Sunday 30 December 2012

Realism in Rawiya: Women of the Middle East tell their story

An image by Newsha Tavakolian from Realism in Rawiya

This just in from my friends at the New Art Exchange in Nottingham, and fully endorsed by me: Realism in Rawiya, a stunning new exhibition of photography from the Middle East. For more details about the range of work at this show, please click here. The launch is on Thursday 24 January 2013, 6pm-9pm at the New Art Exchange, 39-41 Gregory Boulevard, Nottingham NG7 6BE.

Realism in Rawiya presents the work of Rawiya – the first all-female photographic collective to emerge from the Middle East. Operating within what is still a predominantly male-dominated industry, and one fraught with politics, the group credits pooling resources and talents for their rapidly developing profile throughout the Middle Eastern region and beyond. Following on from their success at FORMAT photography festival in 2011, this exhibition marks Rawiya’s first major group exhibition in the UK.

Rawiya, meaning ‘she who tells a story’ or ‘storyteller’ in Arabic, presents the photographers Myriam Abdelaziz (currently in Cairo), Laura Boushnak (currently in Sarajevo), Tanya Habjouqa (currently in East Jerusalem), Tamara Abdul Hadi (currently in Beirut), Dalia Khamissy (currently in Beirut) and Newsha Tavakolian (currently in Tehran).

Each artist established their individual careers as photojournalists, working for news agencies and publications across the Arab world. By living and reporting in the region, the photographers gained an insider’s view of the extremities of these settings, whilst also observing how their reportage could become reframed in the international media’s final edit of events. This shared experience inspired the members to create their own platform, to present what they felt to be the wider political and social stories currently going unseen.

Presented as a collective body of work which bridges the worlds of documentary and art, this exhibition captures the vision of the Rawiya: a multitude of stories and first-hand accounts which challenge the status quo of racism and orientalism often presented in mainstream media.With a specific focus on gender and identity, the exhibition presents a thoughtful viewof a region in flux, balancing its contradictions while reflecting on social and political issues and stereotypes.

Text (c) New Art Exchange

Friday 28 December 2012

Fighting for freedom and film: The Bristol Palestine Film Festival


Following requests, below is the talk I gave at the opening of the 2012 Bristol Palestine Film Festival.

We’re living in revolutionary and unstable times, full of promise and risk, energy, rupture and antagonism. Citizens across the Middle East are demanding the building blocks of fair and peaceful states: stability, freedom, justice; the integrity of government; working national structures and infrastructures; independent, reliable and efficient institutions; high quality national education and healthcare for all; liberation from reactionary dogma, doctrine and dictatorship;  opportunity, democracy, equality and liberty. These issues are no less pertinent here today as we celebrate the culture and resistance of Palestinians not only in Gaza and the West Bank but further out, in the Palestinian diaspora.

Yet revolutions are not defined by marches, protests, fighting and demonstrations alone. No revolution is truly powerful unless it is also creative, uplifting, collective and lasting; and the most profound revolutions affect every part of society. In this way, we use all of the potential of people – not only to resist and react, not only to challenge and confront, not only to defend and fight but also to create, to transform and to promise a better future for all. This year’s festival and its debates are more serious and urgent that ever before, because of recent political and military events [in Gaza]. However, the festival is not just about activism or political identity but about the great wealth of creative talent which deserves to be seen by the world and can in its turn shed light on life everywhere in the world. Great art has universal application even though it comes from a specific context.

At this year’s festival you will find a great variety of film work from and about Palestine. For those wishing to understand the reality of living in constant confrontation with the army, the separation wall and the cruelty and daily caprice of military occupation, combined with the concerted encroachment on and sabotage of historic and valuable olive groves, there are three gritty, important and unflinching films: The Colour of Olives (dir. Carolina Rivas and Daoud Sarhandi), 5 Broken Cameras (dir. Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi) and They Came in the Morning, directed by Leila Sansour. Yet Palestinian film is not defined by victimisation. In Yala to the Moon, directed by Suhel Nafar and Jacqueline Reem Salloum, a woman recreates her world using the gifts of her imagination. And Habibi, a wonderful film directed by Susan Youssef, is a Gaza-set story about forbidden love, defiance, graffiti and urban love poetry. It won the Best Arab Feature award at the 2011 8th Dubai International Film Festival and the honour was richly deserved. Other films in the festival tackle universal themes of human behaviour and of how we choose to react to events. In The Choice, directed by Yasin Erik Bognar, a father and daughter in Ramallah express grief in different ways. And in Sameh Zoabi’s comedy drama Man Without A Cellphone, a cocky young playboy has to grow up and step up in the fight against a nearby cellphone tower which might be leaking radiation.

