An afternoon of Mediterranean Discoveries at the Arab World Institute in Paris by CAROL DRINKWATER

                                                     

                                             Two angles of  l'Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA), Paris

Recently, I had lunch under a thunder-grey sky in Paris. It was a Sunday and the cafés and bars were spilling onto the streets with Parisians enjoying the pleasures of their weekend. I had just flown up from the warm south. Michel, my husband, collected me from the airport before he disappeared for an afternoon screening of one his films at Le Grand Action, a small independent cinema close to where we were eating on the Left Bank. My afternoon was my own to do with as I fancied. A stroll along the banks of the Seine or a museum? 

I had noticed as we drove by that the l’Institut du Monde Arabe, the Arab World Institute, known to all Parisians as IMA, was advertising an exhibition dedicated to Palestine and all that it offers to the world. 

It reminded me that this year of 2023  is the 75th anniversary of the 'Nakba', which means "catastrophe" in Arabic. For Palestinians, 1948, was the year  when thousands were expelled from or fled their country, when they were obliged to give up their land for the creation of the new State of Israel.

I have spent a fair amount of time in both Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) and Israel during my travels while writing my books, The Olive Route and The Olive Tree, and later again for the filming of our five-part documentary series inspired by these books, keeping the title for television The Olive Route. Much that I witnessed there saddened me deeply and left me with a sense of impotency.

            Images takes from the internet of Palestinians fleeing their homelands in 1948.

As we all know, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict continues to be a very contentious subject and not one that I wish to address in this article. I only want to share with you a few of my memories of that part of the world and some details about my visits to IMA.

My late father was in Palestine during WWII. He loved the country and its people and talked to me about those experiences on many occasions during my childhood years. His descriptions, reminisces, were vivid, very evocative and moving. Looking back, I feel sure that those stories, those adventures of a nineteen-year-old serviceman (Daddy was with Ralph Reader's RAF Entertainment Corps) seeded my longing to discover the Middle East. Even as a girl I had dreams of running away from school and volunteering for work in an Israeli kibbutz. My parents soon put a stop to all those ideas! It took me many more years before I eventually visited all those Middle Eastern countries. As I said, for my books and films. 

I was stepping foot into cities and temples and markets I had first heard about when I was little more than six or seven years old. They were utterly magical for me, those first impressions.

I definitely feel a special 'homeland' attachment to that part of the world and often joke - fanciful, I know - that perhaps in my very first incarnation I was a Phoenician. The Phoenicians who originally hailed from the Levant. 

                                                                     Maps of Phoenicia

Phoenicia was made up of individual city-states along and inland of the coast of what today is  Lebanon. They were a rich and magnificently-gifted civilisation known mostly as shipbuilders, maritime navigators, traders and agriculturalists. (They created terraced farming). One of the aspects of their civilisation that has always appealed to me is that they were not conquerors or warriors, although their descendants after they founded Carthage were more aggressive. 

The Phoenicians from Phoenicia travelled across the Mediterranean sea from their city-states in vessels know as gauloi (a trading boat with one main sail), transporting, amongst many other types of cargo, olive trees along with the knowledge of the tree's cultivation. They taught the foreigners where they traded how to produce and use olive oil!

                                Images of Phoenician sailing ships, taken from the internet.

                             Sarcophagus of Eshmunazar.  5th century BC Phoenician King of Sidon

Here is a YouTube clip of an exhibition about Phoenician culture and art. This exhibition was held at IMA and I was fortunate enough to see it. 
https://www.paris-forever.com/en/arab-world-institute/

It was an exhibition rich in statuary and artworks. The geographical displays highlighted clearly the impact the Phoenicians, who are known to have been a major seafaring people, made on other civilisations during their Mediterranean excursions. They founded trading posts around the entire Mediterranean and were the dominant traders of these seas between 1550 BCE and 300 BCE when it was the Greeks who took control of these waterways.

It is important to remember that the Mediterranean was a superhighway. It was used for transport, trade and cultural exchanges between many diverse peoples. It encompassed three continents: Western Asia, North Africa and Southern Europe.

