UPDATED: Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine (2012/2025)

My 4th book Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine, originally published in 2012, has been been updated and reissued. The original publication was followed by my 5th book, Asylum and Exile: Hidden Voices of London, which was based on my outreach work with asylum seekers, detainees and refugees in London (click the thumbnail on the right for more details).

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine has been described as "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" by Andrew Kelly in The Observer. 

ORDER THE UPDATED BEYOND THE WALL: WRITING A PATH THROUGH PALESTINE HERE

In spring 2011 I was invited to tour the West Bank as a guest of Palfest. I knew about the ‘issue’ from casual news watching, despite a longstanding professional involvement in international relations, political analysis, cultural diplomacy and human rights. I am not Muslim and have no Muslim heritage, no Palestinian heritage and no Arab or Middle Eastern heritage. I am not an activist.

I went on the tour and wrote down what I observed, nothing more or less, and these observations became Beyond the Wall. It’s a short, accessible narrative non-fiction piece about ordinary people and daily life, originally published by Seagull Books in 2012. Full details of the original publication, with links to further essays and reviews and a list of events from that time, can be read directly below.

In the book, I focused on character and conversation, setting and community, resilience and survival, atmosphere and daily existence, with the aim of writing something which any reader could engage with.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Over the last twenty three months I haven’t mentioned Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine in any context. I dislike it when individuals push themselves to the front on a human rights ticket during an emergency. I've seen peers speak persuasively about ethics onstage while being egotistical or abusive offstage and witnessed terrible human beings put their signatures to the petitions and statements of the day, just to look good.

In late 2024 I asked Seagull if I could write a new foreword for Beyond The Wall. They kindly agreed and the essay is as current as we could make it while allowing for production time. It clearly expresses my feelings.

I will not be taking up any media slots to comment on this when there are so many direct reports and testimonies already. I’d like to thank Naveen Kishore and Bishan Samadder at Seagull and all at Palfest.

ORDER THE UPDATED BOOK HERE

Photo of me taken in the West Bank, spring 2011, by poet Nathalie Handal

ORIGINAL 'BEYOND THE WALL' LAUNCH TEXT FROM 2012: 

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women, and another which I did for Time Out Beijing. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, Time Out Bejing, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, an interview in Ideas Tap, a long interview in The Asian Writer, Variety, a long interview in The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is "an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century" (The Observer), seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

Health, work, dignity, livelihood: 52 Weeks project by Gulf Labor group protests the working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi

Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island - translated as the Island of Happiness. Their 52 Weeks campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).

Image of Gulf workers (c) Human Rights Watch

52 Weeks is a one year campaign which has just launched. Artists, writers and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, text or action each week that relates to or highlights the coercive recruitment and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi. In the first weeks there have been contributions by Doug Ashford, Doris Bittar, Sam Durant, Matthew Greco, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lynn Love, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Naeem Mohaiemen, Walid Raad, Oliver Ressler, Andrew Ross, Jayce Salloum, Ann Sappenfield and Gregory Sholette. The coming weeks will see contributions by Haig Aivazian, Shaina Anand, Ayreen Anastas, Yto Berrada, Noel Doublas, Rana Jaleel, Rene Gabri, Mariam Ghani, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Josh MacPhee, Marina Naprushkina, Shirin Neshat, Ashok Sukumaran, WBYA (Who Builds Your Architecture) and many others.

Walid Raad, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

If the Guggenheim, Louvre and TDIC [Tourism, Development & Investment Company. Abu Dhabi] were willing to invest as much energy and resources into safeguarding the rights of workers buildings museums on Saadiyat Island, as they are on hiring “starchitects,” building engineering marvels, and buying challenging artworks, then their claims of building the best infrastructure for the arts in the world would be more than words in the wind. Abu Dhabi, its residents and workers, deserve more than the “edgy” buildings and collections proposed by the best museum-brands in the world. Abu Dhabi also deserves the development, implementation and enforcement of the most progressive labor laws for their emerging institutions. If the museums can’t see this, then I can only hope that the ruling Sheikhs and Sheikhas will, and soon.

Doris Bittar, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

Appearances are deceiving. The workers building the museums in Abu Dhabi look neat in their blue uniforms and hard hats. Their cared for appearance belie the facts that many are working 15-hour shifts, have had their passports confiscated and cannot leave or quit, they cannot congregate or collectively make demands regarding their lack of pay and their poor living conditions, and they have no recourse if they are physically abused because of unenforced labour laws. Sometimes, the only way they can leave and be sent home is in caskets.

Naeem Mohaiemen, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

We note efforts to always push blame down the human-labour supply chain: corrupt middlemen, "illiterate" workers, or recruitment agencies in the origin countries. This avoids acknowledgement of the overwhelming power, and responsibility, in the hands of institutions in Abu Dhabi and within the Euro-American art axis.

Guy Mannes-Abbott, a member of Gulf Labor stated to me in an extended commentary:

The migrant community in the UAE makes up some 80% of the population, most of whom have very few rights as such and those [that they have] are very poorly monitored, or easily got around - with the help of [sometimes] vulnerable non-Emiratis. However while there are movements for political reform in all Gulf countries including the UAE this permanent population-in-flux is not included in those fights for citizenship and potential constitutional rights as political subjects. One aim here is to help make such a migrant subject thinkable on a global scale.

