Ahdaf Soueif Talking Books

policies. That, and much more, at our website. You can download our

application also. Hello and welcome to talking books.

It's a celebration of culture with around 500 events across ten days.

The aim of the festival is to bring together some of the world's

greatest writers and thinkers to share their stories and ideas. I'm

speaking to the Egyptian author Ahdaf Soueif. Her novel the map of

love made in the first Muslim woman to be nominated for a Booker prize,

her latest book this is not a border is an anthology celebrating her own

extraordinary literary festival. APPLAUSE. Ahdaf Soueif currency

hotfooting it from the tents, we are in a 30th and she was here for the

Palestinian anniversary, it is their tents, and she has come their

straight from organising that and we want to find out a little bit soap

welcome, Ahdaf Soueif. Thank you. Thank you. Just tell us a little

bit, how did go? OK, while first I just want to say it is a tremendous

privilege and pleasure being back at the Hay festival, this place has its

own spirit and bars and it's always wonderful to be here. Basically,

just for those who don't know, the idea that came to us was, I mean,

looking for ways, as people who write or work with culture in

general, looking for ways to kind of ameliorate or influence for the

better the situation on the ground. We thought that if we took... If we

took artists and writers from the West to go and work in Palestine, to

do literary readings, seminars, workshops at universities and so on

for one week and they would have, you would be giving them a unique

experience, you would be enabling them to the experience of living

like a Palestinian under occupation, for one week. And he would be giving

the Palestinians ex- boat to world-class artists and events. And

then basically everyone would go their own way. The one thing that

was very clear for example is that we would not avail ourselves of the

privileges that come with carrying a foreign and particularly Western

passport, so we would travel as a Palestinian with a West Bank ID,

Batman for example not choosing the airport, going in through Jordan on

the Allenby Crossing, and also going through checkpoints. The other thing

was that basically, because of the checkpoints, it's difficult for

people to move from town to town. And so we decided it would be the

purpose that we would move to its origins and so it became kind of

like a circus, we call it a cultural roadshow, and it's on the move every

day and meeting students at universities and doing events so it

is quite challenging. Michael Pailin, in the way that only he can

say it, and you know, he is one of the contributors to this book

series, by the way, is for some reason, I cannot remember where he

went, but for some reason our stalls and books and cakes and tea were

deemed to be a security threat on that occasion. It was closed down.

