saudi novelist abdo khal wins the $60,000 'international prize for arabic fiction' aka 'the arabic booker'

This is the press release from the publicist of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, Colman Getty Consultancy, announcing that the prize has gone to Saudi writer Abdo Khal.
The prize is worth a total of $60,000 to the winner: $50,000, plus the $10,000 that goes to each of the six shortlisted writers.

SPEWING SPARKS AS BIG AS CASTLES

BY ABDO KHAL

WINS INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC FICTION 2010





www.arabicfiction.org



Supported by the Booker Prize Foundation

Funded by the Emirates Foundation



Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Tuesday 2 March 2010 – The winner of the 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) is SPEWING SPARKS AS BIG AS CASTLES by ABDO KHAL, published by Al-Jamal Publications, Baghdad/Beirut, 2009. The winner of the prestigious literary prize was announced tonight at a gala awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi before an audience of international publishers, critics, writers and journalists.

A painfully satirical novel, Spewing Sparks ­as Big as Castles depicts the destructive impact that power and limitless wealth has on life and the environment. It captures the seductive powers of the palace and tells the agonising story of those who have become enslaved by it, drawn by its promise of glamour. Spewing Sparks ­as Big as Castles exposes the inner world of the palace and of those who have chosen to become its puppets, from whom it has stolen everything.

The winner announcement was made by the Chair of Judges, the renowned Kuwaiti writer Taleb Alrefai. With him were the three other members of the judging panel: Raja’ Ben Salamah, Tunisian lecturer from the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities at Manouba University, Tunisia; Frédéric LaGrange, French academic, translator and Head of the Arabic and Hebraic Department at the Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) and Saif al-Rahbi, Omani writer and poet.

The Chair of Judges, Taleb Alrefai, commented: “The winning novel is a brilliant exploration of the relationship between the individual and the state. Through the eyes of its two dimensional protagonist, the book gives the reader a taste of the horrifying reality of the excessive world of the palace.

“Although only one novel can win the Prize, many exciting and inspiring novels were submitted. The judging panel worked hard in order to consider all this year’s submitted novels, maintaining the established tradition of independence and transparency.”

The Prize, which is awarded annually, is run with the support of the UK’s Booker Prize Foundation and is funded by the Emirates Foundation, one of the leading philanthropic organisations in the UAE. Its aim is to recognise and reward excellence in contemporary Arabic creative writing and to encourage wider readership internationally through translation. In addition to the annual prize, IPAF supports literary initiatives and in 2009 launched its inaugural nadwa (writers’ workshop) for a group of aspiring Arabic writers.

The names of the six shortlisted titles for this independent and prestigious Arabic fiction prize – and those of the previously anonymous judging panel – were announced at a press conference in Beirut on 15 December 2009. For the 2010 Prize, the judges have read and discussed in detail a total of 113 Arabic novels, entered from 17 countries.

The shortlisted finalists for the prize each receive $10,000, with the winner receiving an additional $50,000. They can look forward to reaching wider audiences and potentially securing publishing deals – both within the Arab World and internationally. The previous two winners for the prize – Bahaa Taher (Sunset Oasis) and Youssef Ziedan (Azazel) – have not only secured English publications of their novels, through Sceptre (Hodder & Stoughton) and Atlantic Books respectively, but also a number other international translations as a result of the prize.

Jonathan Taylor CBE, Chairman of the IPAF Board of Trustees, and of the Booker Prize Foundation, said: “In its third year, the Prize has recognised and rewarded another outstanding novel. The Prize continues to generate great excitement and discussion, both in the Arabic world and beyond.”

Salwa Mikdadi, Head of the Arts and Culture Programme at the Emirates Foundation, added: “The Emirates Foundation is pleased and gratified at the exceptional response the Prize ha received regionally and internationally which has resulted in an increase in readership and opportunities for emerging Arab writers."

The Administrator of the Prize, Joumana Haddad, commented: “The importance of the IPAF lies not only in its financial value, but in the social and cultural influence it has, the most important aspect of which is supporting high quality Arabic fiction and encouraging both writers and readers to consider writing and reading as vital acts.”

This year’s winner announcement took place on the evening of the first day of Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2010. A number of IPAF events will take place during the course of the book fair, details of which are given overleaf.

IPAF events taking place during the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair 2010:

Wednesday 3 March

11am Al Multaqa Ladies’ Book Club event with the 5 shortlisted writers of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Location: Hall 8, E46

11.30-12.30am “Meet the Winner of the 2010 IPAF”, Discussion Forum at the

Abu Dhabi International Book Fair, hosted by Yassin Adnan. Location: Hall 9, D40

Thursday 4 March

11am Al Multaqa Ladies’ Book Club event, with the Winner of the

International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Location: Hall 8, E46

5–7pm “Meet the 2010 IPAF Shortlisted Authors” at the KITAB Sofa, hosted by Sayed Mahmoud. Location: Hall 8, K46

For more information visit: www.adbookfair.com

· This is the third year of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. For a full history of the prize visit the website: www.arabicfiction.org. The site features the rules of entry, background information and breaking news and is the quickest way for the prize’s worldwide audience to access information

All works submitted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction must be prose fiction in Arabic

