Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

My Ten Thousand and One Nights 1
August 13, 2007

Whenever there are gatherings of us (book folk), whether old friends or new - such as BEAs - there is amidst the excitement of seeing everyone, the inevitable burble of talk of who has been reading what. When it is a BEA, it's usually a mix of some fall titles read early, or some spring title that's just been published.

Two years ago, I arrived at that New York show, off a spring that had featured books and appearances by Jonathan Safran Foer, Amitav Ghosh, and Nicole Krauss, among others; and a fall that I'd had peeks at, of Joan Didion, Caryl Phillips, and Michael Cunningham. But  there in New York, amidst the suddenness of gathering, when asked, who and what, the names that rolled out were like a loop: Raja Alem, Fadia Faqir, Suheir Hammad, Choman Hardi, Alia Mamdouh, Ibtihal Salem, Raja Alem, Fadia Faqir, Choman ... There was no recognition to any of these names, not a  one, unless they were broken down and explained. Yes, Suheir Hammad, a few remembered a memoir of hers, and that she had done the Def Poetry Jam on Broadway ... and someone might remember an out-of-print novel from Penguin by Fadia Faqir. But who? others would ask? What?

Truth be told, going into that spring, my response would have been about the same. Our store, though, had gotten into logistical aiding and abetting that centrally involved Hedgebrook (www.hedgebrook.org), the nationally-renowned women's writers retreat on Whidbey Island, north of Seattle, and members of Seattle's Arab American community, with others putting a hand in here and there. As a project with all sorts of well-built intentions, six Arab women writers were invited to partake of a residency at Hedgebrook, with the opportunity, while here, to also participate in various readings, forums, and discussions. With a lot of prepatory work done beforehand, these six women arrived in the Northwest at the end of April. One of them, Suheir Hammad, hailed from New York; the others came variously, from England, from Paris (exile), from Cairo, from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (and that one, Raja Alem, brought her artist sister Shadia, which made it a group of seven). Their home countries: Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Egypt, Iraqi Kurdistan, Saudi Arabia. A few knew of each other, but none was familiar with another. Over about a month's time they got to spend writing and hanging out informally at Hedgebrook, a most idyllic place at a most idyllic (spring in bloom) time of year.

They also set about with the aforementioned ensemble appearances, which ranged from Evergreen College in Olympia, to Seattle Arts & Lectures, a women's club, a University of Washington lecture hall, Seattle Public Central Libary (the Rem Koolhaas building), our own Elliott Bay, and a very last night at Hedgebrook itself. There were so many things extraordinary about it all: as there were a number of them, the repeated appearances let the personality and work of each emerge more distinctly; their sense of themselves as a group, with a great range of aesthetics and approaches, became more palpable. Their work, also, more and more was heard, whether read in Arabic (two were more adept at that, and all of us were richer for hearing the urgency and intensity in those readings ... and the humor, when those knowing Arabic would, before the translation was read, laugh boisterusly).

This was all, the public part of this, in the very days leading up to leaving for New York. I was the primary caddy for this, the hauling about and unpacking of books, their sale, the signings, the re-packing ... and many the quick re-orders, to Syracuse, to Texas, to Interlink, to Feminist via Consortium, and Bloodaxe via Dufour (Kurdish poet Choman Hardi's book of poems, Life for Us, being flown over.

In their, too, was my own quickened reading: Choman Hardi's poems; Fadia Faqir's Pillars of Salt; Ibtihal Salem's Children of the Waters; Alia Mamdouh's searing coming-of-age novel of Baghdad in the 1950s, Naphtalene; and Raja Alem's swirling, allegorically-charged novel, Fatma. These were books which, going into that spring, even with this in the projected mix of what authors we were working with, I hadn't given much thought. By the time their reading, their singing (yes), their blowing away, charming and engaging audiences away night after night, was over, and they were flying home, and I was flying to New York, I was thinking of almost little else.

Posted by Rick Simonson on August 13, 2007 | Comments (0)