So, you know, definitely, it isn't Hague, that's for sure. There was

one point, three years ago, will be had the closing event next to

Jerusalem and basically there was trouble and there was tea gas and it

was either turned back and not the closing event or walk through the

teargas so we walked through the tear gas and one of the authors who

was American and I won't say who he was but he was like really upset. I

gave him half an onion which is what you do, you put an onion to your

nose and that kind of neutralised as it and he just took it and went into

the onion! We can't swear, can we? It's a... Onion! Do you mind just

reading a passage from your essay on Jerusalem? This is not a border is a

collection of pieces written a badgering, after all before this

book from people who have been at the festival and I chose to write

about Jerusalem because for the last four or five years, we have really

seen the push against and into Jerusalem becoming stronger and

stronger and at the heart of Jerusalem is of course the dome of

the Rock within the sanctuary and it's always, ever since I started

doing this, the first time I went to Palestine in 2000, there was a

moment when I walked into the century and a really, really felt,

felt such a piece, I mean, it's such a beautiful space and throughout the

festival, I have really wanted to give the visitors that sense, to

give them that moment where you walk in and the world falls way. So I

chose to describe the century and what it means and its history and

here, this is just the second paragraph in that piece. It says the

sanctuary on a hilltop, around the earth fell away. Palestinians built

Jerusalem on a hill and the old city slopes gently towards the

south-east, towards the century. And there, the central and biggest of 26

terraces is the Dome of the Rock. From the south, 20 steps lead up to

it, from the north, just nine. You can see the Dome from the

surrounding hills but you cannot see it from the city. Only when you come

very close to one of the great gateways, when you will almost

through it, is the Dome revealed. Light almost floating. Framed by

necklaces of slim colonnaded arches and attended by other domes and

pulpits and fountains, each of which, alone, would have

commandeered your attention. But in the sanctuary, they are modest,

demanding nothing, content to be here. Absolutely beautiful. APPLAUSE

I love that and actually we discussed you reading it because I

think even, someone like me in the news business but I suspect all of

you sitting at home and watching the news, we get a slightly distorted

view, don't we, of what is going on? And that is such a contrast in such

a wonderful contrast. I think it is such a central thing to our

thinking, this issue of the distorted view so that was... When I

first went, what I was struck by most was the disparity between what

I expected and what I saw. I expect that scenes of unmitigated misery

and destruction and what I found was a society which was really trying to

get on with the business of living. And... Just market and birthday

parties and weddings and cultural events and screenings and all, like,

absolutely under threat and so there is, is tremendous grace and trim and

is beauty and a tremendous will to live and to be part of the, you

know, all the conversations that are going on in the world, and that is

what, really, touches the heart. If you don't mind I would like to leave

this is not a border, I know this is, you have it in the moment, there

are of other things I wanted to talk about and one of which is Cairo, you

are from Cairo, it is your city, you a book about well, what we called at

the time a revolution, but before we talk about that, apparently you are

asked many many years previously to write a book about Cairo and you

didn't, you waited until after the revolution. What was that about? I

needed money. That's not true! That's not true! Well, it's always

true. About the money but you thought you weren't ready. No, I

wasn't ready. I signed the contract to write a book about Cairo,

Bloomsbury will bring out a nice little series by authors about their

favourite cities. Edward Wright wrote about Paris and Peter Carey

wrote about Sydney and I was going to write about Cairo and I didn't

because... It just kind of seemed quite sad because terrible things

were being done to the city, were being done to the country, this was

after the regime, and after I started to write to collect some

sort of allergy, it used to be... And so I didn't do it for years and

years. And then basically, January 2011 happened within a few days,

Alexandra Pringle my editor at Bloomsbury was on the phone saying

well how about that book now? So yeah, I produced the Cairo book in

the kind of, yeah, the further... And the title of the book is Cairo,

Cairo: My City,, our revolution. I was there as a reporter and looking

at the crowd in Thalia Square and it was a Friday and the Christians had

encircled the Muslims as they prayed and I came up with this design of

Muslims and Christians, young and old, rich and poor coming together

in this uprising, in this revolution, and I thought about

that, I thought my God, how naive you were. But you celebrated it at

the time as well. Goodness! Yeah, my God. OK, I think that... I think

that you were not naive. I think that you are absolutely spot on and

correct and perceptive and I think that everything that happens and we

thought happened was true. And there was a moment, it was lost in several

months, when people rediscovered their best selves and actually said

so explicitly and where everybody wanted to be the best that they

could be and all this truism came out and all this talent and all this

energy and all of it, like, in the service of a communal good. And that

was just expressed all the time. And people were, like, I am happy to

suffer hardship for two years, three years, as long as we are in the

right road, as long as this is for everyone and we are building and

even the sense that what was happening was informing not just

Egypt but was informing the world. What I want to say is that the

backlash, the counterrevolution, the backlash, the things that we are

living through now have been so very bad that it is quite difficult to

hold on to the belief in the reality of what happened. I think that no

job and the job of people like me is to always create a space for things

to happen. You do that by maintaining the web

of connections, People's, possibilities that can come to

something in the future. We have 60,000 young people in prison in

Egypt, one of them is my nephew, he's just one of them. We have

people being disappeared off the streets because the regime has two

have elections next year it started three weeks ago just picking up

anybody who could be thought of as an activist across the country. And

vanishing them into prisons. Since general CC took power, 19 new

prisons have been built in Egypt. 19 new prisons. And the contracts for

building the prisons go to the military and the contracts for

refurbishing the prisons go to the Home Office. So basically you would

be letting the 60,000 kids down if you just decided to be pessimistic.

