Our contributors elsewhere

Rabih Alameddine, whose most recent book, The Hakawati, depicted -- among many other things -- the return of a Lebanese-American man to Beirut to see his dying father, contributes to the Granta series devoted to writers and their fathers. Rabih's conversation with Aleksandar Hemon ran in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with an excerpt from The Hakawati. In fact, their conversation was, along with Fady Joudah's poems, one of the inspirations for the issue's title:

HEMON: This idea of keeping death at bay with narration—its model is The Thousand and One Nights. And it suggests that storytelling is an affirmation of life. And I mean the basic fact of life—if you can tell stories, you are alive.

ALAMEDDINE: Yes. We are both from what I call “death on the shoulder” cultures. Many of my relatives saved themselves by entertaining people with guns. You get stopped at checkpoints; one cousin of mine knew she was going to die so she started talking to them. “I grew up in such and such a village,” and so on. She started telling her story very quickly—and they let her pass.

Continuing on this theme: The New York Times book blog Paper Cuts recently suggested a reading list devoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, over at the VQR blog, Michael Lukas suggests some literary additions, including books by PEN America contributors Etgar Keret, David Grossman, and Mahmoud Darwish.

And in the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra seconds the Grossman recommendation. You can read Grossman's Freedom to Write lecture, from the 2007 World Voices Festival, here.

(Photo of Alameddine, above, by Beowulf Sheehan.)

October events in NYC

This Sunday, October 5, at 1:30 pm, a number of writers will gather at the Bowery Poetry Club to celebrate the poetry and life of Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). This is part of the worldwide reading devoted to Darwish that has been spearheaded by The International Literature Festival Berlin.

The event will feature readings, words, and memories from Breyten Breytenbach, Pierre Joris, Semezdin Mehmedinovic, Chuck Wachtel, Farah Ghniem, Ghassan Nasr, Danae Elon, Lila Azam Zanganeh, Ala Alryyes, Ammiel Alcalay, and Archipelago Books. Zafer Tawil will present a musical performance on the oud, and refreshments will be served following the event.

(You can read Fady Joudah’s translations of Mahmoud Darwish here, and his tribute to the Palestinian poet here.)

On Tuesday, October 14, PEN America 9 contributor Xiaolu Guo will talk with Ian Buruma about the legacy of the Cultural Revolution on contemporary China. They’ll speak at the Asia Society and Museum at 7 pm.

(You can read Xiaolu’s story about a call girl in contemporary Beijing, “Reunion,” here.)

Also on Tuesday at 7 pm, PEN will hold this year’s Beyond Margins Celebration at the Bruno Walter Auditorium. “The Present Past: Celebrating Writers of Color” will feature Amiri Baraka, Joseph M. Marshall III, and special guests for an evening of readings and discussion on how cultural history affects writers’ perceptions of the present and the future. The event is free but seating is limited. RSVP to awards@pen.org or (212) 334-1660, ext 108. Please give your full name and indicate whether or not you will be bringing a guest.

The next night, PEN and the National Book Critics Circle will present “Beyond Margins: The Critical Perspective,” a panel discussion about the critic’s role in championing the works of writers of color moderated by PEN Member and NBCC President Jane Ciabattari and featuring Joseph Marshall III, Ibrahim Ahmad, Margo Jefferson, and Rigoberto González. At 7 pm at Housing Works Used Bookstore Café. Free and open to the public.

This, by the way, is Banned Books Week.

Shimon Adaf on poetry and prose

Our next issue features two poems by Shimon Adaf, an Israeli writer born in Sderot in 1972. Shimon is about to publish his third collection of poems in Israel, where he has also published three novels. His second poetry collection has been translated into English by Becka McKay, but has not yet been published here.

Shimon is in New York this week, and I asked him over coffee whether he thinks of himself more as a poet or a novelist or simply as a writer. Simply as a writer, he said. He used to be in a band and still collaborates with musicans—any medium of expression will do. But, he added, poetry and prose come from very different places for him.

When he writes fiction, he said, he thinks that words are sufficient to say what he has to say. However, when he begins to feel that words are not enough, and will never be enough, then he writes poetry.

You can read the two poems from our next issue here.

PS. Also featured this week on PEN.org are poems by Fady Joudah and Mahmoud Darwish and fiction by Rabih Alameddine.

Fady Joudah on Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008)

Mahmoud Darwish was and is a colossal figure in modern Arabic poetry. He passed away Saturday in Houston, Texas after heart surgery. Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet and doctor who lives in Houston and was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for Butterfly's Burden, a collection of three recent books by Darwish. Two of these poems appear in PEN America 9: Checkpoints, along with two new poems by Joudah, who recently won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition. (One of these poems provided our new issue with its title.)


Mahmoud Darwish was and will remain a rare phenomenon in the world of letters, a poet whose constant dialogue with place and time (or non place and non time) have thrust him in the hearts and minds of millions of people. He was as extraordinary and private as he was universal and public.

A tender, shy man, with a sense of humor and satire, he was dedicated to the art of poetry and was not concerned with his public image, but never disdainful of it, always respectful of, and indebted to, his readers. His complex language that incessantly bears the illusion of accessibility is laden with paradox and complex metaphor. He was not only the truest and most beautiful expression of Palestine and Palestinians but also of the Arab world. He is dearly loved in Tunis and Morocco as he is in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Egypt and across the Gulf. And he was also celebrated and honored the world over.

Mahmoud Darwish loved life, and loved it in its full adornment and dignity and did not want it compromised. He would not want sorrow to define him. He would rather “We Love Life” and “Remember after (him) only life”…And he would want not necessarily the fixation on the elegiac and the historico-political in his poetry, but a celebration of his eulogy for life and language. He was an innovator of prosody and contemporary rhythms in Arabic, a philosopher of the self and its stranger others, ever the interlocutor. I can only hope that the day will soon come, especially in English, when Darwish’s night and dream, jasmine and almond blossoms are seen for what they are, the private lexicon of a singular and eternal, timeless voice in the history of human literature.


Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American, is a physician. His first poetry collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007. He has been a field member of Doctors Without Borders since 2001.