On Monday April 30th, was held an exceptional Première for the Comédie Francaise. Normally, the vessel of French national theater reserves its premières to the Richelieu room, in Paris. But that week, it is in the heart of Marseille – at the Gymnase theater – that the House of Molière revealed its most recent creation. And not the least: Rituals of a metamorphosis, by Syrian playwright Saadallah Wannous, starring Denis Polyades and Julie Sicard. This play happens to be the first play translated from the Arabic to ever enter the French repertoire.

The symbolism is striking given that the play, which was written in 1994, in the time of Hafez El-Assad, clearly announces what we today observe on either side of the Mediterranean. One thinks of the Arab spring, but also, if one carefully listens to Wannous, one thinks of all the sexual and financial scandals which happen at the same time a little more to the North.

Saadallah WANNOUS

In the Rituals of a metamorphosis (1994), Wannous has admirably depicted another kind of darkness: that of the weight of tradition, the limitations of religion, the extremism of power, willing to resort to all sorts of lies and repressions to remain… More generally, one can only be baffled by the visionary depiction of the rise of obscurantism that this play offers.

The play is directed by Sulayman Al-Bassam, performed by the company of the Comédie Française.
The play is published in French by Actes Sud.

As the media reported the use of chemical weapons against the Syrian opposition, a picture taken by an activist from Ruqqah caught my attention. It showed a group of children who had fled Aleppo. There were six of them, each with wild hair and burnt skin – the side-effects of the chemicals. Their eyes gazed out at me hauntingly. How is the world not yet burning in shame to witness such a hideous crime?

Caught between the two worlds of exile and the rebel-controlled lands of northern Syria, I wonder about my own role in a revolution as challenging and complicated as that in my native land, now into its third terrible year. I am not in Syria, but neither am I outside; I am in no-man’s land, living my own revolution. Geography no longer means anything. My sense of time has become fluid as I move between airports and stations and the villages of northern Syria, escaping death in its daily pursuit, jolting between news of another massacre and my daydreams of the moment when Assad’s regime will fall. In the midst of all of this I have lost the person I used to be. Yet somehow I have found meaning.

As a writer it has not been easy to discover that the lives of those on the ground have become more important to me than fictional characters. For a long time my relationship with others was more observational than interactive. Now, the relationship between my life and writing is formed by the revolution.

I was with the revolution from the beginning, and I will stand by it until the end. I will expose its errors but I will not abandon it. For me, it is a testimony to the triumph of justice over oppression, the real-life expression of my own understanding of the concepts of ugliness and beauty.

On 3 March 2011, I was in Syria: I witnessed peaceful protesters being killed as they offered an olive branch to the regime, who responded with murder, bombings, torture and mutilation. I saw people protesting for justice, freedom, democracy, and the Shabiha militia, security forces and army responding by killing protesters, disfiguring their corpses, laying siege to whole towns. They made threats against the families of activists; they arrested doctors seen helping the wounded; they worked to sow enmity between people. They wanted to create their own anarchy. If soldiers refused to kill the protesters the security forces would get rid of them once and for all. They had no choice but to desert. I was witness to the fact that the revolution did not take up arms voluntarily.

I left Syria in mid-June 2011, having been discredited, persecuted, threatened and arrested. A year would pass before my return. I travelled between various towns and cities, speaking about the revolution, conscious of the regime’s prowess in manipulating the media, and its success in duping the world into believing that this was a war brought about by Sunni Islamists. I met with intellectuals, politicians and diplomats. They had little idea of what was going on. Most wanted to believe the story that it was a Salafist revolt. Their response was always that the minority groups in Syria were under threat – that the Christians and the Alawites would be in danger from the Sunni jihadis. This was not true; it was a monster they had created to scare themselves. What I saw on the ground told a very different story.

I had to return to Syria. Assad’s aircrafts were bombing bakeries, villages and farms. They bombarded civilians with explosives and sent a rain of poison down. In July last year I went back to the north, to the village of Banash, near Idlib. It was here that I saw the real Syria for the first time. The assault was continuous. Snipers were dotted throughout the rebel-controlled areas and Free Syrian Army checkpoints were all along the roads. There was scarcely any sign of extremist Islamists. In towns such as Saraqeb, the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish and Muthafar al‑Nawab and songs of love and struggle spread through the streets. The notion of a civil state dominated. The economic situation had deteriorated but was still bearable and sectarian tensions were not high. I travelled between the villages of the liberated north, hearing stories of death and heroism. I had conversations with various factions of the FSA, who spoke of a civil state even though many of them were Islamists. In August 2012, I was able to speak with a leading figure of the FSA and the tribal groups, discussing the state of sectarian relations and the importance of avoiding civil war. After my visit, my conviction in the revolution was stronger than ever. I came to understand what it means to die nobly.

