Atwood urged to decline Israeli award

Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood is slated to receive the Dan David Prize from Tel Aviv University in Israel on May 9. The prize committee awards three million dollars in the categories of "past, present, and future" to inspirational individuals of various fields who have made an outstanding impact on the world. Atwood would share one million dollars with Amitav Ghosh, an Indian-Bengali author who writes in English; past literary winners have included Amos Oz and Tom Stoppard, in addition to non-writers like environmental activist Al Gore, cellist Yo Yo Ma, and archeologist Graeme Barker.

Various people, including a contingency of students from the Gaza Strip known as the Palestinian Students' Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel, have expressed their concern over Atwood's possible acceptance of an award from Israel due to the nation's apartheid-like treatment of Palestinian people. In letters that can be read here, they plead that she either boycott the ceremony, use the podium as an opportunity to condemn Israel's actions, or publicly use the winnings to contribute to causes such as writers' groups in the Gaza Strip.

Atwood's website, however, still lists that she plans to accept the award.

She will also be participating in an Earth Day panel called Arts of the Earth on April 25 in Washington, DC.

The Palestine Festival of Literature

American author Claire Messud, whose 2006 The Emperor's Children was longlisted for a Man Booker Prize, has written a fascinating article for the Boston Globe about her recent visit to the Palestine Festival of Literature, a peaceful celebration of Palestinian letters held illegally in Jerusalem, where to use the word "Palestine" is a security risk and to be Palestinian is to be homeless, lost in time and space yet trapped in the void.

The author and lawyer Raja Shehadeh - a gentle man of Gandhi-esque demeanor, whose book “Palestinian Walks’’ won Britain’s Orwell Prize last year - led us on a walk in the hills outside Ramallah, to show us the land that he loves and upon which he has walked all his life. We scrambled up rocks among terraced olive groves to a stone shepherd’s hut, from which we could see the green and gold hills interlaced to the horizon. We picked our way along a dry riverbed, surprising a patterned tortoise, and on to a small village, where a mangy donkey gazed balefully from its tether and ruddy-faced children demonstrated their tree-climbing prowess.

So simple and beautiful, our walk was, alas, illegal: the olive groves of Raja Shehadeh’s childhood have been declared a militarized zone. We might have been arrested at any moment simply for standing in them. (Israeli settlers, however, are free to walk there; just as they are free to carry arms, and they do.) Part of being Palestinian is having your movements curtailed on every front.

What is a world where you cannot go for a walk, cannot assemble to read and discuss literature in public, cannot be certain of visiting your grandmother in a neighboring city? What is a world where you cannot lose your temper, cannot laugh in the wrong place?

Curbside Press publishes Palestinian poetry

The Connecticut literary arts nonprofit Curbstone Press, whose mission statement involves "publishing creative literature that promotes human rights and inter-cultural understanding," specializing in "Latin American and Latino literature," has broadened its scope to release Rain Inside, a collection of poems by Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah.

The poems, translated by Omnia Amin and Rick London, capture life on the Gaza strip, often through surrealist and brutal imagery.

Two previous novels by Nasrallah have also been translated into English--Prairies of Fever and Inside the Night--though the majority of literature by him and his Arabic contemporaries remains unavailable in the Anglophone world.

Raymond Deane of the Electronic Intifada explores this dearth of Arabic translation and reviews the collection.

It is no accident that this sidelining has taken place in the Anglosphere, given the role of the US and UK in occupying Arab lands and propping up Israel. Imperialism/colonialism needs to demonize subject peoples as "uncivilized," a caricature that cannot be maintained without impeding access to those peoples' poetry. Providing such access is therefore a quietly subversive act.

Haruki Murakami and the Israeli-Palestinian Divide

Citing Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's English-language speech on Feb. 20 in Israel as recipient of the 2009 Jerusalem Prize, the Japan Times explores Israel's erection of a defense wall, its role in world affairs, and the human compulsion to divide and separate ourselves.

From Murakami's speech:

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. . . . Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. . . . Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell.