Weblog of a Syrian Diplomat in America

Seven Days in the World of Art

Despite the time, effort and resources I have invested throughout the years attempting to correlate the art scene in Syria with the global trends of the world art market, I have not yet succeeded in finding a convincing answer to the following fundamental question: why have the aesthetics in our region (the so called Middle East) remained firmly rooted in what may be considered a universal human pathos (pleasing, soothing, intoxicating, disturbing or shocking as they may be), while those of the West have moved to the realm of the idiosyncratic and singular? Why are legendary sums of money being paid right now in the West for art that I might never consider purchasing (unless, of course, for the sake of reselling and making a small fortune)?

Being as curious as I am, I couldn’t simply shrug off phenomena like Andy Warhol or Damien Hirst contending that the unimaginably rich have their own sets of standards for spending their money that go far beyond my comprehension. I humbly believe that there might be something I am missing. Hence, I really need to work harder on ‘educating’ myself and exploring new territories that I have not yet erred into.

This is why I earnestly and diligently try to read every book I find about the contemporary art market. Collecting Contemporary by Adam Lindemann is one good example, and Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton is another example.

 

     

The book is a joy to read. It is laden with information and insight. It is even gossipy and funny.

Seven Days attempts to tell the story of the contemporary world art scene from seven vantage points: the artist at his studio, the arts critic, the arts magazine, the world of arts competitions and prizes, the international arts fairs, the Venice Biennale, and the auction houses.

On doing this, Thornton has succeeded in taking her readers in a fascinating and breathtaking tour of the world of art and among the stakeholders of this world. From it, I learned a lot about what is going on. These seven days, more accurately, seven chapters, included hundreds of snapshots and vignettes – all illuminating and entertaining- that give the reader a true sense of being there and witnessing things.

However, the book, as compelling a read as it is, fails to address the fundamental questions of how great art is defined in today’s world, and what distinguishes a great artist from a successful one. It is more a work of a social anthropologist (the society being restricted in this case to the world of art) documenting a social strata than that of a serious art writer providing us with an erudite analysis of the driving forces of the contemporary world art scene.

Notwithstanding my unanswered questions, I still enjoyed reading the book.

P.S. If readers of my blog cannot empathize with my discombobulation vis-à-vis Warhol and Hirst, here is an example of a Hirs’t work of art that was rumored to be sold for 85 million US dollars.

 

    

 

    (For the Love of God by Damien Hirst)
 

If this does not suffice to shock you, then read what the art critic of the British Daily Telegraph, Richard Dorment, wrote (and forgive the racist connotations about Arabs, Africans and South Americans):

"If anyone but Hirst had made this curious object, we would be struck by its vulgarity. It looks like the kind of thing Asprey or Harrods might sell to credulous visitors from the oil states with unlimited amounts of money to spend, little taste, and no knowledge of art. I can imagine it gracing the drawing room of some African dictator or Colombian drug baron. But not just anyone made it - Hirst did. Knowing this, we look at it in a different way and realise that in the most brutal, direct way possible, For the Love of God questions something about the morality of art and money."

With this comment, I rest my case.

The Rest is Noise

I have just finished reading for the second time Alex Ross’s very important book on the music of the twentieth century. Before I proceed into discussing this book, I need to qualify my previous statement: whereas I read the whole book in the first round, I only re-read selected chapters in the second round, so a more accurate statement would be that I have read this book one and a half times(!).

The book has both peaks and weaknesses. It is at its best when it puts the major musical developments of the twentieth century in their historic, political, literary and artistic context. It is rather difficult and a bit boring when it delves into technical analysis of some major works by various composers, and it becomes quite disorienting when the whole discourse focuses on the style, language, technique and idiom of a given composer, say, Pierre Boulez, without any comment whatsoever on the aesthetic aspects of his music, the impact it has created on the public, the profoundness of his musical expression, and the universality of his art. After all this is what makes a composer relevant: did he write music that has either brought more beauty (in the broadest possible interpretation of the word beauty), or affected our visceral appreciation of this most elusive human form of expression.

 

 

Yet the book is very informative, and from time to time quite entertaining, abundant with trivia that adds icing on the cake. I believe that trivia forms a positive contribution to serious books discussing high-brow cultural issues: it put a human, sometimes comic, seldom tragic face on those demi-gods that have fascinated humanity with their outbursts of emotions, wit, joys, sorrows, or stringent logical and abstract polemics.

