A Stroke of Luck – Markus Birdman on laughing in the face of it all

Posted on January 20, 2012 by ew6387

Comedian Markus Birdman brings his show A Stroke of Luck to Southbank Centre as part of Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living.

They say life begins at 40. But then you have a stroke. Oh goodie. Markus talks to us about life, love and death, and laughing in the face of it all….

What effect do you think your stroke had on your life?

Physically the effects have been quite minor. It has only damaged my eyesight. So I’m able to be grateful. It was a warning shot which made me realise I should enjoy life while it lasts and not to take it too seriously. A ‘don’t sweat the little stuff’ lesson.

Why did you feel you could, and wanted to, turn your experience into a comedy show?

Well, firstly I am comedian with quite a dark sense of humour. So I’m playing to my strengths. But it was probably very therapeutic for me. All I seemed to be doing for six months was attend hospital and self obsess, so talk about what you know, right? Plus doing jokes about X Factor seemed trivial under the circumstances.

Do you think comedy is important in dealing with matters of life and death?

Absolutely crucial. Because it’s an environment to be really candid and an opportunity to make taboo subjects palatable. Laughter is the best medicine. Well in my case it’s actually a blood thinner called chlopedodril, but the point stands. However it’s something that too many comedians currently avoid which is a real pity.

One of the installations forming part of Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living is a blackboard on which people can write what they would like to do before they die. What three things do you want to do before you die?

Wow, I’d like to be in a gangster film, with a shooter swearing loudly, whilst Johnny Depp does something louche. I’d like to try and return an Andy Murray serve on centre court. And I’d like to see peace on earth for all the children. Actually never mind the last one.

Markus Birdman – A Stroke of Luck is at Southbank Centre on Sunday 29 January at 6pm.

For more information see the webpage here.

 

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Sue Gill and John Fox recall two inspirational funerals

Posted on January 17, 2012 by ew6387

As part of Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living, Sue Gill and John Fox, authors of The Dead Good Funerals Book, will be hosting a ‘Design Your Own Dead Good Funeral’  workshop on Sunday 29 January.  They will guide you through a process to create a personal ceremony that is truthful and distinctive, yet still legal and dignified.

Here they describe in beautiful detail two funeral services that struck them as particularly unusual and inspirational…

Wilf was a free spirit, a likeable rogue and scrounger – 50+, who died suddenly of a heart condition he had kept quiet about. He always  wore a checked work shirt, winter and summer, although he was pretty work shy,  and went everywhere on his bike. You always knew where Wilf was by seeing his bike leaning against a pub wall. His cardboard coffin was carried into the crem, which was packed to overflowing, all the men wearing checked workshirts, some with the courage to come with paint splodges on them, some with brand new ones at their wives’ insistence. His bike was wheeled in behind the coffin and leant up against it during the service. Everyone filed past the coffin to make their farewells and placed a beer mat on the top where they had written their memories. Mostly “You owe me a pint!”  Back at the pub a special barrel had been brewed for the day in Wilf’s honour.

Val was a newly retired teacher after 30 years service. Incredibly busy and fit – jogging over the Pennine hills, long distance cycle touring, singing in a choir. From diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in January, she had 7 months. Her summer funeral was an extended gathering in their steep garden, which her partner had been terracing and landscaping for a decade.

In the circular lavender garden she lay in her open coffin, wrapped in a felt shroud that had been made over the last couple of weeks by her women friends and daughters – violet, soft greens and apricot pink. Embedded in the felt were tiny mementoes, secret messages and blessings. The coffin was plain pine, painted by a younger artist/ friend, who only recently sat with Val at the kitchen table and discussed the imagery she would like. Alongside the coffin, her beloved touring bike was parked, with flowers in its panniers. Photographs of Val filled the house.

Her choir came and sang, all the cycling club rode up the steep hill and arrived sweaty for afternoon tea and cakes, laid on by neighbours.  Cleaners from the school came to say their goodbye’s.

Small children played hide and seek in the grottoes. It was a perfect mixture of reverence and mirth.

