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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.
Mai Ghoussoub,
an artist,
writer and publisher, was born and brought up in Beirut, and lived in London from 1979. Her
books include Leaving Beirut: Women and the Wars Within (Saqi, 2001)
and (co-edited with Emma Sinclair-Webb) Imagined Masculinities: Male
Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East (Saqi, 2006)
Mai Ghoussoub
wrote four articles for openDemocracy:
"Abu Ghraib: I do not know where
to look for hope"
(10 May 2004)
"Who is serious?"
(9 June 2004)
"Lebanon: slices of life"
(31 October 2006)
"Beirut and contradiction:
reading the World Press Photo award"
(13 February 2007)
Mai Ghoussoub
died in London
on 17 February 2007.
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