This is the point at which individuals, who are often working in "conditions of forced labour" according to Human Rights Watch, because of coercive and illicit recruitment fees equivalent to some two years of earnings [and which incur extortionate and hugely inflated interest rates] for construction workers, link to broader locations, narratives and collectives in a globalised economy. In November 2012  PriceWaterhouseCooper, appointed by Abu Dhabi's TDIC despite compromising links in the Gulf and Gulf Labor's alternative suggestions, reported that 75% of construction workers on Saadiyat had paid recruitment fees and other costs. The response from TDIC has been to demand receipts (!) and to sack even PriceWaterhouseCooper at the end of that year… 

The average income in Abu Dhabi is about $30,000 while the average income for migrant construction workers is less than 10% of that. In Qatar, the average income is over $70,000. 

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has gotten underway with workers trapped by these recruitment fees, many of them - 40% according to PriceWaterhouseCooper, despite an "obligation" on contractors to house employees there - not living in the official accommodation provided on Saadiyat. The official accommodation is a metal-walled camp for up to 40,000 men, almost all of whom originate from South Asia. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is happy to pay these labouring men about $2500-3000 a year and watch others being deported for pleading for a few hundred dollars more per year to eat properly, while itself receiving $17,500,000 a year for 30 years from Abu Dhabi for the use of the 'Louvre' brand alone. The total package is worth well over a billion dollars and includes various sweeteners built in and around Paris for the French government too. 

UAE is a signatory to International Labour Organisation conventions but has not implemented laws on the right to organise and collectively bargain or form a union. There is a minimum wage on the books but it has not come in to law. Both of these would enable these often basely exploited people to address their situation fairly and with dignity as well as to transform their experience into one of meaningful sacrifice. Meanwhile, if a worker on Saadiyat wants to lodge a complaint, which is a legal right, he has to get it in writing and hand-deliver it either to Dubai or another spot in Abu Dhabi notably distant from the camp which even in Abu Dhabi is officially classified as "remote". He can only do that on a day off and on that day off, Friday, these ministry buildings are closed… 

Poster launching Gulf Labor 52 Weeks...
at 2013 Venice Biennale

Gulf Labor is intent on raising standards and extending aspirations. Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Foundation has described the Gehry-designed Museum he wants to build on these foundations as a "beacon" of cultural exchange: brightly-lit meaninglessness. Instead, Gulf Labor is intent on turning that light into the dark corners of this enterprise to remind the world and the UAE of the hopes, dreams and legitimate expectations of the human beings whose lives are being defined by their experience today. 

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, like the Louvre Abu Dhabi, is presently on course to memorialise "conditions of forced labour". There is time, occasion and opportunity to change that. The UAE is trying to achieve something very remarkable, very fast but doing it like this undermines otherwise laudable ambitions and legitimate aspirations. 

With thanks to Gulf Labor and in particular Guy Mannes-Abbott. Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development issues. 

Springtime of the women: a season of amazing talent in spoken word, literature, art, film, theatre and more.

For Books' Sake publish their first fiction anthology; Eve Ensler brings Thandie Newton, Neneh Cherry, Meera Syal and Rosario Dawson to the Lyric Theatre on 26th March; the Human Rights Watch film festival launches with a stunning programme of topical international films 21st-30th March; and a look ahead to Electra Productions hitting Tate Modern with Her Noise, their 3 day celebration of avant-garde women artists' genius at the beginning of May.

1.     For Books’ Sake celebrate smart fiction by smart women with their first anthology, Short Stack, Wednesday 28^th March 2012

In moments of deep despair at the cultural femicide all around, occasionally an amazing heroine shines a light. And sometimes a load of heroines shine a load of lights and throw a party for all their friends. For Books’ Sake is the legendary online magazine dedicated to promoting and celebrating writing by women, in the face of the widespread ignoring and dismissal of women’s work by literary editors, jury panels, TV and radio editors and commissioners and literary event producers of both sexes. The site is brilliantly written, insightful, influential and powerful. Book-lovers and lady likers will emerge from a plunge into For Books’ Sake with a handful of new reading and writing recommendations, a head full of new ideas and a refreshed sense of women’s genius. Get behind this amazing group of women: For Books’ Sake should be a paper magazine, a cultural festival, a TV and radio network, a prize scheme and a full-on touring roadshow with  a free big-bonus raffle and tombola.

If you don’t want to spend your solidarity-time glued to a screen, For Books’ Sake have gone one further and released Short Stack, their first fiction anthology, which is being published by Pulp Press at the end of the month, with a party at 7.30pm at the Tamesis Dock on Wednesday 28th March. You can already get the Kindle e-book edition here. If you want your timbers shivered, For Books’ Sake promise that Short Stack will offer “ten twisted tales of heroines hell-bent on vengeance, reanimated corpses, post-apocalyptic sex and much, much more.” I hope that in the future, the “much more” includes science fiction and fantasy anthologies, because I want in.

