Free Word Centre content

The Week in Ideas, 24th May 2013

2013-05-24T09:46:31+00:00

Facebook continues to judge material encouraging violence against women as inoffensive.

Irresponsible headlines, a free speech argument Facebook might listen to, and bad examples of "Franglais". We round up some key ideas from the week gone by.

A violent attack on a soldier in Woolwich this week was reported on the front page of every British newspaper, and prompted the government to call a meeting of the anti-terrorist committee, Cobra. But is front page coverage of the attacker's message the best response to an act of terror, asks Sunder Katwala in the New Statesman? Should the media really be giving them what they want by providing a platform for their speech?

Dutch novelist Gerbrand Bakker has won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for his tale of isolation and infidelity The Detour, translated by David Colmer, with whom he shares the prize. For the first time, this year's prize was shadowed by a group of readers who awarded their own version of the prize - to a different nominee on the shortlist.

Despite frequent complaints, Facebook continues to judge material encouraging violence against women posted to its pages as inoffensive. However, as Emer O'Toole points out in this piece for the Guardian, there is a business case for removing such offensive content that a large company like Facebook should be compelled to respond to - and it may well be proving effective.

600 Afghan interpreters who have worked alongside British troops are to be given the right to settle in the UK. The plan marks a climbdown from ministers who had decided they should not get the same UK resettlement rights as interpreters in the Iraq conflict - though there are still concerns that many interpreters could still be excluded.

On a lighter note, following outrage from French traditionalists that some universities in the country are planning on teaching some sourses in English, the BBC has published this collection of anglicisms which have already inveigled their way into the French tongue. The Académie Française would not be impressed.

Tired of Being Black? A Child’s-Eye View of Literature

2013-05-22T10:47:11+00:00

Gabriel Gbadamosi's novel 'Vauxhall' and Colin Grant's memoir 'Bageye at the Wheel' both feature child narrators who act as go-betweens between black and white worlds. In an evening at the Free Word Centre exploring how blackness can be both defining and limiting for authors, Colin, Gabriel and members of the audience spoke to us about the child characters from their favourite books who made an impression on their lives.

This podcast was recorded at the Free Word Centre on the 8th of May, 2013, at the event Tired of Being Black? Try Being Irish. It was produced for Free Word by Alice Bloch, a freelance broadcast journalist and radio producer.

This recording is also available to download - subscribe to our iTunes profile here.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Goes for “Detour”

2013-05-21T09:04:15+00:00

Dutch tale The Detour has been announced as the winner of the 2013 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, at an awards ceremony sponsored by Tattinger in London, tonight, 20th May 2013. Themes of infidelity, exile and isolation won over the judges of this year’s Prize to give the author his second major prize win. His previous novel The Twin won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Translator David Colmer will share the prize money with Bakker, in this unique award that recognises writer and translator equally.

The Detour follows Emilie, a translation professor and Emily Dickinson scholar, who retreats from her life in the Netherlands to an isolated farm house in Wales following an affair with a student. A young man hiking past the farmhouse with his dog stays for a night but ends up remaining longer, helping the woman to make repairs to the farmhouse and easing her self-imposed loneliness. But back in Amsterdam her husband forms a bond with a detective who agrees to help him find his wife. Something is deeply wrong at the farmhouse – and what will happen when the husband and detective finally track Emilie down?

Judge and literary editor of the Independent, Boyd Tonkin said of the winner:
'Swift-moving and apparently straightforward, but with mysterious hidden depths, The Detour is a novel that grips its reader tight and never lets go. Gerbrand Bakker’s tale of a Dutchwoman who goes missing from her own troubled life and seeks refuge in rural Wales combines mesmeric storytelling with an uncanny sense of place, and an atmosphere of brooding, irresistible menace. In David Colmer’s pitch-perfect and immersive translation, this book will both linger in your imagination and, quite possibly, haunt your dreams as well.'