Today, circumstances seem more desperate than ever. Not because of the daily massacres, the Scud missiles or the Mig helicopters; nor because of Syria’s transformation into a hell on earth, where people die every day as they wait in line for a scrap of bread, where Assad’s aircraft bombard the bread ovens so that the people will starve. And not because people are living without electricity, burying their dead by candlelight and, by day, resuming battle. Although these are tragedies, the real tragedy is that time is dragging on. I saw this in the eyes of the rebels I met – men armed with weapons and words who declared themselves ready to die for freedom, so others might survive.

Earlier this year, I visited the caves in Reef Idlib where Syrian civilians have fled to escape the shelling. There, I came to a muddy hovel and made my way down into a damp, dark cave. My guide was a woman carrying her young baby, with four other children clinging to her side. They were naked and hungry. At the side of another cave nearby was a girl of 16 who had lost a leg in a bomb attack. She was sitting on the dirty ground. The cave was not fit even for animals. The woman who had brought me there told me how her house had been destroyed; that they had moved to the caves to escape the bombardments, but the aircraft had followed and attacked them there. The people were hungry and sick, and the children lost and confused.

Two years after the revolution began I am touring the alleyways of Saraqeb with a group of young men counting their dead. Mig helicopters bombarded the town for two days straight. Yet, despite all of the pain and suffering, I say the same now as before: my heart is broken and I’ll never be at peace again, but I will not stop fighting Assad’s regime, no matter what the post-Assad future holds. Assad is a tyrant, a murderer and a sadist. Whatever is to come, it cannot be worse.

• Translated by Emily Danby. Samar Yazbek is a Syrian author and winner of the 2012 International PEN Pinter writer of courage award.

Read the rest of the contribution on Palestine Chronicle.

The Independent Foreign Prize honours the best work of fiction by a living author, which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom. Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize gives the winning author and translator equal status: each receives £5,000.

First awarded in 1990 to Orhan Pamuk and translator Victoria Holbrook for The White Castle, the Prize ran until 1995 and was then revived in 2000 with the support of Arts Council England, who continue to fund the award. The 2012 prize was won by Aharon Appelfeld and translator Jeffrey M Green for Blooms of Darkness.

Khaled Khalifa’s In Praise of Hatred, banned in Syria, has made the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013.

The book – published secretly in Damascus and banned forty days later – was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. Set in and around 1980s Aleppo, the story unpicks a life lived under dictatorship and loudly echoes the violence across the Middle East and the Arab world over the past two years. The translation into English by Leri Price is joined on the 16-strong longlist by Orhan Pamuk – who won the first Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 1990 and has subsequently been shortlisted twice – and Ismail Kadare, who won the first Man Booker International Prize in 2005.

The longlist also features Diego Marani, one of Italy’s leading contemporary authors, who was shortlisted for this Prize last year with New Finnish Grammar. Independent publishers are well represented with 11 different houses represented on the list. Harvill Secker also have a bumper year taking four of the slots, and finally Transworld with one. Translator Anne McLean appears twice for her work on The Sound of Things Falling, by Juan Gabriel Vasquez, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas, on which she collaborated with Rosalind Harvey. The longlist features books translated from 13 different languages including Croatian, Norwegian, Hungarian, and Afrikaans.

A shortlist of six books will be announced on Thursday 11 April and the overall winner of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2013 will be announced at an awards ceremony in central London in May at the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Published by The Kenyon Review, February 2013
Below are the first paragraphs.

I became obsessed with sodomizing Sheikh Arif round about the time his posters started crawling all over the streets. Today is July 20, 2012, right? A little over a year and a half after we toppled our president-for-life, Hosny Mubarak. Sheikh Arif’s posters began to show up only three, maybe four months ago—when he announced he was running in the elections held by the Army to replace said president. They seemed to self-procreate. And the more I saw of them, the more intense was the impetus to make the bovine symbol of virility they depicted a creature penetrated. Penetrated personally by me, of course, and I made a pledge to the universe that it would be.