2. The Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Wednesday 21^st March – Friday 30^th March 2012.

Just when you were despairing at the gung-ho 3D big studio Cineplex drek on show as spring and summer approach, the Human Rights Watch Film Festival comes to London as part of its global tour, with a series of nineteen intelligent, topical, global, confrontational and eye-opening work, screening at the Curzon Soho, Curzon Mayfair, the ICA and the Ritzy. Visit the main festival site for a full list of screenings and a look at the brilliant line-up of talks and debates happening alongside the films. Most of the screenings are followed by extremely well-programmed panel debates discussing the issues with the director/s, critics, academics, activists and politically and socially engaged artists. If you’re interested in work looking specifically at women’s place in society then take a look at three standout works amidst a generally stunning programme:

Love Crimes of Kabul, Tanaz Eshaghian’s documentary, which follows three young Afghani female prisoners as they go on trial for “moral crimes” which include running away from home to escape abuse and  allegations of adultery. In refusing to fit into society’s norms by their defiant actions, these women come to be seen as threats to the very fabric of society, and their acts of self-determination as illegal.

A still from The Price of Sex

The Price of Sex, directed by Mimi Chakarova, is about young Eastern European women, sex trafficking and abuse. Chakarova’s film is told by the young women who managed to escape and refused to be silenced by shame, fear, and violence. Director Chakarova is an Emmy-nominated photojournalist Mimi Chakarova filmed undercover and gained extraordinary access for this documentary, which won the 2011 Nestor Almendros Award, announced at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York in June last year. The screening on Saturday 24 March will be followed by a panel discussion with Mimi Chakarova and Abigail Stepnitz, national coordinator of the Poppy Project, which provides support to women who have been trafficked. It will be moderated by Liesl Gerntholtz, women’s rights director at Human Rights Watch.

Family Portrait in Black and White tells the story of Olga Nenya, who is single-handedly raising 23 foster children in rural Ukraine. Sixteen are the biracial offspring of visiting African students and Ukrainian women, who often see no choice but to abandon their babies. Olga reveals herself to be loving and protective but also narrow-minded and controlling. A product of communist ideology, she favours collective duty over individual freedom, and this paradox gives the children the sense of belonging they ache for, as well as cause for rebellion and distrust.

I support this festival wholeheartedly. All the films aim to “address economic inequality and consequences worldwide” and are organised around four themes: development, environment and the global economy; migrants’ rights and racism; personal testimony and witnessing; and women’s rights. The roster is impressively international, with 15 documentaries and 4 dramas from Afghanistan, Bolivia, Bulgaria, Cambodia, the Canary Islands, Ethiopia, Iraq, Italy, Lebanon, the Maldives, Pakistan, Palestine, Paraguay, Russia, Switzerland, Ukraine and the USA. Many of the films will be followed by Q&A sessions with filmmakers, and some by panel discussions with experts and film subjects.

The festival will launch tomorrow, Wednesday, 21 March, at the Curzon Mayfair with a fundraising benefit and reception for Human Rights Watch, featuring Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi’s  film 5 Broken Cameras. 5 Broken Cameras documents a Palestinian village's struggle against violence and oppression. The wall consumes much of the village’s arable land and allows nearby settlements to extend onto villagers’ fields. A cycle of resistance and retaliation develops between the village and the settlements.  

On Thursday 22 March, the Curzon Soho will host the opening night film, Jon Shenk’s The Island President, which follows former President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives (who was forced to resign the presidency this February) as he fights to convince the world’s policymakers to do something concrete about climate change. The Maldives is in danger of disappearing below rising sea levels, creating the world’s first cohort of environmental refugees.

The closing night film and reception will be on Friday 30 March at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. It will feature Nadine Labaki’s drama Where Do We Go Now?,  the story  of a group of women determined to protect their isolated, mine-encircled community. With the women united by a common cause, their friendship transcends the religious fault lines that constrict their society. The film will be followed by a discussion with Nadine Labaki.

Other films to look out for include the following. Further details can be found on the London festival's main site:

• Bettina Borgfeld and David Bernet’s documentary Raising Resistance follows the life-and-death struggle of farmers in Paraguay confronted with the ever-expanding production of genetically modified soy, which requires herbicides and decimates nearby crops.
• Documentary Special Flight, in which director Fermand Melgar has gained  extensive access to rejected asylum seekers and illegal migrants in Switzerland’s Frambois detention centre.
• Maggie Peren’s drama Colour of the Ocean tells the story of a father and son, African refugees whose paths collide with those of an altruistic tourist and a Canary Island police officer.
• Carlo Augusto Bachschmidt’s Black Block documents the police violence and arbitrary detention experienced by seven activists who demonstrated at the 2001 Genoa G8 summit. Each person describes brutal treatment by the Italian police that night, and in the days that followed.
• Annie Goldson’s documentary Brother Number One tells New Zealander Rob Hamill’s story about the deaths in 1978 of his brother Kerry Hamill, and his two friends − John Dewhirst of England, and Stuart Glass of Canada - at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. As Rob retraces his brother’s final days, takes the stand as a witness at the Cambodia War Crimes Tribunal, faces the former prison warden Comrade Duch, who gave the final orders for Kerry and thousands of others to be tortured and killed and meets survivors who tell the story of the notorious S-21 prison. 
• Werner Herzog’s  exploration of life on death row, Into The Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, follows the story of Michael Perry, who was executed eight days after filming began,  and Jason Burkett, who were found guilty of three capital murders in Texas, and unravels the crime and trial from separate viewpoints, including the victim’s families and prison staff.
• Lise Birk Pedersen’s documentary Putin’s Kiss focuses on 19-year-old Masha and her journey through the Kremlin-created Nashi youth movement. Masha supports Putin’s policies of seeking to rid Russia of what Nashi believes are Russia’s “enemies”: political opposition, investigative journalists, and human rights defenders. But as a journalist herself she starts socialising with colleagues in this circle, and  begins to question Nashi and its leaders.
• In Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy and Daniel Junge’s Oscar-winning documentary Saving Face plastic surgeon Dr Mohammad Jawad travels to Pakistan to treat women who have suffered acid attacks. Among them is Zakia, who goes to court to prosecute her husband for her attack. She becomes the first case tried under a new law in Pakistan that punishes the  attackers with life imprisonment.
• Susan Youssef’s drama Habibi tells the story of young lovers Qays (Kais Nashef) and Layla (Maisa Abd Elhadi) who are university students in the West Bank. Both are forced home to Khan Yunis before they have completed their studies and in this more religious and traditional environment their love story can continue only if they marry. Yet Qays is too poor to convince Layla’s father that he can provide for his beloved daughter. In an act of rebellion Qays paints verses from the classical poem Majnun Layla all over Khan Yunis, which angers Layla’s father and the local self-appointed moral police.