Also given a special mention as a very close contender for this year’s Prize was Traveller of the Century by Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia. The book has at its heart a secret affair between two translators, who between bed and the dictionary build their own fragile language. An epic novel of philosophy, history and love, this is the fourth novel by Andrés Neuman who was named as one of Granta’s Best Young Spanish Language Novelists in 2010.

Bakker fought off strong competition from a prestigious shortlist including Man Booker International Prize Winner Ismail Kadare from Albania. Also shortlisted were Croatian author Daša Drndić, Chris Barnard from South Africa and Enrique Vila-Matas from Spain. Vila-Matas’ novel Dublinesque was translated together by Rosalind Harvey and Anne McLean, who has previously won the IFFP twice and had a second title longlisted for the Prize this year, The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez.

Previous winners of the Prize include Milan Kundera in 1991 for Immortality translated by Peter Kussi; W G Sebald and translator, Anthea Bell, in 2002 for Austerlitz; and Per Petterson and translator, Anne Born, in 2006 for Out Stealing Horses. The 2012 winner was Blooms of Darkness by the Israeli author Aharon Appelfeld, translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M Green.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is awarded annually to the best work of contemporary fiction in translation. The Prize celebrates an exceptional work of fiction by a living author which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom in 2012. Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize acknowledges both the writer and the translator equally, recognising the importance of the translator in their ability to bridge the gap between languages and cultures. The Prize ran previously between 1990 and 1995 and was revived with the support of Arts Council England in 2001. The £10,000 Prize money and associated costs are funded by Arts Council England who manage the Prize in partnership with Booktrust. The Prize is also supported by the Independent and Champagne Taittinger.

This year, Booktrust, who manages the Prize, piloted a Readers’ Project, with 300 Readers shadowing the six shortlisted titles. The readers gathered together at the Free Word Centre in Farringdon on 18 May for a mini-festival, featuring a talk from author Elif Shafak, a translation duel, a Google Hangout with the shortlisted authors and translators, and a vote on their favourite title, crowned the Independent Foreign Fiction Readers’ Prize (IFFRP) winner. The Readers’ Project is funded by the Free Word Strategic Commissioning Fund and the NALD Futures Fund (administered by Writers’ Centre Norwich). English PEN, the Reading Agency and the British Centre for Literary Translation are partnering on the project with Booktrust. A bespoke piece of research will provide a detailed study of the barriers to readers’ engagement with world literature and make recommendations for the trade to overcome them. The research will be promoted nationally and internationally in the second half of 2013.

The judges for this year’s Prize were:

Jean Boase-Beier, Professor of Literature and Translation at the University of East Anglia
Novelist and former Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, Gabriel Josipovici
Elif Shafak, an award-winning novelist and the most widely read woman writer in Turkey
Literary translator, Frank Wynne
Boyd Tonkin, Literary Editor of the Independent

Find out more about the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize

Writers’ Room: Ece Temelkuran

2013-05-20T16:36:28+00:00

The Turkish novelist and journalist speaks to our Translator in Residence about why Anna Karenina is more real than Margaret Thatcher, and why a writer's best friend is a waiter who asks no questions.

Why do you write?

I don't know how not to write.

You're a famous journalist in Turkey, but you've also published numerous books of non-fiction, as well as poetry and, more recently, two novels. How do you like to define yourself? As a writer, a journalist, a novelist, or all of these at once?

I write. Journalism is the form of anger and disgust. Literature is the form of writing you need when you are heartbroken or when you are in awe. And when everything seems to be happening on another planet, when you are deeply mute, it is poetry. I need them all... I think. At least at the moment.

How do you write?

I write like a lovely, peaceful obssesive compulsive! After finally deciding what to write, my life turns into that of a monk's. I wake up early, walk, and sit at a cafe where I will be sitting every morning for the next six months. In every country I write a book in, I have such a café with a table and a lovely waiter who doesn't ask many questions and embraces my weirdness. I do the planning in the morning and then I do completely ordinary, stupid stuff in the afternoon so I don’t go completely to “the other side". One time it was watching Sex and the City, one time it was knitting. Then I start writing around 7 o'clock in the evening and go on until midnight. I have fun, but nobody around me does.