The IPAF 2010 shortlist (with names in English) and authors (with country of origin), is as follows:


Al-Madhoun, Rabai
The Lady from Tel Aviv
Arab Institute for Publishing and Studies
Palestinian
--



Ez Eldin, Mansoura
Beyond Paradise
Dar Al-Ain
Egyptian
--



Jaber, Rabee
America
Al-Markaz al-Thaqafi al-Arabi (Arab Cultural Centre)
Lebanese
--
Khal, Abdo
Spewing Sparks ­as Big as Castles
Al-Jamal Publications
Saudi Arabian

--

Mansi Qandil, Mohamed
A Cloudy Day on the West Side
Dar Al-Shorouk
Egyptian
--


Naji, Jamal
When the Wolves Grow Old
Ministry of Culture Publications
Jordanian

The IPAF 2010 judging panel consists of:
Taleb Alrefai (Chair), Kuwaiti novelist and short story writer; Raja’ Ben Salamah, Tunisian lecturer from the Faculty of Letters, Arts and Humanities at Manouba University, Tunisia; Frédéric LaGrange, French academic, translator and Head of the Arabic and Hebraic Department at the Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV); Saif al-Rahbi, Omani writer and poet.

· The winner of the 2008 prize - Sunset Oasis by Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher – has recently been published in the UK by Sceptre (an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton). It also has translation and publication deals in France, Germany, Norway, Greece Romania, Bosnia and Canada

· The winner of the 2009 prize – Azazel by Egyptian writer Youssef Ziedan – will be published in the UK by Atlantic Books in August 2011. It will also be published in Italian, German, Greek, Romanian, Bosnian and Croatian

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction was launched in Abu Dhabi, capital of the UAE, in April 2007 and it is funded by the Emirates Foundation, one of the leading philanthropic organisations in the UAE

Other supporters of the Prize include Etihad Airways, as the official airline of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, and the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair
· An independent Board of Trustees, drawn from across the Arab world and beyond, is responsible for the overall management of the prize. The trustees are, in alphabetical order: Marie-Thérèse Abdul-Messih, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of Cairo, Egypt; Bachar Chebaro, Publisher, Scientific Arab Publishers, Lebanon; Dr. Peter Clark OBE, Independent Consultant and Writer, Middle East Cultural Advisory Services, UK; Sasha Havlicek, Executive Director, Trialogue Educational Trust; Khaled Hroub, Arab academic and director of Cambridge Arab Media Project, UK; Farouk Mardam-Bey, Cultural Advisor, Institut du Monde Arabe, France; Zaki Nusseibeh, Advisor, Ministry of Presidential Affairs – Vice-Chairman, Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage; Margaret Obank, Publisher and Editor, Banipal magazine of Modern Arab Literature, UK; William Sieghart Chairman & Founder, Forward Publishing, National Poetry Day, UK; Yasir Suleiman, Professor of Arabic, University of Cambridge, UK; Evelyn Smith, Company Secretary, Booker Prize Foundation, UK; Jonathan Taylor CBE, Chairman, Booker Prize Foundation, UK

· In addition to the annual prize, the IPAF supports literary initiatives and in 2009 launched its inaugural nadwa (writers’ workshop) for a group of aspiring writers from across the Arab world. The workshop – the first of its kind for Arab writers - took place in Abu Dhabi under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Zayed Al-Nahyan. It resulted in eight new pieces of fiction by some of the Arab world’s most promising authors, five of whom have recently been selected for the Beirut39. This collection of stories is due to be published in 2010.

'kipling abroad' edited by andrew lycett

Rudyard Kipling, the travel scribe
by Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 1 March 2010

Seventy-four years after the death of the Indian-born British author and poet Rudyard Kipling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, his reputation is still hotly debated. This is partly because of his support for British imperialism, and his chronicling of the British Raj.

The controversy over Kipling led recently to the abandonment of plans to transform the house in Mumbai in which he was born in 1965 into a Kipling museum. Instead, the house is to become home to a collection of paintings by local artists.

The house is on the campus of Sir J J Institute of Applied Art, of which Rudyard’s father Lockwood Kipling was the first dean. There were worries that to establish a Kipling Museum there might lead to political uproar.

Mukund Gorashkar, head of the project to renovate the house for the JSW Foundation, was quoted in the London-based Daily Telegraph as saying: “If we tried to convert it into a Kipling museum simply because Kipling was born there, that would ruffle quite a few feathers. In the political storm, you may find that the conservation effort would be set aside.”

The Chairman of the Kipling Society Sharad Keskar reportedly said: “You have a fairly ignorant officialdom in India who don’t know much about Kipling apart from that he was an imperialist or part of the Raj. Officially he’s still persona non grata. I think that is changing, but it’s rather a slow change.”

The shelving of the plan for a Kipling Museum happens to coincide with the publication by London publisher I. B. Tauris of “Kipling Abroad: Traffics and Discoveries from Burma to Brazil”, introduced and edited by the prominent British biographer Andrew Lycett. The book was launched last week at the Nehru Center in central London with a talk by Lycett followed by a reception and book signing. Lycett has already done invaluable work in providing a more nuanced and rounded view of Kipling through his biography of the author published to critical acclaim in 1999.

