[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Saqi Books on the theme of art and liturature in Palestine. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
By Mohammad Sabanneh
About the Book
About the Author
Media Coverage and Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Call for Reviews
Nabil Anani: Palestine, Land and People
By Nabil Anani
About the Book
About the Author
Media Coverage and Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Call for Reviews
Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense
By Marcello Di Cintio
About the Book
About the Authors
Media Coverage and Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba
Edited by Atef Alshaer
About the Book
About the Authors
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Palestine in Black and White
By Mohammad Sabaaneh
About the Book
Palestine in Black and White is an intimate and powerful portrayal of life under occupation from one of the most talented cartoonists working today.
Mohammad Sabaaneh has gained worldwide renown for his black and white sketches. His stark geometric figures and landscapes are rich with Palestinian visual traditions and symbols, while his haunting figures depict a vivid perspective of the occupation.
This first collection brings together one hundred of Sabaaneh’s most striking works, including cartoons that portray the experience of Palestinian prisoners, drawn while Sabaaneh himself was detained in an Israeli prison. The drawings do not flinch from revealing the reality that confronts Palestinians, from Israel’s injustices in the West Bank to their military operations on Gaza.
About the Author
Mohammad Sabaaneh is a Palestinian painter and caricaturist. He has a daily cartoon in the Palestinian newspaper al-Hayat al-Jadida and his work is published in publications across the Arab world. Sabaaneh is the Middle East representative for Cartoonist Rights Network International and the Palestinian ambassador for United Sketches, an international association for freedom of expression and cartoonists in exile. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows around the world. Sabaaneh is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2017 Marseille International Cartoon Festival Prix d’Or. He lives in Ramallah, Palestine.
Media Coverage and Praise for Palestine in Black and White
“An intense communication of Palestinian life; bludgeoned, displaced, yet still resisting.” Israel Book Review
“Drawing from life’s struggles in Palestine: Mohammad Sabaaneh’s political cartoons.” Interview with The National UAE
“This is occupation, not conflict: it’s black and white.’ Interview with MEMO
‘Edinburgh Bound Authors Have Visa Problems,’ Channel 4 News, 15 August
‘Glimpses of hope … “each image is worth a thousand words” ringing ever so true here.” 5*Canvas Magazine
‘Hard-hitting cartoons … offer a candid view of Palestinian experience.’ The Church Times.
‘Art manages to impart what can easily be lost or given less importance within mainstream media. Palestine in Black and White is an intense communication of Palestinian life; bludgeoned, displaced, yet still resisting … Sabaaneh goes beyond the usual symbols associated with the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle [and] depicts Palestine’s open wounds as a collective experience.’ Middle East Monitor
‘Narrates real stories of Palestinians’ The Daily Star
‘A good read underpinned by an open mind can change your lifeview irrevocably. Palestine in Black and White by Mohammad Sabaaneh is one such book.’ Bookblast Top Ten Reads for Independent Minds
‘The cartoons themselves cry out for a different future where both occupied and occupier can break out of their current patterns and frames, past walls and ribbons, into a freer life.’ Marcia Lynx Qualey, Qantara
Additional Information
January 2018
127 Pages
£10.99 (list price)
ISBN: 9780863569401
Where to Purchase
Saqi Books
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Nabil Anani: Palestine, Land and People
By Nabil Anani
About the Book
Nabil Anani is one of the most prominent Palestinian artists working today. A painter, ceramicist and sculptor, he has built an impressive catalogue of outstanding, innovative and unique art over the past five decades, pioneering the use of local media such as leather, henna, natural dyes, papier-mâché, wood, beads and copper.
Considered by many as a key founder of the contemporary Palestinian art movement, Anani’s development as an artist has run in parallel with major events in recent Palestinian history. His work reflects the lived Palestinian experience, exhibiting distinctive responses to issues of exile, dislocation, conflict, memory and loss. Anani’s artistic vision restores and celebrates a denied and often-forgotten reality, his work re-igniting memory.