Your two novels are set in the Middle East and North Africa. Why did you choose to write stories from people living in those places? You lived in Beyrouth and Tunis: how close do you feel to these countries, cultures and its people?

It is the level of craziness and ridicule in that part of the world that makes me feel comfortable, I guess. The fear is real there. So you don't get busy with your own fears, which are more sticky, boring and fruitless. By the way, I am not sure anymore that there are countries for me. There are cafes where I write, people I love to see, things that I miss doing. So maybe it is not a matter of closeness or comfort anymore but an ongoing story which takes place in different parts of the world.

Do you think stories told through literature (or art for that matter) have a stronger impact on people than if they'd read them in the news?

I guess most of the time my characters are those people who you want to be friends with. They are more Zorba than Anna Karenina. Through journalism, you always end up writing about people who you wouldn't want to see, but through literature you can create new people who deserve to exist more. Or you have the chance, at least. I think literature has more impact on life in that regard. You can consider that a prime minister does not exist (by not listening the news for instance) but no one can say that Zorba did not exist. Who would deny the fact that even Anna Karenina is stronger than the Iron Lady?

You've been translated into English and other languages, including Arabic. Do you feel enriched by these translations? Do you think it is essential for a writer to see his or her work translated?

Lately I have a new divine pleasure. It is listening to my writing in languages that I don't know. Recently I listened to a part of my book Deep Mountain in Croatian. And watched the audience; their facial expressions. It is magical. The same thing happened to me in Germany for The Sounds of Bananas. The sighs, the laughter... it is indescribable. I don't know if it’s essential, but one can get addicted to this pleasure for sure. It brings back your childhood to you when you didn't know the words but you wanted to be understood the most. It makes you feel like you are understood even though you don't speak.

You're part of European Literature Night this year. Do you feel European? Should we define literature geographically? Or should literature be above borders?

I think Europe should be redefined. I feel European as much as a Beiruti who is doing contemporary art or an Egyptian on Tahrir Square. I think we need a new Andalucia that will bring together the new political experience of the "Squares" (Tahrir, Del Mayo, Kasbah, Athens) to redefine Europe. But that is a subject of a very long article I guess. The title should be "Andalucia Reloaded", though.

Reframing Palestine: Why Me?

2013-05-20T11:24:30+00:00

In the second of a series of essays exploring our current exhibition, 'Reframing Palestine', journalist Victoria Brittain examines how artist Raeda Saadeh uses her body and performance to represent life in her homeland, Palestine.

Raeda Saadeh is the most original, witty, subversive and deadly serious of artists. She is a Palestinian, born in 1977 in the small city of Um El Fahem, in the north, near Nazareth. Like all Palestinians, she carries the status and scar of what happened to her family during and after the Nakba of 1948: exile for nearly five million citizens, military occupation and control in the West Bank and Gaza, or, as in the Saadeh family’s case, seeing their home become part of Israel.

From her first performances in Ramallah in 1999, Saadeh’s shows have stunned their audiences. In Ramallah, her installation of a young couple’s first home required everyone entering it, including men, to wear women’s gloves. “I asked my friends to start, so that people would do it. It was very funny, but the men had very strong responses – more than the women. I had forced them to be on my side, to think in another way.”

At the Sydney Opera House in 2006, her performance, “Voyage to Jerusalem”, also forced her audience to think, as she used her body and her hair to symbolise what happened to Palestine in 1948, 1967 and thereafter. She sat in one after another of chairs placed in a circle, and snipped off sections of hair with scissors that hung from her waist. She cut again and again, then tried to put the hair back and, failing, began to throw it at the audience: “They were the world.” Then she took off her long, floaty dress and, wearing only her slip, left the stage.