I enjoyed a lot reading the stories about Mahler and Strauss. I laughed at the stories of how scornful Schoenberg was towards the vulgarity of writing music that actually pleases the public. I wondered how a giant like Stravinsky would acquiesce to a petit dictator like Boulez, I was repulsed by the fanaticism of the so called avant-guard composers who would loath and foul-mouth any one who would dare to write a hint of tonal music, and I sympathized with the enormous difficulties Shostakovich and Prokofiev had to face when dealing with an art-patron whose name was Stalin, or even to the humiliation Strauss suffered by Hitler and Gobbles.

The book did not only entertain and inform me, but also brought me back to some almost forgotten or neglected masterpieces such as Shoenberg’s Guerre Lieder and Britten’s Peter Grimes. At one point, reading this book created an irresistible urge to quit anything else and rush to listen to Lutoslawski’s third symphony after at least three years of total oblivion. Finally, it particularly taught me a lot about American composers that I almost knew nothing about: Ives, Copland, Carter, Cage, and Reich.

Nevertheless, one big question still lingers; it is almost a mystery for me: Ross had succeeded in putting me off towards the extreme schools of experimental atonal works of Cage, Stockhausen and company. Did he intend to do so? If that was the case, then why write pages after pages analyzing their music and explaining it? There is an ambivalence in Ross’s perspective on these composers, he never reveals to us if he has included them and allocated a large part of his book to explaining what they have done out of a desire to be ‘objective’ and to present to the reader with all schools of music composition in the twentieth century regardless of their relevance, or that he personally admires their creativity and enjoys listening to the ‘noise’ they have produced.

On Assassination

Last month I visited Seattle for a couple of talks at the Washington University and the Seattle Council on World Affairs.

While there, a gentleman named Dr. James Sanchez introduced himself and presented to me a book written by Cyrus Sulzberger which was published in 1969. He wanted me to read what Sulzberger wrote about the assassination of  Count Bernadotte the United Nations Security Council envoy to the Middle East.

Folke Bernadotte (1895-1948) was a member of the House of Bernadotte, the current royal dynasty of the Kingdom of Sweden, as well as that of Norway between 1818 and 1905. He was a diplomat noted for his negotiations of the release of about 15,000 prisoners from German concentration camps during World War II including 11,000 Jews. After the war, Bernadotte was unanimously chosen by the victorious powers to be the UN mediator in the Arab Israeli conflict of 1947-1948. He was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948 by members of underground Zionist groups while pursuing his official duties.

Count Bernadotte

Cyrus L. Sulzberger worked as a journalist in the newspaper owned by his family The New York Times. His mother was the sole descendent of Adolph Ochs the owner of the NY Times and a Jewish community pillar. Cyrus’s paternal grandfather was Chairman of the American Zionist Federation.

While the fact that Stern and Irgon, the Zionist extremist terrorist groups, have assassinated countless foreign diplomats and Arab civilians is common knowledge to anyone who has read the history of Israel - What I found most astounding was that Cyrus Sulzberger actually knew about the planned assassination of Count Bernadotte prior to it taking place. His brother-in-law Alexis was working at the time for Count Bernadotte, and instead of warning the UN envoy about the eminent danger on his life, he did something extraordinary; I will let him tell the story in his own words, and leave the final judgment to the reader:

“ Tel Aviv, July 24, 1948 A most extraordinary thing happened today. I was typing in our room and Alexis (who is a very late sleeper) was still in bed with the sheet wrapped around his head to keep out the light. A knock at the door and a message was handed to me: a name I didn’t recognize. Downstairs were two handsome, tall young fellows in khaki shorts and light-colored shirts. They shook hands and suggested we go out for a coffee because they had something to say. It turned out they were both South African Jews who had come here since the war and were not only ardent Zionists but members of the Stern gang. … They discussed the aims of the Sternists and, among other things, horrified me by warning that the organization intended to assassinate Count Bernadotte and other advisers on the UN mission just the way they had murdered Lord Moyne [who was the British state minister to the Middle East until 1944 when he was murdered by Stern] because it was necessary to frustrate the UN effort to confine Israel within artificially constricted borders. At first I couldn’t believe them. When I was convinced I took them upstairs, awakened Alexis and, as I pulled him up by the hair, said: “This is my brother-in-law. He works for UN and I don’t want him murdered by mistake; he’s not important enough for any deliberate murdering. Remember his face.” Alexis looked bewildered. My visitors nodded amiably and departed. After they left I told Alexis what it was all about.”

A Long Row of Candles, pp.402-403

Lord Moyne

Count Bernadotte was assassinated six weeks later among other UN officials. However, Alexis’s life was spared, I presume. Following this assassinations, the British authorities declared Stern and the Haganah as terrorist organizations, and put a trophy for the capture of two of their wanted leaders: Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.

