Night and Day The Middle East

illustrations Naji al-Ali & Olivier Kuglerfiction Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya & Joseph Smithcolumn Moni Mohsin essay Samantha Ellisfrom the archive Edward Saidpoetry Edward Mackay, André Naffis-Sahely & Ruth Padelinterview Olivia Snaije writers' habits Lila Azam Zanganeh

the middle east

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night and day issue iv

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Welcome to Night and Day

One year on and the editors of Night & Day bring you our most ambitious issue to date.

This extraordinary year has witnessed the Arab Spring, the death of dictators and purported plutonium enrichment. As Syrian civilians continue to die and we sleepwalk towards conflict with Iran, there is no doubt that all eyes are on the Middle East.

Our excellent cover and graphics are brought to you by documentary illustrator Olivier Kugler from ‘A Tea in Tehran’, his pictorial account of a journey across Iran with a truck driver, a theme continued with Joseph Smith’s short story ‘The 38 Bus to Tel Aviv’. Politics finds

its expression in the satirical cartoons of Naji al-Ali, and in Samantha Ellis’ tender portrait of identity as a British-born Iraqi Jew.

From our archive is Edward Said’s characteristically elegant call for knowledge and understanding. Moni Mohsin gives us a deliciously out-rageous assessment of her Arab neighbours in the voice of a Pakistani socialite, while Iranian-American writer Lila Azam Zanganeh, lets us pry into her daily working habits.

Ruth Padel and André Naffis-Saheley’s poetry speak of a contemporary experience of the Middle East, hinting at its absurdities, while Edward Mackay’s poem

draws a graceful correlation between London and Baghdad, from the past to the present.

At the heart of the issue is Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya’s disturbing and brilliant story ‘Tehran, 2.30 a.m.’, a nerve-shattering half an hour of abject terror in Iran’s capital during what Joydeep imagines could very well be the next global conflagration.

From Tehran to Tel-Aviv, the Thames to the Tigris, Dubai to democracy, this is a cross-section of the Middle East, by some of our most exciting and important voices.

Tom Avery and Parisa Ebrahimi

fiction joseph smith

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It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, that’s for certain. There are still pleasures to be had, of course, but the initial excitement has passed, it is now so distant that it only exists as flickers of memory; and I wonder sometimes if these even might be illusory.

But it is my lot, and for that I am eter- nally grateful. Tonight, for instance, I think I am beginning a new chapter – I think that finally I have found the correct path. I will begin again with Number 1. She is by no means the prettiest, or the best endowed, and there are many features of her that I find distasteful. I will take her, however, safe in the knowledge that in four nights’ time it will be ‘Number 5 Eve’, which is an event to look forward to for sure, because in terms of beauty she is incomparable to all the others; her hair is as black as a raven’s wing, her eyes are like two giant pools of seawater, and the face around these portals to bliss is smooth with barely the first flush of womanhood, while beneath, past the perfect curves of her breasts, beneath the flat plain of her stomach, deeper than all this is the holy of holies, for here in magic folds of flesh exists the ‘Shrine of Olibanum’.

Already I find that I cannot wait! That my jaw is tight and my heart pounding for her. Perhaps I should abandon the plan, discard the correct path (which may be illusory) and go straight for Number 5 tonight, for surely in this mood that I find myself there can be no chance for disappointment, it will be as good as it was when first I took her, for she was indeed my first – oh what bliss it was afterwards to lie beside her, every light brushing of

her finger like a pulse of something pure and secret, a power that only existed between us, that belonged to us and was yet above us and ungraspable.

But no. No no no. I must not deviate from the path. I have learned my lesson. I have learned more than one lesson, have tried many different techniques and systems. In the beginning each night was a wildness: I would have them parade before me and then select whichever one took my fancy; it was an unbridled joy then because of my innocence, and also theirs, and we partook of each other as life on earth partakes in spring, with nothing but a forceful desire to bud upwards, to burst outwards, to unfurl and express lest the dream conjured by the warming sun turns out only to be a dream.

The dream does not end; I found it did not end and soon the nightly selection became more difficult, the parade less enthusiastic, the chaos of passion becoming replaced by a sense of imbalance, that some Numbers were being chosen more often than others, and there was even some embitterment from Number 28, who had not been picked at all. I made a point of selecting her, and do you know what? The very next night I went back to Number 5, and my! How I was rewarded! It was as if all the old magic had suddenly flooded back. It came back with so much force as to be a mystery where it had gone in the first place.

And so, inspired by this I invented the ‘High-and-Low’ scheme, which ran quite successfully for a while, and

was based on the simple premise of picking one of the uglier Numbers, in order to provide contrast with my favourites (namely Numbers 5, 7, 22 and 29. And Number 14 too, she’s good). Then an innovation: I found that if I went Low-Low-High, the contrast was even greater, to much joy all around. A brief experiment in Low-Low-Low-High proved, however, to be too much of a grind.

During this time I did look into the possibility of whether one could transfer Numbers, but was told that this was (unsurprisingly on reflection) banned.

So the High-Low scheme operated for a while, but there was a flaw: on some of the nights when I was due to go Low, I would find that my lust for one of the better Numbers would be uncontrollable. Sometimes I would even break my own rules, and this was a double-edged sword: it could result in a wonderful evening, it could also end in disaster, with feelings of guilt, and self-disgust – for it is always a terrible thing to have to abandon one’s own plans.

After long reflection, and many a stroll, I realised that what I needed was a way to give every evening meaning, and while it would not be possible, or indeed desirable, to guarantee the ultimate highs of exultation and ecstasy every night, if I had a system that meant everything belonged to a greater framework, a higher order as it were, within which I would be guaranteed the occasional highpoint, then surely this would be preferable to the casting about of former times, the tired, lazy parades, the meaningless

The 38 Bus to Tel Aviv

night and day spring 2011night and day issue iv

selections, the disappointing, draping mantle of one person’s flesh on another, which I must confess had become the norm.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if all this planning, all these ideas are again, illusory. And that once again, once I am into the system, once its flaws become apparent, I will begin to think that it is not a good system after all, and will start upon the path of betrayal in my mind, even though going through the motions. I will stick to it for a few more days, may even try to formulate a development, using complex mathematics (the possibilities are endless) – yet I will do all of this with the knowledge that deep down, in the fundaments of my soul, I have already rejected the Path – it is dead and merely awaits

its replacement. Then will follow the usual dreaded period of unorganised choice, with all its pitfalls and self-loathing. Perhaps what I need is some sort of penalty mechanism, to make it more interesting – I don’t know.

Ach but these thoughts are those of the doubter! If I had had such thoughts when I was making my way, I would never be in this position. But I did not, and here I am. One must believe in the system!

Here they come then.

They must sense from my bearing that a new system is at hand, for they are alert and seem excitable. There is Number 1, standing at the end. Steadily I approach her, the others are watching me, and Number 1 thinks

that I will walk past her down the line but no! I stop before her and calmly, wisely, with the certainty that what I do is right and correct, that I stand on the right path, the true path, the only path, I raise my hand out to her, and she takes it.

And as we depart I am aware of the nodding heads and accepting sighs of the others. I know that they are happy, and I am happy, for together we are the strands in a huge fabric of meaning, some of it by my design, which means that every movement we make is once again a wonderment, is ablaze with a glorious light shining all around us, the light of glistening pearls that lie strewn across the golden path of righteousness.

joseph smith

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Having observed, during the war on the home front, that everyone in his Nissen was busy writing short stories, he thought he might as well take a hand.

His first and only story (beginning ‘Bert stood disconsolately on the kerb of Dank street’) was accepted by Reginald Layette for SANGUINE YOUNG WRITING. The customary note on this new recruit to the straggling avant garde read: ‘Born in Merionethshire. Educated at Worthing and Newcastle-under-Lyne. A promising masseur, has also had experience as lift-attendant, and is always Oxford on Boat Race

Day. Recreations: hockey and social intercourse. Is writing a novel.’

In due course his novel was written, and six publishers were given the satisfaction of declining it. The seventh, misunderstanding his reader’s report, was rash enough to say, in writing, that ‘under normal conditions. . . Unfortunately, owing to present difficulties. . .’