These are just a sample of the diversity of work being produced by Palestinian directors or representing life in Palestine. Palestine is not just a ‘cause’ to be taken up, a site of suffering or a fashionable issue in which people show ‘tremendous human resilience, courage and spirit’ and are full of ‘warmth, humanity and hospitality’ despite their ‘plight’. Palestine is not a racial or cultural cliché to be explored and exploited, patronised and stereotyped, but a rich society of individuals who love everything from film, art, performance and literature to freedom, truth and justice ...which are all related and are for everyone, by everyone, without prejudice.




Sunday 9 December 2012

Poetry for Peace, inspired by Rabindranath Tagore

Several months ago I was invited by Wasafiri Magazine of International Writing to contribute to a reading event at Asia House in London. Three writers of South Asian descent – me, poet DaljitNagra and writer and broadcaster Shyama Perera – were to read through an issue of the magazine which was dedicated to appraising and honouring the cultural contribution of radical sub-continental writers. We had to choose an article as inspiration and create an original work in response to it. A full feature on the event, including pictures, can be found here.

I chose a critical essay about the Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore has long been a literary touchstone in my household and I thought I might create from his formal high Bengali a new interpretation of his thoughts, language and imagery. A straight translation wouldn’t work – indeed, even the Wasafiri essay conceded that Tagore was rendered more acutely and subtly in French than English. I wanted instead to distil his essence and compose some new work that was totally Tagore and yet also completely, freshly, creatively myself.

There was one missing link: my mother, a writer and academic. We took down our many Bengali volumes of Tagore and she read some pieces aloud to me, just a few lines, to get the flavour. I found many verses that piqued my interest, particularly the songs from the Gitobitan, the Collection of Songs, which was published in India in 1931. The two pieces I chose to work on come from the section of the collection called Shodesh, translated as Homeland, which contains songs pertaining to India’s dignity, unity, strength and patriotic zeal in the fight against British rulership and exploitation.

I understand and can speak Bengali but can’t read or write it, to my regret. My mother read out the two short songs and we carefully discussed the meaning and rhythm of each line. Then she created a literal word-for-word translation, which I could not have done without and took strong inspiration from in crafting my own pieces. I gave them my own voice, my own words, ideas, rhythm, syntax and form, and I titled them. But their hearts are Tagore’s. The first piece I offer is inspired by a song written in 1905, while the second occurs much later in the original selection and cannot be dated.

Despite the specificity of their first origins, to me the songs are about the struggle for dignity, self-determination and emancipation anywhere, in all situations, not just at a national or outwardly political level. They affirm the power of the individual, they honour the bravery of independent action and acknowledge the risks of speaking out and standing alone. They also pay sad tribute to the way oppressive situations warp and brutalise everyone in them including the perpetrators. The songs are, above all, full of hope for change and faith in people to make that change, to right wrongs, to correct a crooked path, to agitate, to be proud, to be brave, to save, to redeem and to transform.

The Asia House event was a wonderful mixture of Daljit Nagra’s inventiveness, hilarity and wonderful performing skills, Shyama Perera’s intelligence, insight, rigour and candour and my nerves.  I think – I hope – I wrote and read the poems well and I had also hoped that my work wouldn’t disappear without a trace. As serendipity would have it, a few weeks later I received the following message:

We are writing to you and other distinguished figures with strong connections to South Asia, from Iran to Burma, and Tibet to the Maldives, to seek your help in our literary project.
We’re calling the project ‘Poetry for Peace’, a title that can be interpreted in various ways: peace between nations, between communities or between individuals, or peace within oneself.
We will donate 20% of the royalties from the sale of the anthology to Amnesty International and the remainder will help support the Rukhla Project, an active rural development project in Himachal Pradesh, India. The overall aim is to help foster initiatives that support and develop the local community and economy, including working with village schools, eco-volunteering, establishing links with educational institutions within India and abroad (including Japan), and so on. At the moment, the farm directly supports three families, including seven children. This figure is expected to rise as the project develops. There are plans to develop a cottage industry in the short term, producing apple vinegars, cheeses, and other artisan quality products using local materials and expertise. The buildings are being upgraded to accommodate guests, including trekkers, artists, poets, musicians and writers, as one of the aims is to develop it as a visitor centre where people can find their own inner peace and/or explore the forests and mountains with a local guide.

We hope that by sharing our love of words, we can add an idealistic drop to the pool of common good – a small reminder that we are one human race, with so much more uniting than dividing us: a common heritage, a common future, one common life.

I knew I couldn’t let it pass and have submitted the poems to the anthology, along with some of this introduction.

Tagore died in 1941. The national Indian liberty he had dreamed into being in his literature came to pass just a few years later, in 1947. As I write, the world is full of other freedom struggles against inequality, injustice, exploitation and prejudice. I hope that readers engaged in that long and righteous fight are inspired by my words, however flawed, as I was inspired by Tagore’s.




If there be no answer

If there be no answer, continue alone.
At the crossroads, on the high path, should they leave you,
On the dense road, at the tough pass, should they flee,
Should they turn their faces and offer no words,
Then read in secret the inward story
And walk the thorny road on your bloodied feet.
If there should be no lantern light, nor hearth, nor flame,
Then do what others cannot:

Go to the storm
Pluck out a rib
Light it with thunder
And burn alone.



 The victory banner

The tighter the binding, the looser it grows,
Our liberty escapes it, as light as a breath.
The trickier the knot, the rougher the rope,
Our freedom evades it, as subtle as scent.
The angrier they stare, bloodshot and stricken,
So softly we gaze, as open as children.

Inwardly we win, though outwardly submit,
The more vividly we dream, the more real is it.
The louder they shout, we grow more awake.
What’s rent by their hand, we privately remake.

If they strike, they hit water, waves rippling like silk.
If they stamp, they hit water, waves twisting like silk
If they kick, they hit water, waves flowing like silk -
The silk of their banner,
Torn as they tear.


©Bidisha, 2012

He thinks you’re scum but he fancies you, you’re humiliated but you fancy him: the Darcy dilemma in Pride and Prejudice


Mr Darcy is the ultimate punisher. Icily condescending or outright brusque, he is eloquent only when putting others down. Noticed immediately as “fine, tall... handsome… noble,”  at a dance, it becomes obvious that he is not just lean but mean too. Within the elegantly proportioned space of one Austenian sentence after his arrival, “his manners gave a disgust which turned the tide of his popularity.”

For all his apparent loftiness Darcy has been perfectly happy in the company of his class peers but mental inferiors: Bingley the nice but dim best friend, braying Mr Hurst and the mean, shallow Bingley sisters.

When he meets his intellectual equal, Elizabeth Bennet, the cruel machinery of the novel means that it is she who is constantly humbled and humiliated, not him. Darcy’s scathing presumptions about the Bennets are almost completely correct. His one mistake is to underestimate Jane’s feelings for Bingley. But his assessment of Mrs Bennet’s vulgarity and avarice, his lack of surprise at not one but two sisters’ susceptibility to Wickham’s wiles and his assumption of Mr Bennet’s uselessness are proven right. Lizzy must face the wretched truth of all this; the worst Darcy must do is admit that he fancies someone whose family are inferior in both class and etiquette, apologise to Bingley for not mentioning that Jane was in town and wonder whether he should have told people about Wickham’s true nature.

Darcy’s manner changes somewhat after he is told off by Lizzy following his proposal. But his wealth and power protect him from any greater catharsis and weight the narrative entirely in his favour. That is not to say, however, that any reader with a drop of lifeblood in her would fail to be moved by one of the sexiest and most perfect moments in literature, when the two bump into each other at Pemberley: “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immovable from surprise.”

