To celebrate the appearance of the last issue of the Beirut-based Zawaya, a pan-Arab publication that has recently enlivened the cultural sphere, Rasha Salti profiles its founder, manager and editor, the Lebanese critic Pierre Abi Saab On an August night I'm spending time with Pierre Abi Saab on Monnot Street in Beirut. It's an ordinary enough open- air café, but it feels like a rare sanctuary of genteel quietude. And it feels right that our young friendship, which has not always endured the upheavals of life, should find expression in such a place: our kinship originates in shared awareness of a Beirut unscathed by civil war. The city's connection with the wider Arab world had rested on its designation as a safe haven where writers, artists, activists terrorised in their own countries had come to address gaping wounds. And when the war came, or else after it went, it was common for those Beirutis who believed in this designation to leave Beirut. But Pierre went further than any of us in seeking out the inter-Arab sense of identity he had come in contact with in those unbridled years. He moved through both Mashreq and Maghreb, chronicling an Arab world of theatre, literature and music; years and years later, he found his way back -- to a different, barely known city. And here we are now. It seems strangely poetic that he should have been studying dramatic arts at the Lebanese University when the dividing line separating the city into two halves became clearly demarcated; he enrolled in 1977, just as shell fire, checkpoints and snipers were turning commonplace. Yet, with a few theatre reviews published in the daily Al-Nahar, he was also setting out as a journalist. In his student years, while living in the eastern half of the city, Pierre broached the work of a generation of theatrical innovators -- Rémond Gebara, Antoine Multaqa and Roger Assaf, to name three -- whose experiments with form and method were already established. One could safely say that he grew into his own to the rhythm of their performances, or could one? A brief stint on the editorial staff of Al-Sayyid was indispensable for learning the tools of the trade, he recalls in passing, but the true starting point of his career did not occur, he insists, until he joined the staff of Al-Safir. We are talking in the serenity of the surroundings still, but gradually the quiet flow of memories gives way to a spate that threatens to rob the conversation of structure. Speaking fondly of the day Yousri Nasrallah introduced him to Elias Khoury, then the culture editor of the last mentioned daily, Pierre describes the life-affirming exhilaration he felt in the face of fear and despair brought on by the city tearing itself apart, the increasingly perilous process of crossing from one side of it to the other, the drive to maintain a solid network of friendships -- a realm of solidarity through which writers, poets, actors, playwrights, artists, journalists tried to transcend the sectarian madness that raged across the city -- a goal that obliged him, peril or no peril, to make the crossing often enough. It was belonging in this realm that resulted in friendship with Nasrallah, Al-Safir 's film critic. Khoury was looking for a theatre critic to cover East Beirut: he made the offer. And writing from "the other side", Pierre maintains, he developed the fundamental constituents of his style, a peculiar combination of vocabulary and imagery that was to define his writing. Upon graduating in 1981 he went to pursue a doctoral degree in Paris; at least subliminally, he says, he was fleeing an increasingly intolerable situation at home. And dispatching articles as he embarked on this "fantastic voyage of discovery", he was eventually enlisted as a staff writer based in Paris -- a position that offered access not only to Europe's cultural dynamos, but also obliquely back to the Arab world. By 1982, in the wake of the withdrawal of both Israeli and PLO forces from Beirut -- the complete collapse of the coalition of progressive political forces -- a significant number of the Beiruti intelligentsia, both Arab and Lebanese, had formed a vibrant community in Paris; and it was via Paris that Pierre began attending festivals and conferences in a range of Arab cities and small towns from Assila to Carthage and from Baghdad to Cairo. As part of the creative process of Al-Yawm Al-Sabe', a Paris-based publication born of the provocative, beautifully idealistic and almost wholly vivacious atmosphere of that community, his talent blossomed. Emboldened by freedom and solidarity -- the imagined Arab world on which the artists, performers and journalists surrounding him relied was a curiously democratic place, full of creativity and hope -- the embryo conceived in the womb of Al-Safir developed; it grew amidst the dizzying cultural richness of Paris, he sang. Pierre's enthusiasm -- his nostalgia? -- turns those early Paris years into idyll. It was not simply the mindset of the editors, he opines, but the stimulation provided by the intellectual universalism of the city. He covered culture, but he also wrote a column, Fawasel (Junctures), that quickly made him notorious. The experience was too good to last, he implies; "it had to end," and his voice is perfectly level. There followed a stretch of professional vagrancy during which he found shelter with Arabies, a French periodical, then Al-Wasat, the weekly magazine published by the media group that produce the London-based daily Al-Hayat, of which he is now the culture editor. It was during this period that his readers found out about the emergence of a new theatre in Tunisia and Egypt, and a cinema in the Maghreb -- beacons of hope that the press had hardly mentioned at all. He eventually repatriated to Lebanon, not without ambivalence -- "a country no longer [his] own". Until 1991, he had refrained from visiting, and by the time he returned to attend the opening of the Theatre de Beyrouth -- known to most Beirutis as Masrah Beirut -- the logic of sectarianism had taken hold, the city was hardly physically recognisable and his extended Parisian "exile" no longer felt like an uprooting. Yet he was there again, for the post-war rebirth, and the start of the saga of reconstruction. It was the fall of 1992, and he had contributed to the drafting of the text of a pan-Arab dance theatre piece that brought together ballerina Nawal Iskandarani, director Fadel Ja'aibi and choreographer Walid Auoni: a Masrah Beirut highlight that presaged the venue's transformation into a pivotal cultural forum and a podium for opposing the neo-liberal assault on social justice, civil liberties and freedom of expression. Traces of the city he had known proved repeatedly evanescent, but as the theatre