And now for......

3.  A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer: Eve Ensler comes to the  Lyric Theatre on Monday March 26^th 2012.

You will know Eve Ensler as the originator of The Vagina Monologues, V-day founder, tireless international campaigner for women’s human rights, an advocate, a writer, a personality, a heroine and a wit who has used her seemingly infinite energy and success to enable girls and women all over the world in speaking up, shouting out and even taking the stage. A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer is a new performance piece showcased as a collection of one-night performances featuring some of the coolest women performers working today: Rosario Dawson, Eve Ensler herself, Neheh Cherry, Meera Syal, Thandie Newton and more. Memory... is an adaptation of Ensler’s book of the same name. The producers have selected ten monologues to produce a varied and entertaining show expressing how violence against women affects everyone. All proceeds will go to charities dedicated to stopping violence against women and girls including Women for Women International and the Domestic Violence Intervention Project.

In addition to the sharp, shocking, deeply affecting script the Memory... series boasts some incredible art- and acting-world talents as directors: Tate Modern director Chris Dercon; Iwona Blazwick, OBE, director of the Whitechapel Gallery; RADA's Sue Dunderdale and Marcus Warren and Anna Ledwich.

Goldman Sachs Gives altruistic arm (don’t say anything) will be matching all ticket sales with donations, and The Millby Charitable Trust will be tripling this. There are also VIP seats which include the aftershow party with the cast and main players, on sale for £225.

4. Her Noise: Feminisms and the Sonic performance, talks, symposium and screening at the Tate Modern, 3^rd – 5^th  May 2012. Book tickets here.



Image by artist Jan Herman

 After the high profile mainstream success of Eve Ensler’s global empowerment project, I’ll end with something really intriguing, new (to me), avant-garde and promising to look forward to in May. I’ve been contacted by Electra Productions about Her Noise, a three day event which looks critically at political questions in sound, moving image, performance and cross-disciplinary art. It celebrates women in these fields – in particular, longstanding and veteran talents whose practice or influence is still going strong – given context, analysis and discussion by a thrilling range of additional speakers. I hope very much to see much more of this from Electra: putting women artists right back into the heart of cultural dialogue, acknowledging our creativity and importance, treating us to respectful appraisal and positioning us within a broader critical and art-historical framework. Check out the Facebook page here.

Her Noise includes performances and a talk by Pauline Oliveros, an evening considering the legacy of director Meredith Monk and a day of talks and discussions with contributions by Ute Meta Bauer, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Nina Power, Tara Rodgers and more. This programme marks the donation of the Her Noise Archive to the University of the Arts London Archives and Special Collections housed at London College of Communication, and is realised as a collaboration between CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice), Electra and Tate.

Full details below:

Artist Talk and Performance by Pauline Oliveros

Thursday 3 May 19.00-21.30, £12 / £9

Pioneering composer, performer and humanitarian Pauline Oliveros celebrates her 80th birthday this year. She gives a solo performance and a talk entitled 'Archiving the Future: The Embodiment Music of Women', followed by a performance of her 1970 score To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation in the Turbine Hall.

Film and performance: The Voice is a Language

Friday 4 May 19.00, £5

This performance and screening celebrates the legacy of avant-garde pioneer Meredith Monk, featuring work by artists Sophie Macpherson, James Richards, Cara Tolmie and Sue Tompkins and rarely seen films by Monk. The evening is curated by Isla Leaver-Yap.

Symposium: Feminisms and the Sonic

5 May 11.00-17.50, £20 / £14

Exploring and developing emergent feminist discourses in sound and music, this symposium brings together contributions by musicians, artists, academics and writers, including Ute Meta Bauer, Sonia Boyce, Georgina Born, Viv Corringham, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Lina Dzuverovic, Catherine Grant, Emma Hedditch, Anne Karpf, Cathy Lane, Anne Hilde Neset, Maggie Nichols, Nina Power, Tara Rodgers, Salomé Voegelin.

I hope this round-up fills your diary, freshens your heart and restores your faith. Enjoy!

