Novelist , editor of Cairo's foremost literary forum Akhbar Al-Adab, talks about his involvement with the Frankfurt Book Fair -- and its organisers I attended the Frankfurt Book Fair twice before now, first in 1989, when I was invited to a seminar on [my 1988 novel] Al- Zeini Barakat. Then, last year, I contributed to a symposium about bridging the gap between self and other. Both [the late Saudi-Iraqi novelist] Abdel-Rahman Mounif and [the francophone French writer] Taher Ben Jaloun were supposed to attend, but they both ended up apologising for some reason. The francophone Lebanese writer Sinos Khouri, along with [the young Egyptian novelist] Miral El-Tahawi, and a Jewish Iraqi writer, a resident of Germany, came in their stead. Both times round the event evidenced a degree of Arab cultural presence, thanks largely to the work of the association headed by Peter Ripken, which seeks to support so called Third World literature. Ripken has a lot of experience in matters Arab, as well as Latin American and African. And his association invites not only writers but publishers as well. Last year, for example, Mohamed Hashim, the proprietor of [the independent publishing house] Miret for Publication and Information, was at the fair, hosted by the association; the year before, Hosni Soliman, head of Sharqiat Publishing House, was likewise invited to the fair. But I should say that my involvement with literary life in Germany does not quite end here. I've also participated in numerous German-Egyptian exchange programmes, most of which tend to be organised by the Goethe Institute. Last April, I joined a German counterpart in a bilingual reading event -- part of a Goethe Institute literary workshop. This year I'm again taking part in the same workshop, in Berlin, but under a different category as it were. On the request of the organisers, I've also recommended six young Egyptian writers to take part in the workshop this year and in the next few rounds. My task this time round is to speak about Cairo in four German cities, starting with Munich and ending with Frankfurt to coincide with the fair. My contribution also involves introducing the work of the two young Egyptian writers who will take part in the workshop, short-story writer Mansoura Ezzeddin and poet Zahra Yousri. Both are worthy of the attention the event will generate, because they're individually very talented as well as representative of a new direction in contemporary writing. The workshop takes place at a converted brewery -- now a cultural centre -- and the idea behind that part of it is to discuss the work of two young writers and introduce it to a German audience. I'm going to play the role of Akhbar Al-Adab editor, not that of famous novelist or patriarch. You see, such attention is crucial in the light of the situation here in Egypt, for with the exception of coverage in Akhbar Al-Adab, the work of accomplished young writers receives hardly any attention at all. Such exchange initiatives are therefore important and cheering, a real blessing for literature, but it should also be stressed that they have nothing to do with this year's guest-of-honour presentation per se. The results of the workshop in Berlin will be displayed in Frankfurt, where I will be present as a participant in a German project -- I'm in no way part of the official Arab presentation. More than a month ago Mohamed Ghoneim [the executive director of the Arab League committee responsible for the presentation] approached me about being part of the Arab League presentation in Frankfurt and I agreed immediately. I have a lot of respect for [Arab League Secretary-General] Amr Moussa and I believe his concern with culture is sincere. Weeks later, however, I received another call, from the [Egyptian] Ministry of Culture, asking for my passport number and other data. And I refused to give the information, asking the person at the other end to please remove my name from any Ministry of Culture document, for I thought I'd made it clear enough that I would not go as part of a Ministry of Culture delegation. I can go with the Arab League, not with the ministry. I would have loved to take part in the official programme, but I don't want to be involved in anything organised by the ministry. Nor am I very happy with the way things have been done. Ghoneim may be an excellent bureaucrat, a civil servant. He is not an intellectual. It is remarkable how angrily he objected to my opinion of the programme and the suggestions I was making for improving it. I didn't know then that he was the one who put it together. He shouldn't have. As executive director he should only have carried out the decisions of intellectuals, that is his proper role. But he should not have been allowed to make decisions. Among my suggestions was that [critic and Chairman of the Supreme Council of Culture] Gaber Asfour should spend time with 15 intellectuals to discuss what will happen in Frankfurt. In the end he chose to spend his time with bureaucrats. Akhbar Al-Adab published numerous proposals and suggestions. No one listened. Bureaucrats arranged a tourist itinerary