The use of her body has become central to all her work, in installations, photographs and performances, many of which also use video and sound. Displacement, and the images and realities of women’s experience, are her constant themes. The little girl from a Palestinian city inside Israel, with no arts scene, no gallery, who had a burning determination to study art, had to start by convincing her family this was not a joke. She is the youngest of nine children, and as her father died when she was 14, getting permission from the family to go to Jerusalem to study art meant persuading not only her mother, but her four brothers, only one of whom had left the city to live in Haifa. “I absolutely needed their permission, we are very warm and close.”

In 1997, when she was 20, such permission for a girl to go away from home, alone, was unheard of, but she got it. She has an image of herself dancing with a skeleton (pages 7 and 15) that symbolises how difficult this was for her, but how, in the end, “Women can do everything, the skeleton is alive, I am giving him his life.” It was by chance that Saadeh started to use her own body as the centrepiece of her art. In her first year of art school, her teacher assigned “a sculpture object”. Saadeh thought that her body could be the object, with her soul inside it, and she did a performance in a wedding dress and veil of “walking in a huge space, in thistles. You could hear my breathing, I was very, very nervous about what the teacher would say. She said it was amazing.”

Visceral, performance, Jerusalem University, Bezalel Art Academy, 2000

She had found her way: performance, using her body, was what she wanted to do. As there were no performance classes at her university, she simply taught herself – until she won a grant to study in New York. What she saw as the contempt of society towards women was her motivation. Not for her a life where others made a woman’s decisions. “Virginity... I knew of girls killed by their families, I saw friends shaking with terror before their wedding in case there was no blood on the sheet, girls who were divorced because of that, girls who had operations to restore their virginity. Society makes a woman lie to save her life. I’m trying to show there’s another side.”

One of the performance she created at university on this theme was Visceral (below). In this she wore a dress made from a cow’s stomach, very smooth and white, stained with blood, and a necklace made of raw chicken hearts. She stood next to a row of water jugs, and the scene was overlaid with the sound of water dripping from the taps, as though for ritual washing before prayer. At the end, her professor told her to go wash before the students discussed the performance, as the smell from the cow-stomach dress was so bad. “But I refused. I told him, ‘I want you to feel like me. Young girls dream of their weddings, but they are very dangerous for them – will there be blood or not? They have nightmares.’”

Her exhibition at the AM Qattan Foundation in Ramallah in 1997 was also on the theme of virginity. When she told them her subject, their response was that she was crazy. She responded, “You may prefer old politics, but for me virginity is politics. Anyway, art is not for curators, it’s for people.” So, she had her installation of a house, “Which opened with my henna hand prints on the walls – one for each of the husband’s brothers, that’s our tradition at weddings – I even did it myself, you know.” Inside the house, once through the conventional sitting room, the bedroom showed everything upside down, with the bed on one wall, and implicit conversations between 300 couples with 300 men’s ties on one side, and 600 women’s gloves on the other. And then came the bathroom, which showed a nightmare projection of the bride (Saadeh) losing her way in the mountains, then blood coming from her mouth, and the bath water becoming blood.

Crossroads, 2003

The very dark political backdrop to her art is often thrown into relief by her allusion to classical paintings. For instance, she won the first Young Artist of the Year Award organised by the AM Qattan Foundation in 2000 with the photograph, Who Will Make Me Real?. Here she is in a striking pose with echoes of Ingres’ La Grande Odalisque, or Manet’s Olympia, but her body is covered with the Al Quds newspaper, in which columns about death in Gaza are printed sided by side with banal advertisements. “Palestinian politics on a woman’s body,” she comments. One of the judges was the revered Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum, who also began her hugely successful career as a performance artist.

