on one of my favorite books, the stunning “tablet and pen: literary landscapes from the modern middle east”
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In this work, we see the history of the Middle East unfolding as a wide-ranging, passionate, sometimes discordant conversation. I was consistently struck by the interiority of the voices and how rarely, in these days when the “Middle East” is often the lead story in the news, we are given any sense of the intimate and varied intellectual and emotional life of its people. The anthologist’s job is about creating borders, be they historical, formal, chronological, etc. As an editor, Aslan makes a double music as he pushes against the notion of border and statehood imposed by the West while using the historical reality of partition and colonialism to bring forward the very specific ideas of exile and isolation that recur in almost all of the poems and stories in this book.
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I truly do believe that art is the universal language. I’ve spent the last ten years trying to build bridges between the peoples and cultures of the West and of the Middle East, trying to educate Americans about Islam and about Middle Eastern cultures. Yet anti-Muslim sentiment is even higher today than it was after 9/11. So, it’s hard not to feel like a failure.
So with BoomGen Studios [a film production company] and with my new focus on art and literature, I’ve recognized that minds are changed, perceptions are re-framed, not through knowledge, not through information, but through relationships—through stories. And that’s where the arts come in. You need the arts—literature, music, film—as a universal language that allows people to see beyond the walls that separate us. To stop thinking of each other as different religions, or different cultures, or different ethnicities, or nationalities, and start thinking of each other as human beings. As people with the same aspirations, and the same dreams, the same conflicts and the same issues. It’s only through that recognition of same-ness that you really do change people’s minds.
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More here.