In fact, the Phoenicians travelled beyond the Med founding trading posts wherever they dropped oar. On they sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar, out beyond the ancient Pillars of Hercules, south to Essaouira in Morocco or north to the coast of Spain. It is believed they founded the cities of Cádiz and Málaga and were possibly the first settlers to that southern stretch of the Iberian Peninsula coast.

By the way, the extraordinarily evocative trumpet-playing on this Youtube clip above is by Ibrahim Malhouf who is a French-Lebanese jazz musician. If you ever have the opportunity to see him live on stage, I highly recommend you race to get seats. 

Back to IMA and a little about the building itself:

The Arab World Institute is constructed on the left bank of the Seine in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. The idea for an Arab Institute in Paris was first seeded in the early nineteen-seventies when Valéry Giscard D’Estaing was President of France. The purpose was to offer opportunities for research and to disseminate Arab cultural and spiritual values. It was felt that they were not fully understood in France at that time. This was a very important initiative back in the seventies because just a decade earlier the French were extricating themselves, not with all honours, from a long and very messy war, the Algerian War of Independence: 1954 - 1962. It led to Algeria winning its independence from France. It also left a great deal of bad feeling between many Arabs and French citizens, which has not been entirely resolved even today.

The Arab World Institute is an organisation within a building founded between France and eighteen Arab countries.  It is a "secular location for the promotion of Arab civilisation, art, knowledge and aesthetics." Within the building can be found its museum, a vast library, auditorium/cinema, restaurant with impressive views over the city and meeting rooms and offices.

Construction only got underway in 1981 as D’Estaing was handing over the Presidency to François Mitterand. 

Jean Nouvel, one of France’s most esteemed living architects, won the design competition and was put at the helm of the building’s construction. It took until 1987 to complete. It was funded by France and the League of Arab States. It later won the Agha Khan Award for Architectural excellence. (An award established in 1977 and given once every three years.)  

                                               Jean Nouvel, French architect. b.1945

In 2008, Nouvel also won the prestigious Pritzker Award for his contribution to architecture. It included a special mention for his outstanding vision for the "exotically louvred” building that is the Arab World Institute. It is hailed as innovative in modern architecture. 

It is a fascinating and unusual building, much influenced by the decorative artwork the French originally described as Arabesque. Walk the corridors of IMA and you will be blown away by its beauty, the intricacy of the building's designs. 

The Palestinian exhibition, which runs until 19 November 2023, concentrates on four Palestinian artists reflecting Life and the Occupation of their homeland. Territory and Identity. Over the course of this summer, there will be special events, evenings of discussion, film and music. 

The works of the poet/writer, Mahmoud Darwish, who is still considered by many to be the national poet, the voice, of Palestine are readily available in the very comprehensive bookshop. Do take a look before you leave. 

                                                   

                                                    Mahmoud Darwish (1941 - 2008)       

"And I tell myself, a moon will rise from my darkness."

"Nothing is harder on the soul than the smell of dreams when they are evaporating."

What surprised me more than any other discovery during my Sunday afternoon at the Palestinian exhibition was the section entitled 'Jean Genet, Two suitcases'. For me, it was a revelation. Genet was, of course, always a vagabond, an alternative voice, a political combatant, a petty thief, (his greatest passion during his filching years was to steal rare books!), but I had had not known of his travels in Palestine nor his commitment to the Palestinian fight for independence. The exhibition showcases through Genet's hand-written notes, diaries, observations, even hotel bills, the time and energy he gave to the Palestinian people. 

He wrote an essay, Four Hours in Shatila. The essay was inspired by his visit in 1982 to Shatila, a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, where he witnessed much suffering and death.

 

A book followed, titled Prisoner of Love, a memoir of the Palestinian fedayeen*. Held back, it was only published in 1986, one month after Genet's death. 

*The fedayeen are Arab militants or guerrillas. Many, especially the Palestinian fedayeen, are fighting against Israel. The word fedayeen actually refers to those who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause through armed resistance.

