Paperback review

Published in The Telegraph, 12/01/13

The Children’s Hospital by Chris Adrian

This post-apocalyptic tale begins with the end of the world and ends with a new beginning for humanity. After a great deluge floods the world seven miles out of existence, a single hospital remains, designed to keep afloat by prophetic architect John Grampus. In the self-sustaining, self-contained new world that is The Children’s Hospital, it is up to medical student Jemma Claflin, gifted with magical powers, to lead humanity – Moses to Grampus’s Noah. Adrian, a Harvard-educated oncologist and theologian, peppers his uplifting prose with harrowing descriptions of suffering, richly establishing himself as an American fabulist in the tradition of Tony Kushner (the story is narrated by angels, to boot).

Paperback review

Published in The Telegraph, 12/01/13

Jack Holmes and his Friend by Edmund White

Edmund White’s subtle portrait of gay libertine Jack Holmes and his straight best friend, Will, is a sophisticated examination of two selves that has as much to say about essential human desires as about 60s sexual mores. The novel follows the eponymous duo from their first meeting as writers in early 60s New York until the onset of Aids, charting their relationship as it’s shaped by unrequited love, aesthetic failure and the flowering, then foreclosing, of sexual revolution. Jack Holmes and His Friend achieves a greater clarity and a deeper empathy than White’s previous novel A Boy’s Own Story, and for these grown-up virtues it is worthy reading.

Paperback review

Published in The Telegraph, 12/01/13

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

Starting from the premise that God is dead, Alain de Botton nevertheless insists secular society could do with the disciplines and practices enshrined by religion. He argues religion offers boundaries and insights that today’s corporations, universities and buildings lack. A Catholic Mass, for example, is a web of techniques to “strengthen congregants’ bonds of affection” and the Jewish Day of Atonement is a “psychologically effective mechanism” for the resolution of social conflict. Universities with relationships departments and e-Wailing Walls might help replace religion, but in penetrating, stately prose, de Botton ultimately presents religion as the greatest source of practical advice on how to live our lives.

Royal Society of Literature announces Jerwood Awards

Published in The Telegraph

Last night the Royal Society of Literature announced the winners of its annual Jerwood Awards for Non-Fiction at a ceremony in the Savile Club.

The awards – exclusively for works in progress by first-time authors – went to British-Iranian journalist Ramita Navai, forensic psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead and the critic Edmund Gordon.

Navai, who has won plaudits as a foreign correspondent in Syria, including an Emmy Award for her work on the television documentary Syria Undercover, was awarded £10,000 for her book City of Lies: the Undercover Truth about Tehran, an exploration of the elusive character of the Iranian capital, weaving together the lives of its inhabitants, its colourful history and the rich tapestry of its cultural heritage.

Adshead, a consultant at the Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital in Berkshire, was awarded £5000 for A Short Book About Evil, an anatomy of evil that combines clinical vignettes with studies in psychology and theology.

Edmund Gordon was also awarded £5000 for his much-anticipated biography Angela Carter: the Biography, which will not only tell the story of the life of the English feminist novelist but also the cultural history of Britain in the 1960s.

They join a long list of literary luminaries who first found acclaim at the Jerwood Awards, running since 2004 with sponsorship by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation, including Alexander Monro, Selina Mills and Rachel Campbell-Johnston.

The judges, authors Richard Davenport-Hines and Caroline Moorehead, and The Telegraph’s own literary editor Gaby Wood, stressed the importance of the awards as a financial lifeline for writers when most in need of resources.

City of Lies and A Short Book About Evil are both slated for publication in 2014, while Angela Carter: The Biography is due out in 2016.

Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare in the Arab world

This is a podcast from Pod Academy with Prof Margaret Litvin, looking at the curious phenomenon of Shakespeare in the Arab world. In it you’ll learn whether or not Shakespeare was an Arab called Shaykh Zubair, that Shakespeare had already been performed in Yemen within Shakespeare’s own lifetime, and that the most famous Shakespeare ‘text’ in the Arab world is not an early modern English stageplay, but a 20th-century Russian film.

http://podacademy.org/podcasts/hamlets-arab-journey-shakespeare-in-the-arab-world/

 

Theatre’s Arab Turn

Published in The White Review

Apart from the odd Shakespearean exception, from Othello the Moor of Venice to the Merchant of Venice’s marginal Moroccan suitor, The Prince of Morocco, Arabs have never pulled off a prominent presence on the British stage. Strictly speaking, the examples cited aren’t even Arabs. However, in recent years a burgeoning fashion for theatre from or about the Arab world has madeBritain host to the Western world’s greatest cacophony of Arabic voices on stage.

