A festival unto itself

By Youssef Rakha
Ten hours of culture a day is evidently more than the average book fair goer can withstand. In a random sample of ten people standing at different times of the day in and around the time-honoured tent -- looking slicker than ever this year, it is labelled Cultural Café 2001 -- all agreed that two hours of what was generally referred to as "poetry and speeches", the latter part of which comprise most Cultural Café fare, are the maximum they might undertake on any given visit to the fair grounds; and they need not be spent in the same venue, either. Young people in particular stressed the lack of appeal of the literary criticism seminars. Many pointed out that speakers not only assume familiarity with the book under discussion and even the author of that book -- an unwarranted assumption in most cases -- but seem to confuse the audience by using academic and literary jargon. Yet however stilted and uninspiring they might appear to be, these discussions of recently published books remain a reliable yardstick by which to tease out the progress of contemporary fiction and non-fiction.
Many of the books discussed in the Cultural Café in the last two weeks are important by virtue of being either winners of Book Fair awards or Ministry of Culture publications. Yet they were presented mostly as individual literary entities, separate from their milieu. Had the book discussions been better coordinated with the 12-2pm seminar -- which kick-started each day with titles ranging from Artists and Martyrs to The Crisis of Caricature and Women in Literature -- perhaps the latter would have helped place the books discussed in a broader and more relevant context than that of literary criticism alone. The afternoon seminars, at any rate, were perceived by most as less specialised and more accessible. Be that as it may, a better organised display or more informed staff in the Family Library Tent -- a newly instituted venue located steps away from the Cultural Café and showcasing one of the Ministry of Culture's more remarkable mass publishing schemes, in which some books under discussion and many related volumes appeared in the last few years -- might have encouraged potential attendees to pick up a few Family Library volumes pertinent in some way to one or more of the book discussions and at least leaf through them before walking into the neighbouring tent.
A quick flick through the Cultural Café programme reveals the occasional peculiarity: "greater entities here and now," for example, are not explained any further. Fiction discussions are few and, unlike last year's, offer a scarcity of well-established names: Ashgar Qalila Inda Al-Munhana (A Few Trees by the Slope), a novel by Ne'mat El-Beheiri, is almost the only highlight, even if some of the names on offer (Sanaa Seleiha, Sahar Tawfiq) remain recognisable. Non-fiction is far more extensive, reflecting a spectrum of politicised to apolitical cultural concerns, from Human Rights in Islamic Culture to Translation Initiatives in Egypt. Of all the topics under discussion, women's issues, particularly in the context of literature, seem to be the most prominent by far. An interesting and much debated modulation of contemporary culture, "women's writing" is far from being an unambiguous term; in fact it embraces feminist, experimental and conventional outlooks alike. Well-known woman writers like Nawal El-Sa'dawi, Hoda Wasfi, Salwa Bakr, Fawziya Mahran, Fathiya El-Assal and Mona Ragab (author of Al-Nisaa Qadimoun, "The Women Are Coming", another book under discussion) presided over a number of seminars focusing on the woman writer, her life, work and mission.
For example Nawal Mustafa's recent biography of Palestinian writer May Ziyada, May Ziyada Ostourat Al-Hobb wal Nubough (May Ziyada: Legend of Love and Genius, the recipient of a Book Fair Award for the year 2000) was the focus of a discussion to which Mahran and Ragab contributed. Concentrating on what they referred to as "the tragedy of a creator", speakers prodded various aspects of the writer's life -- her upbringing in Lebanon, her immigration to Egypt and the beginning of her career as a published writer in both France and the Arab world, her long-standing and intense pen friendship with Jibran Khalil Jibran, author of The Prophet, her failure to get married and her famous "literary salon". Yet it was the writer's subsequent breakdown and her consequent institutionalisation -- in her book Mustafa argues that May's alleged madness was in fact merely a conspiracy on the part of her family to gain control of her possessions and prevent her from pursuing her liberated literary life -- that attracted the most attention. After what seemed like hours of give and take, alas, the discussion reduced to Mahran and the author explaining to the audience how the lack of a husband and a conventionally fulfilling life induced a psychological imbalance in the author that resulted in her breakdown: hardly a feminist point to make in this context.