                                                              

                                                          Jean Genet 1910 - 1986

Jean Genet was born in Paris in 1910, the illegitimate son of an unmarried prostitute who abandoned him. He was fostered by farming people, spent time in reform school, ran away repeatedly from that penitentiary at Mettray. Eventually, he enlisted with the French Army and was sent to Syria in 1929. This was his first contact with the Middle East but it gave birth to a love of the Arab world that stayed with him for the rest of his life. He deserted from the army in 1936, ended up back in prison and then found himself, under Nazi-occupied France, in an internment camp destined for a concentration camp. Over forty influential French writers and artists, including Jean Cocteau, convinced of Genet's genius, pleaded his case, lobbied for his liberty. He was released in March 1944 and pardoned. He never returned to prison again. In 1949, he was also pardoned by President Charles de Gaulle for his desertion from the army. In 1983, he was awarded the Grand Prize for Literature by the French Ministry of Culture.

Genet was an isolated boy who left school at twelve and went on to achieve literary greatness. 

The 'Bad Boy of French letters' died in Paris in 1986, an internationally acclaimed poet, playwright, and novelist.  He is buried in Morocco.

I don't necessarily agree with Genet's politics - many of his statements are, in my opinion, misplaced, extreme - nor do I condone the way he glorified violence and called for it as a means to ending human brutality. For example, he set himself against almost everybody in Europe when in the 1970s he wrote in support of the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany. 

In spite of all this, he is a fascinating study of a troubled genius and his writings sometimes shed light on the Arab world during his lifetime even if he was not really interested in a peaceful solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. 

Reading some of his notes in the glass museum cases, hand-written in the tiniest almost illegible scrawl, it seemed to me that he romanticised the fedayeen. His observations of his visits over eleven months to guerrilla bases in Jordan in 1970, romanticised conflict. And in the end, apart from putting the Palestinian problem back in the debating arena in the Western world, principally France, little he said or did made a difference to the conflict, to the resistance.

Much of the above I discovered during my Sunday afternoon at IMA. Impressions, images, food for thought on a conflict, a war, that has endured for far too long.

If you haven’t visited the Arab World Institute, when you are next in Paris, I do recommend a trip. Aside from anything else, it has the best library of Arab-French books in the world. Please bear in mind that it is closed on Mondays. Many museums in France close on Tuesdays but IMA is one of the exceptions.

By the way, if you are living in Paris or staying in the capital for a while, IMA offers Arabic language courses. I am very tempted. I tried once before when I was setting off on my Olive Route travels but I did not get very far. My teacher was a Lebanese cook living in Cannes. One evening when I drove down to his little restaurant for my lesson, the place was locked up. He had gone away without a word. I owed him, still owe him, for six lessons!

The Olive Route films and the two Olive travel books, The Olive Route and The Olive Tree are available to buy through the email address on my website. 

www.CarolDrinkwater.com

PS: I have taken most of the above photos from the internet and acknowledge that the copyright is not mine.

                                        

The Forgotten Summer, by Carol Drinkwater

I am two novels along since I published THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER with Penguin in March 2016. For those who read my post last month you will know that my latest novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, to be published 16th May 2019, is set in Paris during the 1968 student riots, and from there the story unfolds.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305963/the-house-on-the-edge-of-the-cliff/9781405933346.html

Usually, when a book or any work of mine has been completed, I move on. Except for editorial or marketing purposes, I find it very difficult to revisit the material because I worry over how I might have improved it. THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER seems to be an exception. Not because I am pleased with my work but because there is such a richesse of material that I might have used, and might still use one day.
The story is set on a family-owned vineyard in the south of France. Within the family, there are secrets and factions. Jane, the English woman who moves into the family when she marries Luc, the French son of Clarisse, the widowed proprietor of the vineyard, only begins to discover how deep and dark are those secrets when a tragedy occurs. Clarisse, her mother-in-law, is a pied noir, a black foot, a French woman, an ex-colonialist, born and raised in Algeria. Her son Luc was also born there. They fled to France at the end of the Algerian war in the summer of 1962, soon after De Gaulle gave independence to Algeria. Once safely arrived in France, they set up home on the vineyard, which is where the main action of the novel takes place.

