Live Performance of Schubert's "Ave Maria" (Version2). Sung by Dorothea Fayne (Mezzo-Soprano) in the Vernissage of Nina Knezevic at the Zero Gallery-Berlin in February 2007. Accompaniment by Ania Tukh (violin) and Carlos Hilsdorf (classical guitar). Dedicated to Mai Ghoussoub
Monday, March 05, 2007
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Abdo Wazen
مي غصوب .. المبدعة المتعددة |  | |||
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| كان الكتاب في مقدم همومها الثقافية المتعددة، الكتاب تأليفاً وصناعة ونشراً. ومسرحيتها الأخيرة التي قدمتها في بيروت العام غابت مي غصوب في أوج عطائها. هذه المرأة المتعددة المواهب والشواغل والهموم التي لم تكمل الخامسة والخمسين بدت كأنها تحدس بموتها طوال حياتها التي لم تطل، فراحت تعمل وتبدع وتنتج بغزارة، متنقّلة بين باريس ولندن وبيروت عاصمتها التي ظلَّت مشدودة اليها، ومنتقلة من الكتابة الإبداعية والبحثية الى النحت الذي تخصصت فيه أكاديمياً ثم الى المسرح وفن التجهيز، علاوة على عملها الدائم في عالم النشر، وقد أبدعت فيه محْدِثة ثورة لم تعرفها دور النشر العربية. ولعل «دار الساقي» لم تكن في عهدة مي، لم تكن داراً عادية، بل كانت أقرب الى المركز الثقافي الذي يدرك ما ينشر ويعرف كيف يروّج كتبه وكتّابه، غير آبه للرقابات ولا للممنوعات المفروضة مسبقاً على الكتابة والكتاب. هذه المرأة التي خاضت تلك المجالات بجرأة وصلابة ومعرفة، كانت كاتبة من الطراز الرفيع، تكتب بالإنكليزية والفرنسية والعربية بلا هوادة. والميادين التي انصرفت اليها كانت متعددة ايضاً: قضايا المرأة وتحررها، الذكورة وثقافتها، الحداثة وما بعدها، الفن، الأدب، علم الاجتماع والفكر... وكتبها التي صدرت بالعربية والإنكليزية خير دليل على فرادة منهجها المفتوح على أكثر من منهج، وقد قاربت عبره تلك القضايا، بروح عصرية ونظرة نافذة وحدس ثاقب. فهي كانت في كتب مثل «المرأة العربية وذكورية الأصالة» و «ما بعد الحداثة: العرب في لقطة فيديو» وسواهما، تصر على الجمع بين البحث الأكاديمي والمقاربة الذاتية المتحمّسة والشغوفة بما تعالج. اما مقالاتها التي دأبت على نشرها في أكثر من صحيفة (ومنها «الحياة») فكانت تتميز بنفَسها المختلف، الحديث والعصري، عطفاً على أسلوبها المختصر الذي يومض ويُلمح. وضعت مي كتباً عدة وأشرفت على كتب جماعية، وآخر هذه الكتب كتاب «لبنان لبنان» الذي صدر عن دار الساقي بالإنكليزية وشاءت ان يعود ريعه الى ضحايا الحرب التي شنَّتها إسرائيل على لبنان صيف العام الفائت. واستطاعت بُعيد حرب تموز ان تجمع في هذا الكتاب شهادات ونصوصاً لأدباء عالميين وعرب ولبنانيين. وفوجئ القراء عندما واجهتهم في الكتاب نصوص لأسماء كبيرة مثل: هارولد بنتر، جون لوكاريه، بول أوستر، نايبول، دوريس ليسنغ، أورهان باموك، حنيف قريشي، البرتو مانغويل وسواهم. فرحت مي كل الفرح بهذا الكتاب وعدّته أجمل تحية أمكنها ان تقوم بها من أجل لبنان، الوطن الذي غادرته بالجسد وليس بالروح. وقد تكون حكايتها مع وطنها حكاية خاصة جداً. غادرت مي لبنان في السابعة والعشرين من عمرها، عام 1979 بعدما عاشت حرب السنتين، كشابة يسارية مناضلة. ولم توضح يوماً ان كانت غادرت وطنها يأساً من الحرب التي اكتشفت عبثيتها باكراً أم لتواصل «معاركها» الثقافية الخاصة بعدما فقدت عينها في حادث خلال الحرب. هاجرت أولاً الى باريس هي التي درست الأدب الفرنسي في الجامعة اللبنانية، ثم الى لندن هي التي درست أيضاً الرياضيات في الجامعة الاميركية في بيروت. في العاصمة البريطانية انطلقت في أعمالها المختلفة، صحافية وكاتبة وناشرة وفنانة... وكانت درست في لندن فن النحت في «معهد مورلي». كانت مي مبصرة ورائية، تعرف ماذا تريد على رغم شواغلها الكثيرة، وكانت تبدو دوماً قادرة كل القدرة على التوفيق بين هذه الشواغل. وإنها بحق نموذج صارخ للمرأة المثقفة التي تجمع بين الهاجس الثقافي والفكري والالتزام «السياسي» والاجتماعي. كانت الكاتبة المناضلة، التي لا يضيرها أن تنزل الى الشارع او ان تجلس الى الطاولة تقرأ بنهم وتكتب بنهم. لم تُشفَ مي غصوب من جرح لبنان الذي اندلع في الجسد والروح. قبل فترة قصيرة زارت لبنان لترى عن قرب «مشهد» الاعتصام في وسط بيروت، وتكون على بيّنة مما يحصل في بلدها. تلك كانت زيارتها الأخيرة، زيارة السيدة المملوءة حياة وحيوية، والحالمة بالأعمال والمشاريع... وهي كانت تصر على تقديم عروضها المسرحية ومعارضها النحتية والتجهيزية في بيروت، بعد تقديمها في لندن وسواها. والجمهور البيروتي «النخبوي» يذكر عرض «ديفا» الذي كتبته وقدمته بالعربية والإنكليزية والفرنسية وجمعت فيه أمّ كلثوم وإديث بياف وجوزفين بيكر وجانيس هوبلن... واختارت ان تقدمه في مؤسسة صغيرة وهامشية هي «زيكو هاوس» عام 2001. ومثله قدمت عرضها المسرحي «قتلة الكتاب» الذي يدور في جو الحرب اللبنانية داخل منزل مهجور يحرق فيه القتلة الكتب... ما أصعب أن نصدق غياب امرأة مثل مي غصوب، غياب كاتبة مثلها وناشرة وفنانة ومثقفة ومناضلة... هذا الغياب المأسوي السريع الذي لم تستأذن به أصدقاءها وقراءها ومتابعيها. غابت بسرعة مثلما كانت تعيش غير منتبهة الى الوقت الذي كانت تسبقه دوماً. ما أصعب ان نصدق غياب مي غصوب التي كانت صاخبة بالحياة والحيوية، وبالأحلام التي يصعب ان يحققها أحد سواها.
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الفائت وعنوانها «قتلة الكتاب» تشهد على شغفها العميق بالكتب وعالمها بل وحياتها أيضاً. وعندما قدمت تلك المسرحية التي كتبتها بالانكليزية أبت إلا أن تترجمها الى العربية وتصدرها في كتيب وزع على المشاهدين. وكان ذاك النص أشبه بالمونولوغ الجميل الذي يحمل في طياته الخوف على الكتاب من قتلته الجدد.الانسان بلا خيال مشروع ديكتاتور
لهذا الحوار قصة تستحق أن تروى، فهو ابن مصادفة حققت اللقاء الوحيد الذي جرى بيني وبين مي غصوب، ليلة الخامس من تشرين الأول (أكتوبر) العام 2004 وانتهى في حال من المودة والاحترام، امتدت وتجددت عبر رسائل قليلة كنا نتبادلها في البريد الإلكتروني. وقد وجدت فيه رسالة منها مؤرخة بـ 12 شباط (فبراير) 2005 تشكرني فيها على «أسطوانة ليرز» أرسلتها إليها تتضمن عشرات من ملصقات السينما المصرية التي حدثتني عن شغفها بها عندما تعرفت إليها في طريقة أقرب الى المصادفة الدرامية. ليلتها كنت وصلت الى مدينة قرطبة الأسبانية للمشاركة في ندوة كانت تقيمها مؤسسة البابطين للإبداع الشعري هناك، وبعد سير طويل في شوارع المدينة جلست على مقعد في مطعم من تلك المطاعم التي تمد موائدها في الشارع، وظهرت حيرتي الحقيقية وأنا أطلب من النادل بعض الطعام وبلغة ركيكة لم يتمكن من فهمها، لولا تدخل «مي» التي عرضت المساعدة وهي على مقعدها الى الطاولة المجاورة. ولما وجدتني أمسك بين يدي صحيفة عربية سألتني على الفور: «هل أنت مصري؟» أجبتها: «نعم» ثم قدمت لها نفسي وتحدثت معها عن سبب وجودي في قرطبة فقالت لي أنها جاءت في المناسبة نفسها بغية الاتفاق على مشروع للترجمة كان يتم الإعداد له بين «دار الساقي» و«البابطين». عرفت على الفور أنها مي غصوب التي قرأت كتابها «العرب في لقطة فيديو» وفتح لي آنذاك آفاقاً مهمة للتعاطي النقدي مع بعض الظواهر التي التقطها، ودفعني للاهتمام بأي كتاب يحمل توقيعها.Mai did not leave Lebanon
كتاب أشبه بالسيرة الذاتية والثقافية ... مي غصوب لم تغادر بيروت
نازك سابا يارد الحياة - 25/02/07//
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فصول الكتاب الخمسة عشر بمثابة سلسلة من الرسائل تخاطب فيها السيدة نومي، معلمتها حين كانت في الثانية عشرة، وهي تركت فيها أثراً لم يمحُه الزمن حين نبهتها إلى سبل العفو والمسامحة وبشاعة الانتقام والثأر. لم ترسل الرسائل إلى السيدة نومي، لكنها ضمنتها كل ما خبرت وشاهدت وشعرت به وفكرت فيه، تقيّمها على ضوء دروس معلمتها الحبيبة بعد أن فارقتها. وتحولت الرسائل إلى هذا الكتاب.
تتذكر مي كلام السيدة نومي عن العفو والمسامحة حين تعرفت إلى «جدة ليلى» التي قضت حياتها غاضبة، ناقمة على زوجها الذي كان يخونها سراً، عاجزة عن الثأر منه، فكان عجزها عن العفو سبب عذابها حتى آخر حياتها. على نقيض «أم علي» التي استُغلت وظُلمت كخادمة، ولكن حين أتاحت لها الحرب أن تنضم إلى المقاتلين، أن تصبح «البطلة أم علي»، لم تفكر على الإطلاق في الانتقام ممن أهانها واستغلها وظلمها. «لم ترغب في الثأر. تطلعت إلى ما بعد الحياة بدلاً من التطلع خلفها، إلى ما تضمنت الحياة.» (ص74) ولكن مي غصوب تعلق على قيمة كل من العفو والثأر. ففي «الحكم على المرء» تؤكد ضرورة ربط الأعمال بما يترتب عليها من نتائج، فلا ينبغي ترك قضايا المسامحة أو اللوم والعقاب لمن يخلط بينها وبين الانتقام. فاللوم والعقاب شيء، والانتقام شيء آخر.
إلا أن الموضوعين الأساسيين اللذين يشغلان مي هما: مشكلة المرأة التي كانت محور اهتماماتها في جميع كتاباتها، ولا سيما مشكلة الحرب والعنف وكل ما يرتبط بهما من قيم ومفاهيم ومواقف.