For “Kipling Abroad”, he has selected excerpts from Kipling’s work – including stories, poems, letters and journalism – to highlight his gifts as a travel writer who roamed the globe to an extraordinary extent.

Kipling was a great recorder of places. “Not just the physical places, but their peoples, their quirks, their smells – indeed the total experience of being at a particular place... He was such a brilliant observer of the world around him,” Lycett writes.
In addition, Kipling was fascinated by social and historical change and was aware of living at a time when the nature of travel was changing. “No longer were heroic individual expeditions being mounted. Rather, he found himself at the cusp of an age of mass travel when tourism was becoming a commodity and with his journalistic instincts he was determined to exploit this.”
Kipling’s writings are peppered with observations about the business and practice of travel, whether poking fun at Western globetrotters in India or railing against mass tourism in the United States. He was also interested in the mechanics of travel, and how it was affected by forms of transportation such as cars, trains and ships. Kipling is associated above all with India, his country of birth. Although he never returned to India after the age of 26, his birthplace of Mumbai was “to remain a positive influence and memory throughout his life.”

In his autobiography “Something of Myself” Kipling wrote: “My first impression is of daybreak, light and colour and golden and purple fruits at the level of my shoulder. This would be the memory of early morning walks to the Bombay fruit market with my ayah and later with my sister in her perambulator, and of our returns with our purchase piled high on the bows of it.”

He went to school in England, in Westward Ho! In Devon, and on returning to India he worked as a journalist in Lahore on the Civil and Military Gazette (CMG) for which he reported from various places. The short stories in “Plain Tales from the Hills”, which first made his name when it was published in book form in India in 1888, were first published in the paper.

In late 1887 Kipling resigned from CMG, and went to work on its sister paper, the Pioneer, in Allahabad. His travel reports for that newspaper were collected in the volume “Letters of Marque” published in Allahabad in 1891. In one article for CMG he describes how, unable to sleep in the humidity of a Lahore night, he ventures to the walled City of Dreadful Night. In “Taj Mahal and the Globe-Trotter” he makes fun of a young male traveler from Manchester who is “doing India.”
Apart from India, Egypt was the first foreign country Kipling recalled visiting, having passed through it as a child on the way to Europe. In 1913 he spent several weeks travelling in Egypt, and his articles on this trip were published as “Egypt of the Magicians” (1913).

He returned to Egypt in 1929 and also went to Palestine where he visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. “In his regular search for winter sun, he also travelled to Algiers, which reminded him of Bombay”, writes Lycett.
In 1889 Kipling had left India and travelled on an eastward voyage to America and England. He was favorably struck by Burma, which inspired his poem “Mandalay.” China gave him the creeps and he much preferred Japan; so much so that he returned there on honeymoon with his wife Caroline Balestier in 1892.

Kipling’s bride was American, and he built a house ‘Naulakha’ in her hometown of Battleboro’ in Vermont. Kipling had robust opinions on the places he visited. San Francisco was “a mad city inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty”. Put off by the crowds of tourists in one major attraction he wrote: “To-day I am in the Yellowstone Park, and I wish I were dead.” He was appalled by Chicago and its stock yards where livestock were slaughtered en masse.

In 1896 Kipling returned from America to England and settled in the county of Sussex for which he developed a great fondness and which inspired his books “Puck of Pook’s Hill” and “Rewards and Fairies.” He enjoyed owning cars, and did a great deal of driving in Britain. When he became rich he indulged his passion for Europe and liked to be driven around France in his Rolls Royce. For some years he spent part of every winter in South Africa, and he also visited South America and the Caribbean.

Interviewed on BBC radio the day after the launch, Lycett was asked whether it is time for Indians to reappraise Kipling. Lycett said: “I can well understand why Indians look askance at him in this day and age, because he was an imperialist, he was not a supporter of Indian nationalism. On the other hand he was the first great Indian writer in the English language. And he was very highly regarded amongst a lot of Indian writers.”

'syrian school' series on bbc tv

‘Syrian School’ TV series aims to challenge stereotypes
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette, 21 February 2010