I must be honest and say that when I delivered the book to my agent and it went to auction there was a background seam within the story that I had not entirely dared to address. The shadows lurking from the Algerian past of two of the main characters were hinted at, but not followed through. It was only when Maxine Hitchcock, my editor at Michael Joseph, Penguin, acquired the book and sent through her notes to me that I was encouraged to face head on those shadows, the ghosts I was writing about.
Behind the beauty and seductive landscape of the South of France, there lies a a more lurid past, Luc and Clarisse's, set in French-ruled Algeria.

Why am I returning in my thoughts to THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER and that bloody period in French history?  President Emmanuel Macron has recently made a gesture that might go some way to healing this troubled past.

France's relationship to the country that was, for close to one hundred and fifty years, its unwilling colony, remains complex and unresolved. The French colonials who inhabited that large tract of northern Africa lived well at the expense of the Algerians.

In 1954, when the Algerian War of Independence, finally got under way, after many years of conflict, subordination and cruelty, France, not long after relinquishing all its claims to Indo-China, (its colonial territories in Southeast Asia including Vietnam) found itself yet again embroiled in an ugly and very costly war. This time on the southern side of the Mediterranean, the northern part of the continent of Africa.

To this day, the very mention of Algeria causes many French citizens to draw breath. The cruelties that took place before, during the eight-year war of independence and even after Charles de Gaulle had granted the country its independence, conjure up feelings of shame, confusion, even pain and anger for many French. For a mixture of reasons. It remains the past that most prefer not to visit and don't talk about. Algeria, and France's treatment of its Algerian citizens, had been brushed under the carpet for a half a century. As well, there is a large population in France, French citizens, who are descended from Algerians who were obliged to flee the land of their birth at the end of the independence war because they had fought with the French. Once victory had been assured, they were condemned as traitors back at home. The punishments meted out by the new Algerian regime were harsh; in many cases death sentences by lynch mobs. France offered refuge to these ex-soldiers and their families. De Gaulle took them in, promised them equality, pensions, education for their children etc. Much of those promises have never been fully honoured or are only now recognised as debts that are due. It has created appalling conditions and resentments for the fourth and fifth generation French-Algerians living, mostly, in the poorest suburbs in France. They feel disenfranchised, lost, lacking allegiance. It makes them prime candidates for recruitment by the likes of ISIS.
They are perceived as a French "problem". A result of the "troubles".

In 2012 on a state visit to Algeria, fifty years after the end of that war, President François Hollande acknowledged the appalling treatment of the Algerians during the 132-year occupation of their country and during the French-Algerian war. Hollande was the first to take this step, to admit to the brutalities that had taken place during the occupation and during the war. He did not, however, apologise.

François Hollande in Algiers in 2012

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/20/francois-hollande-algerian-suffering-french

Many Algerians and some French were disappointed by the fact that, although this was a very necessary and long overdue first step towards a new era, new relations, between the two nations, no apology was forthcoming. During the time I spent in Algeria when I was working on my non-fiction book, THE OLIVE ROUTE, I began to get a sense of the the damage done to Algerian people during all those years of oppression; it had rooted itself deeply. For example, many spoke to me about the lack of education opportunities for their children and, without schooling, the dearth of possibilities to rise within their own country's system, for them to have a voice.  As in South Africa and my own country of Ireland, when even one generation or two are given no opportunities to learn, to read, to engage, another form of poverty is created, an intellectual poverty, and that takes more than those one or two generations to re-enrich the system, to erase  the hatred and anger and frustration and replace those energies with more positive responses to oppression.

In THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER, Algeria and its occupation under the French, is not the central theme in the book, not by any means. It is more a shadow that hangs over the characters. One of the reasons I was hesitant about including this aspect of the material, of addressing it head-on, was because the French themselves have barely addressed it in their literature and cinema, although that is slowly changing. (Jean-Luc Godard attempted a film in 1960, but it was banned.) Also, because, as I have written above, it is an unresolved period in modern French history.