turned, once again, into the vibrant venue of screenings and exhibitions as well as theatrical productions from all across the Arab world, he spied a new city struggling to stitch itself together, to resurrect a collective memory. *** Now as we talk I'm thinking again of Zawaya, issue 10-11 of which will have just appeared on news-stands across the Arab world by the time this article goes to press. An independently funded "journal of living culture" -- La Culture Vivante, Al-Thaqafa Al-Hayah -- it has preoccupied Pierre since he resettled here in 2001. And he founded it in response to what he felt to be a need, he says -- "Something had to be done" -- as a home for those who are homeless in the contemporary Arabic press: artists, photographers, calligraphers as well as writers who are alienated from the status quo. And it caters to the Arab world as a whole, for Beirut-based as it may be, Zawaya has a staunchly pan-Arab purview -- a fact reflected as much in its readers as its by- lines and themes. Collaboration, critical dialogue, opposition to dogma and the hegemony of globalisation are all guiding principles, derived, as Pierre now explains, from the editor's admiration for the courage and subversion that went into forms of expression that emerged in the first few years after the official cessation of conflict in Beirut. These new voices' fearless experimentation, their insolent disregard for approval from senior authority reminded him of the stimuli that, a little over a decade before, had jolted Tunisian, and then Egyptian theatre into life. He pictured Zawaya as a forum providing "a complementary cultural space where such talents, their vocabularies and experimental forms could speak to each other across Arab borders", because, before too long, what he had heard in Beirut was echoing in Morocco, in Palestine, Egypt and Syria. And he felt Zawaya could accommodate the resulting polyphony. One difficulty written into the pan-Arab outlook is that the efforts required to produce and distribute each (double) issue are superlative, in the light of the scarcity and tenuousness of material resources especially. Yet this very obstacle has proved life affirming, in that it generated a labour of love that has humbled and delighted Pierre. So much time, energy and talent have been volunteered relentlessly, "a peculiar complicity seems to bind everyone involved -- an unspoken pact charged with wit and defiance, yet steadfast and stubborn". It would be no exaggeration to speak of miracles: last May, when issue 8-9 appeared, Pierre was elated to find out from friends in Ramallah how, occupation and checkpoints and orgiastic violence notwithstanding, Zawaya was widely and prominently displayed throughout the West Bank. In this day and age, with the Arab League teetering at the edge of collapse, the borders separating Arab states inhumanely policed and concepts of Arabness systematically bled dry, it may seem quixotic to invest oneself in a pan-Arab venture. Arab identity is interrogated both within and without, and Arabs are increasingly at a loss to sustain it. In this context Pierre's self definition as "Arab without being nationalistic" is uniquely admirable. "My being in the world, my project," he says gently, "is identical with the Arab world -- and all its contradictions. I come into myself in this struggle and no other, it's a contemporary political struggle that absorbs all of me. I belong to these societies, their failures implicate and drive me. I may have been deeply marked by the Lebanese experience, but I am not Lebanese. I feel an equally powerful affinity with Tunis, with Cairo or Palestine. I am an Arab, first and foremost. And on the pages of Zawaya I've found a home, but more importantly I've found a community of Arabs, contributors and readers, with whom to share it. Together we're building a shelter under the worst possible conditions -- chauvinism, violence, injustice. In a way Zawaya is a fiction, a folly, an impossible adventure into which to cast our loneliness, our alienation, our estranged wujdan." The choice of title is interesting in itself. Zawaya literally means "corners"; and in the journalistic jargon of the Levant, it also refers to "columns". "The word evokes the marginal," Pierre says, "the almost unseen, the not quite heard -- all that's relegated to a corner, away from attention. It brings to mind those texts" -- like Pierre's own -- "that editors decide to place in the corner of a page, because the status quo deems them unworthy of more attention. It also has a vernacular ring to it," he went on, "in contrast to the pedantic, self-aggrandising titles of art and cultural journals. It refers to the zawaya in which Sufis traditionally contemplate, too, so common throughout the region. And," he says simply by way of conclusion, "I'm fond of the phonetic musicality if the word." Each issue is conceived organically, through the interaction of that geographically dispersed community. "I didn't want to impose guidelines that would be too rigid," Pierre explains. "I simply consult with my friends, over the phone, by e-mail and on my frequent visits to Arab countries. At times we find ourselves overwhelmed by the force of the moment, so for example when we felt the war on Iraq to be imminent, we felt compelled to dedicate the upcoming issue to all of those questions, contradictions and pains the American assault was inflicting on each of us. In the case of the tragic passing of Mohamed Choukri, Abdel-Rahman Munif or Fadwa Touqan, we simply wanted to claim our grief. On one occasion an exquisite series of photographs of Cairo rooftops by Randa Shaath prompted us to dedicate the whole issue to the theme of urban labyrinths. We find inspiration in our own lived experience, what we are witness to, what intrigues us. In that last issue we felt it was time to shed light on cultural practises in the Gulf countries -- and so we did. However what I've found to be especially compelling are those contributors who come to Zawaya on their own, poets, writers and artists who simply find their way to us..." So be it, I'm thinking as I take another look around me: finding our way to each other, as Arabs, as agents of the creative process, as social and cultural as well as political dissidents. It may be anachronistic, fantastical and obsessive, to be seeking out a quiet corner after all that's been said and done, against the odds, and so terribly and persistently, looking through the corners of our ravaged house. But they, those almost inavowable parts of us, provide the only route we have to each other -- and to ourselves. Sometimes the corners hold the best kept secrets, so perhaps it's not as mad as it seems -- to stick with the zawaya of our lives.
