FRANKFURT, 6 October 2004 — Arab writers take center stage at the world’s biggest book fair this week, seeking to build bridges between the West and Arab nations against a backdrop of conflict in Iraq and Israel’s offensive in Gaza.
The Frankfurt Book Fair has invited the “The Arab World” as its guest of honor to promote an understanding of Arab culture and literature and help heal the wounds of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States and their aftermath.
“The necessity for dialogue has never been so urgent as it is today,” book fair director Volker Neumann told Reuters in an interview. “This will be the beginning of a dialogue — a late beginning, but a beginning.”
A particular element of excitement will be generated this year by the appearance of Ali Ahmed Said, the Syrian-Lebanese poet known as Adonis, who is the bookmakers’ favorite to win the Nobel Prize for literature to be announced tomorrow.
The book fair’s ambitious vision has also sparked controversy with some Arab writers boycotting the official presentation in protest at what they see as tolerance by the Arab League — Frankfurt’s partner in organizing this year’s fair — of literary and cultural censorship and oppression.
Nevertheless, it is a great commercial as well as political opportunity for Arab writers.
“Since Sept. 11, the Western world has experienced a surge of interest in Arab affairs,” said Peter Ripken, director of Germany’s Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature, in Egypt’s Al-Ahram weekly.
But many more books have been sold about Arabs than by them, he said, adding that the fair will give Arab writers an opportunity to sell their own books in a marketplace that last year generated more than $700 million worth of business.
“The Frankfurt Book Fair will ...give Arabs a chance to speak for themselves,” he said.
Ninety-three-year-old Egyptian author Nagouib Mahfouz, who helped to put Arabic literature on the world map when he won the Nobel literature prize in 1988, welcomes the chance for younger writers to make a name for themselves.
“It is true that the relations between East and West are at a low point but this is all the more reason why the Arabs should go to Frankfurt,” said the hard-of-hearing Mahfouz in remarks relayed to Reuters by telephone by his friend Mohamed Salmawy.
But some critics of the project to promote Arab culture said the stakes were too high in the current political climate.
“As it is, the world already associates this culture solely with oppression, terror and contempt for women’s rights,” said Egypt’s Jamal Al-Ghitani in an interview published on www.qantara.de, a website dedicated to dialogue with Islam.
“There is no need to do even more damage with a poor showing at the book fair,” he said.
With a broad spectrum of literary luminaries, publishers, critics and opinion-formers gathering for the annual fair, Neumann has assembled a program that will see almost 200 Arabic writers reading their work.
Discussion will take place alongside architecture and calligraphy exhibitions, films, dance events and samplings of Arab cuisine.
A reading from the work of father figure Mahfouz will launch the project, to be followed by such stars as Morocco’s Tahar Ben Jalloun, Algeria’s Assia Djebar as well as Nobel tip Adonis.