Category: travels

adania shibli in lahore

back at the lahore literary festival. wonderful to hear palestinian writer adania shibli talk about her stunning book, minor detail. not sure about the panel – she was paired with william sieghart, a british entrepreneur, publisher and philanthropist, who kept talking about the ‘conflict’ and how dialogue can solve all problems.

so glad adania addressed the use of language and her issues with the word conflict. it’s colonialism, she said. she explained how language can become complicit in a crime, how it can disappear it, and that there is no dearth of dialogue between palestinians and israelis – there is constant contact but it’s a certain kind of interaction, based on power differentials, where palestinians are forced to confront and challenge power structures day in, day out.

adania spoke about her love for the arabic language, how playful, free, and open it is. how important it is to palestinians. ‘adab’ in arabic means both literature and ethics. she also spoke about translation and how it’s essential, even in english, to create a scarred language with a memory of arabic.

finally, she talked a lot about narration and silences. the impossibility of narrating. the linear structure (beginning, middle, end) is not accessible to palestinians, therefore she can only imitate coherence. it’s better to accept silence rather than put words in someone’s mouth. we come to language from two sides of silence – both the reader and writer engage with language in silence.

my favorite session so far.

lahore literary festival

landed at the lahore literary festival today (thx for letting me know saira). went to alhamra to listen to daisy rockwell whose translation of “tomb of sand” by geetanjali shree won the booker prize, historian corinne lefèvre whose book “consolidating empire: power and elites in jahangir’s india (1605–1627)” resets the history of jahangir’s rule, mohsin hamid who talked about “the last white man” (a book i have read), and finally nobel laureate abdulrazak gurnah who discussed his work in: across centuries and continents, colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.

obviously, i was thrilled by a discussion on decolonizing literature and history, and so i wanted to ask mr gurnah about writing in english and the complications of producing decolonial literature in an imperial language. i referenced ngugi wa thiong’o’s “decolonizing the mind” and how he describes the disconnect between a colonized person’s mind and body – the mind functions in the colonial language while the body remains stuck in its native tongue. as colonized people ourselves, here in south asia, i was hoping to engage in an interesting discussion, but mr gurnah became defensive. perhaps he thought this was a personal attack on his work. he didn’t really address my question, saying simply that he didn’t agree with me or with ngugi who was welcome to do his own thing. i was hoping for more nuance and engagement.

anyway, later in the day i was approached by a woman who didn’t seem to be pakistani. she recognized me and said my question truly spoke to her and her husband, esp the idea of the mind-body split. they are french-speaking algerians and understand what it means to think and write in the language of the colonizer. there was an immediate connection between us. we talked about the algerian war of independence and frantz fanon. finally.

mohsin hamid being interviewed