As the groundbreaking World Shakespeare Festival comes to a close, it is worth noting a salutary fact amid worsening regional relations: there were more Arabic-language productions in Britain than in any other language besides English: Cymbeline at The Globe in Juba Arabic; Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad at the Swan Theatre in Iraqi Arabic; and a Palestinian Arabic production of Richard II, also at The Globe. There even came a point a few weeks ago where it would have been possible to see Shakespeare in Arabic three days in a row.

One might legitimately ask whether these Shakespeare performances are Arabic voices. Shakespeare was no Arab, although some Arabs have been wont to pass him off as one; an Iraqi literary critic once joked that Shakespeare is an Anglicism of an Arab bard named Shaykh Zubair; who else but an Arab could hate Jews, Turks and the French with Shakespeare’s stubbornness?

Even amid The Globe’s Elizabethan awnings and Tudor beams, no one could doubt while watching the Ramallah-based Ashtar Theatre Company’s Richard II that this was an original Arabic voice, especially when a dethroned Richard rots in a morbidly Middle Eastern gaol (not necessarily Israeli, and the better for it). Meanwhile, a symbolically subverted (South) Sudanese Cymbeline sides with the ancient Britons against imperialRome, but – in a postcolonial twist – the Romans arrive dressed in the khakis of British imperialism.

This was Shakespeare directed and performed by Arabs in Arabic. Once, Shakespeare’s Arabs were ciphers for his voice – like countless Middle Eastern politicians, those Arabs were puppets at an Englishman’s mercy. But at the World Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare himself became a cipher for Arab voices. In the Arab world, this is actually nothing new. Shakespeare remains perennially popular fare in the theatres of revolutionaryCairo, strife-riddenDamascus, even on a few, gender-segregated salafist Saudi stages (where, with women forbidden from performing the female roles, performances are arguably truer to Shakespeare than anything at The Globe).

The Arab Shakespeare isn’t English, and indeed never was. Even the most famous Shakespeare text in the Arab world is a Russian film, Grigori Kozintsev’s Gamlet from 1964. Dutifully dispersed in the Middle East by the Soviet Union’s army of cultural attachés, Gamlet’s prison guards, spies, effigies of the dictator Claudius, resonated with Egyptians under Nasser. Only the Prophet Muhammad himself is more commonly quoted than Shakespeare, and lends only a little less legitimacy.

But the Arab appropriation of Shakespeare usually takes an original, and unexpected, turn. The hesitant Hamlet’s existential dithering, translated into Arabic as “Shall we be or not be?”, becomes invested with the radical urgency, once of Arab Nationalism and now the Arab Spring, emblazoned in felt-tip all over cardboard placards at Tahrir Square. Even Islamists were quoting Hamlet at the time of the Danish cartoon controversy a few years ago: “Something is rotten in the state ofDenmark”. Shakespeare donned a turban and went native. Or as they would have said in Shakespeare’s day, he “turned Turk”. This summer, for the first time, Shaykh Zubair visited Shakespeare’s shores.

But Shaykh Zubair is not alone. His visit is part of a much more exciting phenomenon, which involves less ambiguously Arabic voices than the appropriation of a classic, “Western” author. The National Theatre of Scotland’s coincidentally coterminous season, ‘One Day In Spring’, has brought to Glasgowand Edinburghseven new plays from the Arab world – despite the NTS’s parochial remit. The London International Festival of Theatre also includes the premiere this month of Lebanese dramatist Lucien Bourjeily’s 66 Minutes in Damascus, as well as Leila and Ben, a Macbeth-inspired Tunisian tragicomedy, to premiere in July. At Notting Hill’s Gate Theatre curtains have also just opened on Iraqi playwright Hassan Abdulrazzak’s The Prophet. Why does British theatre now have its sights set on the Arab world?

The topical currency of the Arab Spring is an inevitable influence – the NTS season’s title, ‘One Day In Spring’, as well as The Prophet’s staging as part of the Gate Theatre’s ‘Resist!’ season, somewhat gives the game away. But only somewhat. The Globe’s Arabic productions had already been pencilled in before Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself, literally sparking off the Arab Spring. None of the Shakespeare performances had any obvious allusions to these events, not even Richard II, a tale of an over-powerful overlord, overthrown by popular uprising. As the Ashtar team repeatedly professed: “It’s notSyria!” OrEgypt,Libya,Yemen, or any of the countries that have played roles in the drama of the Arab Spring.

