{"id":13173,"date":"2015-04-20T07:18:34","date_gmt":"2015-04-20T11:18:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=13173"},"modified":"2015-04-20T07:18:34","modified_gmt":"2015-04-20T11:18:34","slug":"interview-with-marina-warner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/interview-with-marina-warner\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview with Marina Warner…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n
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…\u00a0on the Revelations of Classical Arabic Literature and Judging the Man Booker\u00a0International<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

by mlynxqualey<\/a>\u00a0via Arab Literature (in English)<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\"unnamed-1\"<\/a>Marina Warner is an internationally renowned novelist, critic, and cultural historian who is host to a\u00a0massive\u00a0upcoming Arabic literature workshop in Oxford and the chair of judges for the 2015 Man Booker International:<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Warner’s\u00a0award-winning works of popular scholarship have touched on classical Arabic literature, as in Scheherazade’s Children: Global Encounters with the Arabian Nights<\/i> (2013), co-edited with Philip F. Kennedy, and Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights<\/i> (2011), for which she won a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Truman Capote Award, and a Sheikh Zayed Book Award. Warner is also the recipient of the 2015 Holberg Prize, which is awarded to “outstanding researchers in the arts and humanities, social science, law, or theology,” and is set to be presented in June.<\/span><\/p>\n

In a Skype interview, she spoke about the LAL’s upcoming event at All Souls College at the University of Oxford on April 25 2015 , “A Corpus Not a Canon: A Workshop on the Library of Arabic Literature<\/span><\/a>,” as well as the forthcoming LAL collection Consorts of the Caliphs,\u00a0<\/i>the\u00a0process and\u00a0project of being a judge for the Man Booker International, and more.<\/span><\/p>\n

ArabLit: How did you get to this point, of being part of the Library of Arabic Literature?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Marina Warner:\u00a0<\/b>Philip Kennedy helped me, when I was asked to give a lecture at a memorial for Edward Said at Columbia in 2006. I wanted to explore the name of the West-East Divan Orchestra, because Edward, who was the great scourge of “Orientalism,” had chosen Goethe\u2019s lyric cycle of poems, which could be seen as quite Orientalist by his standards, as the title for his great orchestra.<\/span><\/p>\n

Basically, because I can\u2019t read Arabic, I asked Philip for help with the sources that Goethe was using. Of course, Goethe couldn\u2019t read them either. So I went into the history of the eighteenth century translation of ghazals <\/i>and so forth, and I was very much guided by Philip to the right references and articles. And then I wrote an essay that eventually turned into a chapter of Stranger Magic. <\/i>I\u2019ve since done a tremendous amount of work on encounters, translations, and cross-fertilization between the Middle East and Europe, and I\u2019m very committed to this line of inquiry. I have evolved an interest in how texts exist as imaginary zones — mythemes, if you like\u00a0—\u00a0taking different forms according to the language in which they are incarnated, the place and time.<\/span><\/p>\n

I realized that many of the books that I consider absolutely fundamental to my knowledge of literature are texts that I can\u2019t read in the original. For example, the Odyssey<\/i>. Although I can puzzle out Greek, there\u2019s no way I can read it transparently, to enjoy it. So I\u2019ve basically been reading the Odyssey in multiple versions across time. And the same can be said about the Epic of Gilgamesh<\/i>, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses<\/i>. I can read Latin, but not fluently as I read French or Italian. I like and need translations.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then I have a political concern with trying to raise awareness. One of the maxims of the West-East Divan Orchestra is “knowledge is the beginning.” And I think that the only thing someone like myself, who\u2019s a reader and a writer, can do in the present dangerous and very distressing situation of the world\u2019s conflicts, is to try and read across cultures, in order to understand a bit more.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: And now you\u2019re helping to stage this workshop on April 25.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>Yes, and then we\u2019re doing this massive workshop, and I hope it\u2019s going to come off without incident.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s very much larger than we expect. I think All Souls is rather reeling at this mass descent of Orientalists.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL:\u00a0How many people are you expecting?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>We\u2019ve got around 40 coming who are invited from all different parts of the world. And then we\u2019ve had quite a lot of interest in Oxford itself, and we\u2019ve now got a waiting list. Fire regulations restrict the capacity to 100.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL:\u00a0That\u2019s unfortunate.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>Well, it isn\u2019t really, because I do want there to be a conversation —\u00a0not a grandstanding event, but a discussion between people who are working on similar things. A hundred is already a bit large for that, but many of them know each other already so that will help keep the conversations lively.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL:\u00a0This will be the first LAL event in England?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>It is actually rather surprising that LAL hasn\u2019t had a proper showcase in Britain till now. This will be the first time the list is discussed in England. And I do think that shows the kind of ignorance that I\u2019ve been worried about. So my role is to try and help get the texts out there, in all their variety, their heterodoxy, and their richness. So people don\u2019t continue having this terribly monolithic view: on the one hand Scheherazade, and on the other, Taliban.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL:\u00a0This is why you\u2019re calling it a workshop and not, for instance, a symposium, because you want to foster discussion of projects?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>Yes, exactly.<\/span><\/p>\n