Early evening musicians arrived, lanterns and a sculptural fire was lit. Some people kept her company outside all night before she was carried off in the back of her partner’s pick-up truck first thing to the crematorium. The ashes were delivered that afternoon, when close family held their own service of farewell and the casket was buried in the garden.

 

Design Your Own Dead Good Funeral, with Sue Gill and John Fox   Sunday 29 January, 11.45am – 1.15pm

For more information see the Sunday Festival Day Pass listing here.

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Miranda Hutton on ‘The Rooms Project’ as part of Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living

Posted on January 12, 2012 by ew6387

Miranda Hutton’s ‘The Rooms Project’ is a series of photographs of bedrooms belonging to children who have died. At Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living, Miranda will be speaking about loss and remembering and the relationship between absence and presence in her photography.

Here she recounts how she came to the project and how this intimate and challenging work has affected her and her wider audience.

20 years ago a very dear friend died of cancer; a few years later my Mum died and I started thinking about the physical spaces that have been left ‘empty’ by loved ones who had passed away. I was put in touch with parents who had lost a child and in talking to them I realised that, for many, their child’s bedroom held particular importance; they were special places of remembering. The parents allowed me to photograph their son or daughter’s room and this led to the beginning of ‘The Rooms Project’.

It is a challenging body of work where the content often stops onlookers from thinking about wider issues surrounding death and loss. Parents not only have to suffer loss but they also have to suffer a kind of isolation that comes with people not knowing how to approach them or their grief.

Died 21 months ago (2011)

Died 21 months ago (2011)

Died 4 years ago (2005)

Died 4 years ago (2005)

To see more photos, please visit The Rooms Project at http://www.mirandahutton.co.uk/photography/projects/theroomsproject.html

Miranda will be speaking as part of Death Bites: More About Mortality, Sunday 29 January, 2pm – 3pm

For more information about Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival of the Living please see here http://ticketing.southbankcentre.co.uk/find/festivals-series/death-southbank-centres-festival-for-the-living

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Interview with Sue Gill and John Fox, authors of The Dead Good Funerals Book

Posted on January 10, 2012 by ew6387

Sue Gill and John Fox are conducting a workshop as part of Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living.

Design Your Own Dead Good Funeral’ is a workshop aiming to dispel common myths, demonstrate the nuts and bolts of planning a funeral, inspire you and give you confidence. They talk about what got them thinking about funerals and offer some advice…

Death: Southbank Centre’s Festival for the Living aims to tackle the taboo of death –The Dead Good Funerals Book obviously helps to do this in a very practical way. What made you both feel you needed to write the book?

We’d been to some truly awful funerals.

As you get older your friends start to die. Sometimes the ceremonies were healing, but more often they were formulaic and irrelevant. We felt we must publish a book to offer a no-nonsense yet respectful view of what an inspiring funeral ceremony might be to guide someone faced with arranging a funeral for the first time. So, in The Dead Good Funerals Book, we unpick a traditional funeral and show how it is stuck in the Victorian mode. We spell out how much we can do away with and still be legal and dignified, to leave space to create a funeral that is personal and distinctive.

Obviously you recognise the challenges of organising a funeral – do you both have detailed plans for your own? Has writing the book given you inspiration?

Sue: I don’t feel I am at the prescriptive stage yet, but now we live in the Beach House – a wooden house on stilts directly above the shoreline of Morecambe Bay – I have become increasingly aware of the weather and tides, the extensive horizon, and this has had a major effect on me. I would like my ashes to be dispersed into the vast expanse of this bay, probably using an urn that dissolves in sea water, which could be placed way out on the bed of the sea at low tide.

John: Ditto – after donating my organs.

What five pieces of advice would you give to someone planning a funeral?