Saadeh has used a variation of that referential game with her series of well-known women in European classical painting from the 15th and 16th centuries. She replaces their face with hers, and adds a recognisable Palestinian background. “I’ve given these women their lives back, linked with me, my situation,” she says of the Mona Lisa, who is pictured in Ain Karem, a rich Palestinian neighbourhood before 1948. After the massacre in nearby Deir Yassin, the Palestinians fled, and their houses were taken over mostly by Yemeni Jews. It is now part of Israel, with settlements visible on the skyline. The Vermeer (The Milkmaid, on the cover) shows Saadeh inside a ruined house in El Borj (between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem), one of the 418 Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948.

Lipsticks, installation at Art Cologne, Germany 2005

Every one of Saadeh’s artworks in this publication evokes women’s lives and the question of who controls them. In Crossroads (page 41), the well-known image of her with one foot in a concrete block, outside the door of a house in menaced Old Jerusalem, with her suitcase beside her, there are many layers of meaning, political and personal. Today, this is the image that best reflects Saadeh’s philosophy: “I want my art to be universal. I am not only an Arab woman, I want to be Everywoman: I want to be a European woman, I want to be an Indian woman, I want to be an American woman. I’m trying to continue my future, between so many things, and here is one side stuck in cement.”

No-one could be less stuck than Saadeh, who has so many ideas and always wants to do new things rather than repeat herself. (Though she did reconstruct her amazing installation of 3,000 lipsticks for Cologne after the curator saw it in Italy, and begged her for it.)

She has also exhibited in Cairo, Barcelona, New York, Sharjah, and what is now her hometown – Jerusalem. Her Israeli passport makes these travels possible, but, like every Palestinian, her daily life is a triumph against attempted humiliation, crazy bureaucracy, violence and injustice. She negotiates three checkpoints every day to get to work at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, where less than 15 years ago, she was a girl from the countryside with fire in her head and her heart, which she did not yet know how to express, but which now the world watches and learns from. Her concept today is, “I’m the strong one, you need me.” We do.

The Week in Ideas, 17th May 2013

2013-05-17T12:28:23+00:00

A translation sweat shop, seized phone records and a sexualised princess. Plus, Anne Frank isn't porn. We round up some key ideas in literature and free speech from the week gone by.

The Obama administration is in hot water after covertly seizing phone records on the Associated Press in an attempt to find the source of an information leak. It's an unprecedented intrusion into the affairs of the press by the US government and could have a chilling effect on free speech in the United States.

A plea to ban The Diary of Anne Frank from classrooms in Michigan on the grounds that it was "pornographic" has failed. The bid by a mother of school-age children was unanimously voted down on the grounds that it would "impose situational censorship".

Artist and environmental campaigner Franke James has published a new book detailing the Canadian government's attempts to silence her campaign against development of the Alberta tar sands. The book is comprised of comic visual essays based on emails and memos obtained from the government, who have previously silenced climate scientists and labelled environmental campaigners as 'dangerous radicals'.

Dan Brown's super-blockbuster Inferno was released this week to critical drubbing which made not a dent in its sales. But spare a thought for the translators, who for the book's security worked long hours in a bunker under armed guard, with restricted contact to the outside world.

News of Disney's attempts to glam up Brave's Princess Merida for her induction into Disney World was met with scorn enough to prompt a U-turn. The tomboy teenager with unkempt hair and a love of archery was made skinnier, older and more sexualised.

Power to the Readers!

2013-05-17T11:00:19+00:00

This year's Independent Foreign Fiction prize is being shadowed by reading groups up and down the country nominating their own winner of a Reader's Prize. We spoke to some of the book groups about the challenge of picking a winner.

The Independent Foreign Prize honours the best work of fiction by a living author, which has been translated into English from any other language and published in the United Kingdom. Uniquely, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize gives the winning author and translator equal status: each receives £5,000.

