{"id":28557,"date":"2013-05-27T09:14:22","date_gmt":"2013-05-27T05:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=28557"},"modified":"2013-05-27T09:14:23","modified_gmt":"2013-05-27T05:14:23","slug":"palfest-2013-beyond-the-crisis-narrative-to-art-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/middle-east-society\/palfest-2013-beyond-the-crisis-narrative-to-art-experiment\/","title":{"rendered":"PalFest 2013: Beyond ‘the Crisis Narrative’ To Art & Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PalFest\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Palestine Festival of Literature is currently going on in several places at once:<\/i><\/p>\n

The six-city festival kicked off on Friday: It opened in Gaza\u2019s Mathaf Cultural Center<\/a> with a big group of aspiring writers that broke out into three workshops led by: novelist Susan Abulhawa<\/a> (on the evolution of the Palestinian narrative\/s), journalist Ali Abunimah<\/a> (on blogging and e-journalism), and editor-scholar Lina Attalah <\/a>(on narrativizing Gaza \u2018beyond crisis\u2019).<\/p>\n

The 2013 festival is, as novelist and organizer Ahdaf Soueif<\/a> noted at Saturday\u2019s Ramallah event, the first time that PalFest is occurring all across historic Palestine. \u201cWe are ignoring the artificial boundaries that are in place.\u201d<\/p>\n

The festival, however, is not wholly able to ignore them: One part of the festival is taking place in Gaza while another group of writers crossed from Jordan into the West Bank<\/a> on Saturday morning and afternoon.<\/p>\n

In her reflections on the first day of the Gaza side of the fest<\/a>, Attalah noted that the Gazan story has long been framed as one of conflict and exceptionalism. \u201cBut,\u201d she wrote, \u201cto stroll in the old market, chat with vendors about what they sell, what comes \u2018illegally\u2019 from the tunnels with Egypt and what is permissibly acquired through the Israeli crossing, a sense of normalcy prevails.\u201d<\/p>\n

The crisis of Gaza, she writes, is \u201cprevalent, visible, and haunting.\u201d And yet she \u2014 and the emerging authors in her workshop \u2014 wanted to move away from, or beyond, the frame of crisis.<\/p>\n

PalFest itself has often been narrated as a \u00a0festival of crisis: checkpoints, borders, difficulties, tear gas<\/a>. But, although the essential crisis shouldn\u2019t be obscured, as well as other class and accessibility issues, the festival\u2019s opening day in Ramallah was about art, hybridization, and experimentation.<\/p>\n

South African writer Gillian Slovo<\/a> read from her novel Red Dust<\/i>, and composer Tareq Abboushi put together music both to\u00a0accompany and to\u00a0follow her reading from the book. She read two separate sections from the novel, one from the point of a torturer (Dirk) and the second from the point of view of a man he had tortured (Alex). Dimitri Mikelis played the oud, Maya Khaldi did vocals, and Boikutt<\/a> produced what I called electronic soundscape and playwright Omar El-Khairy called \u201cAtari beats.\u201d<\/p>\n

The amazing thing was that it worked: a South African courtroom drama, an oud, a sensual vocalist, an electronic soundscape.<\/p>\n

Slovo said, after the event, that she had long been hesitant about doing something with novels and music; music, she said, has a much easier working relationship with poetry. She\u2019d worried about \u201cthe power of music to drive the words into a place they shouldn\u2019t be going.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the music, as Slovo read, framed and emphasized the text, heightening it. It was the first time I ever heard the sounds of nostalgic country music coming out of an oud (during Dirk\u2019s section) and during Alex\u2019s section it became both reflective and confrontational. But it never overwhelmed the words.<\/p>\n

In the musical pieces that followed Slovo\u2019s reading, the composer and musicians built on their translations of the text, transposing the novel into a different literary, linguistic, and audial register.<\/p>\n

Attalah, in her post from Gaza, writes that, \u201cRomanticizing crisis by talking about normalcy at the time of siege and occupation is currency and dangerous. But \u2026.[t]alk about normalcy is about championing the everyday as a site of alternative arrangements to the oppressive status quo. It is about glorifying the \u2018ordinary man\u2026 the common hero\u2026 the untold wanderer\u2019 to use the language of Certeau.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normalcy can\u00a0also\u00a0be about glorifying the uncommonly beautiful music of Tareq Abboushi, Boikutt, Dimitri Mikelis, and Maya Khaldi and an uncommon way of experiencing prose and its (musical-literary) translation.<\/p>\n

More from the festival\u2019s opening days:<\/b><\/p>\n

Susan Abulhawa\u2019s reflections on the workshops and the Gazan singer in Arab Idol\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Lina Attalah\u2019s Beyond Crisis: Making Space for Laughter in Gaza<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

M. LYNX-QUALEY: The organisers of this year’s Palestine Lit Fest have decided to ignore, as much as possible, the physical barriers separating Palestinians <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":28560,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,483,80,119,482,5],"tags":[17335,17338,7402,16573,278,861,17337,17339,191,17333,17334,16845,1747,2160,17336],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28557"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28557"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28557\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28570,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28557\/revisions\/28570"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}