A respected short story writer, translator and novelist, Jordanian author Elias Farkouh is also a publisher. Rania Khallaf seizes the opportunity of his presence at the Cairo Book Fair to find out about his multifaceted presence on the Arab literary scene Meeting Elias Farkouh this week at the Cairo Book Fair's Culture Café was particularly exciting. It was a prospect I had anticipated since reading his third short story collection, Twenty One Shots for the Prophet (1982), the first of his books that I encountered, in the mid-1980s. These stories are charged with Arab nationalism, and the pleasure they gave my teenage friends and me -- aspiring writers, all -- was largely bound up with this partially ideological sense of identity. "As a writer I started a little late," my teenage hero recalls in a considered voice. "I didn't try to publish my short stories until I had finished studying psychology at Beirut University, in 1976. But it was an encouraging start. Most of the short stories being written in the Levant at the time revolved around the Palestinian cause, employing high- sounding slogans. I never strayed too far away from the cause myself, but I tended to approach it from relatively marginal angles. "My stories focussed on the ordinary, average man irrespective of social stereotypes -- if you are poor it follows that you must be kind, for example; rich must be a synonym for evil, etc. And to this day my conviction is that writing in support of a cause should never be an excuse for lowering the standard of a literary work. It is the way you deal with the cause, rather, that makes your writing different." Farkouh's stories were first collected in Al-Saf'a (The Slap, 1978). This was followed by Tuyour Amman Tuhalliq Munkhafida (Amman's Birds Fly Low, 1981) and Ihda wa Eshrouna Talqa lil-Nabeyy (Twenty One Shots for the Prophet) a year later; the latter won him the 1982 Jordanian Writers Association award. Since then he has written prolifically, his latest book being another collection of short stories, Huqoul Al-Zilal (Fields of Shadows, 2002). It was following Al-Saf'a, however, that the first principal shift of perspective occurred. "The book was full of weak points, a result of the political commitments my work reflected and the way it reflected them," he concedes. In the following two books, Farkouh's language was rarefied; it became more precise and more expressive. "For me language is not simply a means of conveying ideas," Farkouh explains; "it is itself the idea, the end of writing, and it embodies memory -- the memory of a culture, and the memory of the writer himself." Such is Farkouh's concern with the evocative power of words that, in his work, each word carries a range of meanings -- metaphorical as well as literal. The third collection, the one that introduced me to his writing, was by far the most remarkable of his books to date, and it demonstrates all his interest in language and the evocative power of his style. In itself the title carries many implications, almost semiological in complexity: 21 shots are traditionally fired to salute a political authority, Farkouh explains, yet the prophet is the ideal man whose purity leads to him being the subject of political oppression; the prophet is equally a real person, however, a poet, conceived in the image of Jesus or Mohamed: "The story is in tribute to this prophet-like ordinary person." Such characters -- poor, melancholy, powerless before oppression -- are typical of Farkouh; and his keenness on depicting them is a central aspect of his work. "I am biased in favour of the big issues and the people involved in them. One such issue is class conflict -- defined in Marxist terms. I am eager to portray class conflict in Third World societies. It's a bias I'm committed to to this day. What has changed in my work, rather, is the technique that I use to portray the ideas in question -- not the way you see the world, but the way you employ your literary instruments. These technical developments often happen in unpredictable, sometimes scary ways; that was the case especially with my seventh collection, Huqoul Al-Zilal. Many times, I no longer felt in control. "More and more people are asking me -- writers and readers as well as critics -- whether I am producing generic short stories or mere texts. It is obviously because I abide less and less by the technical rules of short story composition. But I believe a real artist must be pushing at the edges of generic convention -- and constantly experimenting with his compositional techniques in order to do so." One -- inescapable -- resource is the oral literary tradition and the vernacular, which nonetheless does not seem to figure as prominently in Farkouh's work as in that of other writers. "I try to make use of all kinds of art, including film and the plastic arts, especially still life." In "Avo", a short story published in Twenty One Shots, Farkouh makes extensive use of still life and sculpture in evoking the stagnation of the life of the eponymous protagonist, a depressed Armenian. "I feel a good artist can employ all the arts, and even the most trivial things in life, in the service of his vision -- so long as he has the insight to transport the precepts surrounding him into meaningful material. Oral literature has made no direct impact on Jordanian writing, but modern writers still deploy the framework of the traditional Bedouin folk tale in the work they're producing now." *** A loyal "son of Amman" -- born in the year of the Nakbah, 1948, Farkouh insists that his development coincided with that of the city, whose history and culture are among the most recurrent themes in his work -- it was perhaps his awareness of Amman as a potential literary capital that drove him to embark on a