This year, Free Word has been working with Booktrust and the Reading Agency to bring the prize to the people, through the creation of a Reader’s Prize. Reading groups up and down the country have been working their way through the shortlist of books, to nominate their own winner in parallel with the judges. This weekend, the readers will gather at the Free Word Centre to discuss their experiences of the titles with judges, authors and translators, and to nominate their chosen winner.

We wanted to find out more about the experience of judging the Reader’s Prize, so we spoke to two book groups about what it felt like being tasked with picking a winner. Keith Harris is part of the Hepworth Book Group in West Yorkshire, and Lara Narkiewicz hails from a group attached to Writers’ Centre Norwich.

How do your book clubs usually work?

KH: Seven of us meet each month in the local pub to discuss our choice of book. We’re supported by Kirkless Library Service, who provide us with seven copies of each book, free of charge.

LN: Our group is a combination of the Writers’ Centre Norwich book club, and the Readers’ Circle, which helps select books for their Summer Reads programme. We’ve never read books for a prize before, so it was a completely new way of trying to read the books and pick out what could make them winners.

Which books did you read, and what did you make them?

LN: We read Bundu by Chris Barnard and The Fall of the Stone City by Ismail Kadare, which were of entirely different lengths and contexts, and had really disparate voices. It made it clear how difficult it must be to judge a prize!

Out of the two books we read, I think Bundu was the overall favourite. The dramatic tension builds from very early on and the description of the landscape and people’s relationship with it was very vivid. But I don’t speak for all our readers: I know there were some who really enjoyed The Fall of the Stone City and the underlying messages that came through as the book progressed.

KH: Our group read The Detour by Gebrand Bakker, and Dublinesque by Enrique Vila-Matas. Both had a poem at their core, so several of us followed up by reading more of these poets and their work. We very much liked The Detour for its style, plot and the intrigue around several unresolved issues, but Dublinesque was less well liked – we found it rather boring and pretentious. But we did wonder if we would have enjoyed the books more if we’d already read the two poems each book was focused on.

How much did the novels feel like translated literature while you were reading them?

KH: The translations were so good that in neither case did we consider we were reading translated fiction - though we noticed the translation of The Detour sometimes mixed British and USA idioms. Both novels also discussed the art of translation itself, which was an intriguing idea. Of the two, Dublinesque felt like it was translated from a much more foreign literary culture.

LN: Bundu was clearly a translation, as it kept some of the original Afrikaans words, but this added to the authenticity rather than distracting the reader. Though The Fall of the Stone City was not my favourite of the two, I thought the translation was very clever and some of the turns of phrase really stood out. It also seemed that the translator had conveyed the characters’ voices very faithfully.

Both books felt like translations, but this didn’t jar when reading them. If anything, it enhanced the richness of the stories to know that they had been rendered understandable to me and introduced me to otherwise inaccessible books.

Overall, what do you make of the Reader’s Prize experience?

KH: As each group has only been assigned two books from the shortlist, we wonder how voting for the prize will work, but overall it’s been very enjoyable, and stimulated us to go on and read more by Bakker and other authors from the shortlist. The financial support has been excellent, as has been the advice and information from the Reading Agency.

LN: Shadowing the IFF Prize has been great. It’s allowed our two reading groups to read books they wouldn’t necessarily have found otherwise, and promoted the wonderful diversity of translated fiction.

If you're looking for your next book recommendation, you can download a booklet on the complete shortlist from Booktrust here.

Book groups across the country have also been writing reviews of all the title's they've been reading: read what they had to say on The Reading Agency site.

Reframing Palestine: An Introduction

2013-05-13T14:30:12+00:00

In the first of a series of weekly essays exploring our current exhibition, 'Reframing Palestine', curator and publisher Rose Issa gives an overview of the work of the show's creator, Palestinian artist Raeda Saadeh.

“I belong to a country that commits suicide every day, while it is being assassinated.” Nadia Tuéni

Raeda Saadeh is always performing, for she draws little distinction between life and art. She is an intriguing woman: a teacher, daughter, wife and mother who is constantly juggling a complex situation, for as a Muslim Palestinian with an Israeli passport, she can not visit any of the Arab countries that exhibit her work. Driven by her passions and eager for admiration, she is divided by the paradoxes within her society, which she tries to understand, share and resolve.

