By Mona Anis Many of the Arab friends and colleagues I met last week at the Frankfurt International Book Fair in Germany seemed to be upset by the proliferation of Orientalist images -- camels, oriental rugs and Arabic calligraphy as a decorative motif -- promoting this year's Arab participation as the fair's guest of honour. "It was reductionist, stereotypical and outright offensive," proffered a Lebanese female friend who had read for her Ph.D. some 30 years before at the Sorbonne in Paris. As if in response to this fury -- though I am not sure how and in what manner it had been communicated to Germans -- a writer in the magazine Der Spiegel snapped back: "before you start talking, look at the folkloric way you have chosen to represent yourselves". And he was right. In the absence of a focal point for the Arab presentation -- speeches about tolerance, peace and cooperation notwithstanding -- the Arab organisers, collectively as well as individually, had slipped unwittingly into some of the most hackneyed clichés. That one had hoped their Frankfurt presentation would work to dispel. Suffice it to mention that the opening sentence of Amr Moussa's speech at the Fair's inaugural ceremony was, "The Orient comes to you today as a guest," with the notorious "East is East and West is West," following hot on its heels. Having begun on such a note, Moussa's attempt to link Kipling's line to an imperialist past was ineffectual, especially as he claimed that "negative aspects" of the imperialist era had now been "consigned to history" -- an astonishing statement in the light of what is taking place today in Palestine and Iraq. True, Moussa tried to salvage something at the end by appending a few sentences on Iraq and Palestine to an already distributed text, but this was done at the last minute and in response to a powerful political speech by the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, calling upon Arabs to get their act together and rid themselves of violence and fanaticism. And here in my opinion lies one of the biggest blunders of the Arab presentation at Frankfurt, for rather than placing Iraq and Palestine at the centre of it, the Arab League and its Secretary-General tried to rise above the two most burning questions in the Arab and international arenas. Pushing them underneath the Oriental rug, Moussa talked about Kipling, Goethe, the Arabian Nights and "The Islamic Orient and the Christian Occident believing in one and the same God, who is without equal." The failure of most Arab countries to rise to the occasion was perhaps a foregone conclusion in the light of the failure of the League of Arab Nations -- the body entrusted with organising the event -- to formulate a pertinent vision to rally the Arabs. Thus, individual countries were left to fend for themselves in a pretty hit-or-miss fashion, misses far outnumbering hits. A number of Arab countries brought along dancing troupes, a few of them accomplished -- like the Egyptian Modern Dance and the Lebanese Karakallah troupes, the first dancing Scheherazade on the opening night -- but most quite modest, some even embarrassing. As for country pavilions, some of them looked like bazaars. In one, there were Arab women in traditional dress sitting on the floor emulating time-worn rituals in ethnographic fashion; in another, Arab women, again in traditional dress, were busy initiating interested western women in the art of henna decoration; in a third, a man was busy weaving a fishing net. Outside the two tents designated for the Arab exhibitions and discussion panels at the fair, a beautiful Arabian horse had been brought in for all to marvel at -- and it did actually draw quite a large audience, "larger than that attending the literary readings," a cynical friend remarked. Why then were we angry when the supplement of the German newspaper Die Zeit on the fair appeared with an oriental rug on its front cover and a caravan of camels on the back? One hundred and thirty seven years after Egypt's Khedive, Ismail Pasha, visited the Exposition universelle in Paris, where he was reported to have sat inside an imitation oriental palace, treating visitors to the fair to mediaeval hospitality, the Arabs were at it again last week, or so it seemed to me, and I was not alone in that feeling. The horse in particular reminded me and many of the Arabs I talked to of accounts of the 1889 Paris World Exhibition, analysed brilliantly by Timothy Mitchell in the opening chapter of his book Colonising Egypt. Mitchell wrote, "The Egyptian exhibit had also been made carefully chaotic... The way was crowded with shops and stalls, where Frenchmen dressed as Orientals sold perfumes, pastries and tarbushes. To complete the effect of the bazaar, the French organisers had imported from Cairo fifty Egyptian donkeys, together with their drivers and the requisite number of grooms, farriers, and saddle makers. The donkeys gave rides for the price of one franc up and down the street, resulting in a clamour and confusion so life-like, the director of the exhibition was obliged to issue an order restricting the donkeys to a certain number at each hour of the day." Luckily, the horse was brought along to the Frankfurt Fair for only a couple of hours and only on one day. The difference, though, between today's Frankfurt Fair and the 1889 Paris Fair is that this time the organisers were Arab, not European, and it was the Arabs who brought along the horse and the rest of the oriental stuff. It was the Arabs, too, who turned themselves into "an object on exhibit" rather than active participants. Before we blame the Germans for this we should blame ourselves, and those of us who are myopic enough not to see that imperialism has yet to be consigned to history.