ففي «بطولة أم علي» تصور مأساة الفتيات الصغيرات اللواتي يشتغلن خادمات في أسر لا تعرف الرحمة ولا الرأفة ليقبض الأب أجر أتعابهن. و»ثأر جدة ليلى» تقدم مأساة الصبية التي تزوّج من رجل لم تره في حياتها، تعيش معه في الغربة، وحيدة، فيما ينصرف عنها إلى عشيقة سرية. وتنتقد في «شرف وعار» تحرش الرجل بامرأة تكون محشورة قربه في سيارة «سرفيس» ولكنه يقتل ابنته أو أخته غسلاً لعار يعتبر أنها سببته لقبيلته. كما تنتقد وحشية ختان البنات. فالمرأة في مجتمعنا دائماً تحت المجهر: تراقب أفعالها، أقوالها وتحركاتها، وتدفع الثمن. وليست المرأة العربية وحدها ضحية المجتمع الذكوري. ففي «رموز ذات رؤوس حليقة» تتفحص الأديبة صورة امرأة فرنسية اتهمت بالتعامل مع المحتل الألماني، فحُلق شعرها، رسم أنوثتها، وسارت بين جموع أحاطت بها ساخرة ضاحكة. فالمرأة هي أبداً ودائماً الضحية.
ولكن ما يطغى على معظم الفصول هي الحرب التي تلاحق مي حتى في غربتها، وما يرافق هذه الحرب من عنف ودموية ووحشية وظلم. في «نوع من الجنون» تصف مساعدتها اللاجئين الفلسطينيين في مخيم صبرا وشاتيلا وقصة حبها الجارف للمناضل الفلسطيني أبي فراس. ولكن بعد أن جرح أخوها في الحرب هربت من بيروت، وأدركت أن حبها هذا لم يكن سوى محاولة للتغلب على خوفها من الموت المنتشر حولها. تقول ذلك بصراحة وصدق، وبالصدق نفسه تفضح تعامل مقاومين فلسطينيين مع مهربين عالميين مدّعين «أن الطريق إلى التحرر لا يمكن أن تكون طاهرة ونظيفة،» وتثور على الجرائم التي اقترفها من سموا «شهداء». فأخذت تكره الحرب وكل من حمل سلاحاً في سبيل قضية، لتبيّن أن الحروب تحوّل الأفراد إلى أعضاء في مجموعات أو ميليشيات أو عصابات حيث يعاقب الفرد فقط لأنه ينتمي إلى هذه المجموعة أو تلك، ولو كان ضدها، فالإنسان لا يستطيع الإفلات من مـتطـــلــبات مجتمعه وتقاليده. وهنا تتساءل عن موقف الناس من الوشاية، وهل هي دائماً مستنكرة؟ وعن الغموض الذي يرافق معنى الكرامة والعدالة في المجتمع اللبناني؟ لتؤكد أن معايير الشرف لا يمكن أن تتحقق من غير أن ترافقها الخيانات. في مثل هذه التأملات نرى أن مي غصوب لا تكتفي بنقل ما تشاهد وتختبر، وإنما تسبر الأغوار طمعاً بالتوصل إلى حقيقة ما.
وفي كرهها للحرب وغضبها على العنف ترينا في «تحوّل سعيد»، مثلاً، كيف حولت الحرب سعيد من مراهق لطيف، خدوم، بشوش، إلى مقاتل ينعشه خوف الناس حين ينظرون إلى بندقيته، يعتزّ بعدم اضطراره إلى الوقوف في الصف، يدغدغ كبرياءه أن يحترمه من كان يحتقره سابقاً، ويشفيه أن يذلّ الآخرين ويراقب خوفهم منه، وكأن هذه المشاعر كلها جاءت ردة فعل لغضبه على والده الذي كان دائم التذلل للآخرين. بل تحوّل سعيد إلى مقاتل عنيف، مجرم، وقنّاص لا يعرف الرحمة، لا يفكر في غير الانتقام من الذين كانوا سبب إذلال والده والقضاء على مورد رزقه، وانهيار أعصاب أمه وإصابتها بالهستيريا. وإذ تتذكر مي غصوب درس معلمتها تتساءل: هل يمكن نسيان مثل هذه الفظائع ومسامحتها؟! وفي نقمتها على العنف والقتل تبكي صديقها الدائم الابتسامة والفضول الذي اغتاله المجرمون «غير مبالين بابتسامته الدائمة» لأنه تجرأ على انتقاد ظلم الديكتاتورية في وطنه. كذلك تثور على اغتصاب البوسنيات، وعنصرية اللندنيين الذين أحرقوا منزل أسرة آسيوية بمن فيه، فكان أكثر ما يؤلمها هو انتشار العنف في مختلف أنحاء العالم. حتى الانتحاريون الذين يمجد المجتمع تضحيتهم بحياتهم في سبيل قضية ما، تنتقدهم مي في «مسعى نهى وشغف فلورا» لأنهم في شغفهم بالخلود والدم يخلطون بين سعيهم الى العدالة وإكسير الخطر. فإنسانية الأديبة ترفض العنف والقتل أياً كانت مظاهره ودوافعه.
ومن هنا تبدي إعجابها الشديد بنيلسون منديلا في»المسؤولية، الحقيقة والعقاب» إذ قرّر أن يسامح وينسى وأن يحوّل الماضي البشع إلى مستقبل مشرق جديد (ص155)، على نقيض جدة ليلى التي عجزت عن التخلص من ماضيها. فضحايا العنصرية في جنوب أفريقيا لم يتصرفوا، بإيعاز من منديلا، كضحايا، وإنما كأفضل ما يكون عليه الإنسان. وتربط هذه القضية بمشكلة معقدة، مشكلة الحقيقة: فهل من العدل أن نضحي بالحقيقة كي نؤمّن السلام؟ ثم إن العدالة ملأى بما هو نقيضها (ص 169) فالعدالة القانونية ليست مسألة بسيطة في مجتمع متعدد، ولذلك يكون من الصعب جداً أن نجمع بين العدالة والأخلاق والسياسة، فـ «الآدمية» تـــــواجه خــيارات صعبة.
تقف مي لتقيّم معايير العدالة والشرف التي يعتبرها البعض نسبية فيما تؤكد هي أنها ليست كذلك، إذ لا بدّ من التمييز بين القيم والمعتقدات، بين الآراء والحقائق. أما البطولة والخيانة فتبين كم هما نسبيتان في «خونة وفاتحون». فـ «السيد» كان بطلاً بالنسبة الى الإسبان فيما لم يكن بالنسبة للعرب إلا محارباً لا يعرف شفقة أو رحمة. وعليه تقرن فكرة الشهادة والبطولة بالظروف السياسية التي تحيط بمن يُعتبر بطلاً: عاش «السيد» حين كان الغرب في حاجة إلى شهداء، فيما كان المسلمون المنتصرون ميالين إلى التسامح. أما اليوم، فقد انعكس الوضع، فالغرب كاد ينسى شهداءه فيما يعاني العالم الإسلامي التعيس القلق وانعدام الثقة بالذات، وعليه يمتلئ خطابه بالكلام على الأبطال والشهداء، ويأتي شعره الوطني مفعماً بالحقد والثأر. إلا أنها هنا أيضاً تحلل ما وراء المظهر متسائلة: هل حقد الشاعر العربي على الغرب ناتج من كرهه له، أم من صرخة في سبيل استقلال وطنه؟! وقد نعجب ببطل ما أو لا نعجب، أما الخونة والجبناء فلا شك في حقارتهم، وهم، لسوء الحظ، «أناس عاديون» (ص 128)، مثلنا، مما يجعلنا نشك في حقيقة أنفسنا وفي غيرنا، وفي صحة تصنيفنا الأمور تصنيفاً بسيطاً واضحاً. إلا أنها تعلل الخيانة والوشاية، ولو أنها لا تبررهما، وتقرنهما بالحرب والعنف اللذين ثارت عليهما في الكتاب كله، فتؤكد أن الخيانة تفترض جو الحرب والخيانة جو الخوف، وكلتاهما تقترنان باضطهاد من يخالف الحقيقة التي تمثلها السلطة، دينية كانت أم سياسية. فيتجلى بوضوح دفاع مي غصوب عن حرية الإنسان وكرامته وحقه في التعبير عن الرأي.
إلا أن مي تخفف أحياناً من مأسوية الموضوع بفكاهة محببة وسخرية لطيفة. تقول، مثلاً، في «ثأر جدة ليلى» أن كل من هاجر في الماضي كان يعتقد أنه مهاجر إلى أميركا، ولو أنه في أفريقيا يصرّ على كونه في أميركا، لأن أميركا كانت بالنسبة الى اللبنانيين آنذاك بلاد الفرص والنجاح.
ويبقـــى أسلوب مي الذي يصعب عليّ أن أترجم جمال بلاغته. تكتب، مثلاً، حين كانت في فرنسا جاءها تلفون من لبنان أثار «الذكريات المبتورة من مدينة ممزقة كانت في الماضي مدينتها» (ص 10). أو قولها في وصف مخيّم صبرا: «كيف يمكن أن يأمل المرء بفصل «الداخل» عن «الخارج» في مكان كان سطحه من التنك المموج وبابه يفتح مباشرة على ضجيج الزقاق وغبار التراب الذي يقتحمه» (ص 11). أو قولها «سيادة التعسف وانتصار الفوضى هيّجا خيال الناس، وكلما ازدادت مخاوفهم ومحاولاتهم المسعورة للتغلب على هذه المخاوف، اتّسع ذلك الخيال وامتدّ.» (ص 72)
باختفـــاء مـــي لم نخسر فنانة وباحثة وأديبة فحسب، وإنما خسرنا شخصية مميزة من النادر أن نجد لها مثيلاً في صدقها وشجاعتها وإنسانيتها وعطفها ومروءتها ونخوتها. اختفت مي، ولكنها لم تمت، إذ تخلد في ما خلفت من أعمال فنية وأدبية، وفيما تركت في نفوس أصدقائها الكثيرين من ذكريات لن يمحوها الزمن.
مي غصوب.. الهوى دون أهله
مي غصوب.. الهوى دون أهله!
الوقت - حسين مرهون:
في مستشفى بلندن ماتت مي غصوب. ليس بسبب قذيفة. لقد كان الموت هادئاً ورحيماً مع الكاتبة اللبنانية التي اشتهرت في الأوساط الثقافية بحراثتها المستميتة ضمن الخط النسوي Femminsm الذي ميز النشاط الحثيث لنساء عربيات كثيرات في السنوات الأخيرة. تنقلت كثيراً ما بين بيروت وباريس ولندن. كتبت المسرحيات وأخرجتها. مارست فن النحت والجمالي بشتى أنواعه. أسهمت برفقة أصدقاء في تأسيس إحدى أهم دور النشر العربية (دار الساقي). وفجأة توقف كل شيء. توقف قلب مي غصوب. على رغم أنه ظل طيلة عمره عاشقاً. العشق يطيل العمر. لكنه لا يستطيع الوقوف أمام آلة القدر.
لم يشر إليها رفيق دربها حازم صاغية من قريب أو بعيد في كتابه الصادر حديثاً جداً ‘’ليست سيرة ذاتية’’. لم يقل عنها أي شيء، وعلى العكس من ذلك، قال أشياء كثيرة عن آخرين وأخريات. حوّم طويلاً حول رحلاته ما بين الدمغات القومية والماركسية والخمينية... وأخيراً الليبرالية. لكن عداها. أما هي، فخصّته دائماً بكثير من إشارات الوفاء. وليس صدفة أن جميع كتبه: من ‘’ثقافات الخمينية’’ إلى ‘’وداع العروبة’’ إلى ‘’البعث قياماً وحطاماً’’ إلى ‘’مأزق الفرد في الشرق الأوسط’’.. وحتى كتابه الأخير، (ليس صدفة) أنها صدرت جميعاً عن دارها. إنها المرأة. إنها المرأة.