Many artists from the Middle East are often frustrated that critics emphasise their nationality, while failing to address aspects of their work outside the confines of Middle Eastern politics. But how can Raeda Saadeh – a Palestinian artist with Israeli documents who studied in Hebrew at an Israeli University – not be constantly aware of her background? How can her work not be somehow linked to her daily experience of the politics of her surroundings, having to negotiate checkpoints, witness the destruction of ancient and modern Palestinian villages and the construction of Israeli settlements? Saadeh manages to transcend the conflict through art, by playing with anachronism, and experiencing a sort of rebirth through pain and ecstasy.

I see a close link between Raeda Saadeh’s work and the Sentimental Archives of a War in Lebanon, a book of poems published in 1982 by the great Lebanese poet Nadia Tuéni (1935-1983). Even though Saadeh’s work is about Palestine, which has been reduced into the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (the West Bank), one can draw parallels between the poet and the artist.

In her performances, video installations and photographs, Raeda explores a variety of subjects and merges with the political landscape of her occupied country, Palestine. Her work can be interpreted as a description of the body and as a commentary on politics and gender. She explores the dangers and confines of her world, but through recreating beautiful scenes with backgrounds that seem benign at first glance but on closer inspection reflect the destruction of her homeland. Her work can also be read a multitude of ways, from living in a permanent state of actual political occupation to having to respect the “psychological occupation” of old and even archaic socio-religious traditions. She questions the taboos surrounding virginity in the performance Visceral, vanity in the installation Lipsticks, and marriage in the performance Black Bride. Her art historical and cultural references are evident throughout, and appear as an echo of her lived experiences. She wants to evoke comparisons as well as psychological and emotional responses.

Seductive, fearless and sometimes outrageous, Saadeh creates costumes and props to re-enact famous scenes from art history, fables or legends. Using herself as a character or a vehicle for ideas, her photography, video works and live performances challenge well-known fairy tales, Greek mythology (such as the Sisyphus myth in Vacuum), classical fine art (Diana), current affairs (Mona Lisa) or daily domestic chores (Hair). She enjoys controversy, questioning what art is, and building scenes of her own making. Her staging creates intimate ties that link art to melancholy.

One can detect in Saadeh’s performances the language of Marina Abramovich and the young Mona Hatoum; she explores the relationship between the performer and the audience and the desire for ritual and gesture. Her dance macabre, Dance With Me, in which she choreographs a dance routine with a human skeleton, has been performed on several occasions – first as a belly dance (1999), then as a tango (2011), reflecting on the daily life of Palestinians, which involves flirting with danger, humiliation, imprisonment and even death. As a performance artist she is interested in the traditions of her cultural heritage, from beliefs about virginity and honour (or Sharaf, in Arabic) to notions of generosity (or karamah). In the performance, Zaatar – You Stepped on My Dress, which was staged in Switzerland, she enacts a type of communion, but instead of the blood and body of Christ, she gives members of the audience thyme on bread dipped in olive oil (zaatar), sharing the traditional daily meal of ordinary Palestinians. In doing so, she succeeds in communicating in a language that is not verbal but cultural.

In performances staged in the West, where audiences do not speak or share the same language or taboos, there is no talking, no touching, and no overt communication of any kind. Her objective is to engage with the audience in a sort of “energy dialogue”, as Abramovich calls it. The performances are simple, direct, and lack theoretical content: performance becomes life, and life becomes art.

Saadeh’s photographs often reference great master painters, including Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt and Marcel Duchamp – a master of modern and contemporary thought who is one of her main inspirations. (This is explored further in essays by Juliet Cestar and Francesca Ricci, which we will publish in the weeks to come.)