 

Being Modern in the Middle East

Being Modern in the Middle East by Keith Watenpaugh is certainly not for those looking for an entertaining book to spend some nice time reading. It is a difficult read, but richly informative and intellectually rewarding. Once I completed reading the book I could not resist the temptation to call the author, congratulate him on his magnificent work, and get to know personally this academic who has dedicated a great amount of time and effort to research and inform his readers about my birthplace, the city of Aleppo.

My admiration for the book notwithstanding, I found many of the conclusions Mr. Watenpaugh has reached in this book in need of more serious scrutiny and an in-depth scholarly evaluation. This is something I will further discuss at a later stage.

The book is a masterly study of the Aleppo upper class; yes, the upper class, despite the fact that he considers it a study of the rising middle class of Aleppo – but this is really a minor detail. According to Watenpaugh, a rising middle class in the liberal professions, white collar employees, lawyers, doctors and businessmen had led to the emergence of a civil society in the early twentieth century in Aleppo in which new forms of politics, bodies of thought, and ways of engaging the various authorities (the Ottomans, the Arab Syrian kingdom, and subsequently, the French mandate) were created.

The strengths of this book, and they are many, are revealed when he uses the enormous amount of research and digging into historical resources he has done to reconstruct a vivid picture of life in Aleppo, and what being modern meant in the non-West in the first half of the twentieth century.

“Festive social gatherings...were places in which Aleppo’s doctors, lawyers, office workers, and clerks could congregate and perform their “middle-class-ness” in the eyes of another. These salons – like the more formal organizations and schools – acted as arbiters of tastes and sites wherein the middle class of Aleppo could be modern and convey their middle-class modernity to one another...They provided a place in which to create and maintain interclass networks of power and prestige”.

“Foremost of these [literary salons] was that of Marriana al-Marrash (1849-1919) ... she organized a salon in the home she shared with her husband. Habitués included the leading intellectuals of the city, most notably [Abdul-Rahman] al-Kawakibi...in the mixed evenings get-togethers literary topics were discussed...Chess and card games were played, and complicated poetry competitions took place; wine and ‘araq flowed freely; participants sang, danced, and listened to records played on phonographs” .

Watenpaugh reminds us in his book that the oldest Arabic-type printing press in the Levant was Aleppo’s Maronite Press which started its operations in 1701. He also mentions that al-Kawakibi founded the first independent newspaper in the region , al-Shahba’ in 1877. He believes that what happened in Aleppo was part of a larger process in which the East Mediterranean middle class (I would say upper class) formed clubs, founded newspapers and entered into complex critical-rational discourse with one another and government and revolutionary authorities. “Liberalism in its multiple forms was a recurrent theme of the discourse.”

After Watenpaugh details how the politically active Mutual Aid Society evolved into the Nadi Halab (Aleppo Club) in 1913, he writes: “While the Aleppo Club has survived into the twenty-first century and still hosts lectures, sponsors sports teams, and aids the poor, its chief function as a middle-class social club that self-consciously mirrors styles of European bourgeois sociability; it has no overt political presence in the politics of contemporary Syria. In the 1940s and 1950s it was the site of debutante balls and bridge tournaments, and now it hosts gala wedding receptions, karaoke nights, and cocktail parties”.

Some of the anecdotes told in the book are really fascinating. When US president Wilson decided to send a commission to Syria and Lebanon to gauge local opinion in the region, the French and British objected contending that public opinion did not exist in the region. However, the Syrians were already boiling with nationalistic fervor, and the Syrian National Congress was at its peak. When the American commissioners, Charles Crane and Henry King arrived in the region in 1919, they met with a highly enthusiastic and strongly opinionated population. In Aleppo, the population were rallied behind the ideals of a ‘United Country’ and the “natural boundaries of Syria”, which figured highly in the discourse that greeted the members of the commission. By the time the commission arrived to Aleppo from Hama by train on 17 July 1919, Aleppines had already formed a unified stance. King and Crane met with the mayor of Aleppo, Ihsan al-Jabiri and heard from him that what the people of Aleppo wanted was in complete agreement with the Syrian National Congress. The Americans were surely bemused when they also received a women’s delegation (remember, this is 1919) headed by Shukriyya Jabiri the daughter of Nafi' Pasha Jabiri. When they questioned Shukkriyya, they got the following response:

Question: Are you representatives of the women of Aleppo?