This letter enabled our aspiring author to set up as an authority on all aspects of post-war publishing and to secure a post at the BBC. No symposium on the Problems of the Writer, the Position of the Artist in

Society, or Chaos in the Book Trade is now complete without him. Most evenings, at the usual place, he can be heard gratuitously drawing upon his inexhaustible fund of misinformation.

His novel remains in typescript.

His reviews of other people’s novels are printed in Earache.

What can be warmly said in his favour is that he has joined that popular band of labour-saving contributors to periodicals: like theirs, his articles can always be taken as read; like them, he is facilitating the task of getting through the weeklies.

from the archive

Literary Types The Expert

article jeremy lewis

Night & Day

essay samantha ellis

Playwright and writer, samaNtha Ellis, explores her homesickness for a place she’s never been, and the complexity of her identity as a British-born Iraqi Jew.

For as long as I remember I’ve been homesick for a place I’ve never seen. My parents are Iraqi Jews. I was born in London, but my past was quite literally another country. At four, my party trick was to say, in imperfect Judeo-Arabic, ‘You can put the curly tail of the dog inside a sugar cane tube for forty days and forty nights and when you take it out, it will still be curly.’ I thought all grown-ups spoke Judeo-Arabic and that English was just a children’s language. When I started school, I realised my mistake. I remember anxiously asking my mother to ‘Write me an A in Arabic. Write me a B’ but her alphabet had more letters than mine. I was distraught. If we couldn’t even translate our alphabets, how could we ever really understand each other?

At my grandparents’ house in Wembley, my family sat in a blue-grey cloud around the table where they chain-smoked and talked about Baghdad.

My brother and cousins and I heard stories of sleeping on the roof in the hot summer nights and seeing shooting stars, which they thought were UFOs. They kept a gazelle as a pet. They learned to swim in the River Tigris, thrown out of a boat to fight the currents. They ate water buffalo cream for breakfast, sold by women who carried it on their heads in round, flat trays. It was thick as cake, and the women would slice it with a hairpin for them to take home and eat with warm pitta bread and black, sticky date syrup.

They had ice cream that was chewy

because it was made with mastic from crushed orchid roots—I’ve tasted it in a Turkish shop on Green Lanes so I know it exists. But I’ve never eaten masgouf, the enormous flat fish hauled from the Tigris and roasted on the riverbank, with spices, over an open flame. I’ve never seen the sandstorms that turned the skies red or the blind master musicians in dark glasses, playing languorous songs of lost love.

In the 1940s, Baghdad’s Jewish heyday, one-third of the city’s inhabitants were Jewish. Every third house, every third shop —the city almost closed down for Shabbat. No wonder they thought they’d never leave.

The Jews had come to Baghdad as captives of Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC, forced to dredge canals to link the Tigris and the Euphrates. They wept by the rivers, as per Psalm 137, but when they were granted permission to leave, many chose to stay. Under the Ottomans, Jews were protected – if not equal – but after the First World War anti-semitism grew, from street violence in the 1920s to discriminatory laws in the 1930s, to the farhud of 1941, a riot in which Jews were murdered, raped and their homes and businesses looted. The word farhud means a breakdown of order; the Jews would never again feel at home in Iraq.

So in 1950, when they were told they could sign up for a mass airlift to Israel, many (including my father’s family) registered to go. They were stripped of their Iraqi citizenship, and the Iraqi parliament passed a secret law to confiscate Jews’ possessions

and freeze their liquid assets. The Jews who left Iraq left with nothing. After the taskeet, the denaturalisation (an inappropriately bland word for the destruction of a community), only 6000 Jews remained in Iraq. My mother's family was among them. They hoped things would get better.

But with the rise of the Baathists, things got definitively worse. In 1967, Iraq sent an army to fight Israel in the Six Day War. In 1969, crowds cheered as nine Jews, accused of being Zionist spies, were hanged in the streets. One was my mother’s cousin; he was only eighteen. By now, many Jews were leaving illegally, smuggled by Kurds over the mountains into Iran. My mother’s family made the attempt in 1970 but they were caught at the penultimate checkpoint and imprisoned. They finally got out of Iraq a year later.

My family tried to protect my brother and me from the bad stuff, but they were haunted by what they’d been through, and didn’t always clean up their stories. And I wanted to know.

I hated having my hair touched by strangers. Recently I worked out why; my mother had said that when interrogated in prison, they pulled her hair. No wonder I flinched. And then there was the story of the watermelon. The watermelon came on the day they took the men away. The women and children were terrified and the prison guards brought them a watermelon—just one. Eventually the men were brought back. I still don’t like watermelon.

‘You Can Take the Girl Out of Baghdad...’

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The first stories I ever told were to fill in the gaps in my family’s stories. I’d watched The Thief of Baghdad and Sinbad the Sailor, and I was convinced my family had travelled everywhere by magic carpet. I had a very clear picture of my grandmother setting off for the copper market (where the banging was so loud you’d have to communicate in signs) perched elegantly on a fringed carpet. I’m writing a children’s play called Operation Magic Carpet about a child who wants to cure her family of nostalgia. Her intense wishing conjures up a genie, who bursts out of a mango pickle jar and flies her to Baghdad on a magic carpet. In an early workshop, watching the actors improvise my fantasy of rescue and return moved me to tears.

The first time I saw Baghdad moving and in colour was in 1990. We sat up watching the news of the Gulf War, and my parents pointed out landmarks. But the footage was from the bomber planes, and the landmarks were vanishing before our eyes.

I still dreamed, then, of going ‘home’ to Baghdad. There is no dignity in being homesick for somewhere you’ve never seen. Sometimes when I talk about being Iraqi in my north London accent, I feel like a fraud.

I spent my twenties chasing auth-enticity. As a journalist I wrote about my community (I wanted facts, not stories) and tried to learn to read and write but the alphabet never resolved itself out of a mass of squiggles.

I painstakingly transcribed my mother’s recipes, and discovered, among other things, that because I keep my flat at what I think is a normal temperature (not, like my mother’s, Baghdad-hot), I have to wrap my dough in a duvet and give it twice as long to rise. The one connection I didn’t make was marrying an Iraqi Jew. The community in London was warm, noisy and loving but also claustrophobic. We were clinging so hard to tradition that we had turned in on ourselves. I wanted something different.

In theory, I could have gone to Baghdad after 2003. When my friend Marina Benjamin told me about her trip (to research her wonderful history of the Jews in Iraq, Last Days in Babylon) over coffee in the British Library, I felt overwhelmed with yearning. But still I haven’t been back.

It’s not just that it isn’t safe, I’ve realised that going back wouldn’t ever be going home. Baghdad has changed beyond recognition, changed by the advance of modernity, and by war. And so much has been tarnished, or destroyed. There are now reportedly only seven Jews in the city.

As research for my play—and for pleasure — I’ve been reading a new translation of The Thousand and One Nights. Lots of the stories are set in Baghdad and there are magic carpets galore. But one story shocked me. It’s about a firebird who wants to steal a magic ring from a jinniya. He orders

a demon to help him and the demon comes up with a plan. Knowing the jinniya loves fishing, the demon trains a fish, first starving it then feeding it a corpse’s finger. The demon tempts the jinniya to put her hand out to tempt the fish — and when she does, the fish bites off her finger, and with it, the ring.

I’d always thought one day I’d swim in the River Tigris and eat masgouf, but in an echo of the grisly story, Saddam Hussein dumped the bodies of his victims in the river, and even now the police pull corpses out of the reeds. A cousin told me he’d heard the Tigris was “full of arms and legs”. I haven’t been able to get the image out of my head.

It was letting go of the idea of return that has finally made me able to start writing about Iraq. And in my life, too, I feel freer to create my own way of being an Iraqi Jew, and English too. My mother says people ‘cut onions on her heart’, while I say they’re rubbing salt in the wound. I say swings and roundabouts; my father says one day honey, another day onions. We understand each other fine.