for the participants and that was that. It seems no one in the Arab League reads Akhbar Al-Adab. Not surprisingly, indeed, the official programme is disturbingly reminiscent of Cairo Book Fair programmes. It's impossible to change that now. Too late. Much as I would have liked to. But thankfully it is not until the fair wraps up that Arabs will face the most important challenges -- and that work should involve many more parties besides the official organisers. You understand Frankfurt is not simply about the five days of the fair. Even more significantly for the guest of honour each round, it comprises a year-long programme of activities that opens in September. These activities, which will make up a kind of Arab festival, will take place in one German city after another in the 12 months following the fair. And it is during those 12 months that the bulk of the work will be done -- Arabs of every persuasion introducing various aspects of their culture. It is during that year that the German public expects to find out about Arab culture, slowly and extensively, at a normal pace, not in the flurry of the fair itself -- which should really be wholly dedicated to copyright deals among publishers. Lebanon, for example, has set aside a million dollars to finance performances in German theatres through the year. It's a golden opportunity for Arab countries to get in touch with German cultural institutions. People who answer to other ministries -- information and tourism, for example -- should be equally involved. When you go and speak about Cairo in four major centres, for example, there is a good chance that audience members will become interested in seeing that city. In that year Arab cultural activities other than literature should also be introduced. It would be interesting to see a sha'ir (bard) from Sohag singing the praises of Abu Zeid [the hero of the Beni Hilal epic] to the sound of the rababa in Germany. It's been said that some 50 Arabic books will be available in German translation during the fair; the complete list has yet to be published. The volumes in question include canonical works written hundreds of years ago as well as novels by most of the authors who will be present. My concern is that the translations will have been undertaken with haste; translation from Arabic into German is, after all, a rare, expensive endeavour, and a literary text requires meticulous attention. It took the translator three whole years to complete the German version of Al-Zeini Barakat, for example. So one cannot help wondering how the presentation organisers will have managed to translate so much in such a limited period of time, the translation work having started only months ago. Which books did they pick? That's another question, the answer to which will only be ascertained in Frankfurt. My suggestion for Moussa was that we should buy rights to existing German translations of Arabic books, republish these and make a start with them. Such books would include Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idris and many other important writers. The money spent on doing speedy translations of the aforementioned 50 books could have gone towards reprinting such well- translated works, the value of which is beyond questioning. This way we could have presented the fair with a more or less complete library. That, sadly, is not going to happen, we just have to see. As for the literary and cultural figures who will be present at the fair, I think they are more or less representative of their respective countries, even though I would have made not a few changes myself. Positively, major Arab poets with an international reputation -- Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Ahmed Abdel-Motie Hegazi -- are participating. But some crucial names are missing; and some names are unnecessarily if not undesirably included. Some of the names included are those of relatively insignificant writers. Emphasis should have been placed on those people, like [the Egyptian political thinker] Anouar Abdel- Malek and [the Moroccan philosopher] Mohamed Arkoun, who have the necessary communication skills, who are familiar with Western cultural discourse and capable of arguing with it. Rather, the programme looks like a tour itinerary; it has Orientalist inclinations that can only confirm stereotypes of Arabs. Why should the Karakala Band perform Sheherazde, for example? Why not the Port Said folk troupe Al-Tanboura? Some people -- officials -- are going simply because of the posts that they hold in the establishment. Once in power an authority should be responsible and sincere. [Egyptian novelists] Sonalla Ibrahim, Nawal El-Saadawi and Salwa Bakr, [and Algerian novelist] Al-Taher Wattar -- these names cannot be ignored in this way. Ibrahim lived in Germany for three years and has several books translated into German; if he is not on the list the Germans will ask where he is. Important Islamic intellectuals like Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid, the scholar in exile, and historian Tareq El-Bishri, are completely ignored; it is unbelievable. Again, the