Poetry and prose by moonlight in Jerusalem after police close Palestinian National Theatre

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Jerusalem, June 8, (Pal Telegraph) - Palestine's second literary festival, Palfest, took twenty international writers and publishers to five Palestinian cities in late May were undeterred by a heavy handed police action closing the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem for both the opening and final nights.

The British and French cultural centres stepped forward to welcome the writers into their gardens and host the evening events of reading and music honoring Jerusalem as this year's Centre of Arab Culture. It held a week of packed public readings and university workshops.

The inspiration for the festival came from the great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said's phrase about "using the'power of culture against the culture of power". And the ambitious idea was dreamed up in a London home by a handful of writers and people concerned about the deteriorating situation of the Palestinians. The chair is the Egyptian writer, Ahdaf Soueif and funding has come from many sources, individuals, as well as the British Council and UNESCO.

The patrons of the festival include the late Mahmoud Darwish, the late Harold Pinter, Chinua Achebe, John Berger, and Seamus Heaney - reflecting support for the initiative from across continents and from the pinnacle of great contemporary writers. Where politicians have failed for more than sixty years, the world has grown weary and indifferent, and Palestinians have become stereotypes of violent despair, Palfest was born to show western writers a hidden world of culture, while bringing Palestinians new faces and voices to amuse and inspire.

A handful of Palestinian writers, such as Raja Shehadah and Suad Amiry from Ramallah, and poets from the US Suheir Hammad and Natalie Handal, joined the group, contrasting and complementing British writers such as Michael Palin, Carmen Callil, Jeremy Harding, and Deborah Moggach. This year also featured writers from diverse backgrounds, such as the Canadian prize winning author Moyez Vassanji (bringing his law student son along) whose roots are in East Africa and India, and whose novels range across continents and centuries; Jamal Mahjoub, a Briton living in Spain with a Sudanese past to draw on; Henning Mankel, a Swede living part of his time in Mozambique, whose books and and plays are published in many languages; Abdelrazzak Gurnah, a Briton originally from Zanzibar; Claire Messud, an American with a family background in France and Algeria; and Robin Yassin-Kassab, a Briton with a Syrian father.

The visitors came into the Occupied Palestinian Territories through the Allenby Bridge, beginning a sharp learning curve in Israeli attitudes when five of the group - all with Arab names in their western passports - were held at the border for a lengthy process of checks and interviews which took place out of sight. But all were allowed through after four hours, and after an hour driving first through desert and then under the shadow of settlements looming from every hilltop, we arrived in East Jerusalem in time for a quick change and a short walk to the Palestinian National Theatre.

Last year the theatre was the scene of our moving final performance, joined by Palestinian musicians from the Edward Said Conservatoire in Ramallah. This year, when Jerusalem is the Arab world's Capital of Arab Culture, the performance was halted before we got into the building. Armed police and soldiers ordered everyone to leave the venue, and after a few minutes of anxious milling about in the courtyard where a bookstall and refreshment table were set up, the French cultural attaché invited the festival participants and audience to walk to the garden of the French cultural centre. Chairs, lights and sound materialized with extraordinary speed and an improvised shortened version of the evening readings under a sliver of a moon over Jerusalem was met with huge enthusiasm.

Over the next days when the group went to Ramallah, Jenin, Bethlehem and Hebron, the visitors had a crash course in the checkpoints, tunnels, settler roads, and permits (or lack of them) which dictate why the festival travels to Palestinians who are confined to their own small Bantustan in the Occupied West Bank by the closures and permits system.

Besides the evening readings - several of which were enormously enhanced by various musical ensembles provided by the festival's Palestinian partner, Yabous - the writers led workshops with students in universities in Bir Zeit, Jenin and Hebron. Students were enthusiastic, curious, and very well prepared with their questions, most of them English Literature majors in their final year. Many were hoping and planning for the chance to go abroad for a second degree.

The visitors also had a chance to see a wonderful exhibition in Bir Zeit's Ethnographic museum, celebrating Jerusalem's status this year as Cultural Capital of the Arab world, with pictures of the city by well known Palestinian artists who used to live in Jerusalem, and artifacts from old Arab houses in the city.

There was a chance to see those same beautiful historic houses being restored in Hebron at the impressive Hebron Rehabilitation Committee in the Old City, surrounded and infiltrated by aggressive settlers, mostly from the US. A sobering short film showed Palestinian children being escorted to school by ecumenical groups from around the world under daily aggression from settlers and their children. Hebron's Old City is a ghost town with many shops closed either by the Israelis, or deserted as the owners have been squeezed out from making a living. Around the mosque - more than half of which is controlled by the settlers - the petty violence of playing loud music to drown out the call to prayer, or the burly settler who came out to film the writers, gave a pale snapshot of the Palestinians' extremely hard life in the city.

The writers' tour ended with a second closure by military order of the Palestinian National Theatre. This time it was the British Council that came to the rescue by providing another moonlight garden for the closing event. This time the writers read, not from their own work but from favourite books, and the words of Dickens and W H Auden filled the air. It was hard to understand how a society could have become so paranoid that such an evening could be seen as a threat, and so vicious and stupid that preventing this small cultural pleasure of Palestinians on one evening could seem like a good idea.

by Victoria Brittain, a writer and journalist, and a member of the board of Palfest.

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