I don’t eat cream for breakfast; I eat porridge, possibly the most un-Iraqi food in the world. But I eat my porridge with date syrup. You can take the girl out of Baghdad but...well, this dog’s tail is still, and always will be, curly.

samantha ellis

poetry edward mackay

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A small brown bag, three unsmoked Camels,a pocketful of change and moments to spend,a man arrives at a scattered Southbank bookstall.An unpromising haul: a creased Penguin, whose loosepages take flight from chapter twelve, something quarter boundin French, a satchel-scented Latin primer and another relic: The Golden Book Picture Atlas, volume four.Some pages still bathed in the sunset tones of a pink gin,on others, borders stiffly rise in iron. He flits from holy lands,past that holiday in Goa, to Grandad’s Suez tales.Then the scattered headline names of this young century,freshly slid from the cracked shell of Mesopotamia. Jewelled Baghdad is snaked through by the swift Tigrisin a shape so like our own. A young city,rising in the west, spreading to a slack‐looped noose,like the Isle of Dogs, as if the Thames had flowed off course;our cities a double exposure,Pangaean fragments, lost continents, that waited for our seismic age to lock horns and rut;some bloody paper chain of names and storiesturned back upon themselves. A quiet kissalights on his craned neck, tells him time is up.The bag takes the book and a hand takes a hand,two figures wander downstream, to the distracted bend – past three girls thrilling with terror up the shingle,frothing in a boat’s small wake; past a halted, rooflessdouble‐decker; past a diffident, helmeted man who looksthrough last week at loss; past a roadblock; past a quiet shoedrifting to shore; past a solitary, deep-pocketed smoker.Two waterways, strung like irregular heartbeats across the tight chests of two cities, roar in the coming dusk.

edward mackay

The Islesof Dogs

fiction joydeep roy-bhattacharya

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Tehran, 2.30 a.m.

Night

night and day spring 2011night joydeep roy-bhattacharya

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Meanwhile, he had less than an hour left to live, he

reflected, or the rest of a life- time. The darkness was soft and hazy,like a summer night. The air was still, with a damp smell, and moist, as if af-ter a thunderstorm. The shadows of the trees reminded him of the woods back home and, for an instant, he imagined he’d gone back in time, to the quiet chinar alley in Mazandaran and the fields and hills speckled with copses. How silent it had been there, just as it was here, but the present stillness was different somehow; it was heavier, and suffused with vio-lence: a violence that simply existed, putting an end to any possibility of rest. He glanced at his right arm dangling uselessly by his side and even in the darkness he could see that his fingers had turned white. Like a waxwork, he thought, and felt nau-seous. He braced himself against the wall, his dusty boots moving forward and sinking into greenish water thick with scum, the surface coated with shredded glass. A sharp pain scis-sored up his right leg: a piece of shrapnel had embedded itself deep in his ankle and the blood gushed into his boot every time he shifted his weight. Again it struck him how quiet it was in this limpid, cavernous dark-ness. He felt as if he were the only one in this soundless world. He looked around, trying to penetrate the gloom. Over the wall hung branches of faded oak and pine, their tips whitewashed. Before him was the pond with the swans and ducks. Through the smoke rising from the water he saw Akbar-pour and Pezeshkzad emerge from the shadows on the far side of the enclosure. So his moment of rest had been short, yet he felt relieved as he moved through the ankle-deep sludge to meet them. The two septuagenari-ans looked like ghosts, their faces

caked with dust. He was certain he looked no different. Pezeshkzad’s nervous tic was acting up and his face kept twitching. A clear line of blue-white droplets trailed behind him; true to habit, he’d stuffed a pair of milk bottles into the pockets of his dungarees. Behind him, Akbarpour carried a bucket with water slopping over its sides. They reached him and Akbarpour put the bucket down rather clumsily on the ground. They plunged their hands into the water and stuffed handfuls of sopping wet handkerchiefs into their pockets. Pezeshkzad thrust a flask of whiskey at him, and, although he was in no mood to drink, he tilted it back and felt the liquid burn down his throat. He handed the flask back to Pezesh-kzad just as he felt Akbarpour shak-ing him by the shoulder, trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t hear a word. Akbarpour reached forward and brushed his hand against his ear and showed it to him covered with blood. Startled, he pressed his own hands to his ears and felt the warm trickle of blood on his fingers. A numbness overtook him. He understood now why it was so quiet. Akbarpour kept stroking his cheeks and talking heedlessly. Then Pezesh-kzad wrote something on a scrap of paper and thrust it at him. He read it and nodded that he’d understood. He wrapped one of the wet handkerchiefs around his face and put on the protec-tive glasses that Pezeshkzad handed him. They each picked up a flashlight, though his slipped out of his nerve-less fingers and sank into the sludge. When he reached down to pick it up he saw that it had gone out. With a shrug, Akbarpour took his arm and they walked rapidly toward the interior of the enclosure, past the wooden barrier and the clumps of stunted trees. There was more light

here, and when he looked up through the enormous hole in the ceiling it was as if fire was pouring from the sky. He left the two old men behind him and advanced into a wall of dust. At once he felt the heat envelop him. He moved as if in a dream, silently, fluidly. The shattered white walls resembled bared bone. He skirted past a bomb crater, then a metal door torn off by the explosion. In front of him was something dark that might be a cage. A shower of sparks poured out of it, widening into rings of fire as they hit the ground. The air was so hot and thick that he found it difficult to breathe. He hesitated, but knew he had no choice: he had to go inside. Pressing another wet handkerchief to his nostrils, he ducked through the opening. At first, he couldn’t see a thing, then something small detached itself from a corner. It was a female rhesus monkey. She held up her arms and he saw that they had been severed at the elbows: instead of long, slender limbs, he was staring at bloody stumps. Their gazes met and held, tears of anguish streaming from her eyes. Forcing himself to feel nothing, he raised his gun and pulled the trigger. He knelt beside her to make sure she was dead. Turning her over – she felt weightless – he saw that she’d been burnt by a phosphorus bomb. He held her in his arms for an instant before laying her down gently. The floor was slippery with blood and hot water from a ruptured pipe. The sparks kept drawing circles around him. He had to walk through a steam-ing curtain of spray to get to the next cage. It drenched his hair and singed his face but he ignored it, his mind already focused on the task before him. The door between the two cages was hanging by its hinges. It glowed red and was wreathed in smoke. He squeezed past it and entered the

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chimpanzees’ holding area. It had taken a direct hit and the ceiling had come down. The smell of burning flesh hung heavy in the air. He glimpsed a dark hand in the rubble and grasped it, a patch of fur coming away in his fingers. Working through the debris, he uncovered the body of a female chimpanzee. When he touched her head, the cooked skin and flesh slid off, baring the skull. The soft ground smoked. Sweat began to collect at his chin; the moisture clogged up his glasses. He stumbled out, breathing in gasps; there was nothing he could do there. He edged past craters, over tree trunks and shattered and smoulder-ing forms. Zoo staff darted in and out of burning buildings. A massive bomb went off ahead of him, sending debris spinning through the air. Three or four Caspian deer raced back and forth, trying to get away from the conflagration. He reached the burn-ing aviary just in time to see a fireball hurtle through its interior. For a brief moment, there was a lull before every-thing burst into flames. An airborne flock of swans flipped over one by one, combusting in mid-flight. A flamingo disintegrated before his eyes. Every second or so, a tree in the indoor cop-pice exploded with a terrific blast, littering the ground with tiny, black-ened carcasses. A tongue of fire lashed out and scorched his hair. Raising his hands to his face, he found that his protective eyeglasses had dissolved from the heat. He saw everything after that as if through a veil. He stumbled over a corpse in olive-green fatigues, a Revolutionary Guard on zoo detail. A wall went down to his right in an enormous explosion of dust, covering him with brick powder. Someone rushed up and began thumping him on the back. His coat was on fire. He fumbled with the buttons, taking an inordinately long time to slip out of it, then instantly felt a bone-chilling cold. He stumbled

after his rescuer into the terrace housing the small mammals, but lost sight of him. Carrying on by himself, he climbed a flight of stone steps and looked around. Only strips of bloody flesh dangled from girders, and bits of skin and fur were spattered on the walls. From there, he made for the amphibian house, which was burning fiercely, as was the adjacent tunnel with the reptiles. He passed a blazing shed, storage for the animals’ food-stuff. An enormous eagle winged past, flying in ever-widening circles above the rising swirls of smoke and dust. He tried to follow it with his eyes, but it disappeared into a billow-ing black cloud, from the other side of which emerged a stream of swift airborne drones, like a shoal of silver fish against the day-bright sky. They were following the Tehran-Karaj highway, using it as their marker for Mehrabad Airport to the south of the zoo. In a matter of moments they’d carpeted the airport and the zoo with explosives. Next to the zoo, the Azadi soccer stadium had caught fire, making for a clearly visible target for the attackers. Along the highway bordering the stadium, the bombs had fallen among the packed crowds fleeing the blazing city centre. Caught unawares in the middle of the night, thousands of terrified people had made for open spaces like the Laleh, Shahr, Mellat and Jamshidieh parks. Now huge fires raged everywhere, choking the sky. Closer by, in the southern corner of Eram Park, where the zoo was located, scores of target markers floated in the air. They were eerily beautiful, as incandescent as little suns. In the dazzling glare, he saw a zookeeper bend over a dying animal and get blown to pieces by a delayed-action bomb. Another keeper ran furiously past, her forehead gushing blood. A keeling high-voltage pylon knocked her down in a hail of sparks. He rushed over and tried to douse the flames