The cultural currency of the Arab Spring doesn’t do justice to the full story behind even those plays staged as part of obviously political programmes. Although it is set in Cairoamid Mubarak’s fall, The Prophet is a domestic drama that takes place inside the claustrophobic confines of an apartment. Its protagonist riffs on the benefits of a Brazilian and while her contrived connection between the concepts of “the pubic” and “the public” hint at goings-on outside her private sphere; this is a play whose meaning and reputation will stand above contemporaryCairo.

‘One Day In Spring’ adopts a similar attitude. The season’s eponymous keynote performance, a play curiously “curated” by David Greig from texts by Arab authors, revolves around “24 hours in the Middle East” . It doesn’t shy away from the banalities of, say, a supermarket shopping spree or an off-the-cuff one-night-stand: agitprop, it ain’t. The Guardian’s Mark Fisher even called it a “comic cabaret”, although that’s not quite right. Cabaret is the epitome of theatrical escapism, but One Day In Spring was still a politicised portrait of Arab revolution, just warts and all. It might be better christened a political pantomime, what with its gamely audience shouts of “Down with the regime”.

At any rate, David MacLennan, the producer, was already in talks with Greig about bringing Arab voices to the Scottish stage when events kicked off in December 2010. Pegging the programme to the Arab Spring was more an after-thought, or a marketing move. But if not the Arab Spring, what then accounts for theatre’s Arab turn? One might mischievously note that Monadhil Daood, the Iraqi director of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Romeo and Juliet in Baghdad, is married to the World Shakespeare Festival’s director, Deborah Shaw.

In truth, all of this has been anteceded by a little-noted insurgence of interest in the Arab world that has played out in British theatres (alongside galleries, cinemas, publishing houses and university departments) for some years now. When did it all start? Notably, no Arabic-themed theatre production can be traced in the year 2001, but in every year since then a dramatic rise in such productions can be observed. It seems theTwinTowers weren’t the only things to explode on 9/11; an explosion of interest in Arab-themed theatre soon followed and has grown unabated to this very day.

Take the halfway point between then and now, the year 2007, and the upsurge is remarkable. The Arabic-themed theatrical highlights of that year included Hassan Abdulrazzak’s Baghdad Wedding at the Soho Theatre in 2007, recounting the returning experiences of London-based Iraqi expats; David Greig’s Syrian satire of cultural correctness, Damascus (successful enough at Edinburgh for a London transfer); and Richard III: An Arab Tragedy, at the Swan theatre, by Anglo-Kuwaiti dramatist Sulayman al-Bassam.

Unlike a play like Gregory Burke’s Iraq War-set Black Watch (2006), where the Middle East is a dusty, desert backdrop for British characters dealing with British themes, these plays directly address the difficulties of Arab-British relations. Damascus was about a British publisher off to flog textbooks to the University of Damascus, only to have his expectations confounded by a sexy Syrian academic who, for starters, insists that the female illustrations in his books remain unveiled. Baghdad Wedding’s bisexual, pro-invasion Salim also has his perception subverted, turning against Britain after a wedding is wrecked by a missile. Even al-Bassam’s Richard III was hijacked by references to the Koran, kohl and camels,(what to expect from a director whose Al-Hamlet Summit depicted Ophelia as a suicide bomber?). In creating authentic Arab theatre out of a history play set during that most iconically English period, the War of the Roses, it was for one critic “a meta-meditation on the mobility of literature between England and the Arab world”.

Even when the pre-eminent theme of Arab-British relations is not directly addressed within the play’s internal world, the performance of Arab voices in Britain is itself a direct challenge to the status quo of Arab-British relations; once characterised by absence, but now by as impassioned a voice as, say, Raja Shehadeh’s When The Bulbul Stopped Singing (2004), which documents the occupation he endures in Palestine for a British audience whose government tacitly allows it to continue.