ومثل كل الخيبات الوجودية التي مرّ بها جيلها، مرت مي باليسار البورجوازي الفرانكوفوني، لكنها انتهت أخيراً إلى الخيار الليبرالي. وهنا تلتقي محطتها مع المحطة التي بلغها زوجها حازم كواحد من منظري التيار الليبرالي العربي. لكن حذار هنا، إنها ليست ليبرالية جديدة. ذلك على رغم انحيازها على المستوى الثقافي ‘’إلى الزائل والعابر’’ على ما عبر بيار أبي صعب في مرثيته لها قبل أيام.
قصتها مع تأسيس ‘’دار الساقي’’ أثيرة جداً. فغداة اندلاع الحرب الأهلية هربت إلى باريس. ومن باريس خرجت في نزهة بسيطة إلى لندن. تحولت النزهة إلى ولع. ابتلعتها زوايا وحواري مدينة الضباب. كان خروجها من بيروت إلى فرنسا ‘’مؤقتاً إلى أن تهدأ الحرب’’، بحسب ما صرحت في أحد الحوارات معها. وكان خروجها من فرنسا إلى لندن ‘’أيضاً مؤقتاً وصدفوياً بامتياز’’. لكن في الخروجين هذين لم تعد مي. لم تعد إلى لبنان كما لم تعد إلى فرنسا ‘’.. إلا مؤقتاً’’. وعلى العكس من ذلك، كانت إقامتها الدائمة في لندن. وهنا هزّها ‘’ضآلة الحضور للثقافة العربية’’. قررت. صارت عندها دار للنشر. بعد 25 عاماً من هذه التجربة، صرّحت ‘’صارت لندن مثل بيروت’’ في إشارة إلى ازدياد الفضاءات التي صارت تولي أهمية إلى الثقافة العربية.
وعلى رغم أن زوجها قد عرف أم كلثوم مبكراً.. ومبكراً جداً. وهو قد كتب عنها ‘’الهوى دون أهله.. أم كلثوم سيرة ونصاً’’، إلا أنها لم تكن كذلك. ومتأخرة.. متأخرة جداً تعرفت إلى أم كلثوم. ألم نقل قبل قليل إنها تميل أكثر إلى الزائل والعابر؟. تقول هنا ‘’قلما كنا نستمع إلى أم كلثوم’’. لكنها حين سمعتها في سن الـ ,17 استدركت ‘’صار عندي تناقض قوي’’. أما السبب، فتوضحه بالقول ‘’كنت مع قضية المرأة وكنت أشعر بالتأزم حين تغني.. إيشي دايماً تغني يا ظالمني.. يا أنا بانتظارك’’. لكن تالياً، تغير هذا الموقف، وهي تابعت هنا ‘’لم أستطع لأن الأغنية تعبر عن شعور نسوي داخلي’’، على ما عبرت في إحدى إطلالاتها على قناة ‘’الجزيرة’’ الفضائية.
وشكل انخراطها في مجال فن النحت محطة إثراء أخرى. تقول مي ‘’أحب النحت لأنني أحب أن أغطس بيدي’’، مضيفة ‘’عندنا في العالم العربي أن الواحد حين يصبح مثقفاً يتوقف عن الشغل بيديه. لكن هذا غلط’’. تتابع موضحة ‘’الشغل باليدين شيء أساسي. التعبير بالكلمات شيء جميل، لكن التعبير باليدين أجمل’’. وتقول ‘’العمل على المنحوتات يعني العمل على الجبس الأبيض والطين وحتى الحديد أحياناً. شعور جميل جداً يشبه ذاك الشعور لدى الخباز حين يصنع الخبز’’.
وعلى خشبة مسرح ‘’مارينان’’ في بيروت حضرت مي آخر مسرحياتها التغريبية: ‘’قتلة الكتاب’’ العام الماضي. ينتهي المشهد الأخير من المسرحية بالعبارة الآتية: ‘’الكلمات لا تقتل.. البشر هم الذين يقتلون’’. ومي لم يقتلها أحد. كان الموت معها هادئاً ورحيماً.
وداعاً مي غصوب.
رحيل صديق العمر بعد رفيقة العمر
رحيل صديق العمر بعد رفيقة العمر
بيروت الحياة - 26/02/07//
كان أصدقاء الراحلة مي غصوب، وأصدقاء زوجها الزميل في «الحياة» حازم صاغية، وأصدقاء عائلتها، يتذكرونها مع والدها ريمون ووالدتها ماغي وشقيقتها هدى زوجة كمال قصار، ويتعايشون مع حزنهم على فقد الناشرة والكاتبة والفنانة المرهفة والمنفتحة، والشخصية المتميزة التي توفيت قبل 10 أيام في لندن حيث كانت تقيم، في قداس دعت إليه العائلة في بلدتها بيت شباب.
التقى محبو مي غصوب وعائلتها والصور تتداخل في أذهانهم عن دينامية المرأة التي غابت عن عمر 54 سنة في مستشفى لندني، وعن وداعتها وشغفها باستكشاف الأشياء والأفكار الذي لا يمكن لها إلا ان تنقله بالعدوى الى الآخرين بسلاسة متناهية لا تلين... وعن دورها في بناء الصداقات بين من تعرف وتصادق... وكان النائب البطريركي العام المطران بولس مطر ترأس الصلاة عن روحها في القداس الذي أقامته العائلة انسجاماً مع إيمان والديها، في انتظار وصول جثمانها الأسبوع المقبل، لإتمام مراسم مواراتها الثرى. عدّد المطران مطر صفات الراحلة ودورها في الحياة الثقافية اللبنانية في لندن وبيروت، وذكّر بعمل والديها المربيين اللذين لم يكلاّ من حبهما للناس ولأصدقاء مي وهدى. كان المعزون الذين اغرورقت أعين بعضهم بالدموع، انتقلوا الى صالون كنيسة السيدة الكبرى، في البلدة الجميلة. بعد الواحدة بعد الظهر كان الحشد الذي أم المكان كبيراً على رغم الطقس الماطر. وقام الجميع بواجب العزاء وبقي عشرات من الأصدقاء والأقرباء مع العائلة، باستثناء زوجها الزميل حازم الذي ظل في لندن لإتمام معاملات نقل جثمان رفيقة العمر، للعودة به الى لبنان الأسبوع المقبل. رن هاتف المحامي كمال قصار صهر مي وكان عديله حازم على الطرف الثاني من لندن. تحدث كمال وأصيب بالدهشة والوجوم. اقترب من بعض الأصدقاء الذين كانوا حوله بعد انتهاء المكالمة، وأخبرهم واجماً بما سمعه. انفجر بعضهم بالبكاء وصرخ بعضهم «توفي جوزف سماحة». لم يصدق الذين سمعوا. سألوا عديله فأكد ما سمعه. معظم أصدقاء مي هم أصدقاء جوزف سماحة ومحبيه ومن قرائه الشغوفين. تحول العزاء الى عزاءين.
كان جوزف انتقل قبل ايام من بيروت الى لندن للبقاء الى جانب صديق عمره حازم صاغية ومواساته في فقده زوجته مي. وكان يبيت في منزل حازم الذي استيقظ صباحاً وحاول إيقاظ جوزف فلم يفق.
To Hazem...
مي وجوزيف وقلب حازم
جميل الذيابي الحياة - 27/02/07//
عزيزي وصديقي وزميلي حازم صاغية، لا أملك إلا أن أقول «ألهمك الله الصبر والسلوان».
أيها الزميل ذو القلب المفتوح والقلم العميق، العربي الأصيل!
هل أعزّيك بزوجتك وشريكة عمرك مي غصوب؟ أم بصديق عمرك جوزيف سماحة؟
قبل أسبوع كنا نعزي بعضنا بمي، واليوم نعزي بعضنا بجوزيف.
نعلم «أنهم السابقون ونحن اللاحقون». هي كلمات تتناثر من ألم الفراق وأخبار الموت القاسية، ولكن... تلك سنّة الله في الكون.
صديقي حازم ذو المقالة العربية الحادة، والكلمات التي تصحبنا إلى فناء السياسة والأدب والاجتماع في روح إنسان.
هاتفتك قبل أسبوعين لتكتب تقديماً لكتابي الذي لم يُطبع بعد، وجئت إلى لندن ولم ألتق بك، واتفقنا على اللقاء بعد أسبوعين بطلب منك، فجاءت الأنباء حزينة. كم هي مؤلمة أخبار الموت علينا وعلى قلبك الأنيق.
رسالتي الأولى: إلى زوجتك مي... تلك السيدة «العصامية» التي عرفتها منذ حوالي اثني عشر عاماً، وحينها رأيت الأدب سلوكاً، والثقافة تاجاً يزين رأسها ويضفي الأناقة على قلبها الأبيض.
مي صاحبة الابتسامة التي تملأ المكان لتطل علينا من بين رفوف الكتب والمنحوتات في «دار الساقي».
مي... صاحبة المزاج الذي لا يتغير، والبساطة التي لا تتعقد ولا تتأثر بتقلبات الزمن.
أتذكّر قبل عشر سنوات عندما أعددت لها حواراً أدبياً ثقافياً نحتياً عن عملها وحياتها الزاخرة بعطاء الفكر والثقافة والنحت والأدب والإنسانية.
أتذكّر كيف وجدت عينيها تتذوقان الحياة، وهي تحمل كوب قهوتها على نصف يدها، وتتطاير الثقافة مع خيوط الدخان المنبعثة من القهوة لتركل هرمونات اليأس والإحباط، لتملأ المكان حيوية وأملاً وصباحات مشرقة.
مي التي تعشق معركة التاريخ وثقافة الأدب وروح الرواية وخريطة الجغرافيا، لتطل على كل اللغات وتبقى الابتسامة مبتسمة.
كنت أهاتفها من فترة لأخرى نتحدث عن هموم كثيرة، والهاتف جسر للتواصل، وقبل شهر هاتفتها بشأن طباعة كتابي «جدار الماء»، فقالت: أرسله لي عاجلاً حتى أطّلع عليه وأزوّدك برأيي. ذهبت مي إلى ربها امتثالاً لنواميس الكون وإيماناً بحتمية الموت الذي سيأخذنا جميعاً، وبقيت مسودة الكتاب قابعة في أدراج حازم. ها هي مسودة الكتاب تبكي رحيلك يا مي. وداعاً أيتها الرائعة.
ورسالتي الثانية: بالأمس جاءتنا الأخبار باكية تنقل لنا نبأ وفاة صديقك وصديقنا وزميلك وزميلنا جوزيف سماحة. جاء جوزيف من بيروت إلى لندن معزياً بمي، فكتب الله له الوفاة بعد ان قدم واجب الوفاء والعزاء في منزلك، الذي استقبلتم فيه المعزين. تحوّل العزاء إلى عزاءين. غادرت مي الدنيا فلحق بها جوزيف. وهنا تذكّرت جارة أهلي عندما كانت تعزي بوالدي (رحمه الله) قبل خمس سنوات، ولم تمض أيام على رحيل والدي ومواساة تلك الجارة لأمي حتى لحقت بوالدي إلى الدار الآخرة. وتذكّرت وفاة والد الزميل مروان ديماس قبل اسبوع أيضاً، الذي كان يهاتفني وفجأة نقل لنا خبر وفاته.
جوزيف صاحب الافتتاحية المشهود لها عربياً وغربياً، صاحب الفلسفة السياسية التقدمية. صاحب القلم النازف دفاعاً عن حرية الكلمة، وألد الخصوم لأعداء الإعلام الحر.
جوزيف صاحب القلم العميق المخترق للقلوب، القريب من الزملاء والأصدقاء، والسائل دوماً عن الكل. وداعاً أيها الرائع.