The “Syrian School” series, currently being screened in weekly episodes on UK TV digital channel BBC Four, gives viewers an unprecedented insight into life among Syrian secondary schoolchildren. The five one-hour programs focus on the pupils and staff of four schools in Damascus over the course of one year.
The fly-on-the-wall approach takes the viewer into the schools, homes and streets of the Syrian capital as it follows the youngsters and tracks their lives. The teenagers come across as lively, good-humored, ambitious and independent-minded. The series, made by Lion Television, is a joint production of the Open University and the BBC and follows previous OU-BBC series on schools in Africa, India and China.
Anthropologist and filmmaker Max Baring directed and filmed the series. He says: “What excited me about working on ‘Syrian School’ was the possibility that we could un-pick some of the stereotypes that we in the West hold about the Middle East and the Islamic world in general.”
For example, while the number of Damascene girls wearing the hijab is rising, at the same time “young Syrians are eagerly exploring Western tastes and fashions, without compromising their closely-held Arab heritage.”
The series introduces viewers to an array of memorable characters. The headmistress of Zaki Al-Arsuzi Girls’ School, Amal Hassan, is a dominant presence in the first episode. She wants her pupils to see “how strong I am, and how I am proud of myself, and how I am free from inside... To face all the problems of life they have to be like this.”
The school’s pupils extend an ecstatic welcome to the elegant first lady of Syria, Asma Al-Assad, wife of President Bashar Al-Assad. She visits the school to talk to girls working on a newly-introduced innovation, which she is supporting, to prepare young Syrians for work in the private sector and to develop entrepreneurship.
The first episode is centered around two pupils starting the school year in new schools. Du’aa, a girl from a devout Muslim family, has transferred from a Sharia School to Zaki Al-Arsuzi School for her final year of studying for the Baccalaureate exams.
Du’aa, who memorized the Qur’an at 14, stresses that there is no contradiction between religion and a desire for education. “God urged us to seek knowledge and we prize knowledge a lot” she says. As a child she dreamed of space travel, and longed to be an astronaut.
Fifteen-year-old Iraqi Christian refugee Yusif Androus is beginning his first term at Jaramana Boys’ School. Some two million Iraqi refugees have fled to Syria since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Syria provides them with, among other things, free school education.
The influx of Iraqi pupils puts a strain on Syrian schools. Jaramana School, for example, has 500 pupils, including 200 Iraqis, but was built to take only 300. Yusif is a talented footballer, and when he was in Iraq it had been planned that he would play in front of a group of Dutch talent scouts. But after his eldest brother was murdered in sectarian violence the family fled to Syria.
Yusif is still affected by the violence and bombings he witnessed as a young child in Baghdad. Even now he finds it hard to tolerate loud bangs, such as those produced by firework displays.
The program shows a playground scuffle between two of Yusif’s Iraqi friends, who are reprimanded by a school supervisor. The supervisor later says that things are difficult for children from Iraq. “After what they’ve been through we can’t expect their nerves to be normal. They are under a lot of psychological pressure.”
The first episode coincides with the month of Ramadan. It shows pupils at the end of Ramadan going to Eid prayers and excitedly buying Eid presents, visiting family and going to the funfairs that spring up in parks.
The second program focuses on pupils at Yarmouk Girls School in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp established more than 60 years ago.
The Palestinian issue is never far from the pupils’ minds; when the TV crew visits in February 2009 it is a time of particularly strong feeling, just after the Gaza war. Girls express their responses to the war via art and poetry.

Two pupils want to become the first girl rappers in Yarmouk camp. Sixteen-year-old Shaza likes the music of American rappers Eminem, T-Bone and Akon and her love of rap is shared by Rahaf in the year above her. The girls visit the studio of Refugees of Rap, a successful local Palestinian-Syrian-Algerian rap group. The group members listen to the girls’ live performances and give them positive feedback.
Shaza and Rahaf hope to perform at the school prize giving. But this puts them on a collision course with their traditionalist Syrian headmistress Ghada Daloul who declares: “I don’t believe that rap music serves the Palestinian cause.” She is also unhappy that they went to the studio of the male rappers. The two girls’ families also turn against the idea of their becoming rappers. Rahaf confides to the camera: “Girls suffer a lot while looking on at boys enjoying a lot of freedom and going out: a lot of girls wish they were boys.”
Another Yarmouk School pupil, 18-year-old Safa’ Kiwan, is the Damascus girls’ discus champion. She is encouraged by the school sports mistress to train for the national schools championships, but she keeps her training secret from her strict father. Her paternal grandmother clandestinely accompanies her to training sessions.
A poetry writing club run by Muhannad at Zaki Al-Arsuzi School is a highlight of the third program. One club member, Ala [pictured], presents a poem inspired by a thwarted romance that began with an exchange of texts. Meanwhile at a boys’ primary school on the fringes of Damascus, two ten-year-olds compete to come top in class exams. In the following program the Syrian Junior Chess Champion travels to Beirut to take part in the Asian International Championships.

The series ends with preparations by twin sisters for the Baccalaureate exams. Farah dreams of studying English and exploring the world, inspired by her satellite TV heroine, British TV chef Nigella Lawson. Her twin sister Rahaf has more practical aspirations, hoping to study engineering.
Following its run on BBC Four, “Syrian School” is due to be shown on BBC World News in August. At the same time schools in the UK are being invited to twin with schools in the Arab world via an application form on the BBC website.

'sabra zoo': palestinian writer mischa hiller's debut novel

New Arab literary talent pens ‘Sabra Zoo’
By Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 15 Jan 2010

This month marks the publication by London-based Telegram Books of the debut novel of a striking new talent in Arab fiction, the Anglo-Palestinian writer Mischa Hiller. “Sabra Zoo” is a searing and accomplished novel that takes the reader back to the bloody events in Beirut in summer 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

Hiller was born in Hull, northern England, in 1962 to a Palestinian father and English mother. He grew up in Durham, London, Beirut and Dar Es Salaam and currently lives in Cambridge, England.

The engaging first-person narrator of his novel is the 18-year-old son of a Danish mother and a father who is a PLO official. Ivan’s parents have left Beirut in the evacuation by sea of PLO forces after the two-month Israeli siege and bombardment of the city.