With contributions from leading Middle Eastern art historians, Rana Anani, Lara Khaldi, Bashir Makhoul, Nada Shabout, Housni Alkhateeb Shehadeh and Tina Sherwell.
This sophisticated and evocative work illuminates new dimensions of psychoanalysis and the ethical imagination while also sensitively examining the collective psychic strife that so many communities endure today.
About the Author
Nabil Anani held his first exhibition in Jerusalem in 1972 and has since exhibited widely in solo and group shows around the world. He was awarded the first Palestinian National Prize for Visual Art in 1997 and became the head of the League of Palestinian Artists in 1998.
Media Coverage and Praise for Nabil Anani: Palestine, Land and People
Café Dissensus: online photo gallery and overview, 2 September 2018
‘A tribute to a titan … a blazing salute.’ The Gulf Today, feature, 12 September 2018
‘An intricate trail of memory … moves beyond the realm of words.’ 8 October 2018, Middle East Monitor
Additional Information
August 2018
172 Pages
£25.00 (list price)
ISBN: 9780863561481
Where to Purchase
Saqi Books
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense
By Marcello Di Cintio
About the Book
Across Palestine, from the Allenby Bridge and Ramallah, to Jerusalem and Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio has met with writers, poets, librarians, booksellers and readers, finding extraordinary stories in every corner. Stories of how revolutionary writing is smuggled from the Naqab Prison; about what it is like to write with only two hours of electricity each day; and stories from the Gallery Café, whose opening three thousand creative intellectuals gathered to celebrate.
Pay No Heed to the Rockets offers a window into the literary heritage of Palestine that transcends the narrow language of conflict. Paying homage to the memory of literary giants like Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani and the contemporary authors they continue to inspire, this evocative, lyrical journey shares both the anguish and inspiration of Palestinian writers at work today.
About the Author
Marcello Di Cintio is the author of four books, including the critically acclaimed Walls: Travels Along the Barricades, winner of the 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. Di Cintio's essays have been published in The Walrus, Canadian Geographic, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveller, and Afar. He lives in Calgary.
Media Coverage and Praise for Pay No Heed to the Rockets
‘There is an irreverence, individualism and self-possession to all of the writers that springs from the pages. These are sensitive characters living in abnormal conditions… Di Cintio weaves together history with a sense of place and infuses character with dialogue and humor to produce a contemporary portrait of a people who continue to resist both occupation and simple categorization in this masterful work.’ Electronic Intifada, 8 May 2018
‘Using the form of a political-literary travelogue, Marcello Di Cintio explores what literature means to modern Palestinians and how Palestinians make sense of the conflict between a rich imaginative life and the daily tedium and violence of survival.’ Bookblast, Top Ten Reads for Independent Minds, 3 June 2018
‘Marcello Di Cintio takes the reader on a literary journey … a vivid account.’ The Jordan Times, 5 June 2018
‘A compelling read ... forces awareness in the reader of a Palestine beyond our limited imagination.’ Middle East Monitor, 27 June 2018
Interviews
Arablit, 5 June 2018
Monocle 24 Meet the Writers interview with Georgina Godwin, 16 June 2018
Additional Information
May 2018
192 pages
£8.99 (list price)
ISBN: 9780863569807
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From “The Exporter of Oranges and Short Stories”; Pages 188-192
May Ziadeh was an Arab feminist when there was no such thing. Born in Nazareth in 1886 to a Palestinian mother and Lebanese father, May attended a French convent school in Lebanon before emigrating to Cairo with her parents in 1911. She published her first of more than fifteen books that same year: a volume of French poetry written under the fabulous pseudonym of Isis Copia. Ziadeh lived in a time and place that regarded notions of women’s identity and liberation as slander, but she became a compelling voice for Arab women’s emancipation nonetheless. ‘We should free the woman, so that her children won’t grow up to become slaves,’ Ziadeh wrote. ‘And we should remove the veil of illusions from her eyes, so that by looking into them, her husband, brother and son will discover that there is a greater meaning to life.’