publishing career. "My story with publishing begins at an early age," he recalls. "It started while I was a member of the resistance movement in Lebanon, during which time I worked closely with the information committee -- we published magazines and pamphlets. Then, when I came back to Jordan, I was prohibited from working in many fields. So I worked for a short while as a journalist, after which, on the advice of a friend, I decided to move into publishing." Cooperating with poet Taher Riyad, Farkouh worked in Dar Al-Manarat until 1991, the year Dar Al-Azmina, his own publishing house, came into being. The dar is now one of the best known in the Arab world -- testimony to Farkouh's profound understanding of the needs of the milieu in which he worked. "The experience has had a negative effect on my writing, though," he confides, "because it consumes much effort and time. It doesn't help that my rhythm tends to be extremely slow whether I'm reading or writing. A few years from now," Farkouh announces, "I hope I will be able to resume my activity as a full-time writer." His work in literary translation -- Other Fires, a volume of short stories by female writers from Latin America, appeared in 1999 -- makes writing slower still. "Translation is something I find rewarding, especially when I stop writing. It makes me feel I'm producing, whether the end product comprises my own text or that of someone else." Publishing, by contrast, involves no such reward; and it is with level-headed honesty that Farkouh points to "the challenges" facing the Arab Publishers Union -- an issue that interests him almost as much as the intricacies of literary composition. "The main problem facing any Arab publisher is distribution and marketing," he testifies, emphasising the pressing need for an Arab distribution company "capable of distributing Arabic books throughout the region to ensure that the Arab reader should have access to books" regardless of annual book fairs. "It's a very hard target to meet in practice; there are publishers who set out to monopolise the Arab market -- benefiting from the status quo." Despite intense cultural activity -- the Jordanian Writers Association, closed down in the 1980s to be replaced by the less oppositional Jordanian Writers Union, which used to be a stronghold of Arab nationalism and left-wing politics -- censorship continues to be a problem, it seems, undermining the freedom of writers like Mousa Hawamda, who was recently imprisoned for three months on the charge of insulting religious sentiments -- based on two paragraphs of his last book. "In fact," Farkouh responds, "censorship has been less of a problem in the last ten years. Which is not to say that much is still uncensored -- any reference to the royal family, for example, as well as discussions of religion or sex; topics that undermine a conservative society. As Muslim fundamentalism takes a stronger hold, the problem is complicated further, for the state, as well as practising censorship against writers, is very worried about the political implications of Islam. Hawamda's book was approved by the state censorship, for example; it was Muslim fundamentalists who created the stir." Farkouh has much hope for the future, however, with the growing wave of young writing. "The current wave of short story writers stands out for the number of female writers it presents us with -- Hozama Habayeb, Jamila Amairi, Hanan El-Beiruty. I believe these aspiring voices are very distinguished on the Arab level. There is some sort of cultural centralism in Egypt, which works as an obstacle in the way of other Arab writers being recognised. I believe, however, that where the reader has the will to read texts produced behind the borders, he will find a way." *** In his two novels the two aspects of Farkouh's cultural orientation -- the aesthetic precision of the stylist, and the panoramic vision of the political and cultural activist -- seem to come together. "The novel cannot survive in isolation from the writer's personal history," he says. "And one of the main experiences in my personal history is my involvement in the Palestinian resistance movement." In his first novel, Qamat Al-Zubad (Essential Pillars, 1987), Farkouh began a trilogy documenting the contemporary history of Jordan. Reprinted by the Egyptian Council of Culture, the novel covers the period 1967-1976, dealing with the Lebanese civil war and the collapse of Tal Al-Zaatar refugee camp. Farkouh focusses on the characters' inner conflicts, presented against a backdrop of overriding destruction. The second volume, A'midat Al-Ghubar (Dust Columns, 1996): "This part covers the period from 1977, the year when I came back to Amman, to 1982, when Beirut was occupied by Israel, and when the late President Sadat signed the Peace Treaty with Israel. I have yet to start writing the third part, which, if all goes according to plan, will cover my personal history from years 1948 to 1967." Though both books deal with history, Farkouh refuses to describe them as historical novels: "I really don't know what they mean by history in this context. I wouldn't know how to define the historical novel: is it a novel that deals with the past, the present or both? And what about the narrative of the individual, does it not constitute another kind of personal history? Is it, too, a historical novel?" Among Farkouh's future projects is a book of literary criticism, to be entitled Criticism is not Criticism: Writing, the Novel, Poetry : "The aim of the book is to pose questions about modern writing techniques -- in order to define literary genres," he says in the same considered voice. "Through the exercise I hope to establish a standard by which to judge contemporary Arabic writing and work out where we stand."