But we know what happens immediately after that: Lydia’s ridiculous and perilous Wickham fling, which embarrasses everyone but herself and her mother in its crudeness. Darcy is the one who makes everything right; Lizzy gets no heroic moment. At the end of the book the Bennets are even less worthy of Darcy than they were at the start, for now he has the moral advantage as well as the monetary one. Nothing Lizzy can do in private will ever repay what he has done in rescuing the family from public humiliation.

The message of Pride and Prejudice is not that love conquers all but that a rich man can buy his way out of any pickle, that tricksters like Wickham always land on their feet and that women are nothing more than collateral in the dealings of worldly men. Such is the genius of Austen that long after the novel is over, one wonders whether Lizzy goes on to teach Darcy the power of laughter or whether he spends his life freezing her out over the breakfast table.


This article was originally commissioned by Intelligent Life magazine to celebrate the upcoming  200th publication anniversary of Pride and Prejudice in 2013.

Even the rich suffer: Swimming Home by Deborah Levy


It’s wonderful watching the toxic posh get their comeuppance. Deborah Levy’s novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize and is a masterwork of precision malice, a poisoned cocktail of high bourgeoisie, low motives, brittle manners and mean assumptions.

Swimming Home takes a series of cultural clichés and class, sex and national stereotypes and leaves them to fester in the summer sun until all the toxic matter oozes out. Nobody deserves this literary karma more than Levy’s cast of characters: an arrogant and sleazy poet, a desperately gauche pubescent daughter in a clangingly symbolic cherry print bikini, a bickering couple who own a boho antiques shop and a passive aggressive war reporter who’s traumatised from witnessing other people’s suffering. And there is no more apt place for them to confront their own and each other’s whiny demons than the kind of shabby chic villa you find littering the hills of Tuscany and the groves of Provence, full of braying British foodies.   

Swimming Home is set in a Mediterranean village of international crapsters, pretentious bohemians, uptight Eurochic and hateful and hate-filled locals. All are provincial and parochial clichés and the general plot of the novel is a cliché too: a group of frenemies renting a holiday home, whose dynamics are disrupted by the arrival of a beautiful young woman of mysterious motive. Anyone who’s watched Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty or Ozon’s Swimming Pool will recognise this set-up instantly. And anyone who’s been to a place like that, on a holiday like that, with people like that, will know that clichés are sometimes true.

Levy is brilliant at taking this much-used template and examining its self-conscious constructions and falsities. All of the older characters are quite deliberately enacting roles, both as individuals and as parts of the group. Privately, they chafe against these fake and thin identities, wondering how they have become trapped inside them. They are appalled at how their past, immense but unspeakable, has ossified around them. Publicly, they express their discomfort through vicious power-plays, mental battles, verbal barbs over the dinner table, insults disguised as jokes, egotistical bluster and brittle, small, symbolic acts of unwillingness or resistance.

This collection of unlikeables and insufferables thoroughly deserves to be drawn into some summertime mind-games. Enter Kitty Finch, who is also at the villa due to an apparent mix-up in rental dates. Kitty is every poor-little-lost-girl cliché you can think of: skinny, sexy, tough-but-vulnerable, dim yet scheming, crackers, manipulative, deceitful, hot but demonic. Even her name is revoltingly, self-consciously fake and minor: a little scratchy cat and a flighty little bird. Through her, the reader can see every damaged ingénue of page and screen, yet in Levy’s expert hands this interloper is shot through with terrible fragility and a sinister edge. Kitty Finch is a good old-fashioned man-worshipper, a grovelling groupie and a coquette who pretends not to be.