Most importantly, this isn’t a one-way process. At the Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival, Egypt’s first arts festival since its revolution, a panoply of English experimental theatre did the rounds in Cairo. Tim Etchells’s Sight is the sense that dying people lose first was publicised as a “free-associative monologue by a child, a psychotic or a Martian”. Quizoola!, by Forced Entertainment, was an encyclopaedic interrogation of three clowns in shabby make-up, the audience free to leave as and when they please. That wouldn’t have been possible at Ant Hampton’s Ok Ok, where the audience became the performers, communicating with an animated face on a television screen while receiving instructions from headphones. As an Egyptian audience member put it: “it was like being on a kind of mental amusement park ride. The surrender of agency was a relief.” Egyptians have been as surprised by their exposure to British theatre as Brits have to theatre from and about the Arab world.

These populations have long seen each other as crusty cultures. Now a new perception is taking root, one of openness, boldness and non-conformity. The curse of Arab-British relations was that they perennially pointed to the past. Now, in the theatre at least, their images of each other are locked in on the future. Amid the region’s present precarious politics, some hope can be garnered from the theatre as a flourishing forum for Arab-British encounters.

At times relations between Britainand the Arab world have actually galvanised the odd theatrical landmark, most famously John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957) set during the Suez Crisis. But right now, we are witnessing the inverse: a few theatrical landmarks are galvanising relations betweenBritain and the Arab world.

Why the Middle East embraces Edward Albee

Published in The Guardian

It may seem odd that when Egypt’s military rulers are cracking down on American NGOs and threatening to disqualify a presidential candidate on the grounds that his mother held a US passport, a play by the gay, American absurdist dramatist Edward Albee can be staged in Cairo to such acclaim. A recent production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf at the Gomhouria theatre in Cairo cannot but provoke the question: how does the Middle East square its farcical anti-American currents with its admiration for an arch-American farce like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

It turns out the recent production was preceded, last September, by another at El Sawy Culturewheel. In fact, during the past 12 months there have been more professional productions of Albee’s plays in Cairo than in London. But it wasn’t the last 12 months’ revolutionary upheavals that kindled the curiosity in Egypt about this revolutionary playwright.

Egyptian encounters with Albee began as early as the 1960s. Indeed, so enthralled have Egyptians been even by Albee’s obscurer works it seems absurd (fittingly for one dubbed the ‘American Samuel Beckett’). For example, in 1970 Albee’s arcane play Everything in the Garden was broadcast by Egyptian state television, and later sold to other networks in the Middle East.

Most remarkably, Albee has inspired original Arabic works, like Yusuf Fadhil’s novel,Qissat Hadeeqat al-Hayawan (“The Story of the Zoo”), about a troupe of actors performing The Zoo Story in a drink-sodden, bureacratic Casablanca that would be familiar to Humphrey Bogart.

Yet Albee betrays no interest in the Middle East, bar one remark in his collected essayscriticising US sponsorship of King “Farouk & Co” and a casual, figurative allusion to Egyptian camels in Seascape, a play otherwise about giant lizards discussing evolution on Montauk Beach. What does the Middle East see in this purveyor of absurdist Americana?

Maybe it’s best-known repartee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, when hostess Martha screams at husband George: “If you existed, I’d divorce you!” Isn’t this more or less what Israelis and Arabs have been saying to each other for a long time?

Or perhaps Arab audiences couldn’t ignore Albee’s naming of the fictitious campus town in which the play takes place “New Carthage”. Isn’t Albee nodding to the Carthaginian civilisation that flourished in present-day Tunisia: birthplace of the Arab Spring? Wasn’t Carthage itself founded by Phoenicians from present-day Syria: right now the Arab Spring’s fiercest battleground?

Clearly, quarrying for Middle Eastern resonances in a classic American play is a tenuous endeavour, especially when the American context fundamentally grounds his plays, whether in the New England campus drawing-room of Virginia Woolf or New York’s Central Park in The Zoo Story?

In fact, Albee’s works attract Arab audiences not in spite of their distinctly American identity, but because of it. In The Zoo Story, America is Peter, the middle-class executive, but America is also his vagabond interlocutor, Jerry. They are gradually exposed as moral doppelgängers, US nihilism laid bare.

That unpopular message ensured Albee couldn’t find a producer in the United States (the play premiered in leftist Berlin). In 1961, Republican grandee Prescott Bush, George W Bush’s grandfather, denounced it on the US Senate floor as “filthy” and tainted by communism.

But The Zoo Story’s unpopularity at home underwrote its Arab acclaim. It is, for example, a staple of the Syrian stage, from the notable 1978 production by Walid Kowatli (the Soviet-trained doyen of Damascus drama) to Dar al-Assad’s 2010 production which was successful enough to go on tour, including to Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina.