خسارة أن يفقد الإعلام العربي ناشرة بقامة مي غصوب، وهامة مثل جوزيف سماحة، لكنها النهاية الحتمية لكل الأنفس البشرية.
عزيزي وزميلي حازم... نعزيك وقلوبنا معك، ونعزي عائلتَيْ الفقيدين، ونعزي أنفسنا بوفاة صديقين وزميلين رحلا عنا ونحن بهما لاحقون... عاجلاً أو آج
Saturday, February 24, 2007
A Lost Summer & Mai's Tribute in pictures
On the 22nd Feb 2007 we celebrated the life of a remarkable woman. Many people came to pay their respects to our dear friend and mentor, Mai Ghoussoub, who was taken away from us so suddenly last weekend. The room was filled with her stunning sculptures, her artwork, photographs of her various performances, and her dedicated friends. Mai's aura and presence could be felt throughout the room. As one of her Saqi colleagues eloquently said in her speech: "The world was just too small for Mai".
Friday, February 23, 2007
Mai Ghoussoub in her own time...
Neil Belton
22 - 2 - 2007
The Lebanese artist and publisher was a courageous force for the enlargement of life, writes her friend across decades, Neil Belton.
------------------------------------------
Mai Ghoussoub, the founder and joint proprietor of Al Saqi Bookshop and the publishing company linked to it, has died suddenly at the age of 54. Her death is cruel, completely unexpected and still inexplicable. Much more than a bookshop owner and publisher, she was one of the most open, generous, and tolerant people in the cultural life of London over the past thirty years.
Her own work as a sculptor grew in stature with each passing year, and her literary contributions to debate over the middle east were highly personal, urgent pleas for a culture of democratic reconciliation of differences - for a move beyond the cycle of revenge and grievance in which Arab (and Israeli) politics is stuck. Quite apart from her own creative work, she was a kind and encouraging friend to writers, artists, and young people finding their way intellectually and politically. Her instinct, the opposite of the coldly exclusionary reflex of English literary London, was to draw people in, to assume the best of them and to help them by introducing them to writers or academics who might stimulate them. Her death leaves a raw wound for many of us that will take a long time to heal.
Beirut, exile and return
Mai came to London in 1979. She had survived the first phase of the long civil war in Lebanon that had started in 1975, but only just. She lost an eye and had shrapnel wounds in her side that could have been fatal. The tiny Trotskyist group of which she was a member - the Lebanese section of the Fourth International (actually of the United Secretariat of the FI, one of the organisation's many splinters) - refused to participate in the fighting between what many imagined to be the "left" (the Palestinians, the communists, the Arab nationalists and Muslim groups) and the "fascist" forces of the Maronite elite.
With her friend and comrade Andre Gaspard, she organised a pharmacy in Mabaa, a confessionally-mixed working-class area of Beirut that was completely surrounded in the first months of the war. They brought in doctors, nurses and medicine under fire, and distributed free powdered milk to mothers of young children. Much of their time was spent negotiating with the armed groups for the release of Christian workers who had been kidnapped as "spies". Andre was wounded in the knee; the two people standing next to him were killed. Mai was bringing a wounded man to hospital when her car was hit by a shell as she crossed one of the invisible lines that made the city so dangerous. She was 23 years old.
Mai realised more quickly than many western observers that the "armed struggle" had degenerated into a vicious sectarian war, with armed gangs controlling neighbourhoods and slaughtering innocent members of the "enemy" community at improvised roadblocks. The logic of revenge and territorial control had taken over, and her revulsion from it led her towards a very different vision of politics. The caudillo-like leadership that coercive solidarity generates was brought home to her, she told me once, when the members of her small group were "arrested" by Fatah and hauled before Chairman Arafat himself for printing some critical piece about him in their newspaper.
She left Beirut when she recovered from her injuries, and completed her treatment in Britain. Going into exile was not an easy thing to do, even in the midst of a war that had turned the city into a series of armed camps run by militia bosses. Beirut for her represented an ideal of civilised living, a city of hedonism, sunlight and the free exchange of ideas, a place where boundaries were made to be crossed. "Cosmopolitan" was one of her favourite words, and it had no negative connotations for her. In Beirut, Arab traditions of hospitality and courtesy met European forms of restlessness and scepticism; she recalled a café culture of intense discussion, days at the beach-clubs and nights on some restaurant terrace in the mountains.
There was, I'm sure, an element of yearning nostalgia in her picture of Beirut before the fall, though she was clear-eyed about the social and civil tensions that were already undermining the so-called Switzerland of the middle east; yet her image of the country is one shared by many Lebanese expatriates who remember life before the war, and she retained an intense loyalty to the city and to the possibility of coexistence in Lebanon. Two weeks before she died she had gone there again, and for the first time, friends say, she felt utterly depressed about the future of the country, which is once more digging itself into its communal trenches and living in fear of another and more devastating war between Syria and Iran, on the one hand, and Israel on the other, which will be fought out on Lebanese territory.
Since the end of the cycle of wars in Lebanon in 1990, the country had seemed to be recovering part of its old dynamism and prosperity. Mai and her partners opened an Arabic-language branch of the publishing house in Beirut, which is now one of the Arab world's leading imprints; she exhibited her work and was spending more of her time there. Hizbollah's opportunistic raid and Israel's grotesque overreaction seemed to have put paid to fifteen years of patient reconstructive work.
A cosmopolitan wind
Mai Ghoussoub was born into the Maronite upper middle class in the heartland of Mount Lebanon. Her parents' home village is not far from the town of Bikfaya, the stronghold of the Gemayels, the dominant clan of the Maronite political establishment. She was educated at a French lycée, like all her peers, and grew up reading French literature as a matter of course, as aware of events in Paris as of crises in Palestine. It was here that she met her many friends of Sunni and Shi'a origin, who were longing for something new that would cut down the old sectarian barriers. She studied literature at the Lebanese University and also took a mathematics degree at the American University in Beirut.
In London in the early 1980s, Mai was part of a network of leftwing reformers challenging the dominant nationalist pieties that still governed thought about the middle east. The journal Khamsin, which brought together Iranian, Israeli, Iraqi, Lebanese and Egyptian intellectuals, played a crucial role in stimulating debate. Mai was close to those of her ex-Trotskyist comrades who challenged the standard left line on Khomeini in the early days of the Iranian revolution: far from being a kind of Kerensky who would be swept aside by the masses, he was an intelligent theocrat who had shaped an alliance of the bazaar merchants and the "disinherited", and he had genuine mass support. This now seems obvious; in 1979-80 it was heresy for the anti-imperialist left, more concerned with finding good in America's latest enemy than in seeing him for what he was.
Soon after her arrival in London from Paris, where she had spent three years after recovering from her injuries, she noticed that while Paris had three bookshops specialising in the Arab world, London had none. She called Andre Gaspard, by then another refugee from the civil war living in New York, and within a short time they had raised the money to open Al Saqi Bookshop on Westbourne Grove. It was an impulsive enterprise - they did not have proper visas, and English was their third language - but it was very successful, partly because it refused to censor itself: every current of opinion in the region and in the west was represented in the literature that the shop sold, and it became a lifeline for scholars and for dissidents in the repressive societies of the middle east. Minor Saudi princes turned up, for example, and spent thousands of pounds on books that no-one would dare sell in the kingdom.
The publishing company, also called Al Saqi, played a central role in bringing writings on democracy to an Arab audience, including books by Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and many others. They also helped to change western perceptions of writing from the Muslim world.
Al Saqi was the first publisher in Britain to sponsor translations of the work of Ismail Kadare, long before he became celebrated in the English-speaking countries. Broken April, his great story of a society trapped in the logic of vendetta, was, I think, a fundamental book for Mai. Other translations included work by Tahar ben Jalloun, Amin Maalouf, Germaine Tillion, Gilles Kepel, and Fatima Mernissi's groundbreaking feminist text Beyond the Veil. Al Saqi also published Mai's memoir, Leaving Beirut, which combines her own memories with lightly-fictionalised stories of those who went through the war - especially women - and reflections on historical amnesia and the fragile potential for democratic reconciliation of differences. Most importantly, it was about escaping the culture of revenge, and "the difficulties of salvaging kindness in the harsh reality of this Middle East where people both live and condemn each other to exile."
The gift of life
The logo of Al Saqi, the water-carrier, showing a seller of water bent under the weight of his life-giving burden and offering a cup to someone who is thirsty, is one that I will always associate with Mai herself. She was not a good haggler, and I've never met anyone more willing to give of her time and resources to anyone in need. People who worked for her often became friends, and could be found at dinner in her house.
The parties in the bookshop and the Kufa Gallery next door to it were not routine book-trade affairs, because Mai's warmth and interest in people made you feel that you were attending a continuously evolving salon at which your presence really mattered. She was genuinely democratic, and would introduce some deeply unfashionable writer to the Lebanese ambassador or the literary editor of a newspaper without any of the calculated networking motives that such events normally excuse. You didn't always want to read or look at the work of the artists you met at the Kufa Gallery, but you wanted to spend time with them in the atmosphere Mai created, and you looked forward to being drawn in to this generous space again.
Her evenings at home were even better: friends sitting on chairs or on the floor around her living-room, speaking lightly yet with deep seriousness about books, films or issues of the day. You expected passionate argument at Mai's evenings, often kicked off by a debate between her and Hazem Saghieh, her husband and, in the most literal sense, her other half - brilliant, funny and provocative argument about intractable situations between people who refused ever to give in to despair. They were an extraordinary couple, whose disagreements only seemed to strengthen their commitment to each other and to the case for the non-violent resolution of disagreements in the world from which they had come, even as it sank into violent chaos in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.
At the heart
I have memories of Mai's kindness that are too personal to express in the immediate aftermath of her death. If she knew you were in despair she had a way of reconnecting you with life; she could make you feel, without trivialising your difficulty, that the important thing was to revel in what we have left. She would fix you with her one good eye, steadily and humorously, and draw you into accepting an invitation to a concert or an evening in some wonderful Lebanese restaurant, where she or Hazem would insist on paying.
Above all, I will remember the time I spent with her in Lebanon. The first time I went there with her and Hazem was in 1993. The old centre of Beirut was a heap of pockmarked ruins, the landmarks of her idyllic childhood turned to rubble. Syrian paratroopers were everywhere; Syrian intelligence thugs manned checkpoints on the road south to the border of the Israeli-occupied zone. Hizbollah's western hostages had just been released. The names of villages by the roadside recalled massacres and expulsions. But Mai saw the possibility of renewal and was determined to show me the diversity and strangeness, and what was left of the beauty of the country.
For nearly two weeks she and Hazem made the time to take me to the Shi'a south, the Druze mountains, the coastal cities, the Palestinian camps. She patiently explained the rivalries between the Maronite factions as we travelled around the villages on Mount Lebanon. We went to Hazem's home region of Akkar in the north, an extraordinary patchwork of Orthodox Christians and Sunni Arabs close to the Syrian border. They had friends in every community, ex-communists, ex-nationalists, ex-militiamen. They seemed to have seen the worst that politics can do, had lived through a nightmare and wanted to create the possibility of a life that isn't held hostage to impossible dreams of triumph over a near-mythical enemy. She was teaching me her country, and "salvaging kindness".
Mai was at the centre of that web of sadder and wiser friends, refusing to allow petty differences to stand in her way and seeing the good in almost everyone. I am certain that they will all miss her terribly. I know I will.
Neil Belton is a senior editor at Faber & Faber and a writer. He is the author of The Good Listener: A Life Against Cruelty (Orion, 1998) and the novel A Game with Sharpened Knives (Orion, 2005)
22 - 2 - 2007
The Lebanese artist and publisher was a courageous force for the enlargement of life, writes her friend across decades, Neil Belton.