I won’t reveal how the poison plays out once everyone’s in place. That would blunt the cold sharp steel of Levy’s story and undercut the effect of its beautiful language. There is one more thing to point out, and it shows Levy’s brilliance at finding a false idea and stabbing it: the trope of a beautiful young woman arriving to disrupt the social and sexual dynamics of a bunch of villa-renting olive-eaters with her untrammelled foxy moxy voodoo lady-mojo is itself a literary delusion. In reality, gamine young women do not have any sexual power, do not wield decisive influence in psychological games, do not and cannot manipulate other people and do not have events centring around them. They are, instead, treated as bimbos and objects: leered at, harassed, exploited, groomed, pimped, used, abused, raped, objectified and then passed off as teases, liars, hysterics, attention-seekers or mad when they speak up. Beauty and sexiness in very young women seem powerful but are not; instead of being wily minxes, these girls are disempowered, isolated and insecure. They have no power to compel, and are victims. Levy smartly, lightly layers all of these images into her construction of Kitty, whose grovelling submissiveness towards the poet is matched only by his sleazy, pathetic susceptibility.

All these nasty people get exactly what they deserve and Levy delivers them to their fates in frozen, perfect, precise prose. Swimming Home is a brilliant novel about awful people; an absorbing narrative about the self-absorbed, whose pain never loses its tinge of pretension.



Swimming Home by Deborah Levy is published by And Other Stories, a small and brilliant press producing gorgeous contemporary books by some of the world most gifted thinkers. And Other Stories, if you're reading this, I would love to make some gorgeous volume with you.


Reflecting badly on horror: Dolly by Susan Hill


Spoiler alert: contains plot hints.

Does anyone do it better than Susan Hill? Give her a remote house, a graveyard, an attic with an iron-framed bed, some bad weather, circling birds and a childless mother or a motherless child and she’ll give you three hundred pages of expert ghastliness. Dead or ghostlike children, live or lifelike dolls, mirrors that reveal a true face, unjustly buried things trying to get out, unfairly banished things trying to get in, cots and rocking chairs that rock themselves, dead people who’ve lost something returning to look for it… we know what world we’re in.

Hill’s versatility as a literary novelist is well-known but there is a special, chilly pocket of appreciation reserved for her ghost stories The Man in the Picture, The Small Hand, The Mist in the Mirror and perhaps the most famous of all, The Woman in Black, which is onstage and onscreen as well as on the page.

Here’s an indiscreet anecdote from a namedropping writer colleague: “I’m friends with Susan Hill. If you’re worried about money, get a play on. The Woman in Black’s been showing for ever and Susan was telling me it makes so much money she doesn’t know what to do with it.”

Dolly is a long short story, beautifully presented as a black and green pocket hardback by Profile books. It performs the same clever Halloween trick as Hill’s other works, taking all the staples of historic horror and ghost genres and delivering something that is completely predictable, symmetrical and seemingly obvious. Yet it is Hill’s storytelling skill itself that makes these stories seem like they’ve been around forever and are part of some deep national dread.  

Here’s a comment from another colleague, a brilliant writer to whom I was praising Dolly but wondering why we need an old house and no Net for a proper horror story: 
“We need to strip away the modern for true horror because technology isn’t frightening,” she said.
“A literary editor once said to me, ‘No-one wants to read about people texting,’” I said.
“Well – screens might be frightening, people climbing out of them or going into them.”
“Like that Japanese film, The Ring.” 
“But what’s really frightening is people.”
“Or things behaving like people, or bad people pretending to be good people and getting away with it. Or wearing a mask in full view. Have you read the Freud essay, The Truth of Masks? It’s about how disguises are real. We choose the disguise that we think hides us, but we subconsciously choose the thing that reveals our true face.”
“…Or people pretending to be people you know. I once received a lovely letter from a young reader – I write for children – and she told me one of her most horrible dreams. She told me there was someone in her room, and she thought it was her mother. It looked like her mother. And she got close to it and suddenly it said, ‘I’m not your mother.’ And then, the girl wrote, ‘She took me to her cold dark nest.’ Isn’t that the phrase? ‘Cold dark nest.’ She was a writer’s daughter of course, her mother’s a writer, it starts so young.”

In Dolly, two children go to stay at an old house inhabited by a sullen housekeeper and a well-meaning but distant aunt. One child is a diffident and uninteresting little boy, who narrates the story as a grown-up. The other is a fiery, spoilt, unhappy girl whose flighty, frivolous (etc) mother has abandoned her. This girl, Leonora, wants a doll for her birthday. She doesn’t get the one she wants, expresses her rage in a jarringly ugly and ungrateful manner, and then…. There are no thrills or spills with Dolly, merely a momentary act of crude brattishness which is quickly forgotten by the young perpetrator but punished cruelly for decades afterwards by …well… and revealed with implacable, predictable (but no less affecting) calmness.

Dolly is about consequences, about the real monster not being the person or thing you thought it was, about the punishment being much greater than the crime and unfairly and disproportionately affecting many more people than just the perpetrator. It’s about the suffering of innocents and sometimes their revenge. The suffering comes out in twos: there are the two original children, each of whom has a daughter, and there are not one but two dolls, and there may be two or more perpetrators, and two of them might be the dolls – or maybe the dolls are merely reflecting the malice of Fate or the bitterness and pique of a grown adult who’s been hurt – or maybe it’s a very hard lesson that little girls shouldn’t misbehave….

At once frozen and hokey, underpowered yet overbaked, perverse yet obvious, smooth and inexorable, it’s also horribly satisfying. Yet the underlying (and I am sure, subconscious) politics of the story leave a bad impression. Though narrated by a male character, the story is about the nastiness, pettiness, malice and punishing of females, who are the perpetrators of most of the bad events in the book, but for one very significant act at the beginning; and the victims of this female malice are all very young girls themselves, almost babies. The flighty mother who abandons Leonora, the shrewd housekeeper who diagnoses Leonora on sight as evil – “She had looked into Leonora’s eyes when she had first arrived, and seen the devil there”, Leonora the malicious child herself, the childless aunt who seems kind but may not be, the changing female dolls who cause or mimic the suffering of the little girls and grow ugly in their boxes like “a wizened old woman, a crone” in one case and “no longer a beauty… a pariah” in another. The worst thing that is said of Leonora is that “she is too like her mother” – a bad girl taking after a bad woman – and the insult is delivered by another woman, the aunt, Leonora’s mother’s own sister. We are not only in an Edwardian physical setting but also its psychology: whether real or mannequins, young or old, absent or present, females are sad, mad, bad, petty, shrill, vicious, shrewish, irresponsible, occult, corrupt and corrupting.

If your desire to revel in the nastiness of Woman is satisfied and you want some racial and national stereotypes as a side dish then look no further than the Eastern European city the narrator visits as an adult. The medieval Old Town is in the middle, surrounded by hastily over-developed malls and motorways, the building work halted following a people’s revolution and the exile of the state leader. In the Old Town is… you can finish this sentence for me… a little old toy shop, and in the little old toy shop is a little old toy-restorer… “a very small old man” with an inscrutable manner and “a jeweller’s glass screwed into one eye”, from a Quality Street advert at Christmas, who seems to know exactly what the narrator is looking for.

If the Grimm climate of Eastern European cultural clichés is too chilly for you then let’s go to India – that palace of clichés! - with the narrator and his family, to a region which Hill does not even bother to give a name to, instead sketching it with a series of offhand, inexact, thrown-out and embarrassingly crude and ignorant pejoratives: “heat and humidity…extreme poverty” amongst “women and their children in a remote village, where there were no medical facilities and where clothes and people were washed in the great river that flowed through the area.” Tiny hint: there is no such thing as a remote village on the banks of a great river. If there’s a great river, it’s not a remote village but has the provision for irrigation for centuries of agriculture and therefore crops, food, flora and fauna; a prime position along an established transport route; a longstanding and probably classic trade route and the possibility of (to-be-purified) drinking water. Another hint: If you do not know a country, culture or people well, particularly one that was a former colony and subject to any number of racist clichés and Orientalist justifications, don’t patronise it with uneducated generalisations. Write about something you know and respect instead. Want more, reader? How about “terrible diseases… ravage this beautiful country. Poor sanitation, contaminated water, easy spread of infection…” easy and glib, just like that.

Dolly is a smoothly gut-churning story from one of England’s greatest living writers. From its lonely starting point it soon widens into an exploration of the depth and ineffability of curses. However, it leaves a bitter taste as much for its racial stereotypes and tinge of sexual slander as its sensational storytelling and core of fatalistic horror.

Dolly by Susan Hill is published by ProfileBooks.