The Zoo Story has never been produced for television in the US, yet Syrian television had already broadcast a version by 1979. Credit for the first-ever TV production, however, goes to Pakistan’s state broadcaster for a 1968 adaptation by a then-unknown Cambridge graduate called Salman Rushdie.

The Zoo Story is the most celebrated of Albee’s plays in the Middle East because it best satisfies a penchant for his caustic critique of American bourgeois respectability.

The Albee phenomenon in the Middle East is perhaps a mirror image of the enthusiasm with which the Muslim misery memoirs of Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and others are received in the west; they confirm prejudices about the other. Rushdie’s popularity in the west and concomitant Islamic infamy is, in some ways, the counterpart to Albee. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s (quite literal) stab at literary criticism is the mirror image of Prescott Bush’s admittedly fatwa-free fury.

Trust a teacher, Maureen Flanagan, to draw the right lesson. Following a spell at Alexandria University, where her Egyptian students singled out Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf for praise, she cautions how “presenting a worst-case scenario or engaging in fairly vicious satire” – as Albee does – “can be accepted by another culture as simply a true portrait of the entire society”. That is as much a lesson for western admirers of ex-Muslim critics of Islam like Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and Salman Rusdhie as for Albee’s Arab acolytes.

The Arab Edward Al-Bee

Published in Pulse Media, April 2012

Cairo’s culture vultures were surprised this month by a curious quirk in the state-run Gomhouria Theatre’s programme: a new production Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Amid electoral strife, martial rule and the precarious politics of the Arab Spring, one might have thought the metropolitan, mainly Muslim, audience who flocked to see it would have had more crucial things on their minds than the works of the gay, absurdist American dramatist Edward Albee.

This production was no anomaly, hot on the heels of one last September at Cairo’s Sawy Culture Wheel, making two professional productions in the last year–that’s more than London. But it wasn’t last year’s revolutionary politics that kindled the curiosity in Egypt about this revolutionary playwright: Albee’s Egyptian encounters began as early as the 60s. Indeed, so enthralled have Egyptians been even by Albee’s obscurer works it seems – fittingly for one dubbed the ‘American Samuel Beckett’ – absurd. For example, in 1970 there was an acclaimed production of Albee’s arcane play Everything in the Garden, which Egyptian state television even saw fit to broadcast.

Albee’s Arab allure extends well beyond Egypt. “Everything in the Garden was so popular,” its director Mahmoud Haridy tells me, “they sold it to other TV stations in the Middle East”. Most remarkably, Albee’s work has even given rise to original Arabic works. Zoo Story’s popularity in Morocco spawned Yusuf Fadhil’s bestselling novel Qissat Hadeeqat al-Hayawan (‘The Story of the Zoo’), about a troupe of actors performing it in 1970s Casablanca (incidentally, as drink-sodden and bureacratic as in Humphrey Bogart’s day).

But what appeals to the Middle Eastabout this purveyor of absurdist Americana? Certainly, Albee doesn’t betray any demonstrable interest in the Middle East. His only references to the region comprise a throw-away criticism in his collected essays of US sponsorship of “King Farouk and co.” and a casual, figurative allusion to Egyptian camels in Seascape, a play otherwise about giant lizards discussing evolution on New Jersey’s Montauk beach. What appeals to Arabs about this purveyor of absurdist Americana?

It is possible that his popularity is a mere matter of deference to the Western literary canon, like another Western dramatist, William Shakespeare, so well-loved that he has been claimed as an Arab bard named Shaykh Zubair. But this seems a stretch: Albee’s name has divided both the academy and the audiences. In leading critic Fintan O’ Toole’s authoritative words: “Albee’s standing as a dramatist has been extraordinarily insecure” Moreover, last year’s staging of Eugene O’ Neill’s populist play Anna Christie at Cairo’s Al-Talia Theatre proved that a solid literary reputation is not enough to draw in the punters; Nehad Selaiha reports that when she went to review it for Al-Ahram, she was the sole member of the audience, this despite the pulling power of soap star Said Abdel Ghany.

Albee’s popularity in the region, then, must have something to do with the themes his plays treat. Maybe it’s the play’s best-known repartee, when hostess Martha screams at husband George: “If you existed, I’d divorce you!” – isn’t this more or less what Israelis and Arabs have been saying to each other for a long time? Perhaps Arab audiences couldn’t ignore Albee’s naming of the fictitious campus town in which Virginia Woolf takes place “New Carthage”. Isn’t Albee nodding to the Carthaginian civilisation that flourished in present-day Tunisia: birthplace of the Arab Spring? Wasn’t Carthage itself founded by Phoenicians from present-day Syria: right now the Arab Spring’s fiercest battleground?

