Poet Jo Colley reports:
I'm driving through a Durham infested with in-comers - it's Freshers' Week and the city has filled up with carloads of parents and offspring, transporting mini-IKEAs to new temporary abodes. If moving from the south of the country to the north (many years ago now) was a kind of culture shock for me, a learning of a new language - geographical, historical, literary - what is it like for these women, all writers living in exile from their Arab countries of origin? A fascinating event held at the Department of Islamic Studies on Sunday October the 5th, gave the audience some insight into this question.
Fadia Faqir introduced all three readers, then we listened to each of them read and explore the theme of exile, bringing up questions of identity, nationality and language. The first, Leila Aboulela, who left her native Khartoum for the chill of Aberdeen twenty years ago, explained how exile had made her into a writer. She revealingly described herself as "a woman looking out of a window", explaining how the inevitable comparisons a newcomer makes between home and the alien territory led her to a desire to commit these feelings to print. She had never wanted to write before, had trained as a statistician, and was now the mother of a young family. Her first stories were broadcast on BBC Radio, and her first anthology, Coloured Lights, followed in 2001. The Translator was long-listed for the Orange Prize.
Leila Aboulela read extracts from her work which illustrated the state of exile she felt herself to be in, a state which gradually changed as the years passed. The feeling of "disappointed love" is replaced by a kind of acceptance and even assimilation. She wishes now to write from the point of view of the next generations, and also to provide an understanding of Islam for her readers.
The second writer, Zeina B. Ghandour, was born in Beirut, but studied at Kent University, before spending time as an aid worker with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Palestine. She refuses, however, to describe herself as an exile, seeing this state as a "blockade". She spoke movingly about her grandparents who were activists in Palestine and obviously helped to form her own views. She's a lawyer, a sophisticated intelligent woman who is passionate about the Palestinian cause. I thought of her as the most overtly political writer, but the reviews I've read since of her novel "The Honey" are intriguing: a novel about a muezzin's daughter who breeches one of the deepest taboos of Islam by performing the call to morning prayer. It would have been interesting to hear her talk about this.
I was born in what today we call Lebanon. It's true that I am living here in UK as a result of the civil war there, but I will not define myself as an exile, or as living in exile. However, my life is marked by a relationship with exile. My relationship with British society, with British politics, and with British culture, is branded by the history of another exile.
Let me start with Palestine under British Mandate, in 1937:
I like to ask my grandmother about the day they came to take my great-grandfather away. She says it was early morning, around 5 am, and my great-grandmother cried as she packed his suitcase whilst soldiers waited for him outside...
Finally, we heard from Haifa Zangana. Half Kurdish and half Iraqi, this woman has experience of living in Iraq in opposition to Saddam's régime, finally having to make her life in the west to avoid persecution. She has recently revisited Baghdad for the first time in many years, finding that her people continue to suffer under the US occupation. She has written about the current situation many times for newspapers such as The Guardian, providing a clear and authoritative insider's view, particularly in relation to Iraqi women. She finds that when she writes about politics, she uses English, but for her more creative work she uses Arabic. She spoke of a set of stories that somehow she has not submitted for publication, as she wants it to be published in her native country. This was a telling illustration of the separation from the mother country and the ways in which you see it from afar, the umbilical cord that refuses to be broken no matter how many years pass.
The afternoon ended with an interesting discussion about the nature of exile and the degree to which many of us can feel homeless or rootless. It struck me that there was an enormous difference between a self-imposed exile and that which is forced on an individual by a ruthless regime. It was illuminating, inspiring and rather shaming to hear these women's words and perhaps get a glimpse of the world from their perspective.
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Last update: 16th October 2004