A lot of the entries for this blog will show the humanitarian effects of the occupation, disheartening realities to be sure, but I also wanted to include the positive things people are doing to cope with their situation and to rise above it. That said, last week, from May 7-11, there were a series of readings and lectures as part of the first annual Palestine Literature Festival.
It can be difficult for Palestinians to maintain a cultural life under occupation, with its curfews and incursions, and authors and artists must make extraordinary efforts to keep the lines of communication with the outside world open. The Festival was part of that effort, inspired by the call of Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.”
I attended the closing ceremony held at the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian author who was recently awarded the Orwell prize for his book “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,” started the evening with a reading from that work describing a walk along the Galilee before the occupation. Then the guest authors from around the world, who had spent the week traveling around the West Bank, read from works that inspired them and related to the conflict today. Irish novelist, Roddy Doyle, read from the opening of Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” and Pankaj Mishra, an Indian author and essayist, read from James Baldwin’s reflections on force during the Vietnam War. Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian American Poet, choose a different track and gave us a glimpse of the people she met during her stay by reading from her diary—it was mostly in Arabic with some lines in English, “last year we had a barbeque there, now the wall.”
The evening also included several performances by “Yasmeen” a group of musicians from the Edward Said National Conservatory, although they had to change their program a bit because two of their members were held up at checkpoints. I guess that was part of the irony of the evening: it was a Palestine Literature Festival, but a majority of the audience was composed of internationals--the closure of checkpoints that day prohibiting more Palestinians from attending.
The final reader was a Palestinian actor from England, Khalid Abdala, who closed with a passage from an essay by professor Said. Khalid's reading, delivered with the skills of a trained actor, left a lasting and hopeful impression on me: we don’t have to be resigned to the conclusion put forth by Samuel Huntington that civilization is headed for the clash of culture. On the contrary, the rich complexities of culture contain cross currents of understanding that will help heal the wounds of yesterday and provide for a better tomorrow.
It can be difficult for Palestinians to maintain a cultural life under occupation, with its curfews and incursions, and authors and artists must make extraordinary efforts to keep the lines of communication with the outside world open. The Festival was part of that effort, inspired by the call of Edward Said, to “reaffirm the power of culture over the culture of power.”
I attended the closing ceremony held at the Palestinian National Theatre in East Jerusalem. Raja Shehadeh, a Palestinian author who was recently awarded the Orwell prize for his book “Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape,” started the evening with a reading from that work describing a walk along the Galilee before the occupation. Then the guest authors from around the world, who had spent the week traveling around the West Bank, read from works that inspired them and related to the conflict today. Irish novelist, Roddy Doyle, read from the opening of Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” and Pankaj Mishra, an Indian author and essayist, read from James Baldwin’s reflections on force during the Vietnam War. Suheir Hammad, a Palestinian American Poet, choose a different track and gave us a glimpse of the people she met during her stay by reading from her diary—it was mostly in Arabic with some lines in English, “last year we had a barbeque there, now the wall.”
The evening also included several performances by “Yasmeen” a group of musicians from the Edward Said National Conservatory, although they had to change their program a bit because two of their members were held up at checkpoints. I guess that was part of the irony of the evening: it was a Palestine Literature Festival, but a majority of the audience was composed of internationals--the closure of checkpoints that day prohibiting more Palestinians from attending.
The final reader was a Palestinian actor from England, Khalid Abdala, who closed with a passage from an essay by professor Said. Khalid's reading, delivered with the skills of a trained actor, left a lasting and hopeful impression on me: we don’t have to be resigned to the conclusion put forth by Samuel Huntington that civilization is headed for the clash of culture. On the contrary, the rich complexities of culture contain cross currents of understanding that will help heal the wounds of yesterday and provide for a better tomorrow.
To read more about the event and the authors who participated, go to http://www.palestinelitfest.org/
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