The American critic C. N. Stavrou’s even imaginatively conceived Peter and Jerry’s encounter in the New York of Albee’s debut Zoo Story as the encounter between Christianity and Islam in theMiddle East.

Clearly, mining for Middle Eastern resonances in a classic American play can be a tenuous endeavour, especially as the American context fundamentally grounds Albee’s plays, from the New Englandcampus drawing-room of Virginia Woolf to the Central Park of Zoo Story. When the latest scandal in Egyptian politics is yesterday’s revelation that Egypt’s leading Islamist presidential candidate, Hazem Abu-Ismail, has been ruled out on the xenophobic justification that his mother held a US passport, the Arabic Albee seems all the more absurd. How does the Middle East square its farcical anti-American currents with its admiration for an arch-American farce like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

In fact, Albee’s popularity here persists not in spite of his works’ distinctly American identity, but because of this. In Zoo Story, America is Peter, the middle-class executive, but America is also his vagabond interlocutor, Jerry. They are gradually exposed as moral doppelgängers: American nihilism laid bare. That unpopular message ensured Zoo Story couldn’t find a producer within the States (the play premiered in leftist Berlin). In 1961 Republican grandee Prescott Bush, George W. Bush’s grandfather, even denounced it on the US Senate floor as filthy and tainted by communism.

But Zoo Story‘s unpopularity at home underwrote its Middle Eastern esteem. The play is, for example, a staple of the Syrian stage, from the Soviet-trained doyen of Damascus drama Walid Kowatli’s 1978 production to Dar al-Assad’s 2010 production that toured the region, including Egypt’s Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Zoo Story has never been produced for television in the US, yet Syrian television had already broadcast a version by 1979. (Interestingly, The Islamic Republic of Pakistan’s state broadcaster got there first, with a 1968 television adaptation by a then-unknown Cambridge graduate called Salman Rushdie). Zoo Story is the most celebrated of Albee’s plays in theMiddle East because it best satisfies the Arab penchant for the leftwing playwright’s caustic critique of American bourgeois respectability.

Albee’s Arab acclaim is analogous to the enormous enthusiasm with which Muslim misery memoirs like Ayaan Hirsi-Ali’s are received in the West; they confirm prejudices about the other. The Ayatollah Khomeini’s (quite literal) stab at literary criticism is the mirror image of Prescott Bush’s admittedly fatwa-free fury. The correlation between Rushdie’s popularity in the West and his Islamic infamy is, in some ways, the converse counterpart to Albee.

Trust a teacher, Maureen Flanagan, to draw the right lesson. Following a spell at Alexandria University, where her Egyptian students singled out Virginia Woolf for praise, she cautions how “presenting a worst-case scenario or engaging in fairly vicious satire” – as Albee does – “can be accepted by another culture as simply a true portrait of the entire society.” As much a lesson for Western admirers of (ex-)Muslim critics of Islam like Ayaan Hirsi-Ali and Salman Rusdhie as for Albee’s Arab acolytes.

A Teller of Truths: Ray Bradbury’s Middle East Connection

Published in The Millions, 8th June 2012
A modified version of this was also reprinted in The Australian on the 12th of June

It would seem that Ray Bradbury’s sole association with the Middle East was the spurious allusion to his most famous novel in the title of Michael Moore’s Bush-bashing documentary screed against the Iraq War, Fahrenheit 9/11. (Bradbury abhorred the allusion, even calling the left-wing film-maker a “screwed a-hole.”)

Little did Moore know that Bradbury’s bond to the Middle East was actually a strong one, especially to Baghdad, the city his imagination inhabited. “We must be,” he often liked to say, “tellers of tales in the streets of Baghdad.” According to the best known study on Bradbury, Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction, this was “the central notion of his authorship.” Bradbury saw himself in the same tradition as the fantasy storytellers of Baghdad, of The Thousand and One Nights.

Most critics will find the notion that Bradbury’s stories owed anything to the Arabic literary tradition as startling as the stories themselves. But Bradbury’s self-definition as an Arab storyteller mustn’t be ignored. Indeed, the science fiction tradition to which he by all rights belonged arguably began with a story by the medieval Arabic physicianIbn al-Nafis, whose 13th-century novel, translated as Theologus Autodidactus, is cited as the first science fiction novel, not to mention the science fictive attributes of the Theousand and One Nights themselves, as noted by writers from Robert Irwin to Gilbert Adair.

