See no evil, hear no evil

Palestine, censorship and Palestine: Youssef Rakha offers his impressions of the cultural year
2000 ended on an ironic note when Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni appeared on television to bless the official banning of three General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (GOCP) publications. Published in the Aswat Adabiya (Literary Voices) series, the three novels in question had been identified as pornographic by the extremist contingent -- the same people who had caused the more wide- ranging furore surrounding the first Egyptian, GOCP edition of Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar's Banquet for Seaweed, though on that occasion the Ministry adopted a more sympathetic attitude towards literary endeavours. This time, however, Ali Abu Shadi, the head of GOCP, was immediately dismissed; and the heads of the various GOCP book series, including novelist Gamal El-Ghitani and translator Talaat El-Shayeb, resigned in protest. A liberal and open-minded artist, Hosni seemed to be turning on his own people when he claimed that he would be too embarrassed to give one of these novels to his wife to read -- a far- fetched assertion at best. More generally, the episode constituted a demonstration of how the establishment's willingness to appease the extremist contingent can result in arbitrary measures. And the problematic hypothesis that it is the government's responsibility to protect the moral sensibilities of "the people" thereby won out in the end.
One consequence of the banning was that the 33rd Cairo International Book Fair opened in January in an atmosphere of resentment. News of a boycott to be staged by the literary-intellectual contingent, however, never materialised; although many of the Fair's regulars were noticeably absent from the Culture Cafe and surrounds. Samir Sarhan, the head of the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) denied any news of a boycott, seconding the Minister's decision. Yet Akhbar Al- Adab, the mouthpiece of the latter contingent, not only affirmed the news but celebrated the boycott as an event of some magnitude. Nothing all that significant was happening in the cultural arena, after all. Thus the Palestinian Intifada, now in its second year, would continue to overwhelm cultural discourse through the summer -- often in the guise of intellectualised outrage at the brutal aggression of Sharon. Indeed it was Palestine that dominated the activities of the Fair, with novelist Yehya Yakhluf, undersecretary of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, identifying the Intifada as the only "message, the message of Palestinian reality, of freedom and of peace." Appearances by the vernacular poet Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi and the poet laureate of the Palestinian resistance Mahmoud Darwish further testified to this tendency: reading his elegy for the Palestinian cartoonist Nagui El-Ali, assassinated years before in London, El- Abnoudi provided a highly emotional and affirmative antidote to the daily televised news.
Only minor events took place through winter. A remarkable exhibition of prints by Leonardo da Vinci at the Mahmoud Khalil Museum preceded the opening of the second round of the Nitaq Festival downtown. A thoroughly contemporary, "multi-media" event involving theatre performances and seminars as well as installations, the latter coincided with the Ministry of Culture's International Cairo Biennale at the Centre of Arts and the British Council London Nomad exhibition, making of Cairo, at least for a while, a veritable plastic-arts fiesta. In the meantime, the logistic and corporate revolution posited by EFG Hermes, among other companies, raged on. More and more negatives constituting "the nation's cinematic heritage" were bought, the Sawt Al-Fann music company taken over and Internet rights to the work of Umm Kulthoum and Naguib Mahfouz acquired. And while some saw the bright side of the process, welcoming corporate involvement in the cultural arena, nationally oriented intellectuals, grounded in the tradition of socialist engagement, raged against the commodification of culture inherent in the broad- based "sale of our national heritage." At the same time, theatrical responses to the Intifada abounded, with a number of revivals of dramatic classics -- the Palestinian playwright Mu'in Bessisu's Che Guevara, the Moroccan dramatist Abdel-Karim Barchid's The Mountebank, the Syrian Mohamed El-Maghout's The Clown and the Egyptian Bahig Ismail's The Gypsy, among many others -- gracing performance spaces across Cairo and beyond. In April, a Pro Helevtia- organised "encounter" between Swiss poet Raphael Urweider and his Egyptian counterpart, Girgis Shoukri set the tone for many such small-scale events: performances, lectures and seminars.
May brought the Intifada back to the forefront of the cultural arena, with playwright Ali Salem, the literary world's most outspoken champion of normalisation with Israel, expelled from the Writers' Union, newly formed under the direction of Farouk Khourshid following its 2000 crisis. Taking place after the trial of sociologist Saadeddin Ibrahim of the Ibn Khaldoun Centre, which resulted in a seven year prison sentence, however, a perfectly justified response to Salem's most recent "normalising activities" -- the playwright had ludicrously called for a halt to the Intifada -- was misconstrued in the international press as a blow to human rights. Although Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz expressed sympathy for Salem, affirming his right to a hearing at the Union, Akhbar Al-Adab could afford to be thoroughly dismissive of his "case"; along similar lines, indeed, El-Ghitani, its editor, had employed the newspaper as a vehicle for his violent campaign against Ibrahim, seconding the prosecutor's opinion of the sociologist's "subversive" role in Egyptian politics and society. Although a perfectly legal decision -- a "no normalisation" policy had been passed by the general assembly every year since 1995, spokespeople for the Union pointed out -- the catalyst for Salem's expulsion, which had after all been postponed for six years, was undoubtedly his recently publicised stance on the Intifada. And it is the Intifada that set the tone for the next two months of cultural debate, too, conditioning not only intellectuals' behaviour but how fellow intellectuals responded to it.