The death of Magical Democracy and the rise of A Card From Angela Carter

The novelist Angela Carter, who died twenty years ago at the age of only fifty-one, was a creative genius, a consummate entertainer, an ambitious artist, a highly sophisticated crafter and a great intellect. [UPDATE, as at 10th Feb 2012: I have just been contacted by BBC radio producer Sara Davies, who has produced a documentary about Carter's plays, which is going out on Radio 4 on Thursday 16th February at 11.30am. She writes:

I hadn’t known about the plays till an academic in Bristol told me about them, and I discovered they were all in the BBC archive. I’ve used excerpts from all five, with interviews with various people who were connected with her back then, including Susannah Clapp, Marina Warner and Carmen Callil, and I’ve tracked down the studio manager who worked on the plays who talks about what fun it was putting them together in studio.

I don’t think many people know this side of Angela’s work, and the plays are such a riot!

Please tune in and enjoy Carter's imagination and genius afresh.]

I have long wanted to write a book of accessible essays, one about each of Angela Carter's major fictions, expressing my fannish enthusiasm, which is effusive and profuse. I'd envisaged it coming out this year, fully embossed, emblazoned and engilded, illustrated and illuminating, a Christmas gift for the literate. I’d call it Magical Democracy, after a phrase used in the Carter obituary written by Lorna Sage, another genius who died too young... and who also edited a wonderful book of essays on Carter, called Flesh and the Mirror, which includes contributions from Ali Smith and Marina Warner. 

For now, Angela Carter’s life has been commemorated in a beautiful looking, precisely written, perfectly constructed yet melancholy-making volume, A Card from Angela Carter, written by the renowned theatre critic and biographer Susannah Clapp. The book is hand-sized and gifty, its chiselled sentences and glinting insights giving us a sharp and immediate portrait of an entire life.

This is achieved despite rather than because of its central conceit. Clapp and Carter were close friends for several decades. Carter sent Clapp a series of postcards, which Clapp describes with a crisp humour that far exceeds the interest of the cards themselves, which are reprinted in a drab monochrome and bear brief, sharp, dashed-off messages. So there’s an image of a pot of Texan chilli beef. It’s like a 1970s tea towel illustration, block-printed and painfully indelicate. This is Clapp’s brilliant description:

The picture shows a black cauldron trying to pass as a saucepan. Bubbling with beans and frighteningly red beef, it was sending off a swirl of blue smoke.

On the back – and how I wish Bloomsbury had just turned the card over in the photocopier and given us a glimpse of Carter’s handwriting – the novelist has written,

Carter’s reply to the critics! Texas chilli, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp…preferably through his back passage.

This – Clapp’s description and Carter’s message, both - is pure Carter fiction territory: vehement, salty, violent yet camp, the image of beef and chilli turned to one of gore and guts, nutritive turned into purgative, a recipe for the rectum, the domestic made demonic. But the brevity and sharpness of the message is typical Carter too. She was as much a honer and an architect as she was an impresario or conjurer of literary circus tricks. The stories may happen in the lurid glare of a carnival tent – but the tent’s held up with iron pegs and metal rigging. There is method to the madness, deftness to the dazzle.

It has always bothered me that Carter’s work is often described in terms of stylistic effect, symbolic resonance and folkloric influence rather than mental effort or thematic craft. She is depicted (as Clapp acknowledges) as a literary aerialist exulting in costume, a dazzler magicking up a false yet apposite paradox-world of masquerade and bewitchment, of things pretending to be other things in an infinite hall of mirrors, references refracting off references. It is as though, if one were to smash the mirrors, there would be nothing behind them but stage lights and severed puppet strings. Carter’s fiction is presented by critics as one of high theatricality and loosely picaresque plotting, wild abandon held together with the strands of an unravelling devorée  shawl and a spot of false eyelash glue. The books and their characters seem to survive on sheer guts and willpower.

This is a false impression, peddled as much by her lovers as her detractors. Angela Carter wrote with an iron fist in a sequined, fringed, marabou-trimmed lamé glove, holding a scalpel quill. She was a consummate artisan as well as an inspired artist, a romantic as well as an intellectual, a sensualist and a stylist. She may have presided over the revels, but she organised them well in advance and made sure the schedule ran to time. That, in life as well as art, is one of the secrets of great creation: one labours meticulously, tightening those symmetries, buffing those commas, to make it look as though one wrote it (and compel readers to consume it) in a single exuberant swoop.

There is a satisfying tension between the baroque fantasy of what happens in Carter’s fiction and the austere precision with which it is planned; between the lavish indulgences of her characters and their speech and the stern control of Carter’s own ideas. Her characters - whether they are the mercurial, curious, stubborn and inquisitive protagonists of her famous collection The Bloody Chamber or the loquacious giant swan-heroine Fevvers in Nights at the Circus - do not merely enact mechanistic reversals of traditional fairytale martyrdom, overturn overdone gender clichés or blather on pointlessly for page after page of earthy ventriloquism. They are fully imagined lovers, fighters, thinkers, adventurers, charismatic beings. They have heart and soul; they are not just strung up in Carter’s sequence of symbolic events. Readers love Carter because Carter is fun to read: a fantasy novelist who writes ripping yarns that make you feel anything is possible.