Their imprint on Bradbury’s work is little-noted and buried beneath subtle allusions. Unlike his colleagues in the canon, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein , or Isaac Asimov, little of Bradbury’s narrative concerns futuristic, dystopian descriptions, preferring, as Gerald Jonas puts it, “cozy colloquialisms and poetic metaphors” — which happens also to be a succinct summary of the Arabic oral tradition Bradbury claimed for himself. The Martian Chronicles narrated the conquest of Mars with little technological detail — as one astute blogger notes: “He didn’t focus on the engineering, his rocketship stories were clearly more influenced by the Thousand and One Nights than by the moon landings.” Bradbury acknowledged this debt more openly in his short story collection, The Illustrated Man, which adopts the frame narrative of the Nights, weaving unrelated short stories together, all told by the eponymous protagonist’s talking tattoos; the Illustrated Man, of course, is a re-invention of Scheherazade.

But like The Thousand and One Nights, his stories were no mere fantasies; they pretended to entertain, all the while scabrously censuring not just the societies its characters inhabited, but those its audience inhabited too. Be it Scheherazade in the ancient past or Guy Montag in the distant future, they are concerned with abuses of authority in the present. Guy Montag’s role as a book-burning fireman was once most relevant to a McCarthyite America whose censorship of dissident views began to resemble the totalitarian tendencies it supposedly opposed. That was the 1950s. Today, Fahrenheit 451′s lessons are less relevant to America than they are to another region, a region close to Bradbury’s heart.

Michael Moore so angered Bradbury because the film Fahrenheit 9/11, with its provocative subtitle, “the temperature at which freedom burns,” trivialised his warnings. Bradbury believed America had truly recovered from her perturbing past proclivities. “I don’t believe that any of the governments of the past 60 years, including the current one, are guilty of using war to aggrandize their power.” he once said. But the film’s concern with the Iraq war did edge the novel’s relevance towards the region where those perturbing proclivities are these days most widespread.

For it is the Middle East that now has most to learn from Bradbury. I don’t mean his whimsical solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “to create a new Jewish homeland in South Florida,” even if many in the region are likely to sympathise. The Middle East remains by far the most censored place on earth with more banned books than the library of a Roman Catholic parochial school. Where flag-burning and cartoon-burning are well-documented, the escalation into book burnings is a justified fear.

This refocusing of Bradbury’s relevance is only to be expected. When writing Fahrenheit 451, he was in fact thinking of the Middle East all along: “I wasn’t thinking about McCarthy so much as I was thinking of the library of Alexandria 5,000 years [sic] before.” In the Egypt I inhabit “5,000 years” later, voters are currently faced with a choice between Islamist repression or repression of Islamism, two authoritarian candidates with little appreciation of freedom of expression. No one has advocated book-burnings, but book-bannings — a less gruesome cousin — remain the order of the day, many politicians even calling for the infliction of that fate on Egypt’s own greatest novelist, Naguib Mahfouz. No wonder that a few years ago a cultural exchange promoted by the National Endowment for the Arts pickedFahrenheit 451 as the focus of reading groups in Cairo and, unmissably, Alexandria.

My Middle Eastern memorial to Ray Bradbury may seem an unorthodox one, but it is the one he doubtless desired. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he gave an answer that sadly none of the obituarists have recalled:

“Arriving in Baghdad,” he instructed, in Conversations with Ray Bradbury, “walk through the marketplace and turn down a street where sit the old men who are the tellers of tales. There, among the young who listen, and the old who say aloud, I would like to take my place and speak when it is my turn. It is an ancient tradition, a good one, a lovely one, a fine one. If some boy visits my tomb a hundred years from now and writes on the marble with a crayon: He was a teller of tales, I will be happy. I ask no more than that.”

Of course, like a medieval jester in Baghdad, he pretended to be a mere teller of tales. Let us in the Middle East not forget that he was also a teller of truths.

The Rapprochement Between Pop Music and High Culture

Published in The Huffington Post, 9th May 2012

“Pop and thought don’t go together,” a BBC controller once said, resisting the introduction of pop music to his schedules. That battle was won a long time ago, but the sentiment behind it lingers still; pop music lacks the esteem accorded to other art. Poets, not pop-stars, win Nobel Prizes. But several recent developments suggest the guardians of high culture are carving an alcove for pop music in the pantheon of high art.

