News
Colombian painter Botero will soon be showing a series of paintings inspired by the treatment of Iraqi detainees by U.S. troops in the Abu-Ghraib prison in Iraq. (Caution: Graphic material.) You can view a selection here, where you can also read an interview with the artist. And here’s an interesting snippet, where Botero discusses what Abu-Ghraib meant to him and whether politically-inspired art is valid.
“En el momento de la gestacion o creacion de estas nuevas obras sintie que existia alguna similitud entre estos dos hechos de horror?
-No. La situacion es distinta. La violencia en Colombia casi siempre es producto de la ignorancia, la falta de educacion y la injusticia social. Lo de Abu Ghraib es un crimen cometido por la mas grande Armada del mundo olvidando la Convencion de Ginebra sobre el trato a los prisioneros.
“Espera que esta serie, que seguramente sera polemica, tenga efecto politico en el mundo?
-No. El arte nunca tuvo ese poder. El artista deja un testimonio que adquiere importancia a lo largo del tiempo si la obra es artisticamente valida.
The paintings are not for sale, and will remain part of Botero’s private collection.
Link via Daily Kos, via Maud Newton.
Am I an eternal optimist or does it seem as though stories like this one, of artistic cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, Jews and Arabs, are becoming more common these days? A welcome trend, for sure:
The Palestinians and the Israelis get about equal stage time in Ms. Muskal’s version of “The Yellow Wind.” The piece features the vocalists Keren Hadar and Mira Awad singing in Hebrew and Arabic, and work by the Israeli poets Shaul Tchernichovsky, Natan Alterman and Natan Yonatan. The Arab poet Mahmoud Darwish’s “I Am From There,” featured in the composition, says: “I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a single word: home.”
Brian Lehrer, the WNYC radio moderator and talk show host, will be the narrator.
Ms. Muskal took lessons in Arabic music and learned enough Arabic to set the words to music fluently.
Bassam Saba, a Long Island-based musician who plays the nay, an Arab flute, is onstage the whole time. He helped familiarize Ms. Muskal with Arabic music. “I saw how she thinks to force these two cultures together, composition-wise,” he said.
“It follows all the discovery and connections between people on earth now,” Mr. Saba continued. “People are looking for each other more. It represents this kind of cultural communication. For me, it was important to look for this marriage, coming from the Middle East.”
On a related note, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which emerged out of a cooperation between Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim, is still active and will tour again this summer.
The Washington Post‘s Marcia Davis catches up with Ha Jin, who recently won the PEN/Faulkner award for his novel War Trash.
He has come to accept the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for his work “War Trash,” a novel about a Chinese Army veteran of the Korean War who ends up in a U.S. prisoner-of-war camp.
Jin is honored, of course, pleased that others find his work deserving. But he is not fooled either, not caught up in the flash and glitter of the literati life or any idea that winning awards — and he’s captured quite a few in the relatively short time he’s been in the United States — means more than a moment of recognition. That is not his style.
“To become a winner is by luck,” he says in his soft-spoken and heavily accented English. “Among the finalists, many of them are winners of other awards. That shows [winning] depends on so many things, including the judges’ tastes. But a book has to be good to become a finalist.”
It’s simultaneously refreshing and sobering to hear Ha Jin say that he’s “still struggling” and that he “could fail at any moment.” Read on.
Link via Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.
The Casablanca bombings, which took the lives of 45 people, most of them Moroccans, happened two years ago today. There’s some coverage in the press, most of it filed from Sidi Moumen, the slum a few miles north of the city, where the suicide bombers lived prior to the attacks. In the L.A. Times Scheherazade Faramarzi speaks to the families of the two bombers who fled the scene without detonating their bombs, and who are now on death row. In the Boston Globe Charles Radin talks to the victims’ families and to organizers of several gatherings in commemoration of the events. In US News and World Report Thomas Omestad offers a more comprehensive view of how the country has changed since May 16, 2003, including the tensions between reformers and islamists, legal advances and setbacks, and what it means for the future. And in the Morocco Times, Karima Rhanem talks about the commemorative events planned this year in Casablanca. For those who can read French, I highly recommend the Moroccan weekly magazine Tel Quel, which has excellent investigative pieces and penetrating commentary by Moroccans about Morocco.
According to Publisher’s Marketplace, paperback rights to Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (a huge bestseller in the Arab world, and currently being made into the biggest budget Arabic-language feature film) have gone to Courtney Hodell at Harper. I received the hardback edition in the mail just yesterday (thanks to the American University in Cairo Press) and will report back once I get to it, hopefully in a week or so.