The novel opens three days after the evacuation. Ivan is euphoric: “The war was over and I was parent-free for the first time, with my own apartment. I couldn’t ask for more.” But his optimism is premature, and he will soon find himself caught in a perilous situation.

Ivan works as an interpreter at a Red Crescent hospital at Sabra Palestinian refugee camp, which is treating victims of the siege and bombardment. During the siege, nearly 7,000 people were killed and 30,000 wounded, more than 80 percent of them civilians from West Beirut. More than 2,000 of those seriously wounded were burnt by phosphorus bombs.

Ivan is street-wise and witty, yet vulnerable. He is constantly distracted by the attractions of women and is eager for experience. He is particularly drawn to Norwegian physiotherapist Eli, an older married woman with a son. Ivan is, to some extent, an outsider, with his mixed parentage, part-European looks and education at a school in Copenhagen. Those meeting him for the first time often ask about his Russian-sounding name.

Hiller lived in Beirut himself for 10 years on and off, leaving in winter 1982. In writing the novel “I used some of my experience briefly interpreting for foreign medics and journalists in 1982, although I want to be very clear that this is definitely a work of fiction and not my story,” he told Saudi Gazette. “My experience did provide the feel, emotion and even humor of the situation and hopefully allowed me to create a compelling point of view in Ivan – although I suspect his preoccupations are the same as teenage boys everywhere.”

Hiller delineates his characters, even minor ones, with skill, and the dialogue is expertly pitched. These qualities are apparent in Ivan’s interactions with the team of international medical volunteers. They include diminutive strong-minded Dr. Asha Patel and Scottish doctor John. The medical team members work intensively in the day and party hard at night.

One of Ivan’s closest buddies is his Lebanese driver, Samir, who had also been the driver of Ivan’s father. Samir also runs a little café, taking pride in his “special sauce.” He may have a crude womanizing side, but he is at the same time a warm and endearing character.

Ivan gradually reveals to the reader that his parents’ marriage has been crumbling since the accidental death some years earlier of his younger brother Karam in a fall from a balcony.

When Eli asks Ivan to help with a patient Youssef, a patient in his early teens whose foot has been badly damaged by an Israeli cluster bomb, Ivan is reminded of Karam who would have been of a similar age to Youssef were he still alive. Youssef is reluctant to try using crutches, and Ivan manages to get him to have a go. He becomes increasingly involved in helping Youssef back to recovery.

Ivan is leading a compartmentalized life, of which his work at the hospital is only one part. He has remained in Beirut at the request of a PLO official so as to courier forged documents and passports between PLO cadres who are living in hiding. Ivan’s Danish passport allows him to move relatively easily around the city. But there is a traitor among the comrades.
At the same time he works for an American TV company which brings him into the world of international journalists crowded into the Commodore Hotel. This adds a dimension to the novel of seeing the violence through the eyes and recordings of Bob, the American for whom Ivan translates.

Matters become increasingly precarious after the Commander of the Lebanese Forces and President-Elect Bashir Gemayel is assassinated. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) invade West Beirut and their Phalangist allies conduct raids. There is tension on every corner, and hooded informers betray people at roadblocks. An atmosphere of paranoia and danger builds up.
The Palestinian refugee camps after the PLO withdrawal have been left exposed and defenseless. The violence culminates in one of the most ghastly episodes in the modern history of the Middle East: the massacre of hundreds or thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, under the noses of the IDF.

The Israeli government’s Kahan Inquiry of 1983 concluded that while the Phalangists were directly responsible for the massacre, Israeli forces were indirectly responsible. The report ultimately forced the reluctant resignation of Ariel Sharon as Defense Minister, but this was only a temporary blip in his brutal record in relation to the Palestinians.

“Sabra Zoo” is a fast-paced read with an economical style, and readily lends itself to a film treatment. Hiller wrote a film adaptation after completing the novel, while waiting for it to be sold to a publisher, “simply because I had always wanted to write a screenplay and love film as a story-telling medium.” In 2009 his screenplay won the European Independent Film Festival script competition.

Hiller says: “I did not study creative writing as such, but read a lot of screenplays to see how it was done. Since my writing style is sparse anyway, I was attracted to the idea that you can tell a story in 90 to 120 pages of double-spaced type, which is the ultimate in stripped-down writing.”
Hiller is now working on his second novel, in which “an orphaned survivor of the events of Sabra and Shatila is groomed and recruited by a mysterious PLO member to work for him secretly in Europe.” The sale of the book has yet to be finalized, but Hiller hopes that it will be published next year.

cultural cleansing in iraq

Counting the cost of cultural cleansing in Iraq
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette February 1 2010

One of the most enduring sound-bites from the April 2003 invasion of Iraq was the then US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s dismissive phrase “stuff happens.” He was responding to questions over the chaos in which ministries, museums and other institutions were ransacked, looted and burned while US troops stood by and failed to intervene. Rumsfeld suggested that the looting was a positive sign, an understandable targeting of the hated symbols of the ousted regime.