Essentially, her work is a statement about the persistent struggle to survive in a continual state of siege. She uses Western references to communicate that feeling, with different backdrops to reflect her situation: burdened by tradition, overwhelmed by settlers, distraught at destroyed communities, frustrated by checkpoints and curfews. At first glance there seems to be nothing inherently political about her photographs, yet they links to specific times, places and events that contributed to their creation.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for artists to negotiate stereotyping, generalisation, and associative interpretations, especially for Saadeh, who carries the baggage of an “emblematic” personal history. As the late Lebanese historian and journalist Samir Kassir wrote before his assassination, “The Arab malaise is not the result of modernity, but of modernity’s collapse.”

In general in the Arab world, talents abound, but flourish abroad. Saadeh is becoming an exception to this rule. Despite her lack of foreign language skills and her unwillingness to theorise about her work, her photographs, performances and video installations reveal what she lives and sees. As the late Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, once wrote, “And in my feminine hand, I hold tight my familiar eternity.”

Monday Reads: The Great Gatsby

2013-05-13T11:21:21+00:00

Film poster and original cover for The Great Gatsby

As the world of cinema explodes around the release of Baz Luhrmann's champagne-soaked adaptation of this Jazz Age classic, we thought it would be a good time to shy away from the blockbuster and revisit the original, surprisingly slender novel.

Though the story of a man throwing lavish parties to impress his lost love was what came to mind most easily when we reminisced about the novel, it was the dry, disaffected world painted by Fitzgerald's prose that struck us most strongly when we went back to revisit it. It's a place full of parties where no-one is having fun. The world of West Egg is not a pleasant place to spend your time. Everyone is distant, unknowable: and no-one moreso than the one who should be closest to us - Nick Carraway, the book's brittle narrator, who was also far more cutting than we remembered.

Each generation takes something new away from a classic novel like The Great Gatsby. Before we had seen disillusionment, a new world not living up to expectations. But this time we found something like blindness: a luxury world of unhappiness and unfulfilment, with characters floating past each other, never really seeing, never really touching one another. A reflection, perhaps, of our own time.

The Week in Ideas, 10th May 2013

2013-05-10T13:53:41+00:00

The printable handgun, blueprints fo which were downloaded 100,000 times this week.

A Nazi-themed opera pulled from the stage; grammar used as a political weapon; a printable handgun is banned; libel is reformed. We round up some key ideas in the week gone by.

Blueprints for the world's first printable handgun were downloaded 100,000 times from their creator's site this week before the US state department ordered their removal. The plans were created and distributed by 25-year-old law student Cody Wilson, who aims to prove that the age of 3D printing and digital distribution makes the regulation of lethal weapons impossible.

The UK has passed the Defamation Act, which reforms our outdated libel laws, after lengthy campaigns by English PEN and other free speech organisations. It's hoped the reforms will strengthen free speech in this country, and also curb the problem of 'libel tourism', where writers overseas have been threatened by lawyers based in London.

A controversial staging of Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser set in a concentration camp during the Holocaust has been cancelled after it proved so shocking some audience-members were forced to seek medical help after watching.

Grammar has been deployed as a political tool to attack critics of the UK education secretary, suggests Thomas Jones in this piece for the Guardian. The inaugural Bad Grammar Award from the Idler Academy was bestowed on 100 academics who wrote an open letter to Michael Gove criticising his new national curriculum, but it transpires the award's judges have close professional ties to the education secretary and have lobbied in support of his hobbies.

Languages across Europe and Asia might be far more interconnected than we think, according to a new report claiming the existance of a proto-Eurasiatic family of languages. The report identifies a list of words like "hand", "give", "bark" and "ash" which have common roots in dozens of languages spoken across Eurasia and the Indian subcontinent.

Article 19 unveiled practical advice for bloggers about their rights and recourses last week in The Right to Blog, a policy paper which also called for lawmakers to better promote and protect the rights of bloggers around the world.