engulfing her, but it was too late. Driven back, he retreated towards the enclosure housing the Bactrian camels. Just as he reached it, something plummeted out of the sky and buried itself deep beneath the earth. The ground began to cough before yawning open in a great maw of dust. The female camel, slammed against a pillar by the force of the explosion, stood immobile with shock. Her calf lay on its belly in a pool of blood, legs splayed out, skull fractured. Their keeper, Shakouri, a towering man in a warden’s cap, was madly shaking the barrier fence, trying to get over. Finally he tore a hole in the fence with his bare hands and slid down on his hands and knees to the calf. He flung his arms around the wounded animal, his shoulders shaking. Akbarpour came by at that moment with a firing squad. The female camel hadn’t moved; her brains were beginning to slop out from a huge gash in her skull. Akbarpour signalled to the firing squad to put both animals out of their misery. His calm was impressive. The calf ’s keeper began banging his head violently on the ground. He had to be forcibly separated and dragged away. The men lined up and took aim. The calf was trembling uncontrollably. There was a series of grey puffs. The firing squad walked over to the other side of the enclosure and surrounded its mother. There was another series of puffs and the huge animal sank to her knees, dark rivulets streaming from her eyes. The firing squad dispersed. Anguished by what he’d just witnessed, he turned his back to them. As he lurched away, something knocked him over from behind. It was a Turkoman stallion, wide-eyed with terror, dragging its hind legs as it stumbled forward. A bomb splinter had gouged an immense wound on its back, exposing the spine. He lined it up in his sights and gunned it down. It jerked its head backwards and

night joydeep roy-bhattacharya

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staggered for a few paces before collapsing. He looked away, then turned away. He was limping now; with every step, blood ran out of his right boot. The boots had been a sensible choice. The asphalt had begun to melt in the heat and he saw many charred shoes. He came to an alley coated with burning phospho-rus. A rare Persian gazelle caped in flames galloped past him, but he was able to save a second, smaller antelope, flinging himself on it just as it plunged into the darkness. He scooped it up; it was warm to the touch and, for a few moments, he remembered what it was like to hold a living creature. He carried it to the enclosure where they were trying to pen in some of the animals. Handing it to a keeper, he returned to the task that he’d been assigned. Close to the wolf house he came upon a man crouched against a wall who’d burned from the feet up. The man’s upper body was intact, but below his hips there was nothing. The flames seemed fiercer than in other places, and they were sucking the oxygen out of the air. He clambered over a charred heap that had once been a magnificent male. He wondered if it was the one he had named Siddharth on account of its amiable disposition. Akbarpour had obviously already been here, because the next three animals had all been put out of their misery, hopefully before the inferno had roasted them. Now all that was left were blackened bundles of fur and grimacing skulls. The instructions from the Ministry of the Disinherited had been clear: in the event of a major catastrophe, all the large carnivores were to be put down to avoid the possibility of injury to the human population. He counted the dead wolves and realised that some-how they’d missed one. He spotted her high on the slope of an artificial mound. She was badly burnt, half her face blown away by an explosion, and

there were two or three gaping wounds on her flanks where the shrapnel had done its work. She didn’t budge as he dragged himself slowly up the concrete slope until he reached a plinth near her. His entire body was dripping with sweat. He steadied his injured arm against the plinth and aimed between her eyes, but his hand slipped as he pressed the trigger and he hit her on the shoulder. Trailing blood, she crawled around the curve of the slope, her body spasming as he followed her. He found her trying to squeeze into her den, but the entrance was covered by rubble. She buried her head as he approached, and he had to drag her out by the scruff. Holding her down with his leg, he pulled the trigger. The impact jolted him right off his perch. He hit the ground with his shoulder and lay there for a moment, stunned. A piercing pain shot through his ankle. It made him dizzy; he wanted to close his eyes and let go, but forced himself to his feet. He knew that one of the wolves had recently had a litter, and he searched desperately for the cubs. Every moment the place grew hotter. Dark patches crept up the stucco. He knew that if he stayed any longer the smoke would go to his head like poi-son. He turned to leave and found the exit blocked by debris. He hobbled past it to where he could see a jagged hole in one of the walls. The flames bellowed as he stumbled into the open. Shadowy forms ran past him in all directions. His last stop, going by his instructions, was the lion house. Just as he reached there, he met Pezeshkzad with a couple of his men, and they went in together. Pezesh-kzad’s face was a mask. The lions were his charges. A dead lioness lay across their path, the top of her head a crim-son mess. Another lioness slumped in the background, horribly burned. The flames were still licking her back while she protectively covered her

cub. She must have been in agony, and she bared her teeth at them in warning. Pezeshkzad approached her on his own, his arms hanging down. The lioness turned her head away from him. The old man went down on his knees beside her and dispatched her with a single shot. Someone darted forward to grab the cub before it could get away. Pezeshkzad rose slowly to his feet and advanced towards his favourite, Shah Abbas, the leader of the pride, a massive one-eyed Asiatic lion crowned king of the zoo by the city’s children. Pezeshkzad was weeping openly now. The king was barely alive, blinded and burned by incendiaries, his shaggy head swaying from side to side. He recognized Pezeshkzad’s voice and allowed him to near. Pezeshkzad raised his gun, waited for a second, shook his head, and put the weapon down. He flopped down before the lion, his shoulders sagging. One of his men came up from behind and pulled him away. Another keeper raised his rifle and aimed. The lion slumped to the ground. Moments later, as they backed out, the walls fell, burying the lion house. They moved in a daze past neatly piled sandbags and rows of useless fire extinguishers. A pillar of smoke reared high above the zoo, the last breath of its ruins. An enormous cloud of cinder and ash shrouded Eram Park, the smoke no longer black but an intense, almost blinding red that parted for an instant to reveal the snowclad Alborz mountains in the distance. He stared at the peaks with dead eyes. He’d lost all sense of time. As he passed Pezeshkzad, the old man tried to prise his gun away, but he shook his head and turned to go just as a spark stung him in the right eye. He thought he would black out from the pain. He could hardly tell where he was any more; it felt as if he was moving through an incinerator. Sparks kept singeing him. The wind


11

tore at his face. The gun slipped out of his hand. Almost blind, he stum-bled to the left but after a few paces came to the edge of a fire and had to turn around and go back the way he had come. He stepped on something soft: it was a human hand. Ahead of him, he caught a glimpse of the car park bordering the zoo. He made for it, joining a stream of other creatures. They crossed the parking area and entered the expressway, merging with the fleeing crowds. Animals and people took no notice of each other. Here, in the open, everything seemed to be on fire. The ground was slippery; the asphalt had melted here. Occasionally it glowed, either from the heat or from the reflections of the fires, and then it was as if they were wading through molten lava. Many went down in that black river. The massive housing developments on either side of the road were burning fiercely. He could see rows of windows blazing inside. In a matter of seconds, the houses had hollowed into skeletons, with columns of smoke rising into the sky. A fierce wind blasted through them, as hot as a furnace, belching smoke and sparks. As the wind began to spiral, a scent like burning pitch impregnated the air. Windowpanes exploded out of walls, razor-sharp shards ricochetted off pavements, the air filled with projectiles. With wet shawls, jackets and coats wrapped around their heads the terrified survivors fled in a rush. The roaring wind pursued them through the city’s gutted shell, then turned back on itself, snatching at kernels. The larger buildings compli-cated things, but only to a degree, their roofs twisting off as easily as bottle caps. A door danced spirals in midair, a loose sheet of asbestos smashed a parked car into smither-eens. A piece of wooden fencing crashed into the pavement before him and shattered. He crouched down

