gilgamesh graphic novel was translated by Kent Dixon and illustrated by Kevin Dixon.

• The Rusumat comix platform, featuring works in Arabic and in English, is at rusumat.co.

Buy on thesolargrid.net

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We talk about looking down on dialect; passing literary theft off as “salvation”; the beginning of awards season; a book that is a fragmented portrait of Jerusalem; and our fellow podcasters in the region.

Show notes

• The controversy over the appearance of some darija (Moroccan colloquial) words in a Moroccan school textbook reached the highest levels of government.

• Since we recorded Episode 20, Israel’s Resling Publishing has pulled a short-story collection, Horreya, in which they published women’s short stories translated from Arabic to Hebrew. Resling’s statement says that they are investigating the matter. The cover image, by the Lebanese cartoonist Hasan Bleibel, was also taken without permission, and the artist was not credited for his work. Earlier, Resling’s chief editor, Idan Zivoni, gave a statement that was translated and posted on Hyperallergic.

• The shortlist for the first-ever ArabLit Story Prize was announced September 15; longlists for the major French literary prizes have also appeared. Moroccan author Meryem Alaoui made the Goncourt longlist with her La verite sort de la bouche du cheval, and Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek made the Prix Femina longlist with Khaled Osman's translation of her المشّاءة, translated to La Marcheuse in the French, and working title The Blue Pen in English.

• The work of postcard-like fragment-stories set in Jerusalem is Mahmoud Shukair’s Jerusalem Stands Alone, which has recently been translated by Nicole Fares for Syracuse University Press.

• We also mention some other great podcast networks in the region: Sowt from Jordan and mstdfr from Saudi Arabia.

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We talk about the relationships between education and literature; about a devastating entry in the prison memoir genre, from Syria; about the legacy of V.S. Naipaul; and about why Kuwait is the worst offender in the region for censoring books.

Show notes

• This was our back to school episode, informed by the scholarship of Erin Twohig and Ursula’s “Hard Lessons: North African Writers on Education” at al-Fanar. We particularly talked about Mohamed Nedali’s Grâce à Jean de la Fontaine, a satiric and scathing account of the life of a schoolteacher in Morocco, and also Radwa Ashour’s writing on education, in her The Journey (translated by Michelle Hartman) and her later Spectres (translated by Barbara Romaine).
• The discussion also veered slightly to the interview and mixtape with Ma3azef magazine co-founder Ma’an Abu Taleb on Bidoun.
• Ursula’s summer reading included Mustafa Khalifa’s devastating novel The Shell, based on his experiences in Syria’s Tadmor prison, in which he reclaims and re-inscribes humanity. It has been translated to English by Paul Starkey.
• The death of V.S. Naipaul led to several interesting conversations about his work and legacy. Here is one, between Nikil Saval and Pankaj Mishra in n+1.
• And here is a piece by Teju Cole from a few years back about meeting the writer.
• Finally, Kuwaiti readers are pushing back against censorship -- you can follow the online part of the campaign at #ممنوعفيالكويت and #صوركتابممنوعفيمكتبتك. MA student Abrar Alshammari is writing up a longer essay on the current situation for Arablit, but for background, 'It's like they were selling heroin to schoolkids': censorship hits booksellers at Kuwait book fair at The Guardian and Leading Kuwaiti Writers Saud Alsanousi and Bothayna al-Essa on Pushing Back Against a Season of Censorship at ArabLit.

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In our last episode before a summer hiatus, we discuss a graphic novel about the life and art of the stars of Arab music and cinema; Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour’s memoir of studying at university in the United States in the 1970s; and the Moroccan writer Ahmed Bouanani’s novel The Hospital, out in English (alongside a new poetry collection, The Shutters) after nearly falling into oblivion.