So you work on whatever space is allowed, and actually when you're on

the ground you see lots and lots of grounds for hope because people

don't stop working, they don't stop agitating, trying to build, creating

organisations, writing, having photography exhibitions, whatever it

is that people do, they carry on doing. You talk about working in

whatever space is available to you, the space you've occupied for a

very, very long time has been this halfway house if you like between

the orient and the West and the Occident, you've written about it in

mezzo terror, but I think you say now that that space is becoming

smaller and smaller, you're finding it more and more awkward, with that

the right? Actually met to terror was published in 2004 and after

2011I actually think in different terms there were many of us who

occupy what I would call the common ground. The people who actually do

see difference as interesting and exciting and productive. I think

everywhere in the world there is a push to try and create a better and

a new world that is more hospitable to the young and more hospitable to

the planet and that allows for a better future and that is being

clamped down on by a system and that is the fight we are having. It's not

between East and West, it's between the people who want a better future

for everybody and the people who want to keep things as they are and

clamp down on it and use it and exploit it even more. OK, I've sort

of broken... APPLAUSE Thank you. I've broken all the rules I set

myself at the beginning about timings. One last question very

quickly before I let you go. You've talked about all of this not just as

a journalist, not just as an activist, but you're a novelist too.

Let me just ask you, the most famous book perhaps is the Map of Love,

what is it you were able to do as a novelist in exploring some of the

ideas we've already talked about that you can't do as a campaigner or

a journalist? I think that it's very dangerous to embark on a novel or an

purely artistic project with an agenda in mind. I think that the Map

of Love explored, asked questions about things that were very much on

my mind at the time, about whether when I say I love you, you

understand by love you understand the same thing. Along which is

communication, whether it was possible to actually love properly

across culture, what was the relationship between the past and

now? So, yeah, it asked questions and it explored them and I guess

that is what... That is what fiction or art can do, that it can throw out

these questions and let's readers make up their own minds, although of

course that is also what we do with her first, we put things out there

and let people make up their minds but of course articles are much more

direct and much more immediate. A novel is a very, very different

project. I mean, in a way you have to kind of absent yourself

completely from the day to day and the detail of the day to day in

order to be able to just, sort of, have the space to fashion a world in

which your novel can happen. Time for you to ask some questions. Yes?

My question is a bit of a follow-up one on what George was just asking,

it's about the craft itself. How do you go about, thinking of the Map of

Love, with historical fiction integrating rather seamlessly as you

did the political and social history into your story and your plot

without letting it dominate the story that probably is going to

attract some group of leaders, because as I said you can't come to

it loaded with a political message, what advice would you give, how did

you do that? If you're lucky and you got a good book on your hands your

characters will come to life and when your characters come to life

you kind of do what's best for them. And therefore they then moved to

occupy their space and the politics and the history become the

scaffolding... Obviously it controls what they can or can't do, but it is

not their entire life and ultimately one's interest really in politics

and history is they affect the individual life, it's not some

abstract interest, it's because they cause misery and they cause

heartbreak and death and they can cause happiness. So in the end it is

the individual life that is centre stage. Yes, sir.

You made two comments about writing novels. The first one was that you

don't think it's right to embark on a purely artistic project with an

agenda or I think what you meant was a political agenda in mind, and then

you also said that in the Pelfest, everything is political, and one can

think of so many novels that do have a political message, like for

example in South Africa, Alan Peyton's cry with the bloke Anne

Dickins for example who make a political point with everything they

write. How can you reconcile these two statements? I think a novel or a

work of art can be political, will be political, I just don't think...

I would not be comfortable sitting down and thinking I am going to

write a novel to show that oppressing women is bad for example.

Obviously oppressing women is bad and Middlemarch is a great feminist

novel for example, but I think when you're creating a novel or a film

you need to be willing to let it have its own integrity... You set

out, obviously you are yourself and you have your political beliefs and

so on and they will get in there, but it's not there to serve them.

Your job is to conceive of a novel and then allow it to go its own way

and see what it does rather than to hand it in to a particular message

you want to get across I think. I'm afraid our time's up. I've been a

journalist for 30 something years and this story in the Middle East

has been told in such stark and sometimes ugly terms, thank you for

civil eyes in the debate. Ahdaf Soueif. -- civilising. APPLAUSE

Rough rule of thumb for the day ahead is that where you were warm

and sunny yesterday, you will be that bit cloudier