Answer: Yes. [Shukkryyia then presented the chairman with a written statement.]

Question: Are you aware of the activities of the women in Beirut and Damascus?

Answer: Not at all!

Question: Is this something [i.e. the written statement] you all want?

Answer: It is the only thing in our hearts and thus it is our only answer.

Question: Do you have political experience?

Answer: We do not. But our men have been oppressed and they work all the time to liberate the nation and we know this.

Having stated clearly how much I found the book rich and sophisticated, I think that Mr. Watenpaugh has got it wrong on one major finding in his book. In a way or another, he concludes that the actual people of Aleppo did not feel that they were Arabs or Syrians; they genuinely felt that they were Ottomans. According to him, it was the elite and the notables of Aleppo who led the city into the nationalistic movement and the arising Syrian identity. This statement can be easily refuted, and in the extreme, it can be described as controversial. I would say that in the very same period he has discussed, the vast majority of simple Alepines did not speak a single Turkish word, and only regarded their turkish rulers as feared despots. While their sense of belonging to a developed concept of an Arab nation may not be that conscious or sophisticated, Arabism was the only identification they used when describing themselves.

But if you take as an example, his astounding conclusions about Ibrahim Hanano the foremost Aleppo leader who fought against both the Turks and the French, and whose whole personal history is seamlessly interwoven with Syria’s national revival and struggle for independence, one cannot but feel surprised by how far Watenpaugh went in his conclusions. The author actually wants us to believe that Hanano's revolt against the French was not aiming at attaining freedom and independence for Syria, but actually to re-join Syria to the Turkish state. The fact that Hanano also struggled heroically against the Turks prior to the French occupation of Syria did not carry weight with Watenpaugh's analysis.

Despite my misgivings, I still believe the book to be of great significance and an important addition to the study of the socio-political history of Syria in the early decades of the twentieth century. Whether I agree or disagree with some of his conclusions does not mean that I have not found the book to be a remarkable piece of scholarship, and an indispensable read for any student of the evolution of modern Syria.

Summer Reading

My summer vacation always offers me the best opportunity to catch up with my back load of books which I had no time to read during the year. So, in addition to the book I was currently reading, Le Dernier Ange by Robert de Goulaine, I took with me a number of books planning to finish them before I return to America. However, while in Damascus, a visit to the annual book fair at the Assad National Library ended up with purchasing even more books than I can possibly read during two or three vacations to come. This is the syndrome of intellectual greed: deluding yourself to believe that you can really read more books than you practically can ever do. Back to my summer reading; I would say that with the one exception of Le Dernier Ange, all the other books I read were autobiographies of Arab political figures – a political vacation par excellence.

I started with the autobiography of Lutfi al-Haffar, who became the Prime Minister of Syria in 1939 for a short while, and also served as a cabinet minister holding various portfolios. His autobiography further illuminates a glorious phase in the history of modern Syria during the struggle to gain independence from the French mandate. However, the one great achievement by Lutfi al-Haffar that will always be remembered by Damascenes was his life-long dedication to bringing fresh potable water to his beloved city. He almost single-handedly was behind the establishment of the Ain al-Fijeh project. Today, the water of Ain al-Fijeh has become an integral symbol of Damascus, and his life story is a good example of how politicians should limit their lives and deeds to pure politics, but most importantly, should leave behind them a legacy that benefits their nation, and give pride to their descendents. By the way, Lutfi al-Haffar is the father of Salma al-Haffar al-Kuzbari, the renowned writer and literary figure whose reputation has probably exceeded that of her father despite the fact that more people drink today the water he brought than those who read the books she wrote.

Next, I read the deeply moving and equally disturbing memoirs of Juliet al-Meer Sa'adeh, also known as the First Lady-Dean (al-amina al-oula) of the Syrian National Social Party. It is the story of a young nurse of Arab descent from Argentina who fell under the spell of the mega-charismatic Leader (za’im) Anton Sa’adeh, became a member of his party, loved him, married him, suffered with him, and suffered for him. Her ordeal dramatically increased after he was tragically killed. The book as a whole sheds light on the personality and character of some remarkable figures in Syria’s modern history, but it is also an unintentional condemnation of the messy politics that have infected Syria in that critical juncture of her evolution as a state and nation.

The third book I read with great interest and pleasure was the autobiography of Mansur Sultan al-Atrash, the son of the legendary Druze leader Sultan Basha al-Atrash who led the Great Syrian Revolution of 1925. Mansur himself was one of the early Ba’athist leaders in Syria and served as cabinet minister and revolutionary council member several times. His memoirs are rich with details and anecdotes about his childhood and youth in both Jabal al-Arab and Damascus, his student years in France, his membership in the Baáth Party, his struggles against the French and then the Shishakli regime, as well as his relations with the historic founders of the Ba’ath Michele Aflaq and Salah el-Deen al-Bitar. Mansur’s daughter, Reem al-Atrash edited her father’s memoirs with care and love and presented it as an important testament to our generation.

After the excellent Attrash memoirs, I fell on a really bad book. Abdullah Hanna’s history of the beginnings of the communist party in Syria and its historic leaders had some added value from the informative perspective, but as a book, I found it to be incoherent, unorganized, and totally lacking a conceptual approach and a consistent narrative.

Finally I arrive to the captivating memoirs of Muhsen al-Aini, the former Prime Minister of Yemen, and a man of remarkable standing in the modern Arab political scene. Needless to say, I have a very keen interest in Yemen that borders on the infatuation, and I have read all major works written about the making of the modern republican Yemen. However, this is the best book as of yet that I have read coming from a Yemeni writer. Al-Aini’s memoirs did not only shed light on the revolutionary years of Yemen and the early stages of the new-born republic, but they also provide a rare insight on inter-Arab relations, rivalries, and petty enmities. Most importantly, they reveal a lot about the relations between Yemen and the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser. On reading about the troubles that Aini and his colleagues had dealing with the acolytes of Nasser, one is stricken by the similarity of the Syrian and Yemeni experiences vis-à-vis Nasser’s men. It is tragic how such a historic figure like Nasser would be surrounded by men that did everything possible, intentionally or otherwise, to undermine his achievements and tarnish his record.

Since all these books constituted an intense political dose, I found equilibrium by balancing them with a book I was reading in parallel to these memoirs: a novel in French by Robert de Goulaine which took me to a dazzling universe of stylishness, and artistic bohemian living. It is a fascinating book worth reading for its own merits, but I was particularly grateful that it offered me an antidote to the ‘other’ books - alternating between our harsh political realities, and the most exquisite French corporal, natural and culinary delights. The novel tells the story of Vincent, a young man who befriends and becomes totally influenced by an older artist, Alban, he even falls in love with the same woman Alban loves, Solana, and is also attracted to Isabelle, Alban's mistress. Its is a story of how Alban's life spirals down to its tragic end, and the great impact left on Vincent who attempts to pull his own life back together and regain some sort of normalcy. Le Dernier Ange also follows the best Proustian traditions of the French novel, in which style, evocation, description of the habitat and landscape are integral part of the novel and equally important as the plot and characters are.

Atonement

Yesterday, I went to the cinema with Halim and Hayat Barakat. It has been a very long time since I last went to a movie theatre despite Rafif’s and my own love for the cinema. The reason is simple: since Sidra was born we could not bear the notion of leaving her alone with the nanny while we go to enjoy a film.

Now, that Rafif and Sidra are in Damascus while I am alone in Washington, I decided to revive my old habit of going to the movies with Halim and Hayat, so we chose Atonement. And what an experience it was.

I read Atonement, the book, a couple of years ago. Ian McEwan had a splendid subject: that of the tragic consequences of one foolish act at a very green age, and weaved a beautiful plot around it. However, I found the novel to be problematic, alternating between intensity and depth on one hand, and boring descriptive parts on the other.

       

After a powerful and riveting start that spans the first third of the novel, the narrative slacks, and becomes really boring with a detailed description of the life of Londoners – particularly that of hospital nurses during the London blitz of the Second World War.

I couldn’t believe it. Here is a renowned and experienced author with a magnificent theme to work on losing focus and the conceptual organic unity of the work, offering us instead a treatise on the horrors of everyday life in London during the war. However, by the end of the book, McEwan remembers what he initially started with, and takes us back to the story line he had originally thought of, and suddenly our attention is reawakened, and we are back on track.

Forget about one third of the book, and you end up with a beautiful love story with a very deep reflection on the capacity of humans to destroy and inflict pain and suffering. The protagonist of Atonement is a young adolescent, Briony Tallis, with an early flair for writing, and a silly crush on Robbie, a young and dashing son of one of her father’s servants in a manor in the lush England countryside.

Out of nosey curiosity, Briony reads a love letter addressed by Robbie to her sister Cecilia. And to further complicate things, she surprises the two lovers in an explicitly compromised situation. She is shocked and disoriented. Later, when she accidentally happens upon a sexual assault on her slightly older cousin, she falsely accuses Robbie of being the assailant. She does this for many inexplicable reasons, but mostly because she cannot fully grasp the magnitude of what she was doing. The consequences were disastrous for Robbie and Cecelia. But Briony also lives to regret her deed and languish in sorrow for what she did when she was only thirteen years old.

Skipping the boring description of her life as a nurse (was that supposed to be her way of atonement?) the end of the story is equally powerful and totally unexpected.

In the past, I had, more or less, the same experience with books made into films. The film version was never capable of grasping the real spirit and powerful narrative of the book. But this was one single major exception. The film made by Joe Wright succeeded in making us live through the best parts of the book, while condensing those related to the evacuation from Dunkirk and the London Blitz to a reasonable length. Probably, films can always depict the horrors of war in a more concise and efficient way than novels.

In brief, Atonement was a joy to watch: brilliant cinematography and strong suspenseful plot. Every moment of the film was fascinating, and yet it leaves the viewer with a powerful urge to think of the implications of betrayal and atonement. I just loved it.

Birds without Wings

Luis de Bernieres’s Birds Without Wings is definitely one of the finest novels I have read in the last decade. It is a masterpiece. This is a beautifully written epic story about the tragic drama and historical events that stormed Anatolia and Greece by the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is also the story of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his rise to fame and power. But most of all it is the story of ordinary human beings: Turks, Greeks and Armenians who lived and worked together, befriended; fell in love; quarreled; hated and killed each other.

       

The novel alternates between chapters, some are purely fictional, but with a historically accurate and well researched background, and others are purely a concise and objective narration of the life and deeds of Mustafa Kemal and other historical figures from Turkey and Greece.

This story of human suffering is deep and touching. Time and again had authors written on how politics, nationalism, and wars tear societies apart, and how grand and noble notions and beliefs end up inflicting great miseries on the simple and down trodden, however, this novel stands among the very best. I do not hesitate to rank it en par with Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

The telling of grand historical events that shaped modern day Turkey and Greece are not the sole reason for my consideration of this epic novel as a great masterpiece, but also the fascinating lives of its fictional protagonists: more than ten principal characters and almost twenty secondary figures. By telling their interrelated and interwoven stories the reader is not only dazzled by the emotional intensity and human capability for conflicting and even contradicting sentiments and behavior, but is also humbled by the realization of how little understanding of the true nature of things we do actually have, and the false presumptions and prejudices that drive our lives. According to Iskander the potter, Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrows. This sentence of wisdom captures the essence of the novel. All characters hope of fulfilling their dreams, but just like birds without wings, they fail to attain what they are wishing for, and unlike birds, Bernieres’s characers are full of sorrows.

Philothei is a beautiful Greek girl who loves Ibrahim, a Turkish boy. Different religious affiliations notwithstanding, they are engaged and both families bless their planned marriage. But war interferes and harshly shatters their beautiful story.

Rustom Bey is the notable of the village – a man with noble albeit contradictory motivations. He yearns for true love but never attains it. He is shocked by discovering his wife with a lover, murders her lover and drags her to the town square where the mob starts stoning her before the imam interferes and rescues her. She ends up in a brothel, but eventually they find it in their hearts to forgive each other. He looks for love elsewhere - he purchases a Circassian concubine, who is neither Circassian nor a concubine, yet she gives him a partial taste of how it is to have his love requited.

The deep friendship between Karatavuk, the son of Iskander the potter, and Mehmetchik the brother of Philothei on one hand, and that between the Greek orthodox priest and the Muslim imam on the other hand tells a lot about how the inhabitants of this small village had seamlessly transcended all ethnic and religious divides. However, on an ominous level, the novel warns us the it is amazingly easy for communities to forget centuries of harmonious coexistence and spiral down towards sectarian and ethnic animosity. One of the minor characters, the Greek school teacher is presented throughout the novel as a horrible evil fanatic, yet even he is redeemed at a late stage of the novel, thus emphasizing the core concept of this novel: nobody is basically bad or good, we are all humans, and we all have strains of the good and the bad in us.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

When I was first told about this book, my young friend Rana Khouri advised me not to read it, because, as she said, Rafif was pregnant! This made me very curious. I went to the New York Times’ best seller list, to discover that it is about a man who gives away his Down Syndrome newly born baby girl, and tells her mother that she died during labor. Subsequently, his life and that of his loved ones are ruined by this difficult to understand action.

Eventually, I read Kim Edward’s novel. As a work of fiction I liked parts of it, and disliked others. The work starts beautifully and poignantly. It ends in a powerful heart-wrenching narrative. But in the middle it slacks a bit. However, as a document on human behavior, human loss, and human life, I would say that it has left a profound impact on me.

I don’t want to be judgmental and say how horrendous this father’s behavior was. I neither want to be philosophically analytical and say that perceptions and attitudes regarding mentally disabled children have amply changed in the last half-century, hence, what we totally object to today was, by large, accepted behavior in the past. I just want to say that this father has made a hasty decision, which is, to give away his new-born baby, with the best possible intentions in his heart and mind, and lived to suffer its consequences and be haunted by it for the rest of his life.

       

Furthermore, this decision that he took, believing that he was protecting his beloved wife and their son – her brother, from unwarranted grief, has caused immense misery to the very persons he wanted to protect, alienated them from each other, and ruined their lives for a very long time. I should say that the mother’s mourning for her lost child that never ebbed was a major unexpected emotional element which was imperceptible to me - at least prior to reading this novel. The self alienation of the father seemed to me plausible and a natural reaction to the deep guilt he has felt and the everlasting chagrin combined with his inability to disclose to his wife and son what he has done. The only refuge left for him was in trying to freeze whatever memories he had through photographs. This is how he became a memory keeper. It was only after his death that the mother, the son, and the abandoned daughter were reconciled and managed to salvage their lives from the psychological wreckage it has become.

The story begins with a dramatic action: disturbing, distressing, and deeply touching. It ends with the death of the father, after an unfulfilled life and a long profound sorrow. It starts with great emotional intensity, and then engulfs you in slow painful estrangement, resentment, and exasperation. The only sweet element in it is the abandoned daughter herself - cared for by a loving nurse who adopted her and treated her like her own daughter.

One singular, albeit shocking, act by an individual has permanently affected his life and the lives of all those surrounding him. This is not about fatalism. His act was a conscious choice that was based on a strong desire to protect, and stemmed from a troubled childhood. Yet it was his action, and he bore the responsibility for it. Regardless, the book does not present him as a villain deserving our contempt but rather as an unfortunate human being who crumbled under the heavy burden of his erroneous judgment.

The book simply taught me a great human lesson: every child, regardless of how intelligent, brilliant, accomplished, physically disabled or mentally challenged is a blessing that enriches our lives and make us better human beings. A major question that lingered in my mind throughout my journey with the novel was: should he tell his wife the truth about what he did, or should he spare her further distress and agony? Would truth be shattering or would it have the magical healing power that one hopes to find in it?

Labid and Bassam 'Alwani

It is strange how life offers you unexpected rewards when you least expect them. Furthermore, a discovery of a piece of music, a work of art, a book, or a poem, when one is least expecting it to happen, creates a serendipitous effect that multiplies the pleasure factor ten folds.

Twice last week, my routine political activities ended up with a surprise poetical discovery, and twice I was bemused by how life has many strange twists.

Last week, I was visited at my office in the embassy by Professor William Polk, whom I have never known personally before. Professor Polk comes from a prominent American family with a long tradition in politics and the military. Polk is a professor of history and a writer who has authored a large number of books and articles on U.S. foreign policy with special focus on the Middle East. He has co-authored his last book Out of Iraq with former U.S. senator George McGovern.

While we were having a good discussion of politics in the U.S., he casually mentioned that more than thirty years ago he had published a translation of Labid’s poetry. I expressed my curiosity about the book before resuming our political discussion. Days later, I received from Professor Polk a magnificent present: a visually stunning book of poetry: The Golden Ode.

      

This extra ordinary volume provides a translation of one of the greatest pre-Islamic Arabic poems (known as muallaqua – or hanged poem) together with photographs of a number of striking desert scenes depicting some of the sights and suggesting some of the feelings and concerns of the ancient nomadic poet, Labid Ibn Rabiah.

Each page of the volume contains one verse by Labid written in splendid golden calligraphic script with a literal English translation, accompanied by a text commenting on the line of poetry, illuminating it, and elaborating on its inner meaning. Next to each line of poetry is a photograph taken during a camel safari, which led Professor Polk and his photographer-companion through the desert of Arabia where Labid lived, in an attempt to capture the mood presented in each verse.

      

Thanks to Professor Polk, I found myself re-reading and struggling anew with the extremely difficult language of Labid, who lived around 600 A.D. but the pleasure I obtained from this rediscovery of one of the golden muallquat was unsurpassed.

A week later, I gave a speech at the World Affairs Council at the National Press Club in Washington. After the remarks and the Q&A session that totally focused on the situation in the Middle East, a young lady approached me, handed me over a large envelop and asked my politely to have a look at her ‘research work’ whenever my time permits.

While driven back home by the end of the evening, I immediately engaged myself in reading the treatise written by Katrien Vanpee, a researcher at the Arabic and Islamic Studies department of the University of Georgetown. Katrien had previously spent a year in Qatar where she became acquainted with a Syrian poet hitherto unknown to me, Bassam 'Alwani. The treatise she gave me was actually an excellent study of his poetry, style, imagery, vocabulary, and most importantly, the poetic ‘obscurity’ in his work.

Bassam 'Alwani, who was born in Hama, lives presently in Qatar where he teaches Arabic and writes poetry. He has already published four volumes of poetry. In 2005 Bassam 'Alwani took part in the foundation of Qalaq (angst) a poetry group that holds meetings in which members read poetry written by themselves and by prominent Arab poets.

In her concluding remarks, Ketrien Vanpee states that one of the goals of her study was to attract attention to the work of this exceptionally gifted poet, declaring that she would be happy if her work would stir some interest in his writings: “While I have enjoyed my many hours with his volumes, my efforts will feel more worthwhile if the enjoyment reaches more lovers of poetry and of the Arabic language, which many people believe to be a poetic language par excellence.”

I can assure Katrien that, as far as I am concerned, she has been completely successful in intriguing me and arousing my curiosity about this Syrian poet, and has made me determined to read his work at the earliest possible opportunity.

Istanbul

Let me start by admitting one of my weaknesses: I love to indulge myself in reading personal memoirs, also, I adore reading about cities: the historical, societal and anthropological facets of a city. So when a book is both a personal memoir and a story of one of the most glorious cities of the Middle East, one can imagine the pleasure I had during the days I spent reading Pamuk’s Istanbul.

       

The very first memoirs I have read in my life were Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, abridged, translated into Arabic, and published in a three-volume format by the monthly Egyptian book series Kitabi (my book), whose editor was the late Hilmi Murad. This fantastic series from my dad’s library formed the basis for my entry into the world of books and reading since my early childhood.

As for my first encounter with ‘city memoirs’, it was The Daily Chronicles of Damascus, written by Ahmad al-Budeiri al-Hallak the Damascene barber between 1741 and 1762. One of the most fascinating stories of these chronicles was the strike of the prostitutes of Damascus in protest of some draconian measure imposed on their legal trade by the Ottoman wali of Damascus.

A couple of months ago, when it was announced that Orhan Pamuk has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I needed to be careful before publicly announcing my feelings about his winning of the prize for two important reasons: the first had to do with how official Turkey might respond to him winning the prize, taking into account the political implications and, apparently, any ultra-literary motives behind granting Pamuk this prize. The second had to do with my personal friendship with the other strong candidate for the Nobel literature prize, the great Syrian poet Adonis. The fact that Pamuk’s defense of the rights of Turkey’s Kurds might have been a decisive factor in his winning of the prize, did not shed any doubts in my eyes about his magnificent literary merits and my personal happiness on hearing the good news. The same logic applies on Adonis. Yes, I believe that this genius of modern Arab poetry deserves to be a Nobel laureate; however, this does not mean that Pamuk did not equally deserve the honor. If I have any doubts, they are directed at the integrity and sincerity of the selecting committee, not about Pamuk or Adonis.

Back to Istanbul. This is a melancholic journey through the latest chapters of the life story of a great metropolis; nostalgic and sad, but captivating and ensnaring. A portrait that is simultaneously intimate and universal; alternating between the personal and family history of Orhan as a child, and the decline story of Istanbul throughout the last century. The book has it all: his upper middle class bourgeois family home; the story of his first love; family and city photographs; lives of great poets and pashas; comments on architecture, buildings, and city urban design; the sad story of the obsessive encyclopedic Kocu; the great paintings of Melling who “saw the city as an Istanbullu but painted it like a clear eyed Westerner”.

Did I quote Pamuk talking about painting Istanbul? Well the whole book is actually a painting where words are used instead of oil colors, or more precisely, charcoal. Pamuk wanted originally to be an artist, but he decided to become a writer, who addressed all the spiritual, cultural, and ethical problems that face present-day Turkey, without claiming to offer any solutions. His Istanbul is fraught by the fact that modern Turks continue to "grapple with the most basic questions of existence: love, compassion, religion, the meaning of life, jealousy, hatred – in trembling confusion and painful solitude". Istanbul is both an evocation of personal experiences and a statement on the lingering effects of myth, but above all it is a book that brings joy and knowledge to those who read it.