This month, The Mays“, Cambridge-based literary launch-pad of Will Self and Zadie Smith, appointed singer-songwriter John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats its poetry editor. The indie rockstar’s predecessors once included heavyweight poets like Ted Hughes and Andrew Motion. Last year’s guest editor, however, was Jarvis Cocker.

The Britpop pioneer has meanwhile been invited by Cambridge don John Kinsella to give a reading at the university’s English Faculty - part of a series that’s already featured Sonic Youth‘s Thurston Moore and this month hosting readings by Nick Cave-collaborator Blixa Bargeld and Lee Ranaldo(also of Sonic Youth). Addressing his critics, said Prof Kinsella: “I’ve always felt that poetry lives in many spaces and I’m not that interested in boundaries, other than crossing them.”

Cambridge has form here; a few years ago Dr Eric Griffiths, once denounced as elitist for mocking an admissions candidate, set Amy Winehouse to be parsed in a poetry exam. Pop music has scaled the heights of Cambridge University’s ivory tower.

And not just Cambridge’s. Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks, whose previous books had been on Milton, Tennyson and Housman, famously wrote a serious work of literary criticism about Bob Dylan, Visions of Sin, in which Sir Christopher dares to ask whether Dylan is better than Keats.

Pop music’s respectability stretches beyond academia to the august world of literary publishing. This year, prestige poetry press Faber & Faber, made Jarvis Cocker editor-at-large, a position originally occupied by that consummate high-culture contrarian, poet T. S. Eliot. Director Lee Brackstone insisted “Jarvis just seemed a natural fit with the Faber sensibility” - a sensibility that is publisher to 12 Nobel Literature Laureates.

Britain’s pre-eminent literary magazine, The London Review of Books, raised highbrow eyebrows, too, by including in last month’s issue alongside essays on Karl Marx and Sir Thomas More 6768 choice words on David Bowie. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the crusty Spectator, whose disdain for popular culture is well-known, last week had two posts celebrating Bob Marley, one exalting his “perfect songs of freedom, love and redemption.”

Is time acting as the great critical arbiter, pop music acquiring respectability just as the popular tunes of the operetta or Tin Pan Alley have long been elevated to exemplars of a highbrow sensibility? But from Johann Strauss II to Oscar Hammerstein II, popular musicians used to spend a lot longer in the waiting room before Radio 3 deigned to come knocking. There is something more meaningful afoot.

From Joy Division’s reverential mining of J. G. Ballard (The Atrocity Exhibition was a novel before a song) to Mark E. Smith’s post-punk band The Fall (named after the existentialist tome by Camus), well-read British pop has been a fluctuating phenomenon. But only recently has it garnered such wholesale acceptance by the high culture establishment. All the while we see in pop music a reinvigorated, pervasive embrace of literary influences, whether in The Klaxons’ allusions to Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow or in the literate lyrics of Betjeman-obsessed British Sea Power, reputed to be “the brainiest band in British pop”.

An engagement with poetry looms large, especially Betjeman. As Noble from British Sea Power put it: “Betjeman’s wit, furtiveness and charisma made him a prototype for some of pop’s recent best lyricists – Jarvis Cocker, Stuart Murdoch, Morrissey.” Yeats, too – last September, The Waterboys’ album An Appointment with Mr Yeats, was the latest pop interpretation of the Irish bard’s lyrics (a trend encompassing musicians from Idlewild to Carla Bruni).

British pop’s conciliatory overtures to high culture have provoked a counter-reaction from its old-fashioned scions, amusingly coming to the fore in Liam Gallagher’s dismissal of the bookish Bloc Party as a “band off University Challenge”. Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke, an English graduate, had a riposte typical of pop’s intellectual turn: “It is really daft to reinforce the idea that there is something cool about being dumb.” The packed crowds at the concert-cum-literary-salons organised by Bands and Books are inclined to agree.

All of these developments exhibit a welcome contemporary rapprochement between the worlds of pop music and high culture in Britain. All that lacks now is, in true pop-fashion, a bold gesture that could cement the union. Nobel laureates in literature are a curious company, encompassing a Tory statesman, a leftie logician, even a communist comedian. Perhaps it’s time a pop star, too, acceded to the honour – as a certain guitar-strumming Minnesotan minstrel very nearly did last time round…