In the nearly seven years following the invasion, the culture of Iraq has continued to be ravaged. A collection of papers newly published by Pluto Press of London and New York explores the different facets of the onslaught on culture. The book has the provocative title “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq: Why Museums were Looted, Libraries Burned and Academics Murdered.”
The editors of the book are Raymond W. Baker, a politics professor of both Trinity College in the USA and the American University in Cairo; Shereen T. Ismail, Associate Professor at the School of Social Work, Carleton University, Canada, and Tariq Y. Ismail, Professor of Political Science at the University of Calgary, Canada.

The book is dedicated to the late Professor Issam Al-Rawi, Professor of Geology at Baghdad University and Chairman of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) who was assassinated in October 2006. Al-Rawi had founded the register of murdered academics.

The editors of “Cultural Cleansing in Iraq” write that the destruction of the Iraqi state has killed over a million civilians, displaced some four million refugees abroad and internally, and led to the targeted assassination of more than 400 academics and professionals. “All of these terrible losses are compounded by unprecedented levels of cultural devastation, attacks on national archives and monuments that represent the historical identity of the Iraqi people,” they write.
They see Iraq as a country in which the ending of the state was an objective of the occupiers. “State destruction went beyond regime change and included the dismantling of state institutions and the launching of a prolonged process of political reshaping.” They draw parallels with 1980s Central America where death squads were “a foreign policy tool.”

Zainab Bahrani [pictured] – the Edith Porada Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, New York – argues that the damage and destruction to Iraq’s heritage was not just due to poor planning and collateral damage. She asks why the occupiers chose to locate military bases at main cultural heritage sites such as Babylon, Ur and Samarra. The establishment of these bases has causes severe damage, destroying thousands of years of archaeological material. “Like human rights abuses, the destruction of a people’s cultural heritage and history has elsewhere been regarded as a war crime.”

Some contributors note that damage to Iraqi culture started well before 2003. The former director general of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage of Iraq, Abbas Al-Hussainy [pictured], considers that the modern assault on Iraq’s cultural heritage began in the second half of the 19th century. At that time there were illegal exports of artifacts to Asia, Europe and America.

The country’s heritage later suffered during the Iraq-Iran war and, from 1991 onwards, under sanctions. At the same time the regime sponsored “restoration” projects for propaganda purposes. A notorious example was Saddam’s restoration of Babylon with his name inscribed on each brick, in the style of Nebuchadnezzar II. The regime’s punitive actions against the south and the destruction of the salt marshes laid waste to the cultural riches of that area. “However, these earlier assaults on Iraq’s Mesopotamian heritage pale in comparison to the wreckage inflicted by the occupation of Iraq from 2003 onward,” the editors write.

The destruction of Iraq’s collective memory is a theme running through the book. Nabil Al-Takriti of the University of Mary Washington in the USA cites the scholar Keith Watenpaugh’s use of the word “mnemocide” to mean the murder of cultural memory. The push to remake Iraq has been destructive to the country’s collective memory. As Al-Takriti puts it: “In Iraq’s case, during a period of great chaotic flux, one country under occupation lost a great deal of its connection to its past while certain occupying powers profited from that loss in a variety of ways.”

Al-Takriti surveys the huge toll looting, burning and flooding has taken on the precious collections of documents in the Iraqi National Library and Archives (INLA), the Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs Central Library (Awqaf Library), the Iraqi House of Manuscripts, the Iraqi Academy of Sciences, the House of Wisdom and the Iraqi Jewish Archive.
There are disputes over the ownership of some of the surviving documents. The controversial Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya, who was a strong proponent of the invasion, removed the Baath Party Archives from the Party headquarters in 2003 and eventually took them to California. His Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF) claimed stewardship of the archives and then turned them over to the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. But the director general of INLA Saad Eskander [pictured] challenges the IMF’s right to dispose of the collection.

Eskander is also involved in a tussle between Iraq and certain Jewish claimants over the Iraqi Jewish Archive of books, manuscripts and records that was recovered by US troops from a sewage-flooded basement. The Iraqi Culture Ministry agreed that the collection should be moved to the US for preservation, but it was supposed to be returned after two years. Now Iraq is pressing for its return. Explaining why the archive should be returned, Eskander has said: “Iraqis must know that we are a diverse people, with different traditions, different religions, and we need to accept this diversity...To show it to our people that Baghdad was always multiethnic.” But certain influential Jewish personalities and circles in the US object to the return to Iraq.

Philip Marfleet, Reader in Refugee Studies and Director of the Refugee Research Centre at the University of East London, warns that the scattering of Iraqi intellectuals worldwide is “making the prospect of return and reconsolidation of the country’s academic, professional and technical cadres increasingly difficult, leaving a gaping hole in its human resources. A loss of this magnitude will certainly affect the wider society for generations to come.” The Iraqi intelligentsia is in effect being evacuated; hence the presence in Iraqi refugee communities of disproportionately large numbers of academics, writers, journalists and artists.

Leading authors campaign for Libyan novelist’s ‘disappeared’ father
by Susannah Tarbush

Saudi Gazette 26 January 2010
A campaign backed by around 250 of the world’s most distinguished writers is demanding that Libya provide information on the whereabouts of Jaballa Matar, a Libyan dissident and former diplomat who was abducted in Cairo 20 years ago and imprisoned in Libya. The Libyan authorities have never even admitted that Jaballa was imprisoned.