------------------------------------------
Mai Ghoussoub, the founder and joint proprietor of Al Saqi Bookshop and the publishing company linked to it, has died suddenly at the age of 54. Her death is cruel, completely unexpected and still inexplicable. Much more than a bookshop owner and publisher, she was one of the most open, generous, and tolerant people in the cultural life of London over the past thirty years.
Her own work as a sculptor grew in stature with each passing year, and her literary contributions to debate over the middle east were highly personal, urgent pleas for a culture of democratic reconciliation of differences - for a move beyond the cycle of revenge and grievance in which Arab (and Israeli) politics is stuck. Quite apart from her own creative work, she was a kind and encouraging friend to writers, artists, and young people finding their way intellectually and politically. Her instinct, the opposite of the coldly exclusionary reflex of English literary London, was to draw people in, to assume the best of them and to help them by introducing them to writers or academics who might stimulate them. Her death leaves a raw wound for many of us that will take a long time to heal.
Beirut, exile and return
Mai came to London in 1979. She had survived the first phase of the long civil war in Lebanon that had started in 1975, but only just. She lost an eye and had shrapnel wounds in her side that could have been fatal. The tiny Trotskyist group of which she was a member - the Lebanese section of the Fourth International (actually of the United Secretariat of the FI, one of the organisation's many splinters) - refused to participate in the fighting between what many imagined to be the "left" (the Palestinians, the communists, the Arab nationalists and Muslim groups) and the "fascist" forces of the Maronite elite.
With her friend and comrade Andre Gaspard, she organised a pharmacy in Mabaa, a confessionally-mixed working-class area of Beirut that was completely surrounded in the first months of the war. They brought in doctors, nurses and medicine under fire, and distributed free powdered milk to mothers of young children. Much of their time was spent negotiating with the armed groups for the release of Christian workers who had been kidnapped as "spies". Andre was wounded in the knee; the two people standing next to him were killed. Mai was bringing a wounded man to hospital when her car was hit by a shell as she crossed one of the invisible lines that made the city so dangerous. She was 23 years old.
Mai realised more quickly than many western observers that the "armed struggle" had degenerated into a vicious sectarian war, with armed gangs controlling neighbourhoods and slaughtering innocent members of the "enemy" community at improvised roadblocks. The logic of revenge and territorial control had taken over, and her revulsion from it led her towards a very different vision of politics. The caudillo-like leadership that coercive solidarity generates was brought home to her, she told me once, when the members of her small group were "arrested" by Fatah and hauled before Chairman Arafat himself for printing some critical piece about him in their newspaper.
She left Beirut when she recovered from her injuries, and completed her treatment in Britain. Going into exile was not an easy thing to do, even in the midst of a war that had turned the city into a series of armed camps run by militia bosses. Beirut for her represented an ideal of civilised living, a city of hedonism, sunlight and the free exchange of ideas, a place where boundaries were made to be crossed. "Cosmopolitan" was one of her favourite words, and it had no negative connotations for her. In Beirut, Arab traditions of hospitality and courtesy met European forms of restlessness and scepticism; she recalled a café culture of intense discussion, days at the beach-clubs and nights on some restaurant terrace in the mountains.
There was, I'm sure, an element of yearning nostalgia in her picture of Beirut before the fall, though she was clear-eyed about the social and civil tensions that were already undermining the so-called Switzerland of the middle east; yet her image of the country is one shared by many Lebanese expatriates who remember life before the war, and she retained an intense loyalty to the city and to the possibility of coexistence in Lebanon. Two weeks before she died she had gone there again, and for the first time, friends say, she felt utterly depressed about the future of the country, which is once more digging itself into its communal trenches and living in fear of another and more devastating war between Syria and Iran, on the one hand, and Israel on the other, which will be fought out on Lebanese territory.
Since the end of the cycle of wars in Lebanon in 1990, the country had seemed to be recovering part of its old dynamism and prosperity. Mai and her partners opened an Arabic-language branch of the publishing house in Beirut, which is now one of the Arab world's leading imprints; she exhibited her work and was spending more of her time there. Hizbollah's opportunistic raid and Israel's grotesque overreaction seemed to have put paid to fifteen years of patient reconstructive work.
A cosmopolitan wind
Mai Ghoussoub was born into the Maronite upper middle class in the heartland of Mount Lebanon. Her parents' home village is not far from the town of Bikfaya, the stronghold of the Gemayels, the dominant clan of the Maronite political establishment. She was educated at a French lycée, like all her peers, and grew up reading French literature as a matter of course, as aware of events in Paris as of crises in Palestine. It was here that she met her many friends of Sunni and Shi'a origin, who were longing for something new that would cut down the old sectarian barriers. She studied literature at the Lebanese University and also took a mathematics degree at the American University in Beirut.
In London in the early 1980s, Mai was part of a network of leftwing reformers challenging the dominant nationalist pieties that still governed thought about the middle east. The journal Khamsin, which brought together Iranian, Israeli, Iraqi, Lebanese and Egyptian intellectuals, played a crucial role in stimulating debate. Mai was close to those of her ex-Trotskyist comrades who challenged the standard left line on Khomeini in the early days of the Iranian revolution: far from being a kind of Kerensky who would be swept aside by the masses, he was an intelligent theocrat who had shaped an alliance of the bazaar merchants and the "disinherited", and he had genuine mass support. This now seems obvious; in 1979-80 it was heresy for the anti-imperialist left, more concerned with finding good in America's latest enemy than in seeing him for what he was.
Soon after her arrival in London from Paris, where she had spent three years after recovering from her injuries, she noticed that while Paris had three bookshops specialising in the Arab world, London had none. She called Andre Gaspard, by then another refugee from the civil war living in New York, and within a short time they had raised the money to open Al Saqi Bookshop on Westbourne Grove. It was an impulsive enterprise - they did not have proper visas, and English was their third language - but it was very successful, partly because it refused to censor itself: every current of opinion in the region and in the west was represented in the literature that the shop sold, and it became a lifeline for scholars and for dissidents in the repressive societies of the middle east. Minor Saudi princes turned up, for example, and spent thousands of pounds on books that no-one would dare sell in the kingdom.
The publishing company, also called Al Saqi, played a central role in bringing writings on democracy to an Arab audience, including books by Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and many others. They also helped to change western perceptions of writing from the Muslim world.
Al Saqi was the first publisher in Britain to sponsor translations of the work of Ismail Kadare, long before he became celebrated in the English-speaking countries. Broken April, his great story of a society trapped in the logic of vendetta, was, I think, a fundamental book for Mai. Other translations included work by Tahar ben Jalloun, Amin Maalouf, Germaine Tillion, Gilles Kepel, and Fatima Mernissi's groundbreaking feminist text Beyond the Veil. Al Saqi also published Mai's memoir, Leaving Beirut, which combines her own memories with lightly-fictionalised stories of those who went through the war - especially women - and reflections on historical amnesia and the fragile potential for democratic reconciliation of differences. Most importantly, it was about escaping the culture of revenge, and "the difficulties of salvaging kindness in the harsh reality of this Middle East where people both live and condemn each other to exile."
The gift of life
The logo of Al Saqi, the water-carrier, showing a seller of water bent under the weight of his life-giving burden and offering a cup to someone who is thirsty, is one that I will always associate with Mai herself. She was not a good haggler, and I've never met anyone more willing to give of her time and resources to anyone in need. People who worked for her often became friends, and could be found at dinner in her house.
The parties in the bookshop and the Kufa Gallery next door to it were not routine book-trade affairs, because Mai's warmth and interest in people made you feel that you were attending a continuously evolving salon at which your presence really mattered. She was genuinely democratic, and would introduce some deeply unfashionable writer to the Lebanese ambassador or the literary editor of a newspaper without any of the calculated networking motives that such events normally excuse. You didn't always want to read or look at the work of the artists you met at the Kufa Gallery, but you wanted to spend time with them in the atmosphere Mai created, and you looked forward to being drawn in to this generous space again.
Her evenings at home were even better: friends sitting on chairs or on the floor around her living-room, speaking lightly yet with deep seriousness about books, films or issues of the day. You expected passionate argument at Mai's evenings, often kicked off by a debate between her and Hazem Saghieh, her husband and, in the most literal sense, her other half - brilliant, funny and provocative argument about intractable situations between people who refused ever to give in to despair. They were an extraordinary couple, whose disagreements only seemed to strengthen their commitment to each other and to the case for the non-violent resolution of disagreements in the world from which they had come, even as it sank into violent chaos in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.
At the heart
I have memories of Mai's kindness that are too personal to express in the immediate aftermath of her death. If she knew you were in despair she had a way of reconnecting you with life; she could make you feel, without trivialising your difficulty, that the important thing was to revel in what we have left. She would fix you with her one good eye, steadily and humorously, and draw you into accepting an invitation to a concert or an evening in some wonderful Lebanese restaurant, where she or Hazem would insist on paying.
Above all, I will remember the time I spent with her in Lebanon. The first time I went there with her and Hazem was in 1993. The old centre of Beirut was a heap of pockmarked ruins, the landmarks of her idyllic childhood turned to rubble. Syrian paratroopers were everywhere; Syrian intelligence thugs manned checkpoints on the road south to the border of the Israeli-occupied zone. Hizbollah's western hostages had just been released. The names of villages by the roadside recalled massacres and expulsions. But Mai saw the possibility of renewal and was determined to show me the diversity and strangeness, and what was left of the beauty of the country.
For nearly two weeks she and Hazem made the time to take me to the Shi'a south, the Druze mountains, the coastal cities, the Palestinian camps. She patiently explained the rivalries between the Maronite factions as we travelled around the villages on Mount Lebanon. We went to Hazem's home region of Akkar in the north, an extraordinary patchwork of Orthodox Christians and Sunni Arabs close to the Syrian border. They had friends in every community, ex-communists, ex-nationalists, ex-militiamen. They seemed to have seen the worst that politics can do, had lived through a nightmare and wanted to create the possibility of a life that isn't held hostage to impossible dreams of triumph over a near-mythical enemy. She was teaching me her country, and "salvaging kindness".
Mai was at the centre of that web of sadder and wiser friends, refusing to allow petty differences to stand in her way and seeing the good in almost everyone. I am certain that they will all miss her terribly. I know I will.
Neil Belton is a senior editor at Faber & Faber and a writer. He is the author of The Good Listener: A Life Against Cruelty (Orion, 1998) and the novel A Game with Sharpened Knives (Orion, 2005)
Guardian obituary
Obituary
Friday February 23, 2007
The Guardian
Mai Ghoussoub
Malu HalasaFriday February 23, 2007
The Guardian
A tour de force in Arab literature and letters, Mai Ghoussoub, who has died at the age of 54, was a publisher, author and artist. The controversial titles she published for Saqi Books, the company she founded 28 years ago with her childhood friend André Gaspard, and her critical essays on aesthetics, sexism, censorship and war - as well as her striking art performances - embody a vibrancy often associated with her native Beirut, a city and intellectual scene now eclipsed by the increasing Islamisation of a fractured Middle East.
Ghoussoub was born into a Lebanon where, as she wrote, the doctor apologised to her Christian Arab father, a professional footballer, for delivering a girl to a family with no male heirs. She attended the secular French lycée in Beirut, with children of all religious persuasions. To please her parents she studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut, at the same time taking a degree in literature at the Lebanese University. She came of age during the anti-Vietnam war protests of the late 1960s - at a time when the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum sang A'tini Bundaqiya (A rifle to liberate Arab land) and the writings of Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir were widely available in Beirut bookstores.
Despite supporting the Palestinians in the early 1970s, Ghoussoub and a group of students were kidnapped in Beirut and brought before the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, then based in that city, for distributing a publication critical of his corruption. They were only released because one student had an important father. Rebellious and anti-establishment, Ghoussoub was a self-proclaimed feminist, who adored modern jazz and belly dancing.