A Card from Angela Carter restores the idea of Carter as a constructor of tremendous skill as well as a creator of wild genius. The postcards are merely a device to pay tribute, to illuminate, to analyse, to commemorate and to critique. On their few hasty lines, Susannah Clapp has managed (like a Carter character herself) to spin and hang a tight, light and glittering biography, beginning to end, with teaching jaunts, prize-judging and prize-winning, family, career, lifelong love and mortal illness in between. I am not quoting much from the book because I want you to buy it. But I had to put in this wonderful line:

Her card was a photograph of an armadillo, a curved creature picking its way, like an elderly millionairess, through prickly undergrowth.

Days after having read it I am still wondering how Clapp did it. In barely a hundred pages she has performed an origami trick of stunning expertise, folding an entire life into a half-inch width of book, summarising a life and a body of work, conveying a steely awareness of time’s passing, a sense of history and a complex depiction of Carter’s character and contribution. With her icy, smooth humour and beautiful spare prose, Clapp strips out the tinny taint of campness that surrounds Carter. She does away with the standard critical soundbites – of the macabre, the kitsch, the playful, the carnivalesque, of masquerades and harlequins, dolls and hybrids, fairy lives and horror tales – that obscure Angela Carter under a thick white greasepaint of cliché.

There is not one great mind here, there are two, and both have been undersold. Susannah Clapp’s previous book, With Chatwin, is a superlative personal memorography of the travel writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, whom she was close to. It was praised fulsomely by all the major papers when it came out some years ago. These lines of praise are to be found, rightly, on the back of A Card From Angela Carter. But Clapp has not produced a major full-length work since, despite her tremendous talent and huge fanbase, obvious from her popular theatre reviews for the Observer, her erudite wit as a theatre critic for Night Waves on Radio 3, her pedigree as a co-founder of the London Review of Books (for whom Angela Carter was a longtime writer) and the support and joy which has greeted the publication of  A Card from Angela Carter. It has only been out a week and it’s been covered with great positivity in The Observer (who gave it their Review section cover) and The Guardian, flagged up as a must-buy in ES magazine, reviewed well in The Independent and made a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

I want more from Susannah Clapp. I want a big book. Two thousand word reviews and one hundred page books are too meagre for a magnificent mind and a wide wit. Write a satire about a Biba-chic theatre critic, why don’t you? Just keep a diary and change the names at the end.

A Card From Angela Carter has been created with obvious devotion. Its controlled yet luxurious cream, black, gold and red cover was designed by the brilliant Holly Macdonald and the lovely red-inked endpapers were drawn by Carter’s longtime collaborator Corinna Sargood. There is a twist in the plot to do with these endpapers, which I won’t reveal except to say that it brings tears to the eyes and fully establishes this book as a serious eulogy for a dazzling talent too briefly explored…

…and too thinly praised. Carter was always loved by readers, much admired by other writers and reviewed thoroughly and respectfully. She was a prolific journalist whose great insight turned even casual reviews into weighty and important cultural essays with wide relevance. She was adapted very successfully for film (notably by Neil Jordan for The Company of Wolves) and was an acclaimed dramatist for radio, as well as working speculatively in theatre. However, none of Carter’s novels had ever been Booker nominated. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published with great fanfare but ignored by that year’s Booker jury, leading directly to the establishment of the Orange Prize, now in its 17^th year.  Clapp writes, “Her early death sent her reputation soaring.” She adds, however, that

[Carter] was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternative pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties...

Twenty years after Angela Carter’s death, there is still no major biography of her and no major mainstream critical volume about her work. Could I propose here a small reconsideration of a speculative amateur scholar’s enquiry entitled… Magical Democracy?

Until I complete that magnum opus of trenchant literary criticism and squealing sycophantic hagiography, A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp can be purchased everywhere, published by Bloomsbury.

!Women Art Revolution: a brilliant and salutary film by Lynn Hershman Leeson

I am writing to celebrate the film Women Art Revolution, poster image above, which is being showcased by one of my favourite London galleries, the Whitechapel. For over forty years, Director Lynn Hershman Leeson has collected hundreds of hours of interviews with visionary artists, historians, curators and critics who shaped the beliefs and values of the Feminist Art Movement and reveal previously undocumented strategies used to politicize female artists and integrate women into art structures.

!Women Art Revolution elaborates the relationship of the Feminist Art Movement to the 1960s anti-war and civil rights movements and explains how historical events, such as the all-male protest exhibition against the invasion of Cambodia, sparked the first of many feminist actions against major cultural institutions. The film details major developments in women’s art of the 1970s, including the first feminist art education programs, political organizations and protests, alternative art spaces such as the A.I.R. Gallery and Franklin Furnace in New York and the Los Angeles Women’s Building, publications such as Chrysalis and Heresies, and landmark exhibitions, performances, and installations of public art that changed the entire direction of art. New ways of thinking about the complexities of gender, race, class, and sexuality evolved. The Guerrilla Girls emerged as the conscience of the art world and held academic institutions, galleries, and museums accountable for discrimination practices.

Over time, the tenacity and courage of these pioneering women artists resulted in what many historians now feel is the most significant art movement of the late 20th century. Carrie Brownstein composed an original score to accompany the film. Laurie Anderson, Janis Joplin, Sleater-Kinney, The Gossip, Erase Errata and Tribe 8 are some of the gifted musicians who contributed to our soundtrack.