Yes, indeed, my pale-skinned friend. Just please don’t look so bovine yourself while I tell you. To slip my modestly-sized dingaling into Sheikh Arif’s mighty badonkadonk: out of some sick mixture of fascination and outrage, I guess, it felt more like the purpose of my life than anything I could imagine doing before I died. And the feeling fazed me more than anyone. Even under the historical circumstances, sodomizing Sheikh Arif wasn’t something I could assimilate. With a little loosening of the platysma, I’m sure even you can imagine.

My name is K-h-a-l-i-d (and then) D. (and then) N-a-w-w-a-r-a-h. You know we’ve had TV ads warning us about talking to foreign journalists. Because, the Army tells us, all foreigners are spies. You heard about that too, ha ha! Here, have a cigarette. For one thing, it really makes no difference to my mother’s religion if you are a real operative—you know the expression, “my mother’s religion”? I mean, via business and/or Gulf oil, the Army and the Muslim Brotherhood are both serving foreign interests, right? What difference should it make to my mother’s cunt if you turn out to be a CIA agent? Khalid D. Nawwarah, yes. Drink your beer. I think human beings everywhere should know.

Fear not, gentle spy: I won’t tell you my life story. The important thing is that, like many Egyptians, I’ve spent years pretending to study at a place pretending to be a college that is, in fact, a temple Kafka might have imagined, where priests of social climbing hand out certificates of status to acolytes, granting passage. Totally fucked up. Either you join the mafia of the college-educated or you are cored for life—an apple, yes, to be consumed by the respectable. With the result that standards have been dropping steeply for sixty years, and not just standards of respectability. Like many cyber-activists, who are all dependent on their parents, I attended an expensive private school where I learned my English. Unlike them I’ve always enjoyed reading books in that language, in case you’re wondering how I know things that have nothing to do with either career or country.

The girl who had been bought ten years earlier for two wads of cash is now out of the house. But as she just crosses the gate of the villa, Hanan regrets her actions and feels the sacred fire of passion devouring her a little more each step Alya takes away from her. Her return is towards a monstrously violent father, in a house infested with vermin, in an area where men are brutes with women. The scenes of brutality and savagery are like slashes in the silk, unimaginable flashes of lightning in an utterly smooth text.

Samar Yazbeck brushes with infinite tenderness the portrait of these two women. The first draped in the dignity of a great lady, the other priding herself over her freedom and the power gained over the body. These two walls separate them, for ever shutting them in their misfortune, their misery, and society. Baffling, poignant and disturbing, this novel will not leave you indifferent.

The original in French below, la lettre du libraire.

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La fierté, l’amour, la liberté, la cruauté. Quatre thèmes incontournables et délicatement mis en scène par Samar Yazbek. Alya, est la jeune bonne illettrée et pauvre de sa maîtresse Hanan Al-Hachimi le jour et devient son amante la nuit. La passion de la grande bourgeoise explose lorsqu’elle la découvre dans le lit de son vieux mari.

La jeune fille achetée dix ans plus tôt contre deux liasses de billets est chassée de la maison. Mais à peine a-t-elle franchie la grille de la villa que sa maîtresse regrette son geste et sent le feu sacré de la passion la dévorer un peu plus à chaque pas de Alya. Elle retourne vers un père monstrueux de violence, dans une maison de tôle infestée de vermine, dans un quartier ou les hommes sont tous des brutes avec les femmes. Les scènes de brutalité, de sauvagerie sont comme des déchirures dans la soie, des éclairs inimaginables dans ce texte doux comme une caresse.

Samar Yazbeck brosse avec une infinie tendresse le portrait de ces deux femmes. La première drapée dans sa dignité de grande dame, l’autre enorgueillie de sa liberté et de son pouvoir acquis sur les corps. Deux murs infranchissables qui les éloigneront à jamais pour les renfermer dans leur malheur, leur misère, leur société. Troublant, poignant et dérangeant, ce premier roman ne vous laissera pas indifférent.