Jaballa Matar is the father of the London-based novelist Hisham Matar [pictured], 39, a major literary talent who created a literary sensation when his 2006 debut novel “In the Country of Men” (Viking) was shortlisted for Britain’s premier literary prize, the Man Booker, and for the Guardian First Book Award. The novel has won several prizes including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book award for Europe and South Asia, the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Italian Premio Vallombrosa Gregor von Rezzori. It has been translated into 22 languages.

“In the Country of Men” is set in Libya in 1979 and is written from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy who witnesses the events unfolding around his dissident father, who is tortured while in prison. The novel is permeated with a sense of absence and loss, and captures the paranoid atmosphere of the time.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband and other government figures have responded with sympathy to the campaign for Hisham’s father. If Libya fails to provide satisfactory answers to the questions the UK is currently raising on Jaballa and other dissidents, and on human rights issues, there could be a freezing of Libya’s efforts to forge an improved relationship with the EU.
In mid-January the 250 writers spearheading the campaign signed a letter from English PEN’s president Lisa Appignanesi and from Hisham, published in The Times daily newspaper of London. The signatories included three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature – JM Coetzee, Orhan Pamuk and Wole Soyinka – and nine winners of the Man Booker prize, among them Margaret Atwood, Kiran Desai and Michael Oondaatje, as well as the current poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy and her predecessor Sir Andrew Motion.

The letter noted that Jaballa Matar was one of the most prominent Libyan political activists, and had continually called for democracy, the rule of law and justice in Libya. He was kidnapped from his home in Cairo in 1990 and his family has not seen him since.

Two letters from Jaballa to his family were smuggled out of Libya’s political prison, Abu Salim, in 1992 and 1995. They revealed that the Egyptian authorities had held him in Cairo for two days after his abduction, before handing him over to Libyan officials. He had been flown to Tripoli, tortured and subjected to arbitrary detention.

The letter in The Times added that Jaballa was seen in 2002 in a secret political prison in Libya, and that his family, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International believe he is still in that country. But the Libyan government denies all knowledge of the whereabouts of Jaballa and other “disappeared” Libyans, and he is yet to be granted an open trial.

The letter concluded: “We urge the government to use its new relationship with the Libyan government to demand sincere and significant improvements in Libya’s human rights record. We, therefore, ask the Foreign Office whether having regard to the latest Human Rights Watch report, published on Dec. 12, in which Jaballa’s case is documented, it will seek information from the Libyan government about the whereabouts of Jaballa and other political prisoners.”

David Miliband responded with a message posted on the Foreign Office website and in a letter published in The Times saying: “I fully sympathize with Hisham’s situation. I can only imagine how it must feel not to know the fate of your father year after year.” Miliband said Hisham has his full support in his quest to find out what happened to his father and that “Hisham and his family need to know the truth now.”

After receiving the second letter from Jaballa in 1995, his family heard nothing more from him. So when news leaked out in 2002 that the authorities had massacred 1,200 prisoners at Abu Salim prison in 1996, the family feared that he was among the dead. The Human Rights Watch report of December, which includes a reported sighting of Jaballa, has brought the family a surge of fresh hope. Hisham wrote in a recent article in the Guardian that he has received a message that someone saw his father in a secret political prison in Tripoli in 2002 and that he is “frail, but well”.

Hisham is now devoting much time to trying to find out what happened to his father. The Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts, who has known Hisham for some 15 years, quotes him as saying his daily routine has completely changed: “I am a novelist until lunchtime and then, from lunch to midnight, work on my father’s case. I was 19 when I last saw him. It has been hard to continue over the years. You block it out and try to get on with life. Boy, I am so thrilled now!”
The Free Jaballa Matar campaign has a Twitter account, a Facebook site and a website at freematar.org. The campaign has support from PEN, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the International Center for Transitional Justice.

There is an uncanny overlap of fact and fiction in the story of Jaballa Matar and the work of his novelist son. Hisham referred in his Guardian article to the second novel, on which he has been working for the past three years. The novel concerns “a man haunted by the absence of his father. He stalks his lovers, lives in his house and wears his clothes. He is a most faithful son.” And now, weeks from finishing the novel, he has learned that his father, who disappeared 20 years ago, may be alive. If Libya fails to provide answers to the questions the British government is posing on Jaballa and other issues, this could impact on the framework agreement Libya has been negotiating with the EU since 2008 with the aim of strengthening political, social, economic, commercial and cultural relations.

When asked in the House of Lords last week whether the framework agreement must be based on meaningful progress in political and human rights reform, Foreign Office Minister Lady Kinnock answered “yes”. She also said that the latest talks with Libya on Jaballa Matar had been held the previous weekend.