About Lynn Hershman Leeson:
Writer / Director / Producer / Editor Lynn Hershman Leeson pioneered site specific, performance and interactive media. Most recently, she was honored by the Digital Art Museum in Berlin with the d.velop digital art award (d.daa), the most distinguished honor for lifetime achievement in the field of new media. Her other honors include the prestigious Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica, the ZKM/Seimens Media Arts Award and, as a Sundance Screenwriter Fellow, she was honored with the Flintridge Foundation Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts. She has also received The Alfred P. Sloan Film Prize for writing and directing Teknolust, and in 2006, the International Association of Digital Arts award for “innovative storytelling,” Zero One Prize for “Media that Matters” and a Creative Capital Grant for her documentary, !Women Art Revolution. In 2009, she became a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Siggraph. Hershman Leeson wrote, directed and produced the feature films Teknolust, Conceiving Ada and Strange Culture, in addition to 14 other films and shorts. The films starred Tilda Swinton, were shown at the Sundance Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and Berlin International Film Festival, and were all internationally distributed. Her artwork is held in numerous collections, including at the Museum of Modern Art (New York), The National Gallery of Canada, DG Bank (Frankfurt) and The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis). She has published extensively, is the Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and Emeritus Professor at the University of California.

Screening dates for !Women Art Revolution: 

• The official UK Première, Launch and In Conversation between Lynn Hershman Leeson & Achim Borchardt-Hume, Whitechapel Gallery's Chief Curator, is on Saturday 15 October at 3pm. The price is £6/ £4 concessions.
• Free screenings are on Sunday 30 October at 3pm, Sunday 13 November at 3pm and Sunday 27 November at 3pm
• There will be a screening and In Conversation between Griselda Pollock and Lynn Hershman Leeson on Sunday 11 December at 3pm, price £6

text (c) Whitechapel Gallery press

A great variety of art. Not a great variety of artists.

An image from the Hackney Hoard show at Galerie 8

This year I have written in celebration of the Max Mara Art Prize for women, showcased at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The Whitechapel has an excellent track record in supporting women artists: its comeback show after months of restoration featured the work of Goshka Macuga and Isa Genzken, amongst others. Even the thinking behind the Turner Prize, notorious within the art world for being awarded to such a small number of women artists over the long duration of its history, has transformed in the last ten years, with a marked increase in women shortlistees and women winners. This is all to the credit of the art world, which has been quicker on its feet than the literary and classical music worlds when it comes to crediting women for our creativity and intellect. Recent major exhibitions and retrospectives in the UK have given cultural space to Maria Lassnig, Polly Morgan, photographer Dorothy Bohm (at Manchester Art Gallery), Marina Ambramovich, Fiona Banner, Nancy Spero, Annette Messager, Eva Rothschild, Tracey Emin (currently on at the Hayward) and Susan Hiller and I have every hope that this trend will continue. In the last few years Emin and Barbara Kruger have represented Britain and America respectively at the Venice Biennale (Emin being only the 2nd female artist ever to do so) and I hope their presence counteracts somewhat the utterly damning art world statistics given on the Guerilla Girls' brilliant posters, which I saw at the 2005 Biennale.

It's heartening to see an entire international industry and a great and grand discipline with centuries of history change in so short a time. I feel hopeful...until I read Brian Sewell's openly misogynistic ripdowns of Tracey Emin and Susan Hiller, until I realise that only one of the major newspapers picked up on the Women Make Sculpture show at the Pangolin Gallery - and until I get a press release like the below:

Hackney Hoard
Opening celebration: Thursday 21 July 2011 / 6 - 9 PM
With a special performance by Doug Fishbone

GALERIE8 proudly presents Hackney Hoard, a project initiated by celebrated artist and amateur London historian Adam Dant. The exhibition takes the discovery and narrative surrounding the find of the “Hackney Hoard” as a starting point and what follows, is an inquiry of the value and status placed on contemporary art objects.

Including an introduction by finder Terence Castle, and artworks by Adam Dant, Le Gun artists, Matthew Killick, Annabel Tilley, and Gavin Turk.

The Hackney Hoard exhibition is part of GALERIE8's summer opening series of events entitled Launching Pad to begin its residency within the Arthaus building. This diverse exhibition, both visual and interactive, engaging and reflective, will include a series based on events, sound and performance art, a publishing fair, film screenings and theatre evenings.

Le Gun are a collective of illustrators whose work is exciting, fresh and original. The collective is made up of 8 men and 1 woman. Of the rest of the named artists invited to participate in Hackney Hoard, there are 4 men (Adam Dant, Matthew Killick, Gavin Turk and Doug Fishbone) and 1 woman, Annabel Tilley. I am sure that all are excellent - as well as Le Gun, I love Gavin Turk's work. But don't tell me that a grand total of 12 men and 2 women participants is anything like a free and fair representation of all the possible creativity, genius, artistry, insight, history, performance, collaboration, energy and thinking that the show's organisers could have accessed. The PRs for these exhibitions are always, of course, female. I wonder how they feel, working so hard to support projects whose perks and credit go only to the men in power. I have run out of interest in perpetrators' excuses, lies and victim-blaming ("it's women's fault - women are scarce - shy - small - unpushy - having babies - emotional - absent - less bothered about success/fame/money/career"). Don't tell me that it's just a funny and sad coincidence that all the really really great work is done by men and all the really really shit work is done by women and, hey, that's just how it is. I mean, the current Galerie 8 show features a woman artist, Mary Yacoob, so they obviously know some. The audience for all cultural events in all disciplines from dance to music to literature to art to design to theatre is always at least half and usually majority female. We deserve better. Turn it around.

