Suad Amiry at Weavers’ Studio
Suad Amiry at Weavers Studio
Well, the Kolkata Lit Fest is over, having left me with a thumping cold and a temperature, unfortunately, and I’m likely to be out of action till tomorrow. The talk on Saturday was good and interesting, though rather poorly attended because everyone was listening to Five Little Indians in the bookstore. Not only did our timings clash, but poor Actionist, to whom I’d sent the original times, turned up a day late and missed the graphic novel session. The festival has been plagued with confusion over timings, venues and speakers, some events having at least two options for all three. Tut tut.
We had a good discussion, having actually managed to behave ourselves quite well. When I’m on panels like this I usually manage to stick my foot in my mouth, but thankfully they only sered the beer at the end, so I was saved. Sonia Jabbar read out her story from Electric Feather, the book of erotica that Ruchir Joshi has edited for Tranquebar.
But the silly season is far from over. The book fair is ahead of us, and writers from all over the world will converge on Kolkata and try not to choke on the dust at Milon Mela. Hence I shall start the fortnight of bibliomania by being in conversation with Suad Amiry, a Palestinian writer, in the much more comfortable surroundings of Weavers’ Studio in Ballygunj Place on 27 January.
Suad Amiry will also be coming to Jadavpur University Department of English on 28 January and will be in conversation with students at the Audio Visual Room from 3pm.
Here’s the press release:
Suad Amiry is an architect, and Founder-Director of RIWAQ: the Centre for Architectural Conservation in Ramallah. After growing up between Amman, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo, she went on to study architecture at the American University of Beirut and the Universities of Michigan and Edinburgh. Amiry has been living in Ramallah since 1981; she participated in the 1991–1993 Israeli-Palestinian Peace negotiations in Washington. She won Italy’s prestigious Viareggio-Versilia Prize in 2004, and her first book, Sharon and My Mother-in-Law was long-listed for the Lettre Ulysses Award for Reportage. Her most recent book is Murad, Murad. She’s published by Granta and Bloomsbury in the UK. I don’t think she has an Indian publisher, but Ritu Menon’s Women Unlimited is organising her tour of the country
Her book Menopausal Palestine: Women at the Edge is an irreverent, political story linking the state of Palestine to the lives of ten women for whom Palestine—or its absence—was the centrifugal force around which their lives revolved. For 40 years, from the 1967 war till Hamas’ victory in 2006, these women shared a past and unfulfilled dreams and aspirations. With that victory, however, they now mourn the loss of a diverse Arab culture, of secularism and pluralism, and their replacement by what Amiry calls ‘local nationalism’ and ‘global religious fundamentalism’. Amiry recalls the social and political history of Palestine ‘through the lives of my PLO women’s generation’, in what can only be called a personal-political tour de force.