and watched as stone tiles and bricks whistled past. The pressure of the air was terrific; it seemed to twist right through his guts. A fire warden’s helmet smashed down next to him. He reached over to put it on and found a severed head inside. Shying back, he scrambled away on all fours and turned a corner. Here, a tall building shielded the street from the firestorm. Rising to his feet, he began a stum-bling run. Everywhere he stepped, he crunched on broken glass. His injured ankle forced him to slow down. His pace grew sluggish, and more than once he felt himself pushed aside. Bundles of charred rags im-peded his progress; often they were all that was left of the dead, their bodies shrunken by firebombs to half their size. The stench of roasted flesh was overpowering. He glimpsed an air-raid warden yelling through a klaxon, but for him all was deathly quiet. He followed the grey line of people, their faces pitted, clothes smeared with ash as they stumbled silently over the debris and the dead. Some came to a standstill and keeled over. They lay where they’d fallen while others stepped over them. There were dead, dead everywhere. Many were smouldering like cinders. Others were all blown up with black and brown stains on their bodies. Still others looked as if they’d gone to sleep peacefully. Everything living was in its last stages. He himself stepped on burning corpses without a second thought. Blackened hands and feet stuck out everywhere. A suitcase spilled open and suddenly he found himself surrounded by porcelain cups and saucers. To his right, a bare- headed woman swaddled a baby in her arms. She wore an ash-coloured chador, or perhaps it was covered with ashes. She turned to look at him and he saw that she was beautiful, her heavy black hair draping down like a cowl. A piece of airborne debris

knocked her over, and the baby spilled out of her arms into a crater filled with fire. The woman didn’t get up; her clothes began to smoulder. People crept past her on their hands and knees so as to be near the ground to breathe easier, but not knowing, as they advanced, if they were getting away from the firestorm or merely heading back into it. Many had caps and garments over their heads to shield their eyes from the rain of cinders. They passed a five-storeyed building just as it glowed like a torch and detonated, the blast waves knock-ing him over. Someone lifted him up. A red haze surrounded him. He took a couple of steps and stopped, the ground buckling under him. He was exhausted, and down to his last hand-kerchief. He felt a burning sensation in his legs and tripped over a piece of window frame. He fell headlong across it and into a large crater, at least three metres deep. At the bottom was a group of perfectly still figures: two young girls with handbags and a boy in school uniform. They were all unmarred, lying as if asleep, their distended pupils mirroring the burning sky. One of the girls wore an incomprehensible expression of serenity. He stretched out next to her, his face a mass of blisters, his lungs on fire. He felt the deep calm of resig-nation. He had no will left in him. He was too fatigued to go on. Covering his face with his arm, he closed his eyes. He was no longer in the darkness of the crater but back home in the apartment on Vozara Street. Bahar was gently stroking his face. It’s all right, beloved, she whispered; everything is going to be all right. She kissed him on the forehead. A layer of ash mantled her face, like dirty snow. She coughed, once, and then was still. The ash stirred before settling down. It was 3 a.m. in Tehran.

joydeep roy-bhattacharya

Euripides, with your scalpel pity and your songs, who watched from exile in Macedonia, 403 BC, that city where you spoke out against massacre (blowing up the allies, for God’s sake!) sizzle in its turn. Long Walls pulled down.

You who were torn to pieces on a goat-track by dogs – what's the use? I think of you walking in dapply oak forests of the north where feather-fetlocked war-stallions are grazing waving meadows which Athenian yeomen, blunting their hoes on rockfields, would kill to cultivate.

You imagine, as you hike, a baby-faced stranger. A god with cinnamon sideburns, ivy sap leaking through his microtonal ’oud, entering every city alike: barbarian, Greek, twin-towered, devout.

But this is March 2006 and I’m on the edge of a bed, among cappucino shadows of afternoon in the freezing cold Movenpick Hotel, Bahrain.100 degrees outside and the Manager can’t turn off the air conditioning, no one can. Cement roofs roil up and down, up and down, far as the eye can see. Caramel domes and salmon sky in the first Gulf State to find oil. I’m watching the President of Iran in ivory denim conduct a dance of seven ministers on CNN. They hop in celebration. Old men,

round and again round a desk of microphones like the crown of stalwart hills and radio masts about a holy city. They have enriched plutonium! (Do they feel a touch ridiculous, too?) Representatives of other Arab states, plus my friends downstairs, are all calm. No big deal, no cause for alarm. But Washington is talking of war. Another Abu Ghraib? Euripides, whose microtones I lived with a long strange while: where are your arguments now, that frayed silk rope of human, divine, and the same rules applying to all?

poetry ruth padel

12

As I Flick the Remote in the Gulf I think of an Ancient Greek Playwright

At home the same things happened. Women were widowed, then died. Parents shuffle through empty roomsWithout the sons they loved. Our troops have earned this praise in our name. We must shut up about such acts of shame.

trojan women 379-84

To speak of distance, the sanctuary lampof something you must find or do, and something you have to escape.

To speak of hope, born on the site of loss. The task is to assimilate. To movebetween Arabic, Hebrew, Russian, Greekand French. Commemorate your journey to the crossing-place.

The hard thing is to pass. Harder still to fold your wings and drop the mask. Translate.

ruth padel


13

To Speak of Distance

graphic novel olivier kugler

14


15

graphic novel olivier kugler

16

issue iv

17

night and day

plus ça change... olivia snaije

18

It has been almost twenty-five years since master political cartoonist Naji al-Ali was assassinated in London. During his career he drew an estimated 12,000 cartoons for a variety of newspapers, champion-ing the rights of the underprivileged, drawing attention to human suffering and the politicians and policy-makers responsible. His messages were loud and clear, and no one was spared. As reports from the Middle East con-tinue to dominate today’s news, one keen observer is conspicuously missing – Ali's character Hanthala, the Palestinian child with an infal-lible moral compass, his back always turned to the viewer.

There are many elements that make Ali’s work compelling, but what is particularly striking, looking at the drawings thirty-odd years on, is how contemporary they remain. Witness his numerous cartoons from the 1980s about the United States’ interest in Arab oil states, or his portrayal of misappropriation of Palestinian land and illegal Israeli settlements. Today, Ali’s mythical brainchild might shrug and say ‘plus ça change...’

Naji al-Ali was born in the village of al-Shajara, in today’s Galilee, in 1936. He fled to Lebanon during the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 and came of age in the refugee camp of Ain al-Hilweh. ‘Where do I begin?’ Ali asked Egyptian writer Radwa Ashour in an interview she conducted with him during the summer of 1984. ‘Perhaps from the day we left Palestine on our way to southern Lebanon. And from the looks in the eyes of our mothers and fathers that did not speak of facts, but expressed a sorrow which was the language in which we learned about the world...’ As political awareness made its way into the camps in the 1950s, Ali began to draw on the walls of Ain al-Hilweh, and, soon after, on the walls of the Lebanese prisons where he was incarcerated for his political activities. In 1961, Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani gave Ali his first break by publishing his cartoons in Al-Huria, the official magazine of the Arab Nationalist Movement. Two years later, Ali moved to Kuwait where he found work with the maga-

zine Al-Talea (Avant-Garde).

It was in the wealthy Gulf state that Ali created his alter ego and his guardian angel, the iconic ten-year-old Hanthala, whose cult-like fig-ure today is reproduced regularly as graffiti, on T-shirts and hanging on necklaces. The reason Ali introduced the boy (his name meaning ‘bitter des-ert fruit’) to readers, he explained to Ashour, was that ‘the young, barefoot Hanthala was a symbol of my child-hood. He was the age I was when I left Palestine and, in a sense, I am still that age today. Even though this all hap-pened thirty-five years ago, the details of that phase in my life are still fully present to my mind. I feel that I can re-call and sense every bush, every stone, every house and every tree I passed when I was a child in Palestine.

‘The character of Hanthala was a sort of icon that protected my soul from falling whenever I felt sluggish or I was ignoring my duty. That child was like a splash of fresh water on my forehead, bringing me to attention and keeping me from error and loss. He was the arrow of the compass, pointing steadily toward Palestine. Not just Palestine in geographical terms, but Palestine in its humani-tarian sense – the symbol of a just cause, whether it is located in Egypt, Vietnam or South Africa.’