Association of German Orientalists -- an organisation that did a lot of work for Arab heritage, printing canonical books like the 36-volume Al-Miqyas and reprinting Abu Nawwas -- has not been contacted. They are people who genuinely care about Arab heritage and have no imperial tendencies whatever; don't they deserve a gesture of gratitude? Ironically German choices are more to the point, you could say they comprise a more honest representation, for all the names excluded from the official programme were invited by the German side. It seems they are more concerned about Arab culture than Arab officials. And they may well represent Arab culture better than the official organisers of the presentation. On the whole one could say the list of participants represents an official vision, the governments'. Some very important names are missing -- a terrible fact. As to the question of what Arab culture is, well -- Arab culture should really describe an intermingling of numerous and sometimes widely divergent cultural identities whose geographical extent includes the area from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf. Inevitably it draws on the ancient civilisations of the Near East and Asia Minor, as well as a shared modern experience of history and the achievements of Muslims, Christians and Jews. But Arab culture cannot be reduced to Islamic culture, nor can be reduced to the Arabic language, in fact, for it includes different languages -- Amharic, to mention but one example. Arabs write in German and other languages as well as French and English. Any definition of Arab culture should be extremely inclusive, because it cannot afford to do without any of these elements. Arab culture comprises, for one very significant element, a plurality of fictional writing. The organisers are fussing over a new edition of the Thousand and One Nights, for example -- a fact that is positive enough in itself -- but it can only be hoped that contemporary trends in fiction will not be forgotten in the process. When you think about fiction, too, it is shocking that, apart from the opening speech, [Nobel laureate] Naguib Mahfouz is not scheduled to make any contribution to the fair. A speech, and that is it. I therefore suggest that, in the course of the year-long festival, a week-long series of seminars and film screenings on Naguib Mahfouz should be held, to open on his birthday in December. I think that is the least that can be done in this context. There is no such thing as improving the image of Arabs in the West. The Germans, for one Western people, are remarkably aware of the reality of life in the Arab world. So all this talk of their thinking of Arabs as fanatics and terrorists is quite simply not true. The purpose of the presentation is to introduce our culture, and I, for one representative of that culture, don't like to think of myself as schizophrenic. What I will say in Germany will be identical with what I've always said here, and what my writing communicates. The most important thing is honesty. Rectifying misconceptions about life in the Arab world is really the responsibility of media and tourism authorities, not cultural or literary figures. It should also be said in this context that the Arab perspective is dangerously over-sensitive in parts. Issues like Palestine and Iraq -- sensitive issues, from the viewpoint of Arabs -- are not provided for in the official programme, yet it is precisely such issues that Germans are eager to find out more about. And in Germany people are far more understanding of the situation than Arabs expect; there is an anti-globalisation movement there too. This obsession with "image" only really concerns extremist commentators, whether in America or the Arab world. It has little relevance for Germans or Arab culture as such. A pseudo-issue. As writers and intellectuals it is our duty to be present in Frankfurt whether or not our names are on the official list. Personally I refuse to represent the Ministry of Culture or participate in any of its activities; it is a political stand, and it is against the establishment. Nor, in the light of that establishment's policies, am I particularly optimistic about our global status in the cultural arena. In the past we had issues to present; we used to discuss Avicenna or Al-Maqrizi; now we have nothing to talk about. The issues that we do have -- censorship, the impact of the establishment on the life and work of intellectuals, our culture minister's unabashed efforts to keep intellectuals out of decision making, or else the frightening face of culture in closed Arab societies like Saudi Arabia -- are hardly even mentioned. That said, whether or not such issues receive due attention in the end, we do have a problem, and our problem is that we are representing Arab culture at its historical worst. Conditions being what they are, culture can only go so far; even the writers' union is not an independent institution. Besides, with Arab regimes working to silence and repress the role of intellectuals and civil society in culture, what do we have to look forward to? By Lina Mahmoud