Show notes

• A record-breaking four of the 18 “PEN translates” prizes for 2018 are going to books translated from Arabic. They are: The Book of Cairo, edited by Raph Cormack, with various authors and translators; My Name is Adam by Elias Khoury,translated by Humphrey Davies; Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette; and The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, also translated by Jaquette.
• More about the great Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannouscan be found at the World Theatre Day website.
• A Seismography of Struggle: Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Magazines is a project of the French National Institute of Art History; an exhibition and talks were recently hosted by Kulte Gallery in Rabat.
• The Iraqi comix collectivethat was refused Swiss visasis Mesaha,and you can find more about them on their Facebook page.
• Lamia Ziade’s Ô Nuit Ô Mes Yeux is a stylish, charming illustrated text about the larger-than-life lives of Arab musicians. An excerpt titled “Fairouz in my Grandfather’s Shop,” translated into English by Edward Gauvin, appears in the July 2018 Words Without Borders. Ziade’s Bye Bye Babylon has been translated into English by Olivia Snaije.
• Another beach read is Radwa Ashour’s The Journey: Memoirs of an Egyptian Woman Student in America, translated by Michelle Hartman. Other portraits of the US discussed: Tawfiq al-Hakim in The Revolt of the Young, which has been translated by Mona Radwan; Yusuf Idris’s New York 80; Alaa al-Aswany’s Chicago, which was translated by Farouk Abdel Wahab Mustafa; Bahaa Abdelmeguid’s Sleeping with Strangers, translated by Chip Rossetti; and Sayyid Qutb.
• And—there is some debate over whether this is a beach read—but Moroccan author-filmmaker Ahmed Bouanani’s The Hospital, translated by Lara Vergnaud, and his The Shutters, translated by Emma Ramadan are newly out from New Directions Books, and get a recommendation both from Ursula and from MLQ.

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We talk to humorist Karl Sharro about the origins story of his Twitter alter-ego Karl ReMarks and about finding the ideal online nemesis. Marcia takes issue with a new book listing the “hundred best novels in translation.”

Show notes

• Karl Sharro spoke about Karl ReMarks’ new book, And then God Created the Middle East and Said ‘Let There Be Breaking News’ (and Analysis). The book is forthcoming July 9.
• Boyd Tonkin’s The 100 Best Novels in Translation was released June 21. The two Arabic novels that made the list were Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, translated by Denys Johnson-Davies, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan. The translation was overseen by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, along with Martha Levin, and their notes on the manuscript can be found at the Lilly Library Manuscript Collections.
• You can read the Amazon press release online about how the mega-corporation has (finally) launched some 12,000 Arabic ebooks into the Kindle system. You can find and purchase them on Amazon.com.

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In which Ursula and Marcia discuss how much innocence American can claim when abroad, and the urge to write expatriate diaries in one’s twenties; they also talk about the new collection Marrakech Noir; and about the never-ending debate over Classical versus Colloquial Arabic.

Show notes:

• Ursula’s “Innocence Abroad” responds primarily to Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World.
• Marrakech Noir, ed. Yassin Adnan,is the third Arab city to join the Akashic Books series, following Beirut Noir and published simultaneously with Baghdad Noir. The Marrakesh collection features stories by lesser-known writers like Hanane Derkaoui, whose “A Way to Mecca” has some particularly fun moments, as well as heavyweights like Mahi Binebine, Mohammed Achaari, and Fouad Laroui—whose short-story collection The Curious Case of Dassoukine's Trousers was translated by Emma Ramadan. Fouad and Emma previously talked with MLQ about the collection and about writing in Moroccan Arabic.
• Hossam Abouzahr, who runs the excellent “Living Arabic” project, also wrote “Standard Arabic is on the Decline: Here’s What’s Worrying About That.” In part, it responds to Elias Muhanna’s much-discussed New Yorker essay on “Translating ‘Frozen’ into Arabic.”
• Jeremy Harding wrote in the LRB about writing workshops in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine.
• Two fun, free Arabic-learning apps for young childrenare “Antura and the Letters” and “Feed the Monster.” The Etisalat Prize for Arabic Children’s Literature also recognizes a “digital book app” category each year.
• Mohamed al-Bisatie’s World Cup novel is Drumbeat. James Murua first had the idea of creating a writers’ team for the World Cup, using the hashtag #AfricanWriterWorldCupSquad.

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