Ali always sought to remain true to the people he had grown up with, who didn’t have the luxury of leaving the camps. In the 1970s he returned to Lebanon to work for the recently launched As-Safir newspaper, his drawings reflecting a growing disgust with what he felt was the corruption

Plus ça change... Naji al-Ali


of Arab regimes, a wealthy elite that ignored injustice and the destitute, and the continuing brutality of the Israelis toward the Palestinians.

When Israel invaded and occu-pied Lebanon in 1982, Ali took his eldest son, Khalid, who was fifteen at the time, back to the camp to inspect the devastating damage of a battle in which hundreds of civilians had lost their lives.

‘My father used to say that his pen should be like the knife of the surgeon, cutting through hypoc-risy and rhetoric,’ said Khalid al-Ali, who now lives in Bahrain. He works actively to keep his father’s work and memory alive by organising exhibi-tions and, most importantly for him, a series of books of Ali’s political cartoons, reissued in chronological order.

‘Some people went as far as to say that his work was basic political slogans; others just focused on the [political] message and not the artistic side of the cartoons themselves.’

But in his original drawings it is easy to see that Ali’s gestures were fluid yet precise, and some are de-cidedly painterly, evoking expres-sionism and the social realism of the Depression-era United States. In most of the cartoons, the ragged Hanthala has his back to the observer, a silent witness to the horror and absurdity of the region’s politics. His hands, clasped behind him, have been read to signify the dejection, or binding, of the Palestinians or the polite voyeurism of non-Palestinians. In one particularly powerful draw-

ing, though, Hanthala’s furrowed, anguished face is visible, turned towards a couple of Palestinian peasants ploughing their occupied land with an AK-47, while sowing it with heart-shaped seeds.

Hanthala occasionally participates in the action as in one image, published in the Kuwaiti paper, Al-Qabas in 1984, in which Hanthala joins a woman and a girl in throwing stones at both Israeli soldiers and Arab politicians – Ali foreseeing the Intifada many years before it hap-pened. Ali’s drawings became increas-ingly critical of Arab leaders over time, his son observed, and he por-trayed them as ugly, misshapen, and bottom-heavy figures.

Three months earlier, in what could be an eerie prediction of his own murder, Ali had published a drawing of Hanthala’s death – lying face down with an arrow in his heel.

In a 1999 documentary by Iraqi film-maker Kasim Abid, Ali’s wife Widad describes the death threats he received regularly in Lebanon, and how she would wake up each morning to start his car for him because she felt that, ‘if something were to happen to me, it wouldn’t make a big difference. But as for Naji, he was irreplaceable.’

Ali obviously felt a tremendous responsibility towards the Palestinian people, and told Ashour in the 1984 interview: ‘I was always troubled by my inability to protect people. How were my drawings going to defend them?’

In the end the death threats were real, but Ali’s work endures and is, unfortunately, just as timely. As Ali

himself put it, ‘Hanthala, [whom] I created, will not end after my end. I hope that this is not an exaggeration when I say that I will continue to live with Hanthala, even after I die.’

Interest in Ali’s work has continued in the years after his death. A book in Arabic has been published with drawings from 1985–87, and Khalid is preparing another with cartoons from 1983–85. In 2009 Verso published a collection of cartoons called A Child in Palestine that included an introduc-tion by acclaimed graphic novelist and journalist Joe Sacco. In it, Sacco writes that when he first travelled to the

occupied West Bank he was slightly reluctant to tell his hosts that he would be depicting their stories in cartoons, ‘Would they think I intended to trivialise their oppression? I needn’t have worried. Upon blurting out my approach, a smile of understanding usually creased their faces. Of course! We had our own cartoonist! Naji al-Ali!’

Last September a group of young Palestinian graphic artists reproduced Ali’s cartoons on the walls of a Ramal-lah gallery in a tribute to the Egyptian revolution, and an exhibition of his cartoons was held in Finland. Khalid al-Ali is planning an event to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of his father’s death and hopes to continue to pub-lish books on his father’s work. ‘He died because of his work, so for us it’s important that his work be out there.’

olivia snaije

19

poetry andré naffis-sahely

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Unlike the Mongols before them,this is a horde that raises no dust,and handles neither bullet nor sword;

theirs is a different sort of invasion:one involving visa and suitcasesthat slide neatly right under their seats.

No one city can claim them; every streetthat they walk might as well be in Chicago,Chennai, Taipei or Dubai. ‘Geography'

is a word they often hear but considerboth vast and useless. What is life if notbrief glimpses of rivers, suburbs, of houses

they will never sit still in? Such thoughtsare best left to the nights and there arenot a few sleepless ones... This is a tribe

highly prone to nostalgia and familiarto places like building sites, kitchens –to stalls where the scrubbers of toilets

dream of old patients and stethoscopes.In the land of their birth, each endof the month is an occasion for a feast,

one bought by the cash which they wireacross mountains and oceans. Adaptable,tireless, long-legged and peaceful – this

is a species whose turf covers the wholeof this brightly-lit and bewildering world:like the lichen, the mollusc, the killer whale,

or even the monarch butterfly – an insectthat mates and reproduces during its journey,so that each larva always wakes in a land

both excitingly new and terrifyingly foreign,and every successive generation carries onwith the next stage of their endless migration.

ProfessionalVagabonds


21

What city stays still like a glass-cased clock?I wish this one did. I can't let it out of my sight:the coffee-house I emptied my cup in one day

has turned into a beauty salon, and the housesI once lived in are no longer there. All my life I wanted to show someone this strange town,

and now that you're here I just sit by the creek and mumble something incoherent in disbelief – little to do except list the sights in a Guinness

Book of Records way, or explain how there were no museums or libraries, no interesting ones anyway? All that hate and here I am. Narrow wooden boats

sail past the bright hotels. This whole country is like a hotel: a sweaty ride in a glass elevator;at the ding of the doors, a chance to escape.

andré naffis-sahely

The Returnfor Alexandra

extract edward said

22

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation. No one disputes the fact that Napoleon actually lived and was a French emperor; there is however, a great deal of interpretative disagreement as to whether he was a great or in some ways a disastrous ruler of France. Such disagreements are the stuff out of which historical writing is made and from which historical knowledge derives. For interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is in interpreting, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place. In this sense, all interpretations are what might be called situational: they always occur in a situation whose bearing on the interpretation is affiliative. It is related to what other interpreters have said, either by confirming them, or by disputing them, or by

continuing them. No interpretation is without precedents or without some connection to other interpretations. Thus anyone writing seriously about Islam, or China, or Shakespeare, or Marx must in some way take account of what has been said about these subjects, if only because he or she wishes not to be irrelevant or redundant. No writing is (or can be) so new as to be completely original, for in writing about human society one is not doing mathematics, and therefore one cannot aspire to the radical originality possible in that activity.

Knowledge of other cultures, then, is especially subject to ‘unscientific’ imprecision and to the circumstances of interpretation. Nevertheless, we can say tentatively that knowledge of another culture is possible, and it is important to add, desirable, if two conditions are fulfilled – which, incidentally, are precisely the two conditions that today’s Middle East or Islamic studies by and large do not fulfill. One, the student must feel that he or she is answerable to and in

uncoercive contact with the culture and the people being studied. As I said earlier, most of what the West know about the non-Western world it knew in the framework of colonialism; the European scholar therefore approached his subject from a general position of dominance, and what he said about this subject was said with little reference to what anyone but other European scholars had said. For the many reasons I have enumerated earlier in this book and in Orientalism, knowledge of Islam and of Islamic peoples has generally proceeded not only from dominance and confrontation but also from cultural antipathy. Today Islam is defined negatively as that with which the West is radically at odds, and this tension establishes a framework radically limiting knowledge of Islam. So long as this framework stands, Islam, as a vitally lived experience for Muslims, cannot be known. This, unfortunately, is particularly true in the United States, and only slightly less true in Europe.

edward said

Extract: from Covering IslamKnowlege and Interpretation

from the archive


23

from the archive

from the archive edward said

24


25

article jeremy lewis

Night & Day

night and day

When people first began talking of Arab Springs, I thought they were talking of a spa – an Arab frenchise, you know, a bit like Maroush on Edgewear Road and Knightsbridge. So I thought Arab Springs was a chain of spas, with branches in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and all. I shouldn’t say, because they are our Muslim sisters, but Arab women are very hairy, na? All the time they are threading and waxing and sugaring and all. That’s why I thought Arab Springs was the place where they got their legs done and their eyebrows and their upper lips... So when people said that in Bahrain and in Yemen it hadn’t taken off and that royal families there had opposed it very much, I thought maybe the women there are not needing so much of waxing. Anyways, under those heavy black niqabs, who’s to see if your upper lips are threaded or not?