In a discussion of Aisha Abul-Nour's Al-Imdaa Salma (Signed, Salma), critic Salah Fadl spoke repetitively of the author's subtlety and her "literary skill". The critic explained how three essential characteristics had kept Abul-Nour's early work, read years ago, fresh in his mind: the "thoroughly modern" boldness with which Abul-Nour tackles her subjects, her successful use of the first person (an occasion for expanding on the difference between the author and the narrator, a point of contention when it comes to confessional narratives by women) and how she manages to uncover the deepest and darkest recesses of the female psyche without recourse to shock tactics or "violence of expression". The latter comment led to an extended digression in which Fadl spoke out against "those who are ignorant of the craftiness of writing and literary sensitivity" even as he insisted that no form of authority should be imposed on literature, "for that would mean the death of literature". Praising Abul-Nour's subtlety -- how "the female entity cannot be reduced to a mere body" in her work -- the critic then advanced a detailed analysis of the novel, drawing many a positive conclusion.
The Cultural Café is most popular during the late-evening session, when the lecture-room-style podium is replaced by a small video screen showing mostly the course work projects of Cinema Institute students in the third and final year of their studies. Young, relatively accomplished directors contributed a documentary and a short film each, whereas the work of four or more Cinema Institute students was lumped together in the same sitting. Young directors featured included Hala Galal (whose double bill comprised a documentary on novelist Bahaa Taher filmed in Switzerland, and a short film based on one of his short stories, also set in Switzerland), Hala Khalil, Housam Ali and Islam El-Azzazi (who contributed only a short documentary on the Fayoum portraits). Other, perhaps more notable highlights included the screening of two films by veteran documentary filmmaker Atiyat El-Abnoudi, Cairo 1000-Cairo 2000 and Narrator, as well as that of set designer and documentary filmmaker Salah Mari's record of the Aswan Sculpture Symposium. All in all the visual component seemed to facilitate contact with the young, who would comment loudly on the film while its events unfolded before them. Finally, a cultural activity seemed to grip the less culturally aware: moments of silence testified to absorption and lively applause indicated approval as droves of movie-lovers kept slipping into the tent all through the evening.
"Graduation films", as they are known, are complex, laboured affairs of incredibly short duration in which a simple idea is elaborated within the means available to the budding director who conceived it, which can vary markedly from one case to the next. An evening of graduation films at the Cultural Café this year was usually preceded by a broadcast of the national solidarity song, Al-Hulm Al-Arabi (The Arab Dream), which involves rare footage of the Palestinian plight, the Lebanese Civil War and other regional predicaments, bringing together a vast number of popular singers from all over the Arab World. This worked well as a method of luring Cairo Book Fair's young and uneducated into the tent. Some audience members lit cigarettes; and the murmur of nonchalant conversation did not cease when the screen went blank and the first Cinema Institute offering reared an unaccustomed head on all present, beginning the nightly run of four or more unrelated films shown without interruption.
Hanna Atalla's The Shadows of Time utilised excellent camera work and engaging ethnic music to depict the spectacle of an old man's death in the Egyptian countryside. The man appears to be dead but his wife refuses to believe it, and the stories people tell about him suggest that she might be right. Dialogue is unrealistically stylised, revealing the film's philosophical statements on life, death, goodness and, inappropriately, patriotism. In Haitham El-Tamimi's Conversation about Silence, by contrast, a livelier, though perhaps less polished camera realistically captures the life of a lower middle class urban family with an emphasis on the lack of communication among its members. Except for the occasional interjection (female attempts to start a conversation are repeatedly shushed by a male character), not a word of dialogue is brought to bear on El-Tamimi's despairingly visual statement of frustration. Osama Abul-Atta's film version of a short story by the veteran writer Soliman El-Fayyad, The Cocoon, was bold and provocative. Set in an Azharite institution in Zaqaziq during the British occupation, it tells humorously of the sexual frustrations of a group of students, maintaining a sense of suspense that lasts well into the final climactic moment, when the students are forced to confront the object of their frustration embodied in a young prostitute that one of them manages to smuggle into the dorm room. Kamla Abu-Zikri's The Six o'clock Train, finally, is the poignant story of a father awaiting the return of his son at a provincial train station. As the action progresses, it transpires that the son actually died years ago in the 1967 War. The father, who refuses to believe it, has been regularly coming to the station to await his return for years.
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