During the 1975 Lebanese civil war, she and Gaspard helped to establish two medical dispensaries in quarters of Beirut from where the doctors had fled and where there were no pharmacies. They lived in a poor Muslim area on the west side of the notorious green line. Their humanitarian group negotiated the release of Christian hostages, but not all efforts were successful. When they demanded that George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hand over a kidnapped Phalange Christian militiaman, his body was dumped at the door of their dispensary.
In 1977 Ghoussoub was driving a wounded Palestinian to hospital when she was shot. She lost an eye and went for further medical treatment in the UK. She moved to Paris briefly before returning to London and starting Al-Saqi Books, the first Arabic bookshop in London, with Gaspard in 1979, an ill-timed venture. They had little money and the road to the airport in Beirut - the city where they needed to buy books - was closed. Eventually, they stocked their store in Westbourne Grove, which became a hub for Middle Easterners in London and for UK universities. By 1983, they were publishing their first titles, but by 1987 the book trade was faltering and they were forced to sell Saqi's literary imprint, Serpent's Tail, to Pete Ayrton.
Dynamic and compassionate, Ghoussoub was a courageous publisher. Her commitment to gender issues was reflected by Saqi's booklist - with a range of titles that few Arab publishers would dare to produce: for example, Brian Whitaker's examination of gay and lesbian Middle Eastern life, Unspeakable Love, and the novel Menstruation, about a fundamentalist who smelled women's periods, by the Syrian Ammar Abdulhamid.
In her own writing, Ghoussoub explored "the female enigma" whether by featuring Janis Joplin in her play Divas, for Jamil/Jamila, performed in Beirut, Paris, London and Newcastle, or analysing social sexual dynamics in her essay on Viagra chewing gum, an alleged plot by the Israelis to threaten Egyptian birthrates. Her memoir Leaving Beirut, published in 1997, revisits chastity, nationalism and the futility of revenge taught by a Jewish teacher at Ghoussoub's lycée, which laid the groundwork for Saqi's humanitarian open door policy to anyone - no matter their religious persuasion - threatened by violence and war.
Saqi parties were legendary. An Israeli journalist could be seen hugabug with an Arab editor and close friend of Arafat's, according to Index on Censorship's Jo Glanville, who edited Qissat, a Saqi anthology of Palestinian women's short stories. When Glanville reminded Ghoussoub that she came from a Jewish family and was perhaps not the best choice to edit a Palestinian collection, Ghoussoub disagreed - a rare stance in today's Arab world.
Ghoussoub, who studied sculpture at Morley College, London, and the Henry Moore studio in the 1980s, combined her loves of literature and art. Her sculptures and installations were exhibited internationally. In 2004, in a duo show with the Israeli artist, Anna Sherbany, part of the London Biennale at the Shoreditch gallery, she became one of the first Arab women artists to explore the veil in a public space by dressing up in an elaborate Islamic get-up and carrying a tennis racket around the art haunts of Shoreditch. To her delight, nobody took any notice, proving a pet theory that Britain is a tolerant country.
Last year's war between Hizbullah and Israel spurred her into action. The resulting books and readings in London, and the art exhibition, Lebanon - Image in All the People, curated by Ghoussob and Souheil Sleiman for the Liverpool Biennial, celebrated Beirut, the city she loved. As the Lebanese poet Abbas Beydoun writes, "Mai was very patriotic, but at the same time a woman of the world. She was the daughter of the moment, the first to present postmodernism in Arabic. She was herself without compromise, yet she always cared for everyone." Or as Ghoussoub metaphorically described herself only last month: "I live horizontally and I'm not ready to stand up."
She is survived by her husband, the journalist and writer Hazim Saghie, her parents Antoine and Maggie Ghoussoub and her sister Hoda.
Jo Glanville writes: Mai Ghoussoub was an original. A vivid personality with a charming, girlish quality and a raffish appearance, she had an immense influence on a wide group of people. The political conviction and courage she showed in her youth, during the bloody civil war in Lebanon, informed an independence of spirit and thought which cut through all the political rhetoric that plagues the Middle East.
She and Hazim were always the best people to talk to if you wanted to be brought back down to earth. Discussion of the latest Iraqi or Lebanese crisis would be punctuated with humour, jokes and irony - no matter how much despair there might also be. Nothing was too serious not to be deserving of mockery.
She was an intellectual and artist with a great sense of fun. She brought together an extraordinary array of people and many friendships were forged around her social hub. Although she was extremely well connected and greatly admired, I often felt that the Arab intellectual and artistic community she was at the heart of remained sadly neglected by the mainstream. Only when Saqi's warehouse in Beirut was bombed during the war last summer, did her company begin to get wider public acclaim.
She was one of those rare people whose death leaves a hole not just in the lives of family and close friends, but in that of a wider community. Her influence will remain, but her input is still needed: at a time of conflict, polarisation and very few laughs, her culture and humanity were evidence of just how much brilliance the Middle East can produce.
·Mai Ghoussoub, publisher, writer and artist, born November 2 1952; died February 17 2007
Independent Obituary
Mai Ghoussoub
Writer, artist and co-founder of Saqi
Published: 23 February 2007
Mai Ghoussoub, writer, artist and publisher: born Beirut 2 November 1951; twice married; died London 17 February 2007.
In the late 1960s a terrible murder shocked Lebanon. A young servant killed her new-born baby by throwing him from the ninth floor of a building. For days, the media pilloried her as a monster. Then, a student, barely 18, discovered that the maid had been raped by her employer and that, unable to endure this "shame", had chosen to expiate it by killing the evidence of that rape. The student went on to write a searing plea for the maid and offered the article to every newspaper in the land. Not one dared publish it. In patriarchal Lebanon, men could not be guilty of rape; the fault always lay with the woman.
So started the extraordinary career of Mai Ghoussoub, sculptor, writer, publisher, human-rights activist and one of the most remarkable women of our times, who died suddenly last week.
Born in 1951, Ghoussoub graduated in maths from the American University of Beirut, then studied literature at the Lebanese University, then sculpture at Morley College in London. She participated in the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) as a Trotskyite. Soon, disillusioned that, in pursuit of expediency, even idealistic leftist movements reneged on their moral and progressive values, she devoted herself to humanitarian work. On one occasion, as she was driving a wounded victim to hospital, her car was hit by a shell and she herself was badly injured. Despite treatment both in Lebanon and England, she lost an eye, a fact known only to her relatives and a few friends.
Mai Ghoussoub lived and worked as one unscathed - or rather, as one for whom being scathed was just one of life's quirks. Her book Leaving Beirut: women and the wars within (1998) is one of the most poignant testimonies to that fratricidal war.
In 1976, she moved to Paris and worked there as a journalist for Arab newspapers and, in collaboration with her childhood friend André Gaspard, then working in a bank, wrote Comprendre le Liban, an exposé of Lebanon's contradictory identities that appeared over the pseudonyms Selim Accaoui and Magida Salman. (Magida Salman survived to write elsewhere, contributing, for example, to another book, Women in the Middle East, 1987.)
Two years later, during a trip to London, Ghoussoub noted that this cosmopolitan city did not have a bookshop specialising in Arabic works. So she rang Gaspard and suggested that they should start one themselves. Gaspard came over immediately. And the two, as yet without funds or premises and, not least, without residency permits, set about achieving this. Thus, in 1979, they founded the Al-Saqi bookshop, in Westbourne Grove, which, over the years, has become a treasury for anyone interested in Arab culture and scholarship. The bookshop soon engendered a publishing house. Today, this house, with its imprints, Saqi and Telegram, has established itself as one of the most vibrant, daring and humanist independent publishers in the world.
Early in 1991, Mai Ghoussoub married a compatriot, the distinguished writer Hazem Saghieh, an astute commentator on Middle East affairs. If there really are marriages woven by a divine authority, this was one of them. Dynamic at every level, the couple enjoyed an enviable diet of heated political arguments, hilarious laughter, explorations of the arts and love of the most caring kind.
Mai was a life force. She vivified every social gathering, every professional engagement and, above all, every one she met. I don't know - nor can I imagine - a single person who, whether he/she agreed with her powerful views or not, was not captivated by her at first sight. She had many interests, she excelled in many disciplines. She never admitted to having one identity. She maintained she had many identities or, rather, many identifying elements.
True to the spirit of her beloved Beirut and its diverse cultures, she loved words. Consequently, she campaigned ardently against censorship. Though she acknowledged that words, misused, could incite hatred and conflict, she defended their right to be voiced. Exposing their evil, she maintained, was a challenge we all had to face. Her keynote speech for Freemuse in 2005, "It is Banned to Ban", is a passionate defence of freedom of expression; and her 2006 play Texterminators is as moving a paean to the sanctity of books as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. "Words," she said, "don't kill; humans do."
Always non-judgemental, as evinced by her defence of the unfortunate maid who committed infanticide, she constantly defied, through both her sculpture and writing, all forms of inequity, injustice and taboos. In many articles and from many platforms, she censured political transgressions and human-rights abuses, not least the tortures in Abu Ghraib. In her installations Displaces and What is the Purpose of Your Visit (Berlin, 2005), she attacked the prejudices against "identities" and refugees.
She explored the vagaries of masculinity in Imagined Masculinities: male identity and culture in the modern Middle East (2000), a collection of essays that she edited with Emma Sinclair-Webb. She fathomed the mysteries of femininity and transvestism and the metaphors of dressing in her 2002 performance play Jamil/Jamila, in her sculptures of such iconic divas as Um Khaltoum and Josephine Baker, and in her installation Penelopeia Project (Hellenic Museum, Chicago, 2006). And she grieved for her beloved, conflict-ridden Lebanon in such exhibitions as "Under Different Skies" (Copenhagen, 2006), "Beirut Out of War" (Museum Man, Liverpool, 2005-06) and "Lebanon - Image in All the People" (Liverpool Biennial, 2006) - the last with her fellow artist Souheil Sleiman.
Her works, I believe, will live on. So will Saqi, the publishing house she co-founded. Its staff, its editorial team and its authors may feel like orphans, but they know that she remains everywhere around us.
Moris Farhi
Mai Ghoussoub had a unique combination of formal intelligence and joyous creativity, writes Maggie Gee. She saved my career as a writer; it is as simple as that. Without her, my 2002 novel The White Family would not have been published and subsequently shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the International Impac prize.
She read the novel, loved it and rang the same day to accept it, after all London's mainstream houses had turned it down. Perhaps the book's frank description of racism struck a chord with her; also, she knew that the censorship of unacceptable thoughts does nothing to deal with their root cause, fear breeding hatred.
Mai was an artist in everything she did, and in her physical self as well, slender, warm, curvaceous and intensely graceful, a trained dancer who still had long dark hair in her fifties and dressed in dramatic deep reds and blacks.
Her autobiographical book Leaving Beirut is a gripping and enlightening meditation on how you can live beyond the horrors of the past and find new hope without forcing or falsifying forgiveness.
PEN hears with great sadness of the death of Mai Ghoussoub
Mai Ghoussoub (1952-2007)
Mai, a member of PEN, artist, writer and founding director of Saqi Books sadly passed away on 17 February 2007 in London. She will be dearly missed.
"We all mourn the sudden death on 17 February of Mai Ghoussoub, a formidable woman, a fine artist, and an inspired publisher. Her energetic presence marked all who came into contact with her. She rallied us into action over the tragedy of the last Lebanese war, hosting the Lebanon Lebanon evening for PEN members. Mai made Saqi Books not only a list but a site for understanding. She will be very much missed." Lisa Appignanesi, Deputy President
"It was an extraordinary privilege to work with Mai Ghoussoub. Vibrant, passionate, committed to giving a voice to persecuted writers whose words might not otherwise have reached the reading public, she was also sensitive to the anguish involved in giving shape to a harrowing account of torture and rape. It is wholly typical of her dedication and skill as a publisher that she was able to make space at Saqi Books for Asiye’s Story, Turkish journalist Asiye Guzel’s acccount of her ordeal in prison.