  • Bring your own homegrown flowers, or pick some from the hedgerow – they mean so much more. If there are shop bought bouquets remember to take them out of the cellophane.
  • If it is a burial, maybe ask in advance for 3 or 4 shovels so you can backfill the grave yourselves if you wish – a very satisfying completion. Don’t let them put you off with health and safety issues.
  • If it is to be a cremation, and 70% of us opt for this, go and have a look at the crematorium beforehand and talk to them about what you want to achieve.  Ask them to remove anything you’re not happy with  – silk flowers, crucifix …. – bring in your own stuff from home: photographs, candles, lanterns, special cloths. Book a second slot of 20 minutes to give yourselves plenty of time – you may get it free.  Crematorium staff are usually flexible and delighted to help. Once the cortege arrives on the day, it is too late to make changes.
  • You are not obliged to have a minister of religion involved. A secular celebrant or a suitable friend or colleague may lead the service. There are excellent sources of poetry and readings.
  • Live music is powerful – solo cellist, granddaughter on flute, guitar and vocals. Friends and relatives find it a huge privilege to be asked to contribute. Acoustic is best. Complex sound systems take time to set up.

Advice no 6 !!

  • Bring photos and albums of pictures to the gathering afterwards. A great ice-breaker, gets people talking, sharing memories across the generations. Can even heal family rifts.

Design Your Own Dead Good Funeral, with Sue Gill and John Fox   Sunday 29 January, 11.45am – 1.15pm

For more information see the Sunday Festival Day Pass listing here.

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Winter Festivities: Anita Sethi reviews the Economist Books of the Year festival

Posted on December 11, 2011 by Anita Sethi

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By Anita Sethi

www.twitter.com/anitasethi 

The Southbank is strung with beautiful Winter lights outside, and inside is an enlightening experience, too, as this weekend sees the Economist Books of the Year festival, with a veritable feast of a programme.  It got off to a rollicking start with a talk by Edmund de Waal, author of the acclaimed book, The Hare With Amber Eyes, which scooped the Costa Book Award for Biography and the Ondaatje Prize.  Last month I chaired the Southbank Centre Book Club on The Hare With Amber Eyes and the response from participants was phenomenal, with discussion ranging far and wide across the globe, from the extraordinary journey Edmund de Waal undertook tracing the history of the Japanese netsuke he inherited – 264 wood and ivory carvings of plants and people and animals – to what ‘things’ and objects mean in our own lives.  The complexities and fascinations of family history were also unpicked by Simon Sebag Montefiore through his compelling book Jerusalem: the Biography – the author is a descendant of the first European to be allowed by the Ottomans to visit the Temple Mount and uses family diaries and memoirs as a key to unlock the mysteries of yet undiscovered terrains of the past.

Objects are indeed a continuing theme throughout the weekend with a talk by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, about the fascinating History of the World in 100 Objects, which traces a journey through both time and geography discovering how things reveal who we are – from ancient tools such as handaxes to modern contraptions that it seems we could not do without such as the credit card.

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
Today grand themes ranging from war to love to science are on the menu, with the haunting memoir by Janine di Giovanni, Ghosts by Daylight, to Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw who will later this evening do no less than explain the deepest questions of life and the universe through the complexities of quantum physics – a talk I, for one, wouldn’t miss for the world.

Janine di Giovanni

 

Email: anita@anitasethi.co.uk

* An archive of Anita Sethi’s literature blogs, dispatches and interviews can be found by clicking here.

 

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Hayward Gallery Short Stories Competition

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Daniel Webb

Hayward Gallery is inviting you to create 300 word short pieces of fiction, inspired by George Condo’s outlandish  yet heart-rending paintings, and will be judged by George Condo and Hayward Gallery Director, Ralph Rugoff.

The winning entrant will receive limited edition George Condo: Mental States playing cards, a signed catalogue and free tickets to one of Southbank Centre’s creative writing courses in 2012, and all entrants receive a George Condo: Mental States notepad.

The competition is inspired by the fantasy characters of  Condo’s portraits, and in particular his painting ‘The Psychoanalytic Puppeteer Losing His Mind’, which following a meeting with Salman Rushdie in 2001, led to a description of the painted figure to appear in his novel ‘Fury’

Here is an example short story, by Emily Webb, inspired by Skinny Jim.