Ziadeh fell in love with Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran, though she would never meet him. Their romance endured for nineteen years, sustained solely through the love letters they sent back and forth from Cairo to New York, where Gibran lived. This was the most literary love affair I’d ever heard of. His death in 1931 shattered her.
Ziadeh ran the most famous and one of the most enduring literary salons in the Arab world. Beginning in 1913 and continuing every Tuesday evening for twenty-three years, she welcomed leading writers, activists and intellectuals – men and women both – into the warmth of her father’s apartment, where they debated culture and politics over cups of tea and rosewater. May’s salon became known as a place of serious learning, friendly but not frivolous. She expected her guests to arrive on time, and those invitees who dared to miss a gathering were obligated to apologise by phone or in writing. From her salon blossomed the ideas that fuelled the Arab Nahda, or awakening; a renaissance movement that challenged the then prevailing traditions of literature, gender, language and culture.
In 2002, more than sixty years after her death in 1941, May Ziadeh’s famed Tuesday salon inspired another May, May Nayef, to create her own literary salon in Gaza. She named the salon Nuun after the letter in the Arabic alphabet that indicates the feminine. On the fifteenth of each month, between fifty and a hundred people gather in a meeting room in central Gaza City. ‘We examine culture from a woman’s point of view.’ They discuss the work of female writers and artists, the portrayal of women in the arts and women’s contributions to Palestinian cultural life. Men are welcome to attend, May says, as long as they know they are there to talk about women.
‘At first, we had to go to the authors and invite them to come and speak about their books,’ May said. ‘Now they come to us.’ Authors plead with May to include them in Nuun’s program.
For writers living under blockade, the salon provides a rare opportunity to meet with an audience of engaged and intelligent readers. Nearly all of Gaza’s writers, male and female, have been invited to speak at Nuun. So have authors visiting from the West Bank and abroad. Professors from the English department in Gaza’s universities have given talks about female writers from the United Kingdom, the United States and Africa. The salon hosts musicians and visual artists too who come to speak about their work.
But they don’t talk about politics. This is May’s rule. ‘We talk only about books and about culture. I think culture is more powerful than anything anyway.’ Because politics invades the daily life of Gazans in so many pervasive ways, Nuun’s attendees appreciate the rare reprieve the salon offers. ‘We are very proud of this,’ May said.
Nuun may avoid politics, but politics does not avoid Nuun. The Ministry of Culture started to notice the salon since the Hamas takeover. Nuun never had links to government agencies, and Hamas’s conservative officials tend to distrust organisations they do not oversee. Nuun’s independence, this unmonitored exchange of ideas, worries the ministry. They also don’t like women and men gathering together, especially to discuss women’s issues. ‘They think we are dangerous,’ May said. ‘We talk about freedom at Nuun. We try to open minds. This is terrible to them.’
A couple of weeks before I sat with May, a newly assigned deputy minister of culture called her and demanded a meeting. She tried to ignore him, but the deputy minister persisted. May finally relented. In his office, the deputy told her he wanted her to relocate the salon from its current venue to a room at the ministry itself. May refused. ‘I told him that we’ve been operating without any relationship to the government and that I want to keep it that way.’
‘Either you hold the salon under our wing or we close you down,’ the official said.
‘But you have no wings,’ May responded. ‘You’ve only had this job for two months. We’ve been here for fourteen years.’ ‘Then we will send someone to the salon to see what you are doing.’
‘You can send anyone you want. We don’t talk about politics. We talk about culture.’
‘Culture is very powerful,’ he said. ‘We want to know what you are talking about.’
Then the deputy told May that the ministry had published a book of poetry written by four young Gazan women. ‘If we gave you the book, would you invite the poets to the salon?’
‘If the poems are by women, then yes,’ May told him. ‘I don’t care if the poets are Hamas or Fatah. If they are women then they are welcome. We can talk about the poems and people who are listening can say whether they like the poems or not.’ The official agreed.