Time in Nasrallah’s novel spans multiple generations in one location: the village of Hadiya in a Palestine under 19th and 20th century foreign domination. Flipping the Middle Eastern script as most have come to know it, the novel concludes where our perceptions of the region often begin: in 1948 with the creation of the State of Israel. Unlike Palestinian writers Emile Habibi and Ghassan Khanafani, upon whose classic work he builds, Nasrallah has said that he wants to voice the little known conditions of life in Palestine before the creation of the State of Israel. The measure of the greatness of this book is its humility in approaching a people’s vast experiences and rituals across this long stretch of time between Ottoman and British then Israeli occupation, as Nasrallah deftly narrates this community’s character within a specific locale and around the acts of the novel’s hero, Khaled, whose reflections and deeds ennoble the lives of each successive generation. That Nasrallah’s writing evokes this epic grandeur in discrete, alluring, lyric chapters, one story seamlessly weaving into another, is even more compelling: the long novel enlightens us in flash fictions which illuminate each other and sustain our attention.

Through stories that at first seem innocent enough – the taking of a bride, the building of a monastery, the choosing of sheep for slaughter, the bond between Khaled and a white horse whose beauty and strength is compared to “a full moon that never sets” – Nasrallah manages to travel back in time to shape an environment of characters and scenes free of stereotypes and assumptions which a contemporary Westerner might too quickly bring to the table through habits of reading overly contextualized by the arch-narrative of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict post 1948. Drawn into the late 19th and early 20th century life of an Arab community rarely encountered in literature about Palestine, the reader momentarily suspends belief in his own pre-suppositions about the region and engages events which happen as and not after political and social conditions are lived and articulated. Nasrallah chronicles captivating stories of characters whose lives intimately cross on multiple, surreal levels: heroes who transform into the spirit of their horses, horses who assume the roles of loved ones come and gone and searched for and resurrected in another life which is this life, loved ones who are martyred in their struggle against invading armies. These stories define and honor the discipline of a culture, so that the characters in Nasrallah’s novel often act in the service of the words his narrator cites: “According to an Arab saying: there are three types of service that aren’t demeaning: service performed for one’s household, taking care of one’s mare, and waiting on a guest.”

But these are not stand-alone vignettes nor do they lead into a novel representing a people’s fixed cultural code, since political realities surface which must be increasingly faced, and the characters (and readers) must adjust over time. For example, at the start of Nasrallah’s tale we are drawn into a meeting between two village elders, one of whom, Abu Salim, is being asked by Khaled’s father to send his daughter far from home to marry Khaled., “We were afraid,” Khaled’s father says, “you’d say that you weren’t prepared to send [her] far from home.” And Abu Salim responds: “This country is as big as one’s heart…Nothing in it is far away, and nothing is foreign.”

The deep, wrenching irony here is that while the country may indeed be “as big as one’s heart,” in this particular time and space under Ottoman rule, as in 2012, everything is absorbed by the animosity of the foreign, since the land is perpetually occupied by outside entities. Thus, as the novel evolves, chapters are more apparently devoted to how Humankind behaves in this fierce struggle to hold the land over time: villagers waiting for Arab rescue armies which fail to rescue them from the British, resistance fighters bringing down their occupiers, village lawyers cleverly making the case for the existence of “a village with a history,” which “existed before the country was divided into districts, and continued to exist thereafter.”

Sinan Antoon, Jana Elhassan, Mohammed Hassan Alwan, Ibrahim Issa, Saud Alsanousi and Hussein Al-Wad are announced as the six authors shortlisted for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Their names were revealed on January 9th 2013 at a press conference held in Tunis, Tunisia, by the previously anonymous Judging Panel, chaired by the Egyptian writer and academic Galal Amin.

This year’s shortlist reveals a number of varied thematic concerns, which lie at the heart of the Arab reality of today. These include, amongst others: religious extremism; the lack of tolerance and rejection of the Other; the split between thought and behaviour in the contemporary Arab personality; the Arab woman’s frustration and her inability to break through the social wall built around her; the laying bare of the corrupt reality and hypocrisy on social, religious, political and sexual levels.

The 2013 Judging Panel was also announced during the press conference, held at Tunis’ prestigious Municipal Theatre.

The Judges are: Egyptian academic and writer Galal Amin (Chair); Lebanese academic and critic Sobhi al-Boustani; Ali Ferzat, who is head of the Arab Cartoonists’ Association, and owner and chief editor of the independent Syrian daily newspaper Al-Domari; Polish academic and Professor of Arabic Literature at the Arts College of the Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska, and Professor Zahia Smail Salhi, specialist in Arabic Literature Classical and Modern and Gender Studies at Manchester University.