My most vivid memory of Mai is of her standing beside Asiye and Fiona Shaw at the launch of Asiye’s Story in 2003. Asiye was a main case for the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN, and Richard McKane, our vice-chair, had translated her words from the Turkish. Asiye’s lines, which she repeated under torture: `There is no way out/my heart/no other way/we will survive these pains,’ was a testament to her courage; they also spoke vividly to me of Mai’s own courage and determination in championing the cause of a free Lebanon.
Last September English PEN and Saqi Books cooperated on another joint venture, together with OpenDemocracy and Index. An evening of readings, music and performance celebrated the publication of Lebanon, Lebanon, the anthology Mai created in protest against the Israeli attack of 2006. At the New Player’s Theatre, many of Mai’s authors read against a video backdrop of images of war. It was a full house and, as Mai wished, all the proceeds went to the children of the Lebanon. An outstanding event of the evening was Mai’s performance of Texterminator, a piece she had previously brought to the Lyric Theatre. She was, said my daughter, who helped to stage manage the event, `Just awesome.’ Awesome, and irreplaceable." Carole Seymour-Jones, Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN
Mai was born in 1952 in Lebanon and moved to London in 1979, where she studied sculpture at Morley College and the Henry Moore Studio. That same year she and her childhood friend, André Gaspard, founded the Al Saqi Bookshop, which has become a beacon of Arab culture in London. In 1983 they founded Saqi Books and in 1990 started the Arabic publishing house Dar al-Saqi in Beirut.
Since the 1980s Mai combined her activities as an artist, writer and publisher. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She wrote numerous articles on culture, gender, aesthetics and the Middle East, is the author of many books in English, Arabic and French and her short stories have appeared in various anthologies.
In 2005 she wrote, directed and performed Texterminators at the Lyric and Dominion theatres in London, the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, and the Marignan Theatre in Beirut. It was described as ‘outstanding theatre’ by Time Out. Most recently, her work was featured in the exhibition Beirut Out of War at the MAN Museum in Liverpool.
Mai, a member of PEN, artist, writer and founding director of Saqi Books sadly passed away on 17 February 2007 in London. She will be dearly missed.
"We all mourn the sudden death on 17 February of Mai Ghoussoub, a formidable woman, a fine artist, and an inspired publisher. Her energetic presence marked all who came into contact with her. She rallied us into action over the tragedy of the last Lebanese war, hosting the Lebanon Lebanon evening for PEN members. Mai made Saqi Books not only a list but a site for understanding. She will be very much missed." Lisa Appignanesi, Deputy President
"It was an extraordinary privilege to work with Mai Ghoussoub. Vibrant, passionate, committed to giving a voice to persecuted writers whose words might not otherwise have reached the reading public, she was also sensitive to the anguish involved in giving shape to a harrowing account of torture and rape. It is wholly typical of her dedication and skill as a publisher that she was able to make space at Saqi Books for Asiye’s Story, Turkish journalist Asiye Guzel’s acccount of her ordeal in prison.
My most vivid memory of Mai is of her standing beside Asiye and Fiona Shaw at the launch of Asiye’s Story in 2003. Asiye was a main case for the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN, and Richard McKane, our vice-chair, had translated her words from the Turkish. Asiye’s lines, which she repeated under torture: `There is no way out/my heart/no other way/we will survive these pains,’ was a testament to her courage; they also spoke vividly to me of Mai’s own courage and determination in championing the cause of a free Lebanon.
Last September English PEN and Saqi Books cooperated on another joint venture, together with OpenDemocracy and Index. An evening of readings, music and performance celebrated the publication of Lebanon, Lebanon, the anthology Mai created in protest against the Israeli attack of 2006. At the New Player’s Theatre, many of Mai’s authors read against a video backdrop of images of war. It was a full house and, as Mai wished, all the proceeds went to the children of the Lebanon. An outstanding event of the evening was Mai’s performance of Texterminator, a piece she had previously brought to the Lyric Theatre. She was, said my daughter, who helped to stage manage the event, `Just awesome.’ Awesome, and irreplaceable." Carole Seymour-Jones, Chair of the Writers in Prison Committee of English PEN
Mai was born in 1952 in Lebanon and moved to London in 1979, where she studied sculpture at Morley College and the Henry Moore Studio. That same year she and her childhood friend, André Gaspard, founded the Al Saqi Bookshop, which has become a beacon of Arab culture in London. In 1983 they founded Saqi Books and in 1990 started the Arabic publishing house Dar al-Saqi in Beirut.
Since the 1980s Mai combined her activities as an artist, writer and publisher. Her art has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She wrote numerous articles on culture, gender, aesthetics and the Middle East, is the author of many books in English, Arabic and French and her short stories have appeared in various anthologies.
In 2005 she wrote, directed and performed Texterminators at the Lyric and Dominion theatres in London, the Unity Theatre in Liverpool, and the Marignan Theatre in Beirut. It was described as ‘outstanding theatre’ by Time Out. Most recently, her work was featured in the exhibition Beirut Out of War at the MAN Museum in Liverpool.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
Guardian Unlimited: Arts blog - books
Remembering Mai Ghoussoub (1952-2007)
Lucy Popescu
February 22, 2007 03:15 PM
Remembering Mai Ghoussoub (1952-2007)
Lucy Popescu
February 22, 2007 03:15 PM
Mai Ghoussoub, who died unexpectedly on Saturday, was many things to many people. But in the world of letters she was perhaps best known as a director of Saqi Books, aptly described as "a fiercely independent publisher for writers of all places and peoples". They publish award-winning authors as diverse as Moris Farhi and Maggie Gee.
Originally formed to provide a focus for Arab culture, the publishing house gradually cast its net wider. More recently, in October 2005, they cemented their success by founding the Telegram imprint, designed to concentrate specifically on international fiction.
Born in Lebanon, Mai Ghoussoub received her BA in French literature from the American University of Beirut. She moved to London in 1979 where she later studied sculpture at Morley College and cofounded Saqi Books. She continued her activities as an artist, a writer and a publisher until the time of her death. Her work was featured in many exhibitions both internationally and in the UK, and she wrote numerous articles on culture, aesthetics and Middle Eastern issues for international journals, and is the author of many books in English, Arabic and French.
I first got to know her through the writers' organisation PEN and we often joined forces, most recently on publicising Lebanon Lebanon, a collection of writing and drawings from some of the world's leading authors with all proceeds from the anthology going to Lebanese children's charities.
We shared a passion for theatre and human rights, and could talk about either subject for hours on end. She invited me to write an essay on political theatre for an Arabic journal and in 2005 I helped her with publicity for a wonderful piece of theatre she wrote, directed and performed, Texterminators, at the Lyric Hammersmith theatre in London.
A warm and generous host whose dinner parties and book launches were equally welcoming, Mai was the sort of person who would always thrust some additional gift into your arms as you left - a particular bottle of Lebanese wine, or a set of espresso cups that you had admired. A vibrant personality, an eminent cultural force in publishing, a fine spokesperson for Lebanon, and a wonderful friend, it is still hard to believe that she has been taken from us.
Her untimely death is a tragedy and I know her family and friends will miss her terribly. Publishing will be a poorer place without her.
Some of Mai's writings
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Remembering Mai Ghoussoub
Remembering Mai Ghoussoub
Anna Wilson
Maggie Gee
Anthony Barnett
20 - 2 - 2007
The loss of the Lebanese artist and publisher leaves her friends and colleagues bereft. Maggie Gee, Anna Wilson and Anthony Barnett pay tribute to Mai Ghoussoub.
------------------------------------------
* Anna Wilson, Saqi books
* Maggie Gee, novelist
* Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy
Anna Wilson, Saqi books
I spent many happy hours looking for things with Mai. Some of our most fruitful conversations and ideas emerged while searching for her handbag, her keys (kept in a giant pink spectacle-case with magical powers of camouflage), or, often, a manuscript. Every meeting was an opportunity to find things, and lose things; to leave things on desks and to take other things as mysteriously away. And it always delighted me to come upon her phone beside the coffee machine, or her bag under my desk, as it meant she would soon be back.
Now on my desk is the goofy, toothy, toy camel she brought from Dubai for my as-yet-unborn child. I was looking forward so much to having a child that Mai would know; it was one of the many reasons I think of my child as lucky. But I know that no amount of effort on my part will ever conjure for him, or for her, one tiny iota of this elegant, intelligent, humorous, humanist lady, who made time for every single person she met, who put such a refreshingly high value on life, who loved her friends and family with such devotion, who loved art and books and films and performance and human culture in all its forms, and who has left me behind, on this last leaving behind, with a sense of shocked disbelief that I should ever have had the outrageous good luck to know Mai and to work with her for four precious years.
Maggie Gee, novelist
Mai's article on a Beirut photo is typical of her: willing to rethink things, generous-spirited, empathic, ready to give credit to other artists and not rush to judgment or to condemn.
I wish more people could think and feel as Mai's extraordinary life taught her to think and feel. But as soon as I write that, I realise Mai would never have wanted more people to be like her, since she believed in variety and diversity above everything. I am probably just saying I wish from the bottom of my heart that she were not dead.
If you look at her life and her struggle to become an artist and fight for freedom of expression, to cross cultures, bringing what she learned from one life to enrich the next, to publish books she believed in, many of which, like my own The White Family, might never otherwise have seen the light of day, you see that Mai Ghoussoub was an emblematic figure for openDemocracy. This space carries forward the freedoms she believed in, and her friends will be grateful that you mourn her today.
Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy
I find Mai's death acutely painful in a way that may show something about her exceptional spirit.
For a long time I knew of her only as the legendary co-founder of Saqi books. I met her for the first time not long ago, got to know her slightly when she wrote for openDemocracy. Then she approached me, as she did others, to help with Lebanon, Lebanon, the collection she inspired as a protest against the Israeli attack in July-August 2006.
I had been enraged by the Israeli chief-of-staff's decision to punish an entire people for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. Here was a society on the way to recreating a secular, pluralist, economically promising country in the middle east and it was being smashed. I threw myself into helping Mai as much as I could.
From this moment of collaboration I learned of Mai's qualities as an artist. She was exceptionally gifted as a sculptor, and a radical choreographer of performance, as well as an inspirer of culture and publishing. We talked of my borrowing some of her sculpture, of going to Lebanon, of a possible collaboration between openDemocracy and Saqi books. In her emails she always added kisses to my partner. It was as if we were in our 30s, anticipating a working friendship tempered by experience.
The pain I feel at her death is that I was looking forward to getting to know her.
Our last conversation was when I called to ask her view of the large Hizbollah mobilisations and she said she found herself in a most uncomfortable and unusual situation of feeling she should support a government.
The article we published in openDemocracy a week ago - "Beirut and contradiction: reading the World Press Photo award" (13 February 2007) - was typically self-reflective, calmly taking the reader through her own change of mind about a prize-winning photograph from Lebanon which juxtaposed the war and young fashionable women. Mai examined the layers of experience it contained, brought it back to the viewer (and, as she put it, voyeur) and helped you to do what is so necessary yet so hard in today's world - to look twice at an image. It was her looking forward.
And so, I looked forward to working with her. She was open to the future because she was naturally, independently and continuously creative. Few countries need these qualities as much as Lebanon. I hope a new generation will step forward to try and fill her role with same intelligence and humanity.
Anna Wilson
Maggie Gee
Anthony Barnett
20 - 2 - 2007
The loss of the Lebanese artist and publisher leaves her friends and colleagues bereft. Maggie Gee, Anna Wilson and Anthony Barnett pay tribute to Mai Ghoussoub.