Croaking Through The Weeds

Black dots on the trousers. She knew something was missing. Now she’d noticed it, she felt irrationally irritated by the clown’s subtly mismatched costume; pantaloons conspicuously void of the black dots scattered between insipid pastel blotches on the oversized top, drawing her eye away from his mediocre magic tricks. Perhaps that was it. Didn’t clowns always try and distract from their slights of hand? Not that distraction was a problem; the kids seemed distinctly unimpressed with this middle-aged pretender, more excited by the mechanical, back-flipping dog he’d just drawn from a top hat (live rabbits being, she assumed, a health and safety hazard these days).

She should obsess less. Too much time to think. But could she cope with her sister’s life, all children’s birthdays and runny noses and ketchup half wiped from the high chair? She battled with an orange, digging her fingers into its waxy resistance and releasing the skin’s musty, tangy smell. Something to do with her hands; she’d kill for a cigarette. Suddenly the squealing and thumping around her was too much. She abandoned the orange, oozing juice onto a cheap paper plate, and escaped into the garden.

Hopeful plants and ubiquitous weeds surrounded the squalid pond, the best assimilation of nature’s beauty this suburban neighbourhood could offer. She watched a lethargic frog lollop from the black tarpaulin into the water.

“Got a lighter?” A gruff voice behind her. The clown had finished his shift.

“Sorry, I’ve given up.”

She had the involuntary urge to grab the offending cigarette packet and chuck it into the pond. He seemed to notice the perfunctory reflex of her hand. They stood for a moment, held by the slight social oddity of the movement. The frog croaked, back up for air, echoing the clown’s guttural throat-clearing as he turned and left her to her cravings.

Here is the information on how to enter the competition:

  • Short story submissions should be emailed to competitions@southbankcentre.co.uk with ‘George Condo Short Story Competition’ in the subject line.
  • All stories must be original fiction and no more than 300 words long.
  • The deadline for the competition is 6pm on 18 December 2011.
  • The authors of those stories shortlisted for the overall prize will be alerted by email. Due to the volume of submissions, the Hayward Gallery may not be able to reply to all entries.
  • The winning short stories will be posted here, on the Hayward Gallery blog: http://thehayward.southbankcentre.co.uk/
  • ALL ENTRANTS WILL RECEIVE A LIMITED EDITION GEORGE CONDO: MENTAL STATES NOTEPAD

George Condo, Skinny Jim, 2009, Private Collection. Image courtesy Luhring Augustine © the artist

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‘In everything there is a story’. By Anita Sethi

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Anita Sethi


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By Anita Sethi

www.twitter.com/anitasethi 

“All the stories that human beings tell are stories of alliance and betrayal”, says Greg Mosse, who runs the Southbank Centre Creative Writing School which will be back in January 2012.  I caught up for a chat with Mosse far from the shores of the River Thames, and instead beside the Khaled Lagoon in the emirate of Sharjah where the Sharjah International Book Fair this year celebrates its 30th anniversary and where Mosse gave creative writing classes. The appetite for learning how to write is clearly immense here: “There was a huge waiting list for the class”, explained Mosse.   It was fascinating to see how the process of storytelling differs throughout the world and the ways in which it is the same as well as the obstacles facing all writers regardless of geographical location. “Everybody knows what a good story is; too often, instead of writing the story they start writing about the story”, explains Mosse. Events like these help since the chance to meet with other writers and readers offers a wonderful window for the “exchange of ideas”.

“You can’t teach imagination but you can teach skills of structure and development”, explained Kate Mosse, founder of the Orange Prize and award-winning novelist, also speaking at the Fair.  Greg Mosse continues, “you can unblock people from the way they might be programmed.  A novel moves really slowly – mastering a form that inches forward is really special and and not like learning to write a pop-song”. This month is National Novel Writing Month but Mosse says, “If it was National Plan a Novel Month that would be much better; if you came out with a plot and the first 5000 words. The novel is a slow moving form that requires lots of stamina”.

He describes his experience of teaching all around the world and helping people to take their experience and inspirations and transcribe it into novel form, describing strategies that are useful for all writers, regardless of their different cultural traditions.   He also discusses some of the international writers he admires which offer an opening into another world including the Saudi Arabian novel The Consequences of Love.  The Mosses have also demonstrated the immense power of the internet to reach a wider international audience with their various hugely successful web projects.