Also, we haven\u2019t asked for prepared papers, so it\u2019s also meant to be fairly informal. We want it to seed ideas.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL:\u00a0What are you hoping will come out of it?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I\u2019d like the barrier that segregates Arabic literature and its traditions from the rest of literature to dissolve in the way that it\u2019s dissolved between European literature and Latin American literature, for example. The status of Arabic literature in the general context of studying literature is very marginal. That\u2019s partly because the texts haven\u2019t been accessible.<\/span><\/p>\n

For that reason, the Library is very, very valuable.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL:\u00a0And there will be additional events with the invited authors and academics, after the workshop?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I\u2019m doing a series of seminars, called “Orienting Fiction,” following weekly after the workshop, at a tangent to it, as it is concerned with living literature and motifs. I want to explore how the different modes of fictional narration in Europe and in Arabic are learning from and intertwining with one another. So within the novel, a very large category, Arabic writers are bringing traditional methods of their own.<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, Hoda Barakat, who is on our Man Booker International list, patterns in a symbolic way. The Tiller of Waters<\/i> is constructed around imagery of fabrics, which provide the cadences of the story. It\u2019s a very poetic structure and an interwoven structure\u00a0—\u00a0it is a fabric in itself.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ibrahim Al-Koni, who\u2019s also coming to the seminars, and is also on the International Man Booker list, is drawing on Tuareg folklore, customs, mysticism\u00a0—\u00a0a whole world of experience and imagination We\u2019re enriching the corpus of fiction by acknowledging the innovations coming from these writers, which are, in many important ways, their own responses to their cultural traditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: There is a panel discussing Consorts of the Caliphs<\/i>, which isn’t available yet, to which you wrote the foreword. How did you come to that book?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I think it has a feminist interest, and there is a feminist strand to my work since the Seventies. I certainly found it very interesting in those terms. The fact that the women\u2019s trace on history was fairly light, and had it not been for these quite fragmentary details that Ibn al-Sai\u2019s brought out, that he\u2019s recorded, some of that trace would be lost. There\u2019s a certain poetic side to that.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking about doing something inspired by the book.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Can you talk about it?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I\u2019m going to NYU next autumn, to the Center for Ballet and the Arts, and I\u2019m hoping to create a ballet with composer Joanna MacGregor and choreographer Kim Brandstrup.<\/span><\/p>\n

They may not feel immediately involved in the subject, so I have to put it to them, but I\u2019m quite interested in how many of these women were involved in creating water irrigation systems and supplies, and had the people\u2019s access to water in their minds. So I was thinking of trying to do something watery in a ballet — a strong metaphorical theme in the history of the form\u00a0—\u00a0think of Swan Lake!<\/span><\/p>\n

It seemed to me that this was a way I could shift Orientalism\u00a0—\u00a0that instead of having houris, we could have water-engineers; a different kind of enchantment.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: So there\u2019s a definite feminist interest in Consorts of the Caliphs<\/i>. What about other aspects that would interest people from across other disciplines?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>One of the aspects of it that I thought could be discussed is the concept of slavery, which is very complicated. One can see in the Consorts of the Caliphs, <\/i>as one can also see in the Arabian Nights, <\/i>that the word is a very elastic one and its English resonance narrow and very unsatisfactory. The editors and translators of Consorts have decided to use \u2018slave\u2019 for the favorites of the Caliphs, and they gave this decision a great deal of thought. That is one of the things that we can discuss at All Souls.<\/span><\/p>\n

The fact that slavery was practiced and then used metaphorically in different ways, I think, deserves more discussion.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: In your foreword, you talk about the Consorts of the Caliphs<\/i> and the Nights. <\/i>How do you see the relationship between those two texts?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I think I\u2019m right in saying that some of the traces of earliest culture and politics in the Nights<\/i> are pretty coeval with the Consorts of the Caliphs. <\/i>The vision of Baghdad in the Nights <\/i>reflects that period. There\u2019s a way in which that peak of Abbasid civilization colors the stories in the Nights<\/i>, and we glimpse it in some of the stories.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

AL: And do you think this collection will have mainstream interest?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>These volumes represent a necessary first level: accessible publications for further dissemination. This is the kind of raw material that writers will use, and teachers, and filmmakers and other communications media. People who do research will use these books, but readers won\u2019t so much take them on the tube to work unless they\u2019re really professionally interested. They don\u2019t have quite that feel. But the paperbacks, I think, will have that feel.<\/span><\/p>\n

But I don\u2019t think that\u2019s against the Library\u2019s editions. The scholarship establishes the texts. It\u2019s a vital and necessary stage.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: One of the sessions at the April 25 workshop talks about cultural diplomacy. I wondered how you saw the LAL books in the context of cultural diplomacy.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>Crucial. One hopes that they will contribute a more nuanced and subtle and more informed picture of the very, very complicated and very different phases and interests of the whole culture that has flourished in Arabic. It\u2019s vastly varied and a vast area of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