4th MaxMara Art Prize shortlist announced

Last night the Whitechapel Art Gallery and MaxMara announced the names of the five artists who have been shortlisted for the fourth MaxMara Art Prize For Women and launched the exhibition of the most recent winner, Andrea Buttner:

Extract of work by MaxMara Art Prize winner Andrea Buttner, currently on
show at the Whitechapel Gallery.

From drawing and sculpture to filmmaking and performance the MaxMara Prize this year offers real diversity in practice whilst showcasing some of the best work by women artists in the UK today. The short-listed artists are Christina Mackie, Avis Newman, Emily Wardill, Spartacus Chetwynd and Laure Prouvost.  The Judging panel was chaired by Iwona Blazwick, Director of The Whitechapel Gallery and included Gilda Williams, critic and lecturer; Amanda Wilkinson, gallerist; Lisa Milroy, artist and Muriel Salem, collector.

The MaxMara Art Prize for Women is the only UK art prize for women and was set up to promote and nurture female artists based in the United Kingdom, enabling artists to develop their potential and providing an opportunity for them to produce new works of art.  The prize itself will result in a six month residency based in Italy and an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery.

An Evening With Jabba the Hutt, by Spartacus Chetwynd

Spartacus Chetwynd  (b. 1973, London) studied Social Anthropology at UCL before completing a BA in Fine Art at the Slade and an MA in Painting at the RCA.  She works in both performance and painting. Her DIY performances re-enact iconic scenes from literature, cinema and art using handmade costumes, choreography and elaborate stage sets. She has performed at Frieze Art Fair, Art Basel, ICA and Tate Modern and has had solo shows in Milan, Dijon and Zurich.

Christina Mackie  (b.1956, Oxford) studied at Vancouver School of Art and Central St. Martins. Mackie makes sets of sculptures that interlock to form installations. She has had solos shows at the Henry Moore Institute and Tate Britain and will have an exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery in London in 2012. Her work has been included in the British Art Show and the Busan Biennial. In 2005 she was awarded the Becks Futures prize and in 2010 the Hamlyn Award for Artists.

Avis Newman (b. 1946, London) studied at The Central School of Art and Goldsmiths College. Her layered, minimal canvas works, objects and works on paper show a longstanding preoccupation with the fundamental language of marking and inscribing and the initial moment of tracing. She has work in various public collections including Tate, London and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  Solo exhibitions include: Renaissance Society, University of Chicago, de Appel Foundation, Amsterdam. Camden Arts Centre, London, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney.

Laure Prouvost  (b. 1978, Croix-Lille, France ) lives and works in London. She graduated from Central Saint Martins and took part of the Lux Artist Associate Program. Her work includes painting, video, sound and site specific works.  She has exhibited at Tate Britain, ICA, Serpentine and BFI. She opens a solo show at MOT International in April 2011. She was awarded the 56th Oberhausen Short Film Principal Prize (2010), a FLAMIN award  (2011) and the EAST International Award (2009).

Game Keepers Without Game, by Emily Wardill

Emily Wardill  (b. 1977) is a London-based filmmaker and performance artist. She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and works predominantly in film and video.  She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally with solo shows at the ICA, London and PS1 New York; screenings at the London Film Festival and performances at the Serpentine Gallery. In 2010 she won The Jarman Award and her work is currently on show in The British Art Show at the Hayward.

Each of the artists will now be asked to create a presentation on their plans. The winner will be announced in September 2011 and the project realised during a six-month residency in 2012.  The residency is divided into two locations - the American Academy, Rome and the Pistoletto Foundation, Biella. The resulting work will then be offered to the Maramotti Collection for acquisition, and an exhibition of the resulting work will take place at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 2013.

The Maramotti family, owners of the MaxMara Fashion Group, are major contemporary art collectors. The MaxMara Art Prize for Women is the first time the fashion house has established an arts prize in the UK and reflects the company’s strong association with art and women.  The Max Mara Fashion Group was founded in 1951 by Achille Maramotti and is now run by the next generation. The company is one of the largest women’s prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) manufacturers in the world, with 2082 stores and 23 different brands sold in more than 90 different countries in the world. On 29th September 2007 the Collezione Maramotti opened to the public in Reggio Emilia, Italy. For further information, please visit www.collezionemaramotti.org. The first winner of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women was Margaret Salmon, the second was Hannah Rickards and the third Andrea Büttner, whose show is currently on at The Whitechapel. For more details click here.

Iwona Blazwick OBE, Director, Whitechapel Gallery said, “The Whitechapel Gallery has a long tradition of premiering female artists and the Max Mara Art Prize is close to our heart as it champions and supports female artists.  The short-listed artists for the next award offer a snapshot of the sheer calibre of art being made by women in Britain today.  The judges very much hope to bring these artists and their work to even wider attention.  For the winner the judges are looking for something exceptional and an artistic practice that is truly fascinating, and look forward to being able to give the winner of the Max Mara Art Prize the gift of time to develop new works of art.”

For more details visit The Whitechapel Gallery website.