Returning to that tricky art of constructing a novel, Mosse says: “I ask students to understand that there is a possible next thing in everything you say – all the time, in everything, there is a story”.  Without a story, “there is just now, there is no sense of something else about to occur whereas a novel maintains a sense that something else is about to occur”.  

I stroll by the beautiful corniche contemplating the things that are about to occur including delving into more literatures and landscapes from around the world.   As for the things that shall be occurring closer to home by the River Thames, I’m looking forward to chairing Book Club on “The Hare With Amber Eyes” on 23rd November and the event “Dark and Deep” on 25th November, with Louise Doughty and Vayu Naidu – hope to see some of you there. In the meantime, happy reading and writing!

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in praise of poetry, by Anita Sethi

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Anita Sethi

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 By Anita Sethi

www.twitter.com/anitasethi

Bees weave throughout the Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy’s beautifully bitterweet new collection of poetry, which she shall be reading from this month (7th November 2011, 7:30pm, Queen Elizabeth Hall).  Displaying an astonishing thematic and technical range, “The Bees” (Picador, £14.99) is filled with elegies, eulogies, and is in  the words of Don Paterson, “a beautiful honeycomb of a book”. 

This quietly exhilarating collection opens with the idea that “honey is art”, and indeed after reading these powerful poems, one feels that the creation of language and poetry is as primal and essential as that other life-giving nectar, and how a poem might, in the words of the Poet Laureate herself, display both the passion and compassion that sweeten our lives.

Carol Ann Duffy has long charmed with her beguiling rhymes, the ability to connect through sound seemingly disparate things, and in doing so elucidate a deeper meaning.  A particular favourite poem of mine is the “Hive”, which ends with the simple yet effective line:

“the hive, alive, us – how we behave”

The word “hive” reaches towards its sister-in-sound “alive”, turning into “behave” until the collection becomes a metaphor of how best we ought to live – both alone as a solitary bee bumbling about in the air and together in homes and communities.

The collection is filled with rhymes that catch you by surprise, sometimes stinging, and sometimes soothing.  In the  poem “Water”, the pain and poignancy of losing a mother is distilled throughout until the poem ends with the word “daughter”: “What a mother brings / through darkness still / to her parched daughter” – the poem both remembers the way its author has been nourished and nurtured by her mother whilst looking forward to the next generation and echoing how she now does the same for her own daughter.

Echoes are indeed at the heart of this marvellously nuanced collection, with a poem of this name which hauntingly describes how loved ones linger on in the  memory even when they have left us in life; how intimations of them will catch us suddenly unawares in the midst of our hectic present-day lives. Indeed, reading the collection on the tube home caused quite a literal shiver down the spine as I sensed all around those echoes, hidden from the surface but, when we stop and pause to remember, poignantly palpable.

With an awareness of death at its core, these often startling poems offer an intense, urgent message to seize what is best in our brief lives while we can, to savour life’s many sweetnesses.  This collection raises questions that cut to the very quick of existence and linger in the mind as the taste of honey does on the tongue, leaving the reader with that peculiar feeling that truly good poems incite – at once filled, yet hungry for more:

“What will you do now with the  / gift of your left life?”

Carol Ann Duffy

* Carol Ann Duffy will be reading from The Bees at The Queen Elizabeth Hall on 7th November, 2011, 7:30pm

Email: anita@anitasethi.co.uk

* An archive of Anita Sethi’s literature blogs, dispatches and interviews can be found by clicking here.