2 of tipton 3 meet former guantanamo guard

Two ex-Guantanamo detainees meet their former guard
by Susannah Tarbush
Saudi Gazette 19 January 2010
They were known as the Tipton Three: a trio of young British Muslim men from the English town of Tipton who traveled in October 2001 to Pakistan for the wedding of one of them, Asif Iqbal. While waiting for the wedding arrangements to be finalized they crossed into Afghanistan where they were seized by the Northern Alliance and sold on to US forces. The Americans flew them to Cuba and incarcerated them for more than two years in Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
In March 2004 Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul [pictured below] were released without charge and flown home. On their return they made numerous allegations of torture in Guantanamo. The British film director Michael Winterbottom turned the story of the Tipton Three into the docudrama “The Road to Guantanamo”, screened on Channel 4 and released on DVD and in cinemas in 2006.
Now two of the men have appeared in an extraordinary 23-minute documentary film, in which they are reunited with a former guard from Guantanamo, Brandon Neely. The film was made for BBC-2 TV’s nightly current affairs program Newsnight and shown in two parts last week. The film was part of a special week of Newsnight programs marking the first anniversary of US President Barack Obama’s pledge to close Guantanamo within a year. In practice, Obama has found it impossible to keep his promise.
The 29-year-old Neely, who is from the Texan town of Huntsville, left Guantanamo to serve in Iraq in June 2002 and resigned from the military in 2005 to become a police officer. But he was haunted by the ill-treatment and torture he had witnessed at Guantanamo. Those in charge of the detention camp had said the detainees were “the world’s most dangerous men.”
But the more he saw detainees being released without charge, the more he came to think that the stories they had told him about how they came to be in Guantanamo – and which he had at the time disbelieved – were true. He began to speak out publicly against Guantanamo. Neely says: “I never thought in a million years that the US would lock up so many innocent people for no reason other than being Muslim and in the wrong location. It really frustrated me and I was really angry and needed to tell my story.”
In December 2008 he approached the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA) in order to contribute testimony to the Guantanamo Testimonials Project. As a further step he decided to try and make contact through Facebook with some of the former detainees. “I decided to type in the names and see if a profile came up and I came across Shafiq’s Facebook page.” Neely sent Shafiq an email saying he was “truly sorry” for the hell the detainees had been put through in Guantanamo, adding: “If there’s anything I can do to help just let me know. Take care.”
Shafiq says: “It was shocking and surprising to receive a message from one of the guards saying basically that what happened to us in Guantanamo was wrong.” He replied to the message, and he and Neely embarked on an email correspondence. When the BBC learned that the former guard and former detainees were in touch by email, they approached them to ask whether they would be willing to meet in person. When they agreed, the BBC flew Neely over to London for a meeting with Shafiq and Ruhal.
The initial awkwardness at the meeting was dispelled when Ruhal told Neely lightheartedly “you look different without a cap”, and Neely replied: “You look different not in jumpsuits.” Neely again apologized for the way Shafiq and Rasul had been treated at Guantanamo.
Shafiq said: I’m really happy for Brandon to come all the way here to say sorry to us. It means so much to us.” He told him: “I don’t hold you responsible for what happened to me. You were there to do a job and you had to do that job.”
During the time they were at Guantanamo, the guard and two detainees found they had much in common. Neely was surprised to find what good English Ruhal and some other detainees spoke. When he talked to Ruhal, it was “no different from sitting with a friend and talking about women or music.” He would ask Ruhal if he listened to rappers Eminem or Dr. Dre, and Ruhal would “do a little rap; it was just funny”.
He also remembers him talking about James Bond movies. The detainees were forbidden sweets or candy, and Ruhal recalls how Neely smuggled him some Skittles sweets, which was “the kindest thing he could have done for me.”
Neely’s departure from Guantanamo coincided with life getting even tougher for the Tipton Three. They were put in isolation and pressure was placed on them to try to get them to confess to being members of Al-Qaeda. They were played a grainy video which allegedly showed them at a speech given by Osama Bin Laden. They said they could prove they were in Britain at the time the video was shot, but it took months for proof to arrive.
Ruhal says that out of all the torture techniques, the playing of loud music was probably the worst. “It was extremely loud in a very small room like someone screaming down your ears for hour upon hour. You could have gone crazy.” He thought many times about taking his own life, but “I thought if I kill myself that means they’ve won.”
Neely felt particularly bad about an incident on the first day of processing detainees in Alpha Block when a handcuffed older detainee who had been told to kneel had suddenly jerked and not done as instructed. Neely had slammed his face into the concrete floor. Another detainee told him some days later that the reason the man had jerked when made to kneel was that he thought he was going to be executed because he’d had a family member who was executed in the same manner in his country. Neely says: “I really felt horrible.”
In the evening Neely and the two former detainees and their wives were filmed at an Indian restaurant. This was the first time Neely had tasted curry.
The Tipton Three have always adamantly denied that they crossed into Afghanistan for purposes of jihad. Ruhal says that after Asif’s father said it would take two or three weeks to arrange the wedding, the friends were touring around and decided to visit Afghanistan. The war started the day they arrived and they eventually ended up in Kunduz.
They admit that they went to a Taliban training camp in Kunduz, but say this was to find out what was happening. And they have also admitted handling an AK-47, but this was out of curiosity. Ruhal says: “At the end of the day if I was guilty of a crime, or if Shafiq was guilty of a crime, we wouldn’t be sitting here today. We were released without any charge. If we were really a threat to this world, America especially, there would have been no way we’d have been released.”