Through June and July, another Intifada-related issue dominated the culture scene: should contemporary Arabic novels be translated into Hebrew? What prompted the debate was an initiative undertaken by a Paris-residing Israeli, Yael Lerar, a friend of Moroccan critic Mohamed Berrada and a pro-Palestinian activist. By founding a publishing house specialising in contemporary Arabic literature in Hebrew translation, Andalus, Lerar hoped to promote understanding across difference. Contemporary Arabic novels in Hebrew, she maintained, could contribute to providing Israelis with an "opening to understand an Arab perspective." The intention, she would subsequently explain, was for all the proceeds from the sale of Andalus publications to be donated to Palestinians fighting the occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. When Berrada began to contact Egyptian novelists about securing their permission to translate and publish their works, however, many refused, their ideologically sensitive nostrils detecting a whiff of normalisation. Akhbar Al-Adab typically honed in on these suspicions, declaring Andalus a fraudulent trick and launching yet another campaign aimed specifically at the project of translating Arabic literature into Hebrew, a project that had admittedly stumbled into ideological and moral difficulties in the past. Berrada wrote an open letter to the newspaper in which he explained the purpose of the project and elucidated Larer's stance on the Intifada. And though Edward Said, the authoritative scholar of Orientalism and the voice of Palestinian conscience in the West, declared the campaign against Andalus "a sorry spetcacle," many commentators, including high- ranking literati like Mahmoud Amin El-Alim, persisted in their censure of Andalus.
In June, the acting icon Soad Hosni's tragic suicide in London overwhelmed the cultural press, putting an end to a significant debate that had barely begun. In declaring the prose poem -- the defining genre of the work of the Generation of the Nineties -- an empty and futile endeavour, the well-known poet and literary authority Ahmed Abdel-Mo'ti Hegazi prompted not a few scathing critiques of his Al-Ahram column, triggering off a weeks-long debate which, even though it focused on the viability of prose as a medium for poetic expression in Arabic at the present time, incorporated a wide variety of issues. Hegazi, once an innovator and the victim of classically-minded censure, was likened to the extremist contingent in that he insisted that, in order for writing to qualify as poetry, it must abide by the canonical rules of rhyme and rhythm. In defining the viability of a practice by whether or not it abides by predetermined rules, Hegazi was thought to be making the same kind of repressive argument as religious zealots: the statement "you are not a poet unless you employ rhyme and rhythm" being a reflection of the statement "you are not a Muslim unless you subscribe to such and such precepts." At the height of the grief for Soad Hosni, however, the prose-poem debate quickly died out; and Hegazi, who has yet to adequately defend his views on the topic, seemed to emerge out of the ruckus unscathed. By the end of July filmmaker Mohamed Khan's Ayyam Al-Sadat (Days of Sadat), a large- scale production starring Ahmed Zaki as the late president, had shifted the emphasis away from literary debate and back towards the visual -- although a novel by filmmaker Ra'fat El-Mihi, Hurghada: Sihr Al-Ishq (Hurghada: Love's Magic), published by the Paris-based Darwish press, was the target of yet another censorial campaign. In the guise of Zaki, Sadat lived on.
The summer ended with 500 Palestinian intellectuals staging a sit-in in protest against Sharon's brutality outside the UNESCO headquarters in Ramallah. It was in the culture scene's response to the 11 September attacks, however, that the Palestinian cause -- a necessary adjunct to the woes of the disinherited and the dispossessed the world over -- was brought into focus most forcibly in cultural discourse. Focusing on the New World Order as the framework within which the attacks occurred, Arab intellectuals discussed issues of injustice and militancy, explaining the spread of violence as a decline in the principles of morality. While acknowledging that the murder of thousands of innocent civilians could not be sensibly condoned, critic Gaber Asfour, in common with many other commentators, declared, "Can we blame the dead man if he scratches the cheek of his murderer? Terrorism is ugly, it is true, and the souls of innocent victims are dear, no doubt. But before blaming the victim," Asfour concluded provocatively, "we should prevent his oppressor." Few other things happened in the meantime. Filmmaker Mohamed El-Qalyoubi was inopportunely dismissed from his post as the head of the National Centre for Cinema, to be replaced by Abu Shadi, who was reportedly thus recompensed for the loss of his job at GOCP, the cycle of promotions and demotions, resignations and dismissals in the Ministry coming full circle. Yet El-Qalyoubi embraced the decision with joy, he said: "I was relieved on realising I would have more time to work as a scholar and a director." The revival of the Ismailia Documentary Film Festival shortly afterwards supplied a peaceful antidote to the horror of 11 September.
Notwithstanding "Days of Sadat" and the famed auteur Youssef Chahine's latest film, Sukkout Hansawwar (Silence, We're Shooting) -- Chahine's first collaboration with the Tunisian singer Latifa, a story of melancholy love -- the cinematic figure of the year should surely be Dawoud Abdel-Sayed, whose Ard Al-Khawf -- a 2000 take on the social transformations besetting Egypt in the 1960s, also starring Zaki -- was nominated for the Oscars foreign film award at the start of 2001. Towards the end of the year Abdel-Sayed made a remarkable come-back with his Muwaten wa Mukhber wa Harami (Citizen, Detective, Thief), the first film in which the urban folk singing phenomenon Shaaban Abdel-Rehim made an appearance on screen. A complex, picaresque epic tackling the theme of corruption, "Citizen, Detective, Thief," though perfectly accomplished in its own right, has been accused of constituting a promotional vehicle for Shaaban, whose inadequate skill as an actor is made up for by long stretches of singing, especially towards the end. Abdel-Sayed has vehemently denied the charge, however, describing Shaaban's appearance as a simple casting choice. Yet it seems wryly appropriate that the year, having begun with a censorial crisis, should end with the pedestrian and thoroughly frivolous sound of Shaaban.
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