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in praise of Charles Dickens

Posted on November 3, 2011 by Anita Sethi

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By Anita Sethi

www.twitter.com/anitasethi

It was the best of times, it was the best of times for stimulating literature discussions in the past few weeks at the Southbank, to rewrite that infamous opening line of A Tale of Two Cities.   The spirit of the ubiquitous Charles Dickens has weaved in and out of literature talks, from Claire Tomalin discussing her excellent new Dickens biography, Dickens: A Life (published by Viking) to Greg Mosse invoking him syntactically in a recent thought-provoking Southbank Creative Writing class about writing from an assured third-person viewpoint: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” in a single line captures the exhilaration of the birth of two republics, yet the horror that they were born in so much bloodshed.  A Tale of Two Cities has also made it on to the wonderful World Book Night list for 2012 released recently and featuring a treasure trove of titles past and present; it will be interesting to see whereabouts in cities around the country copies of the book are left next year (World Book Night, incidentally, is held on Shakespeare’s birthday).

The Booker Prize also raised the debate about ‘high’ versus ‘low’ in literature and the issue of ‘readability’, discussed by Chair of Judges Stella Rimington.  The ghost of Dickens reminds us that it is indeed a false division since whilst being a heavyweight literary figure he is also hugely popular and was so in his time – showing how good writing can straddle divisions to reach a universality.

I recall Charles Dickens every time I return to my hometown of Manchester, since it was there that Dickens himself opened the country’s first free public lending library in 1852, built upon the philosophy and principle to “provide wisdom for all, regardless of background”. It was here that I would enjoy the benefits of such a library and find a quiet sanctuary in the midst of the chaos – but will future generations be able to say the same? Dickens believed that libraries should be available to all, “knowing no sect, no party, no distinction; nothing but the public want and the general good” – showing their fundamentally democratic nature.

The fantastic Dickens 2012 campaign run by the British Council further elucidates the author’s contemporary relevance, and the British Council Literature Director Susanna Nicklin points out that issues tackled by Dickens such as social inequality are still so resonant today, and not only to people in the UK but all around the world.

Dickens offers words of wisdom relevant to life as well as literature, showing how good books can provide us with a moral compass; a favourite quote from the writer himself:  ”Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts”.

 

Learn-English-Dickens.jpg

 

Email: anita@anitasethi.co.uk

* An archive of Anita Sethi’s literature blogs, dispatches and interviews can be found by clicking here.

jacket image for Charles Dickens by Claire Tomalin

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ON EGYPT: An interview with Sahar El Mougy

Posted on October 20, 2011 by Anita Sethi

By Anita Sethi

www.twitter.com/anitasethi

Issues at the heart of life and literature during The Arab Spring were debated earlier this month at the Southbank Centre when we were treated to a stimulating discussion from Johnny West and Sahar El Mougy; if you missed the event, fear not, as below is an exclusive interview with Sahar El Mougy.  Discussions about the intersection between culture and politics continue on 20th October, 7.45pm when three leading authors from Egypt, Khaled Al Khamissi, Ahmed Mourad, and Ahmed Khaled Towfik, published by Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, shall be appearing at the Southbank, shedding insights into a country which has been at the heart of geopolitical events in 2011.

AN INTERVIEW WITH SAHAR EL MOUGY

* Could you describe your experiences in Tahir Square during the Arab Spring? 

Tahrir Square was and still is a life transforming experience. When I saw the demonstrations on TV 25th January, I knew I will be going down with my children on Friday of Rage (28th January). We knew it would not be an easy ride. We had our vinegar bottles and Pepsi (as anti tear gas remedies) and met with friends and went. It was supposed to start after the Friday prayers, i.e. around 1.00 p.m. The first crowd of people we saw was huge. I shivered. Walking in the crowd, chanting “the people want to oust the regime”, then seeing some young men climb the picture of the tyrant and tear it, I felt I was watching a rewind of the Saddan Hussein fall. But this time it was no rewind. It was live. The security forces started the brutal acts early, maybe just an hour after we started. Tear gas bombs. Rubber bullets. We started running away from the gas. But I heard some men shouting “Don’t run. Come back”. I knew we wouldn’t quit. The rest of the day was tough. Smelling tear gas for a whole day is sickening. Yet, I knew all along this was a rebirth. By 7 p.m. we managed to go into Tahrir. The scene was indescribable. People flooded into the place, injured, bruised, in tears, yet there was this woman who stood in the middle of the street and she started ululating. She was giving voice to the joy we all felt. People you didn’t know would offer you vinegar and onions and cigarettes. We would look at each other in amazement. We were seeing our beauty and strength in each other for the first time. No matter how exhausted we were, we all smiled.