‘And how were the Hamas poems?’ I wondered.
May shrugged. ‘They were all nationalist poems. They were not bad.’
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
A Map of Absence: An Anthology of Palestinian Writing on the Nakba
Edited by Atef Alshaer
About the Book
The Nakba or ‘catastrophe’ of 1948 saw hundreds of thousands of Palestinians dispossessed from their land to create the state of Israel, creating a refugee crisis that is still ongoing today. This trauma is a central theme in much of the contemporary writing from Palestine, whose writers have been the vanguard of identity and representation of their people, rendering their depths, fears, longings and hopes in a variety of discourses and styles.
This unique collection brings together the finest poetry and prose on the Nakba by Palestinian writers over the last seventy years, for the first time. Covering three critical periods (pre-Nakba, post-Nakba and post-Oslo Accords), it includes translated excerpts of poems, novels, short stories and memoirs by major authors such as Mahmoud Darwish, Samira Azzam, Fadwa Tuqan and Edward Said, as well as by emerging Palestinian writers.
Showcasing the vibrant and distinctive literature of Palestine, this landmark anthology highlights the ongoing resonances of the Nakba.
About the Author
Atef Alshaer is a lecturer in Arabic Studies at the University of Westminster. He was educated at Birzeit University in Palestine and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, where he obtained his PhD and taught for a number of years. His other publications include Poetry and Politics in the Modern Arab World and Love and Poetry in the Middle East (forthcoming). https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/alshaer-atef
Additional Information
May 2019
320 pages
£16.99 (list price)
ISBN: 9780863569906
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
“Palestine from the Sky”
Amira Sakalla
I don’t want to be here
confined in this body
where the passage of time
is my most
intimate
partner.
All else is exile.
All else is a flattened landscape.
Crushed down,
unearthed,
swept off.
and I must build again.
I must build again.
I don’t want to f*cking be here
inside my body
absorbing
so many hits as the winds
of time strike hard
on my limbs and leave
me rathering that I be broken
into pieces
and
dis-
solved
into sand
because
at least the sand all moves in the same direction
when the wind blows.
I want to escape my body and
go where the souls go and know
that they got to return and know
that they got to fly and know
that they got to know that I loved them
before I knew.
I don’t want to be here
in my body because the body is a strong thing
that protects the soul from damage
and who says I deserve that?
Who said what souls should leave
their bodies so soon.
I ran across continents looking for my home
and in my exile I concluded that it is only
my body but my heart and soul
want to fly free,
not subjected to the pain of my body.
When will I finally blossom
When will I finally bloom
for the world to see
When will the birds
sing lines of my poetry?
I hate the journey.
I hate the path.
I’m sorry, prophets of God,
that I’d say that.
But who deserves to arrive
if Yaser could never
see Palestine
from the sky.
This poem was written against the background of the Israeli killing of Yaser Murtaja, the journalist from Gaza, as he was covering the Great Return March. He wrote just shortly before his death on 6 April 2018: ‘I very much wish to take images of Gaza from the sky one day. My name is Yaser Murtaja, age, 30 years old, I live in Gaza city, and I have never travelled’.
Iqbal Tamimi
I saw the carnage…saw girls’ dreaming hands
Blown to red atoms, and their dreams with them…
Saw babies liquefied in burning beds
As, horrified, I heard their murderers’ phlegm…
I saw my mother stitch my shroud’s black hem,
For in that moment, I was one of them…
I saw our father’s eyes grow hard and bleak
To see frail roses severed at the stem…
How could I fail to speak?
Iqbal Tamimi is a Palestinian poet, and the Editor in Exile of The HyperTexts. She also has an online magazine, Journomania, and was recently named one of the top fifty Tweeters among Arab women, and number one in the journalism category, by Birds on the Blog. You can get to know Iqbal by reading her poems about the Nakba (‘Catastrophe’) of the Palestinian people and the plight and perils of being a Palestinian woman in exile.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com