I think the Sufi poet \u2018A\u2019ishah al-Ba\u2019uniyyah will be a revelation. A woman teacher with a mystical vision. Her work has very striking resonance with other mystics, for example the thirteenth-century Flemish mystic Hadewijch, who wrote a form of ecstatic poetry which is really quite close to \u2018A\u2019ishah\u2019s. So there is some very interesting comparative thinking to be done.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Will there be more LAL events in Britain after this?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I hope there will be. There\u2019s a lot of interest in the people who are coming. Abdelfattah Kilito is going to do the first seminar in my series, and then he\u2019s going to SOAS in London, and they\u2019re thrilled that he\u2019s coming. And al-Koni\u2019s also going to go to SOAS. I think once one takes a step, others rise to the occasion.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Did your familiarity with the Nights, <\/i>and with LAL, and Arabic literature, at all inform your readings for the International Booker?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>Very much so, yes. I was asked to be the chair, and the chair\u2019s job is to choose the judges. I chose them\u00a0—\u00a0and I was very lucky that they agreed to do it\u00a0—\u00a0because they have an interest beyond the Anglo-American metropoles.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that I wanted to impose. But I think the way communications are now happening in the world, and the way languages are existing in these forms of transmigration, that we need to consider the map of literature from multiple perspectives rather than from the commercial poles where the publishing powerhouses are.<\/span><\/p>\n

And it\u2019s very significant that actually most <\/i>of our writers on the list, and many of the writers whom we read for the prize, are published by small publishers. It\u2019s the small presses that are reading widely and finding interesting voices. The voices of our time.<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the writers whom we read, who unfortunately didn\u2019t quite make the list, is Bensalem Himmich. And Himmich is a very strong example of writing about the past in a very detailed, rich way —\u00a0as Gamal al-Ghitani does, in Zayni Barakat<\/i>, a novel I also admire profoundly. These are exemplary historical writings, that bring the past into living being, but at the same time they\u2019re actually palimpsests through which one sees the present time.<\/span><\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t a question of changing the vantage point to another vantage point, it\u2019s actually accepting a model of the world that is very internet-like, in the sense that it\u2019s flat and networked, rather than radiating from New York or London.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Will the judges meet again in person before May 19?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>We meet on May 17 for the final decision.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: You\u2019re re-reading before then?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>We\u2019re reading some more, yes. Reading again.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: It must have been overwhelming. I\u2019ve spoken with many of the judges of the \u201cArabic Booker\u201d (the International Prize for Arabic Fiction), and all of them have eye tics by the end.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I must say, I found it hugely enjoyable. The Arabic fiction prize is submitted by publishers?<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Yes.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>That\u2019s a drawback for judges, because it creates an enormous list, not of your own choosing. We were very privileged, because we came, all of us, with a pool of books we had read\u00a0—\u00a0in our work and in our lives\u00a0—\u00a0and we\u2019re all of a certain age with different areas of knowledge. So there\u2019s a lot of reading behind us. Basically I asked the judges: Why don\u2019t you recommend writers who you think could win and who the rest of us haven\u2019t heard of? And I suppose we started, therefore, with a pool of five writers each, whom we each didn\u2019t know, who we each thought could win. There were lots and lots more who were famous, who we all knew about and we\u2019d all read and we discussed them as well, of course.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: It\u2019s very different from a publisher-submitted prize.<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>And those only look at a single year. This is a prize for a lifetime\u2019s body of work —\u00a0though not a lifetime achievement award —\u00a0so it goes right back.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s a very pleasant prize to read for. It was a huge amount of work, and it\u2019s also very taxing on one\u2019s house. My house is now impossible. I haven\u2019t been able to have a friend to a meal. It requires rebuilding Babel each time I try and sit down at my kitchen table.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Are there other Arab writers who were close to the shortlist?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>The chair always writes an article about the prize, and I want to pay tribute to Radwa Ashour, because she was a strong candidate for the shortlist if she hadn\u2019t died. I can\u2019t guarantee that she would\u2019ve been on, but she was definitely under consideration.<\/span><\/p>\n

AL: Is there a part of the April 25 workshop that you\u2019re most looking forward to?<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

MW:\u00a0<\/b>I suppose I am looking forward to the cultural diplomacy panel because that\u2019s the one I can engage with without being at sea. And it is a very live issue. Obviously, there are all kinds of critical considerations —\u00a0criticisms of the Emirates, for example —\u00a0and questions about the limits of collaborations, and so forth. All these questions are very, very crucial.<\/span><\/p>\n

This interview first appeared on the <\/i>Library of Arabic Literature<\/i><\/span><\/a> website, through which you can <\/i>pre-order a copy of the\u00a0<\/i>Consorts of the Caliphs<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note: Since this interview, I have received an invitation to the April 25 workshop and look forward to\u00a0participating and writing about the discussions.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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