Sahar El Mougy in Egypt

* You described that “it was was a revolution that was to a great extent feminine”: could you describe more about this?   

The first four days of the revolution, before the security suddenly vanished from most corners of Egypt, the male/ patriarchal/ tyrannical attitude dominated not just in the brutality of the security attacking peaceful demonstrators who only carried slogans and flags, but also in the discourse of the tyrant and his men. They were late in showing up. They claimed they knew what is good for us. They didn’t mind killing more than a thousand people and blowing the eyes of another thousand. They were killers. It was all about the “force”. Later, the feminine dominated. You could see that in the music and songs in Tahrir, in the wit and humour, in all the palms of strangers offering you water and dried dates. There was this tenderness among people that you could not but see as the anima of the Egyptians coming to the fore after years of oppression. Love flooded the angry crowds. We were angry against Mubarak who has always humiliated and lied to us. And we were discovering this surging love for each other. The simple and not so well off people would ask the well to do “why are you here?”. And the well to do looked at them in admiration, explained this anger has nothing to do with how much you earned, which schools you took your children too. It was about “karama” (dignity), a concept so well put by Johnny West in his book Karama: Journeys in the Arab Spring.

* What is the impact of the revolution on women? What effects do you think it will have for the future? 

It will certainly have a tremendous effect on society in general, women being part of it. When you have social justice, the male oppressors would realize they have no need to vent out their anger against women. Women, on the other hand, have been empowered by the revolution, their newly discovered inner power would change a lot. However, I have to say here that when it comes to women, we need cultural change, a social revolution, which will take longer than ousting a tyrant.

* What are the main challenges facing a female writer in Egypt? Did you have to struggle for the “right to write” (you have previously described the experience of getting divorced as a step towards self-realization)?

When I was arguing with my ex husband, who felt threatened and insecure by me starting a writing career, I knew I was not arguing with a person only, I was in conflict with a patriarchal mode of thinking. I was one woman (a Nora’s Ibsen), and he was a whole society that told women “nothing is more important than your family”. When you tried to explain there is no competition, things could coexist, it fell on deaf ears. In that sense, I was facing a challenge. But it was not a challenge “to write”. It was rather a challenge to be the human being I was growing to be. But then when I stepped into the world of writing, I have to say I was warmly received by critics and readers. It seems I was giving voice to the experience of many Egyptian women.

* Could you describe your journey to becoming a writer? You’ve described before a turning point when you were 30 and depressed, and turned to writing. It would be interesting to hear more about this. 

It was on the night of my 30th Birthday that I felt I wanted to write to know how I feel about the day. I just couldn’t figure out how I felt. Was I unhappy about stepping unto the second half of my life? On the blank page, I found myself faced with the depression I suffered during my 20s. I found out I was depressed because I have tried so hard to please the people around me, to be the good girl everyone was expecting. I realized how I buried the child within under a heap of social expectations. “Oh my God, I don’t know who I am!”, the bitter but illuminating realization dawned upon me. Hence was the beginning of a quest for the true me, hidden deep within. During this process, pain and eventual loss were companions. Yet the journey was definitely worthwhile. I came across pleasant surprises, new things to know about myself and the world. My basic tool in the inner journey was writing. This is why my first collection of short stories The Lady of the Dream (1998) is a jigsaw of a feminine self re- identifying the alphabet of the “self”: the places that mattered, the unhealthy relationships… etc. In retrospect, I was writing the person I am as well as foreseeing the metamorphosis. Dreams, memories, histories were a great help along the way.

* What are the main challenges and obstacles now facing women and the taboos that need breaking?

A lot has to be done to rebuild a free and humane society respectful of all its people. In this process, women need to free their minds from the patriarchal mindset which has brainwashed them into seeing themselves as inferior. Liberal values need to be endorsed. Religious preachers need to be de- iconized (if I can say so) so that no authority is higher than the individual human mind.


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