The six shortlisted titles were chosen from a longlist of 16, announced in December 2012. The novels were selected from 133 entries from 15 countries, published in the last 12 months. The shortlisted novels are, in alphabetical order:

Ave Maria, Sinan Antoon (Iraqi), Al-Jamal

I, She and Other Women, Jana Elhassan (Lebanese), Arab Scientific Publishers

The Beaver, Mohammed Hassan Alwan (Saudi Arabian), Dar al-Saqi

Our Master, Ibrahim Issa (Egyptian), Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation

The Bamboo Stick, Saud Alsanousi (Kuwaiti), Arab Scientific Publishers

His Excellency the Minister, Hussein Al-Wad (Tunisian), Dar al-Janub

The International Prize for Arabic Fiction is awarded for prose fiction in Arabic and each of the six shortlisted finalists receives $10,000, with a further $50,000 going to the winner. It was launched in Abu Dhabi, UAE, in April 2007, and is supported by the Booker Prize Foundation in London and funded by the TCA Abu Dhabi in the UAE, who were announced as the new sponsor of the Prize in September 2012.

The winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction 2013 will be announced at an awards ceremony in Abu Dhabi on 23 April 2013, on the eve of the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. An English translation of the winning novel is guaranteed for the winner. All five previous winners of the Prize have secured English publishing deals for their novels.

The Oxfam Novib / PEN Award is presented annually to writers and journalists who are being persecuted for their work, or have had to flee. In addition to Samar Yazbek, who is the only one attending the presentation in the Netherlands, this Award will also be presented to four other writers this year.
Syrian Samar Yazbek (born 1970) is the author of successful novels, many translated too. She also works as reporter and script writer for Syrian television. Yazbek has taken part in the Syrian uprising from the start, in order to end 40 years of dictatorship. She visited prisoners, put their stories to paper, and thus gave the revolution a face. Until, no longer able to resist the pressures, she had to leave the country. In her book, A Woman in the Crossfire, she reports on the first five months of the revolution in Syria. This book will be published n the Netherlands by Nijgh & Van Ditmar and Oxfam Novib in April.
The Cameroonian writer and co-founder of the Cameroon Writers Association, Enoh Meyomesse, has been in prison since November 2011, on the basis of contrived accusations. He is being denied proper legal representation and is treated badly.
The Iranian activist, journalist and deputy director of the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (DHRC), Nargass Mohammadi, is also in prison. She had published reports on human rights violations and visited political prisoners, and was convicted among others for “propaganda against the regime”.
The Congolese journalist Déo Namujimbo has had to flee the Democratic Republic of Congo because of his work for Journalists in Danger and Reporters Without Borders. His brother Didace, also a journalist, was killed in 2008. Déo now lives in exile in France.
In Turkey the academic and writer Büşra Ersanli was accused of “leading an illegal organisation”. De state linked her work to the illegal PPK, which is an absurd accusation considering her efforts for a peaceful and democratic solution to Turkey’s problems with minorities.
The presentation of the Oxfam Novib / PEN Award is part of the Writers Unlimited Festival, which takes place in The Hague from Thursday, January 17 to Sunday, January 20.

About Oxfam Novib / PEN Award: the international writers’ association PEN (poets, editors, essayists and journalists) is a partner organisation of Oxfam Novib and committed to the wellbeing and safety of persecuted writers. The PEN Emergency Fund helps persecuted and refugee writers with a one-off amount of € 2,500, to keep their heads above water. Five awards are presented every year; only 1 of the laureates is coming to the Netherlands. On previous occasions the Oxfam Novib / PEN Award was presented to Hrant Dink (Turkey), Duong Thu Huong (Vietnam) and Anna Politkovskaya (Russia). Last year the Iranian journalist, blogger and activists Asieh Amini received the award. The Hague is the city of international justice, peace and security, and a logical place for presenting the award.

About Oxfam Novib: People in developing countries must be able to build independent livelihoods, and to do it by themselves. In order to achieve this, Oxfam Novib works with partner organisation on site, private and institutional donors, volunteers, businesses, governments, Oxfam’s affiliates around the world, and other “ambassadors of DIY”.