And then suddenly it donned on me – now don’t ask bore questions like how and why – that all these remonstrations in Tahrir Square and all the bombings in Libya and all the killing shillings in Syria, this is Arab Springs. Why it should be called spring and not: spring, summer, autumn and winter, seeing it’s lasted a whole year, is anyone’s guest. So I asked Janoo, (that’s my husband who’s into bore things like economies and politics and history and geography and has always got his face inside newspapers) why spring lasts a whole year in Arab places and why it’s only ten days long in Pakistan. Then he told me slowly and quietly like I was stuppid, that Arab spring is not a season, it’s actually a big fight between Arab peoples and their guvmunts. Respite ruling for some

thirty, forty years, their guvmunts are enjoying too much to go just yet and so the people who haven’t been enjoying at all for the last forty years are fighting with them and saying no, no, you must go now. And they call it spring because it’s meant to be an awakening.

You tau know how much broad-minded I am, but between you, me and the four walls, I think so all these peoples from sandy type places, they’re a little bit backwards. I know Dubai has biggest mall and also the tallest tower and that Saudi Arabia is all air-conditioned and completely covered with marble but imagine waking up after forty years, like you were Rip wan Wimple or someone. What I mean is that instead of sitting around suffering silently for forty years, why they didn’t arrange a little plane crash like we did for General Zia after eleven years, haan? (If we hadn’t he would still have been sitting on our heads grinning like an ape.) Or why they didn’t do a military coo in Syria like our army does in Pakistan every ten years? That way everyone has a nice change. We don’t get bored of seeing same grinning face on our TV screens for forty years and also the army wallahs, the generals and the kernels and all, they also come out of their barracks and get a chance to make even more money and strut about in their uniforms. So why the Arabs don’t do like us? So again Janoo spoke in that special slow voice he keeps for me and said that in both Syria and Egypt, military was hand in love with the guvmunts, that’s why there was no coo. Frankly speaking, I think so that’s unnatural. Imagine, an army that listens to guvmunts and does as it says! A bit like parents listening to

children and going to bed when they’re told. Weird, no?

And also when we were seeing Egyptians on TV guarding their neighbourhoods from looters and thievers, I must say I was tau very disappointed. The only arms they had were kitchen knives and baseball bats. Now if it had been Pakistan, every household would have had at least two Kalashnikovs, if not a rocket launcher or even a missile or two. No wonders their spring has dragged on for a whole year. And Libya is meant to be so rich and all, and it doesn’t even have an atom bomb. Honestly! Now you know why I think they are backwards? Pakistan may have a hundred million starving illitred poors but at least the rest of the world looks at us with so much of respect.

Janoo is very excited that there are stirrings of Arab spring in Saudi also. Janoo is not a fan of their royal family. I’m not minding the Saudis so much because thanks God I don’t have to live there and receive hundred lashes for driving and go about dressed all in black. The only thing I mind about them is that they are a little bit rude when you go to do Hajj. And their religious police, I’m sorry to say, has no manners at all. I know they’re not educated but at least they could show a little bit of respect to people from decent baggrounds. And also they are putting up madrasshas in every village in our country and turning all our innocent hungry naked unemployeds into snarling vicious Wahhabis. I hope so Arab Spring comes tomorrow into Saudi!

moni mohsin 26

issue iv

From her fortified mansion in Pakistan, Moni Mohsin’s deliciously wicked fictional heroine shares her thoughts on recent events in the Arab region. All malapropisms and outrageous opinions printed here are intentional. [disclaimEr: The views expressed in this column do not reflect the views of the author]

Neighbourhood Watch

night and day writers habits

Jump start: Before I write I’ll often read a paragraph of a book that inspires me—Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Joy Williams’ stories, a Wallace Stevens poem. The pleasure I experience as a reader reminds me of why I wanted to write in the first place.

Nourishment:In the past, my answer would have been “one gallon, minimum, of Diet Coke.” I have purchased so much early morn-ing Diet Coke from the people at Gro-cery-Candy, my corner bodega in the Heights, that I truly believe I’ve put the Grocery-Candy proprietor’s sons through college with my habit. An ex-boyfriend used to bring me these court-ship sacks of gum and Diet Coke. But I’ve been off the sauce for one month, so we’ll see if it negatively affects my writing. Not to be juiced on aspartame at all times... I’ll tell you what, though, green tea just doesn’t have the same kick. If suddenly I write a quiet decaf masterpiece, á la Marilynne Robinson or James Salter, we’ll know the reason. At the moment, though, I keep falling asleep at the wheel...

Music: While I was writing Swamplandia!, I listened to The National’s ‘Alligator’ semi-superstitiously. For St. Lucy’s, it was the Donnie Darko soundtrack. Juana Molina’s song ‘Son’, and Cat Power’s ‘Haiku Ten’, which for some reason became Ava’s theme when I was writing the second half of the book. I don’t often write to music, but I do think it can work to take a break and listen to a song that feels

atmospherically linked to whatever mood you’re trying to create on the page. I also will listen to people like Jay-Z or Rye Rye if I’m in need of an adrenal-ego jolt to power through sloth or doubt!

Where I work:This semester, on the gorgeous Bard College campus. but generally, at my neighbourhood Starbucks, where ev-ery day I go head to head with another squatter/writer for the coveted power outlet seat, near the Splenda trough. You’d think we’d be allies, two writers at the ‘office’, but it gets Darwinian. We both really need that outlet. Distraction of choice: I live on a fire escape filled with men-acing, fornicating pigeons – and I have to say, watching pigeon procreation is a horrifying distraction. The internet is a bad one; too often I’ll “research” by reading fascinating articles about, say, tetrachromacy in butterflies that have zero bearing on whatever story I’m os-tensibly writing. Or email, I send my friends far too many doofy emails. The Hood Internet, Netflix, all the usual suspects.

Inspiration: I live by the cloisters, and I love walk-ing there in any weather – sometimes the physical activity of walking can jostle something loose for me, like leaves freed from their branches by wind. (More often, though, I find my-self jogging lightly away from barking dogs, or thinking obsessively about which Subway sandwich I’m going to order). Reading my favourite authors, watching movies, certain song lyrics, I

think if you’re in an open state almost any of the day’s flotsam and jetsam can function as inspiration. Oh, and in New York, street eavesdropping can be as gratifying and shocking as the best film or book!

Exercise: I do jog, very slowly, but how this im-pacts my writing is unclear to me, be-yond ensuring that I’ll still fit in my Scandinavian butt-shrunken ‘Stefan’ Ikea chair.

Nemesis: Me! I don’t know if I can answer this one any more specifically than that! I really think writers can be their own worst enemies –plagued by doubt, sure, but also just lazy sometimes. It takes great energy to write forward, and a focus that is difficult to find in the noisy world of 24/7 accessibility, where TV, the Internet and the great ticker-tape of Times Square are always raining information on you, acidifying your attention span.

Relief: I wish I could impress you with a glam-orous response here, like bourbon on the rocks, or a Kama Sutra pose, but see my nerdy answer above, about the gum and Diet Coke. Word Count:Oh, I want to lie about this, the way I want to tell the doctor I eat at least fif-teen portions of fruit and vegetables a day! Depending on the stage of the project, anywhere from several thou-sand to a sad little palmful of words. But I think that word count is a decep-tive metric –projects expand and con-tract. I think time spent in the world of the book or the story counts for more, and I aim for three to four focused hours a day, although if things are go-ing well I’m happy to spend all week-end holed up in a fictional universe.

HabitsWriters

karen russell has been featured in the New Yorker’s debut fiction issue, was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists in 2007 and was recently named one of the ‘20 under 40’ by the New Yorker. Her short story collection, St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, was universally acclaimed and was longlisted for the Guardian first book award in 2007. Her first novel, Swamplandia! is published by Chatto & Windus in March. She lives in New York.

writers' habits lila azam zanganeh

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lila azam zanganeh's intimate habits from the garret.

jump start: Jump starting is always a balancing act. First, you wake up. However, since you don't really need nor particularly like alarm clocks, you wake up at somewhat random hours (depending on how late you've grudgingly made your way to bed). You don't need to rush, agonise over lateness, dress, and commute. So you take your time. You have breakfast. You munch calmly. You sit by the window. Then you remember you need to call someone. Moments later, you glance at the papers (mostly at the Headlines and the Books sections, that is). Soon, you read a poem, which is something you love to do every day (anything from Auden to Coleridge to a page of Homer). Then you feel guilty, and begin to answer very urgent emails (the urgency seems proportionate, of course, to your lack of willingness to get to work). At this point, you may take a break, since you're already feeling a tad hungry (always, it seems, when it's time to concentrate). Finally, around noon, having no other options, you shut down the internet (which you have purposefully disconnected from your writing space), turn off your BlackBerry, hide it away in the pantry, and at last, you open your word document and begin staring, puzzled, at your own prose.

nourishment/beverage:The trick, of course, is variation. Various sundry teas (loose leaf is better, as it should feel like a luxury), chocolates galore, fruits (preferably fresh, though dried mangoes work quite well). The idea is also to make up for greed with healthy doses of guilt-relieving antioxidants: blueberries, black chocolate, green tea.

music: Only baroque music works for me. Rhythms have to be crisp and regular (Handel is my personal favourite, and Bach too). Vocals have to glide without ever being intrusive. The crescendos of baroque music (think of Handel's choruses in Julius Caesar) impart a lot of energy. On good days, if you hit upon the right tune, they can make you soar and fly. The da capo arias, with their multiple repetitions of identical musical lines, also provide mental sustenance. You are lifted by the melody, which accompanies you without substituting itself for your thought patterns. To me, baroque music is truly the best vitamin (along with the occasional daily nap).

where i work:In my living room in New York, at my dining table, or else reclining on a large, red couch. No electronic appliances, all phones off. All I need is a lot of natural light. When I tire of working from home, I also love to work in cafes or restaurants. I have to feel comfortable that the staff won't want to throw me out after the second hour, and I also need to love the surroundings. In New York, Cafe Sabarsky at the Neue Gallery is quite pleasant, or else Lady M, the tiny, ultra-chic Japanese pastry shop on 78th street. distraction of choice: Without a doubt: chocolates and pastry (Lady M's banana cream cake, or its lethal mille-crepes).

inspiration: There is no such thing as ‘inspiration’. Once you have blessedly jump-started the lazy animal sleeping inside of you, it really is all about the hours you put in at your desk. The more energy you

use, the more you get, and sentences begin to flow, stories form. But it is all very hard work. I'd say 90% hard work, 10% contingency.

exercise: Breathing and biking. The only writerly exercise I know of – except writing – is reading. On bad writing days, I read and re-read my favourite writers (Nabokov, Shakespeare, Joyce, Pushkin, and countless poets).

nemesis: Slumber. The irresistible desire to fall asleep.

relief: Give in, sooner rather than later. Then make yourself a cup of strong tea, and pick up where you left off. word count:I never count words, but I do count hours. I try to put in an average of four hours of writing a day. Cruise speed can average at five, but can range anywhere from two to eight hours. The longest ever have been twelve hour writing days, towards the end of a project. But one risks burn-out, so best to keep those for the very last stretches. I am now writing a novel on love titled The Orlando Inventions, which has required enormous amounts of research as it spans fourteen centuries. So – each and every day – I try balancing writing, reading, mind-wandering, day-dreaming, and brief spells of sleep on that red couch. On most days, when I finally get down to actually working, I must confess that I am happy.

HabitsWriters'

contributors night and day

List of Contributorsnaji al-ali was born in Palestine in 1936. In 1948 Ali became a refugee and came of age in the southern Lebanese refugee camp of Ain al-Helweh. Ali drew for a variety of Arab newspapers over twenty-four years until he was assassinated in London in 1987. He was the first cartoonist ever to be awarded the Golden Pen of Freedom award of the International Federation of Newspaper Publishers.

lila azam zanganeh was born in Paris to Iranian parents. After studying literature and philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she moved to the United States to teach literature, cinema and Romance languages at Harvard University. She has been published in The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Nation, The Paris Review, and La Repubblica. Her first book, The Enchanter: Nabokov and Happiness, was published by Penguin. She is currently at work on a novel titled The Orlando Inventions. She writes and lives in New York City.

samantha ellis is a playwright. Her plays include Cling To Me Like Ivy (Birmingham Rep and national tour), Patching Havoc (Theatre 503), The Thousand and Second Night (LAMDA), A Sudden Visitation of Calamity (Menagerie), Startle Response (Young Vic workshop), Sugar and Snow (Hampstead Theatre / BBC Radio Four), Martin’s Wedding (Blind Summit/ BAC) and short plays for The Miniaturists, Pursued by a Bear and Agent 160. She is writing a play called Operation Magic Carpet for the Unicorn Theatre and Birmingham Repertory Theatre and a book called What Would Lizzy Bennet Do? for Chatto & Windus.

olivier kugler was born in Stuttgart, Germany, and grew up in a small village in the Black Forest. Influenced by French/Belgian bande desinées and Otto Dix. Studied Graphic Design in Pforzheim and worked as a designer in Karlsruhe. He received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service to do a

Master’s degree in illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Since then he has been working as an illustrator in New York and London.

edward mackay is a poet living and working in east London. His poetry was shortlisted for the inaugural Picador Poetry Prize (2011), commended in the Emerge Escalator competition (2010) and shortlisted for an Eric Gregory Award (2009). His forthcoming pamphlet will be published by Salt in October.www.edwardmackay.com

edward said was a prolific writer on a wide range of topics including literature, music, cultural criticism and Middle Eastern issues. Of his many books, at least two have become classics: Orientalism is a brilliant analysis of how Europe came to dominate the Orient through the creation the myth of the exotic East, while the monumental Culture and Imperialism has redefined our understanding of the impact of European imperialism upon the shape of modern culture. A passionate advocate of Palestinian rights, Robert Fisk described him as the Palestinian’s ‘most powerful political voice’.

moni mohsin is the author of two books, the Indian bestseller The Diary of a Social Butterfly based on her hit column in Pakistan's Friday Times and a novel, The End of Innocence. Born in Pakistan, she lives in the UK.

andré naffis-sahely is a poet and translator. His translations of The Rule of Barbarism (Pirogue Poets) and The Bottom of the Jar (Archipelago Books) by Abdellatif Laâbi, as well as of The Barbary Figs (Arabia Books) by Rachid Boudjedra will be published in May, September and October respectively.

ruth padel is a prizewinning poet, Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and of the Zoological Society of London, and first Resident Writer at Somerset House, London. Her collections include

Rembrandt Would Have Loved You, Voodoo Shop and The Soho Leopard, all shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Darwin: A Life in Poems, shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, and most recently, The Mara Crossing, a mosaic of poems and prose about migration, shortlisted for the London Poetry Award.

joydeep roy-bhattacharya was born in Jamshedpur, India, and studied politics and philosophy at Presidency College and the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught literature and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Bard College, and the University at Albany. His novels The Gabriel Club and The Storyteller of Marrakesh have been published in eleven languages in sixteen countries. His new book, The Watch, will be the lead title in Random House's relaunch of Virginia & Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press this summer.

joseph smith is the author of The Wolf and Taurus. He lives in London.

olivia snaije is a journalist based in Paris. She is a former commissioning editor at Saqi Books as well as a former executive editor of Alef, a London-based magazine about the Middle East. She has reported for Beirut’s Daily Star from London and Paris since 2001. She was editor-in-chief of World Media in Paris, where she put together a magazine published by a group of twenty-six newspapers worldwide, including Libération (France), La Stampa (Italy), El País (Spain), Ha’aretz (Israel), Al-Ahram (Egypt), Oslobođenje (Sarajevo) and the Tages-Anzeiger (Zurich). She has written for the Guardian, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Condé Nast Traveler, The Global Post, The National and Middle East, and was a staff member at both Vanity Fair and CBC/Radio Canada in New York. Jonathan Cape published her translation of Lamia Ziadé’s Bye Bye Babylon in 2011.

With special thanks to milo harries.

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Night and Day The Middle East