------------------------------------------
* Anna Wilson, Saqi books
* Maggie Gee, novelist
* Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy
Anna Wilson, Saqi books
I spent many happy hours looking for things with Mai. Some of our most fruitful conversations and ideas emerged while searching for her handbag, her keys (kept in a giant pink spectacle-case with magical powers of camouflage), or, often, a manuscript. Every meeting was an opportunity to find things, and lose things; to leave things on desks and to take other things as mysteriously away. And it always delighted me to come upon her phone beside the coffee machine, or her bag under my desk, as it meant she would soon be back.
Now on my desk is the goofy, toothy, toy camel she brought from Dubai for my as-yet-unborn child. I was looking forward so much to having a child that Mai would know; it was one of the many reasons I think of my child as lucky. But I know that no amount of effort on my part will ever conjure for him, or for her, one tiny iota of this elegant, intelligent, humorous, humanist lady, who made time for every single person she met, who put such a refreshingly high value on life, who loved her friends and family with such devotion, who loved art and books and films and performance and human culture in all its forms, and who has left me behind, on this last leaving behind, with a sense of shocked disbelief that I should ever have had the outrageous good luck to know Mai and to work with her for four precious years.
Maggie Gee, novelist
Mai's article on a Beirut photo is typical of her: willing to rethink things, generous-spirited, empathic, ready to give credit to other artists and not rush to judgment or to condemn.
I wish more people could think and feel as Mai's extraordinary life taught her to think and feel. But as soon as I write that, I realise Mai would never have wanted more people to be like her, since she believed in variety and diversity above everything. I am probably just saying I wish from the bottom of my heart that she were not dead.
If you look at her life and her struggle to become an artist and fight for freedom of expression, to cross cultures, bringing what she learned from one life to enrich the next, to publish books she believed in, many of which, like my own The White Family, might never otherwise have seen the light of day, you see that Mai Ghoussoub was an emblematic figure for openDemocracy. This space carries forward the freedoms she believed in, and her friends will be grateful that you mourn her today.
Anthony Barnett, openDemocracy
I find Mai's death acutely painful in a way that may show something about her exceptional spirit.
For a long time I knew of her only as the legendary co-founder of Saqi books. I met her for the first time not long ago, got to know her slightly when she wrote for openDemocracy. Then she approached me, as she did others, to help with Lebanon, Lebanon, the collection she inspired as a protest against the Israeli attack in July-August 2006.
I had been enraged by the Israeli chief-of-staff's decision to punish an entire people for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. Here was a society on the way to recreating a secular, pluralist, economically promising country in the middle east and it was being smashed. I threw myself into helping Mai as much as I could.
From this moment of collaboration I learned of Mai's qualities as an artist. She was exceptionally gifted as a sculptor, and a radical choreographer of performance, as well as an inspirer of culture and publishing. We talked of my borrowing some of her sculpture, of going to Lebanon, of a possible collaboration between openDemocracy and Saqi books. In her emails she always added kisses to my partner. It was as if we were in our 30s, anticipating a working friendship tempered by experience.
The pain I feel at her death is that I was looking forward to getting to know her.
Our last conversation was when I called to ask her view of the large Hizbollah mobilisations and she said she found herself in a most uncomfortable and unusual situation of feeling she should support a government.
The article we published in openDemocracy a week ago - "Beirut and contradiction: reading the World Press Photo award" (13 February 2007) - was typically self-reflective, calmly taking the reader through her own change of mind about a prize-winning photograph from Lebanon which juxtaposed the war and young fashionable women. Mai examined the layers of experience it contained, brought it back to the viewer (and, as she put it, voyeur) and helped you to do what is so necessary yet so hard in today's world - to look twice at an image. It was her looking forward.
And so, I looked forward to working with her. She was open to the future because she was naturally, independently and continuously creative. Few countries need these qualities as much as Lebanon. I hope a new generation will step forward to try and fill her role with same intelligence and humanity.
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
A lost summer- JOIN US TODAY- THURSDAY 22nd
This weekend we lost our dear friend and mentor Mai Ghoussoub, who passed away unexpectedly on Saturday afternoon. For those who did not know her, Mai was a unique individual whose love of life, Lebanon and literature inspired everyone who knew her.
No words could fully capture Mai's essence.
As a tribute we have therefore chosen to dedicate our book, " A Lost Summer: Postcards from Lebanon", to her memory. Mai gave the book her full support and celebrated its publication with the words 'a real gem'.
We at Lebanon United like to believe that her spirit and her love of Lebanon are reflected throughout its pages.
She would have wanted the book launch to go ahead, as she planned it, on the 22nd of February, at Saqi Books. Please join us there to celebrate the life of this remarkable woman whose memory will remain in our hearts forever.
Tributes to Mai have been pouring in from all directions. Dana has been collating these on her blog http://forafreelebanon.blogspot.com/index.html - which Mai loved.
Lebanon United
Lebanon United brings together a group of like-minded individuals from different nationalities, religions and political affiliations to help Lebanon in its time of need. It is a unifying thread for those with the will and desire to rebuild Lebanon.
Lebanon United brings together a group of like-minded individuals from different nationalities, religions and political affiliations to help Lebanon in its time of need. It is a unifying thread for those with the will and desire to rebuild Lebanon.
Obituary of the DailyStar...
Mai Ghoussoub, 1952-2007
Lebanese icon packed several lifetimes' worth of achievement into her 55 years
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Lebanese icon packed several lifetimes' worth of achievement into her 55 years
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Obituary BEIRUT: Lebanese artist, writer and publisher Mai Ghoussoub died suddenly on Saturday afternoon, after being hospitalized the day before for what seemed like no more than a particularly virulent flu. She was just 55 years old. With her untimely death, artists, writers and intellectuals all over the Arab world and the diaspora have lost one of their fiercest defenders of contemporary cultural production and artistic experimentation. Born in 1952 to a family from the lush green mountain town of Beit Shabab, Ghoussoub grew up in Beirut and attended the French Lycee. She came of age in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, and was precocious in exploring the intellectual ups and downs of radical, revolutionary leftist politics and university-style activism. She studied French literature at the Lebanese University and earned a degree in mathematics from the American University of Beirut. In 1977, Ghoussoub was seriously wounded in an explosion that ripped through Beirut in the early stages of the Civil War. She sought medical treatment in Paris and stayed, once it became clear the conflict wasn't going to end anytime soon. Two years later, Ghoussoub was in London, where she studied sculpture, lived the life of an artist and forged links with a community of Arabs in exile from the defeats and disappointments of the preceding two decades. She and her best friend Andre Gaspard - realizing there was no proper place in London to buy novels or nonfiction from the Arab world and fearless of the fact that they had no experience in publishing whatsoever - established Saqi Books in 1979. With time, the bookshop grew into a bi-continental publishing business, Dar al-Saqi, with offices in London and Beirut turning out daring books in English and Arabic on everything from art to politics. By the early 1980s, Ghoussoub was exhibiting her sculptures in clay, iron, resin and aluminum. She eventually added installation, performance and collage to her broad arsenal of artistic practices. In 1998, Ghoussoub published "Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within," a tangled and creative mix of memoir, fiction, recollection, old-fashioned yarn-spinning, postmodern pastiche, literary criticism and methodically plotted political essay. The book tapped into a major dilemma which, then and now, preoccupies Lebanese literature - the decision to stay or go. The book's opening chapter, "A Kind of Madness," begins with a young woman in Paris whose serene sense of exile is jolted out of place by the rude intrusion of a ringing telephone: "Beirut calling, hold the line." Ghoussoub's book delves into the character's memory of life in Lebanon and twists and turns around the people she used to know and the question she is reluctant to answer: What would have happened if she had stayed? In its trenchant depiction of the sometimes irrational attraction and repulsion of Beirut - "Beirut exhaled a fragrance of damp earth. A sweet, teasing scent filled her nostrils. A triumphant sun had cleared the grey thickness from the sky, appeasing its anger with an offering of blue" - the book has become required reading for anyone, foreign or native, harboring a love-hate fascination with the city. In addition to telling stories about such characters and places as Mrs. Nomy, Masrah Farouk (a text later incorporated into artist Nada Sehnaoui's site-specific installation on Martyrs Square about recollections of Beirut before the war), Umm Ali and Leila's grandmother, "Leaving Beirut" touches down on Chen Kaige's film "Farewell My Concubine," the video testimonies of so-called "martyrs," Andalusia and the Cid, photographs by Robert Capa, poems by Paul Eluard, French collaboration with the Nazis, torture in Argentina and tragedy in Bosnia and Rwanda. The voracious appetite of the book's intellectual, aesthetic and political concerns replicates in miniature the wide-ranging and all-consuming interests of its author. Ghoussoub seemed to dabble in everything with restless enthusiasm, boundless energy and unconditional generosity for people, places and subjects alike. In collaboration with Emma Sinclair-Webb, Ghoussoub edited a volume of essays in 2000 entitled "Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East," a groundbreaking and unprecedented book that took the gender lens - typically used to gaze upon women - and turned it to focus on men and the construction of masculinity, at a time when traditional definitions of what it means to become and be a man were - and still are - changing rapidly in the Arab world. In her 28 years at the helm of Saqi, Ghoussoub remained intensely involved in all the books she and Gaspard signed on to publish. She believed in them just as she believed in not just rocking but overturning, beating, smashing, shaking lose, salvaging the wreckage from and reconstituting better the entirety of the proverbial boat. During her tenure, Saqi published such books as Trevor Mostyn's "Censorship in Islamic Societies," Fuad Khuri's "The Body in Islamic Culture" and Brian Whitaker's "Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East," which is slated to be translated into Arabic, censors be damned. Over the years Saqi has also put back into circulation new editions or reissues of Ismail Kedare's critically acclaimed novel "Broken April," Hanna Batatu's "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq," Fatima Mernissi's "Beyond the Veil," Tawfik al-Hakim's "Diary of a Country Prosecutor" and Mohamed Choukri's cult-classic autobiography "For Bread Alone," along with important works by the poet Adonis and the prototypical Egyptian feminist Nawal el-Saadawi. Saqi has published books about the Jewish community in Iraq, the Yezidis and Kurdistan during World War I, along with Moris Farhi's raucous and lusty "novel in 13 positions" ("Young Turk"), Syrian writer Ammar Abdulhamid's novel about a man who suffers an acute olfactory ability to detect when a woman is having her period ("Menstruation") and Dubravka Ugresic's novel about young students who flee from Yugoslavia as it disintegrates only to find work in a fetish-footwear factory in Amsterdam ("The Ministry of Pain"). Saqi has put in a valiant effort in terms of filling the gaping void that exists in the documentation of Arab cultural production and artistic expression. At a time when few archives exist to record the work of artists from the Middle East, Saqi has printed beautiful monographs for Hussein Madi and Mohamed Rawas (a painting of whose graces the cover of "Leaving Beirut"). In early October 2005, Saqi spun off a fiction imprint called Telegram Books, and Ghoussoub's wild productivity in responding to the war in Lebanon during the summer of 2006 - not just with articles and emails but with books, exhibitions and performances - attests to the outrageous energy she gave so generously to the world of arts and letters. Ghoussoub supported artists, filmmakers, musicians, young designers and, of course, writers both established and unknown. Nothing was too experimental or "out there" for her, and she gave everyone who came to her with an idea, no matter how half-baked, a fair shake. Moreover - and as was noted by one of the many people to have posted tributes to her online in the last few days - Ghoussoub was cool. Seeing her around Beirut or London, at exhibitions or performances or festivals, was like catching sight of Debbie Harry in New York. Ghoussoub embodied brains and the life of the mind with both style and street cred. She was icon, she was an example, she made things happen, she left a remarkable record of work, and she will be deeply, painfully missed.
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