I have received many letters from readers who tell me they had known little if anything about this period of France's twentieth-century past. France in Vietnam is far more widely written about. Some readers have gone on to dig out material, to acquaint themselves more fully with that period. This pleases me greatly, as it would any writer. And the subject stays with me. Questions nag at me. I feel reasonably confident that, at some point, I will return to this subject, to write another book set in France, in Algeria. I don't know precisely what it will be, but there remains so much there yet to be mined.

It is an evolving story. Layers of history being peeled away to uncover what really lies beneath the surface. Fascinating for any writer.

Maurice Audin, tortured and murdered by the French State at the age of 25.

And so, when I read in the news several weeks ago ago that Emmanuel Macron (who was not even born at the time of the Algerian war) has gone a step further than Hollande, I felt that France might finally be making headway. Macron has offered up evidence to the torture and murder by the French state of one of their own citizens, Maurice Audin.
Audin was French, a journalist. But orders had been given to do whatever it took to crush the fight for Algeria's independence, to punish anyone who showed allegiance to the Algerian cause. Audin was a twenty-five-year-old mathematician, a communist, a reporter, and an ardent supporter of the Algerian Nationalists. Since his disappearance in 1957, more than half a century ago, Audin's family have searched and badgered to find out the truth about what really happened to the young man, who disappeared without trace. His widow, Josette, wrote letters every day, letter after letter, determined to root out the truth. The truth of Audin's ignominious end was buried and has remained out of reach until last month when Macron revealed the truth. He handed to the family an official document confirming that the French state had been directly responsible for the death of Audin.

I thought of this incident again last week after reading of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  The impenetrability of state lies and subterfuge.
The pain and angst for the victim's loved ones. The never knowing.

                Here is Macron in the presence of Michèle Audin, daughter of the late Maurice Audin. When this photograph was taken, they had both just left the home of 87-year-old Josette Audin, Maurice's widow, who has lived for sixty-one years without ever knowing what became of her young husband, the father of her three children. Michèle was three years old when her father went 'missing'.

It was a summer evening, 11th July 1957. French paratroopers burst into the apartment on the third floor of the block where the Audin family lived in Algiers. Maurice was dragged away and never seen or heard of again. Now, it has been admitted by Macron that he was tortured and murdered on instructions from the State. At the time, Josette was told that her husband 'had been shot while trying to escape'.
She never remarried. The fight for justice became her raison d'être. She wrote to every new president after his election begging for the truth.
Until Macron, every French president has preferred to avoid the brutalities of the war, never owning up to France's role in the executions of those who sympathised with the Algerian cause.

Shortly after he was elected, Macron contacted Josette to reassure her that he was willing to address the matter. The official statement from the Elysée Palace is the result. An end to the silence and denial. In this one instance.

But will Macron's gesture make any real difference at this late stage? I hope it will offer Audin's family the possibility of laying the horrors and concealed past to rest. I also believe that it is an important step in the process of healing between the French State, its citizens, Algeria and the Algerians who are residents in France. It will, I think, help move all parties towards a reconciliation with the nation's recent colonial history, its shameful past.

There is dignity is Macron's decision to come clean about this story. One story, I fear, of many.

Maurice Audin was a young Frenchman who spoke out against his own government and openly reproached its inhuman behaviour towards its citizens. His open criticism cost him his life. Macron's admission of the facts of Audin's torture and death and the fact that France used torture as a means to its ends throughout the Algerian war came ahead of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but as the world looks on in horror at the lies, the foul play, the mourning and grief Khashoggi's family is suffering, it makes this almost forgotten French story all the more poignant. Both men died under conditions no wild beast should be obliged to suffer. Audin's death is history to most, except to his family and, perhaps, French political historians.  However, the calculated murder of journalists, the treatment of those who speak out against a regime is, tragically, obviously not history, given the recent events in Istanbul.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, our right to criticise, to call to account those who govern on our behalf: this is what is at stake. Macron's willingness to admit to the state's guilt is, I believe, at this time, so important not only for the history of France but for all of us and the world we are living in.

www.caroldrinkwater.com