Its a celebration of culture with around 500 events across ten days. The aim of the festival is to bring together some of the worlds greatest writers and thinkers to share their stories and ideas. Im speaking to the egyptian author ahdaf soueif. Her novel the map of love made her the first muslim woman to be nominated for a booker prize. Her latest book, this is not a border, is an anthology celebrating her own extraordinary literary festival. Applause ahdaf comes here hotfooting it basically from the staging the 10th. Were in our 30th Anniversary here at hay, but for the palfest, the Palestine Literary festival, its their 10th anniversary, and she has come here straight from organising that, and we want to find out a little bit more, so welcome to ahdaf soueif. Thank you. Applause just tell us a little bit, how did it go . 0k, well, first ijust want to say it is a tremendous privilege and pleasure being back at hay. This place has its own spirit, its own buzz, and its always wonderful to be here. Basically, just for those who dont know, the idea that came to us was, i mean, looking for ways, as people who write or work with culture in general, looking for ways to kind of ameliorate, or influence for the better, the situation on the ground. We thought that if we took if we took artists and writers from the west to go and work in palestine, to do literary readings, seminars, workshops in universities and so on for one week and they would have the you would be giving them a unique experience. You would be enabling them to the experience of living like a palestinian under occupation, for one week. And you would be giving the palestinians exposure to world class artists and events. And then basically, everyone would go their own way. And so, one thing that was very clear, for example, is that we would not avail ourselves of the privileges that come with carrying a foreign, and particularly a western, passport, so we would travel as a palestinian with a west bank id, would travel. And that meant, for example, not using the airport, going in through jordan on the allenby crossing, and also going through checkpoints. The other thing was that basically, because of the checkpoints, its difficult for people to move from town to town. And so we decided it would be perfect that it would move to its origins and so it became kind of like a circus, or we call it a cultural roadshow, and its on the move every day and meeting students at universities and doing events, so it is quite challenging. Just to give you an idea, michael palin, in the way that only he can say it, and you know, he is one of the contributors to this book of essays, by the way, says, you know, for some reason i cannot remember where he went but he said for some reason, our stalls of books, cakes and tea were deemed to be a Security Threat on that occasion. It was closed down. So, you know, definitely, it isnt hay, thats for sure. No. There was one point, i think it was three years ago, when we had a Closing Event in silwan, which is right next tojerusalem, and basically there was trouble and there was tear gas and it was either turn back and not a Closing Event or walk through the tear gas, so we walked through the tear gas and one of the authors who was american and i wont say who he was but he was, like, really upset. I gave him half an onion, which is what you do you put an onion to your nose and that kind of neutralises it, and he just took it and then he went its a onion we cant swear, can we . No. Preferably not so, its a onion laughter. Would you mind just reading a passage from your essay onjerusalem . This is not a border is a collection of pieces written either during, after or before this book, from people who have been at at palfest, and i chose to write aboutjerusalem because for the last four orfive years, we have really seen the push against and intojerusalem becoming stronger and stronger. And at the Heart Ofjerusalem is of course the Dome Of The Rock within al haram al sarif, which is the sanctuary, al aqsa, and its always, ever since i started doing this the first time i went to palestine in 2000, there was a moment when i walked into the sanctuary and i really, really felt felt such a piece. I mean, its such a beautiful space and throughout the festival, i have really tried wanted to give the visitors that sense, to give them that moment where you walk in and the world falls way. So i chose to describe the sanctuary and what it means and its history and here, this isjust the second paragraph in that piece. Um, it says a sanctuary on a hilltop, around it, the earth fell away. Palestinians are masters of terracing. They builtjerusalem on a hill and the old city slopes gently towards the south east, towards the sanctuary. And there, the central and biggest of 26 terraces is for the Dome Of The Rock. From the south, 20 steps lead up to it. From the north, just nine. You can see the dome from the surrounding hills, but you cannot see it from the city. Only when you come very close to one of the great gateways, when you are almost through it, is the dome revealed. Light almost floating, framed by necklaces of slim, colonnaded arches, and attended by other domes and pulpits and fountains, each of which, alone, would have commandeered your attention. But in the sanctuary, they are modest, demanding nothing, content to be here. Absolutely beautiful. Thank you. Applause i love that bit, actually. We discussed you reading it because i think even, you know, someone like me in the News Business but i suspect all of you sitting at home and watching the news, we get a slightly distorted view, dont we, of what is going on, and that is such a contrast and such a wonderful contrast. I think it is such a central thing to our thinking this issue of the distorted view, so that was when i first went, what i was struck by most was the disparity between what i expected and what i saw. I expected scenes of unmitigated misery and destruction and what i found was a society that was really trying to get on with the business of living. And, just markets and Birthday Parties and weddings and cultural events and screenings and all, like, absolutely under threat and so there is, there is tremendous grace and tremendous beauty and a tremendous will to live and to be part of the, you know, all the conversations that are going on in the world, and that is what really touches the heart. All right. If you dont mind i would like to leave this is not a border for a book thats about i know this is the book that youve got out at the moment. There are lots of other things i want to talk about one of which is cairo. You are a cairean, your city, you wrote a book about. Well, lets call it what we called it the time a revolution but before we talk about that, i mean, apparently you are asked many, many years previously to write a book about cairo and you didnt, and you waited until after the revolution. What was that about . Yeah, uh, it i needed money. Laughter no. Thats not true well, its always true. Not about the money, but you felt you werent ready. No, i wasnt ready. No, what i mean is i signed the contract to write a book About Cairo Bloomsbury were bringing out a very nice little series by authors about their favourite cities. Edmund wright wrote about paris and peter carey wrote about sydney, i think, and i was going to write about cairo and i didnt because. Itjust kind of like seemed quite sad because terrible things were being done to the city, were being done to the country this was under the mubarak regime and every time i started to write, it felt like some sort of elegy this it used to be. And so, i didnt do it for years and years. And then basically, yeah, january 2011 happened, and within a few days, Alexandra Pringle my editor at bloomsbury was on the phone saying well, how about that book now . So, yeah, i produced the cairo book in the kind of, yeah, the fervour of. And the title of the book is cairo my city, our revolution. Ahdaf, i was there as a reporter and i was trying to dig out some of my scripts but i sort of remember it, and i remembera line. I sort of said looking at the crowd in Tahrir Square and it was actually, it must have been a friday, and a group christians had sort of. Encircled. Encircled the muslims as they prayed and i came up with this line of muslims and christians, young and old, rich and poor, come together in this uprising, in this revolution. I thought about that, i thought my god, how naive you were i mean, but you celebrated it at the time as well. Goodness yeah. Yeah, my god ok, i think that. I think that you were not naive. I think that you were absolutely spot on and correct and perceptive, and i think that everything that happened and we thought happened was true. And there was a moment, it lasted several months, when people rediscovered their best selves and actually said so explicitly, and where everybody wanted to be the best that they could be and all this altruism came out and all this talent and all this energy and all of it, like, in the service of a communal good. And that was just expressed all the time. And people were, like, im happy to suffer hardship for two years, three years, as long as we are in the right road, as long as this is for everyone and we are building and there was even the sense that what was happening was informing not just egypt, but was informing the world. What i want to say is that the backlash, the counter revolution, the backlash, the things that we are living through now have been so very bad that it is quite difficult to hold on to the belief in the reality of what happened. I think that myjob and the job of people like me is to always create a space for things to happen. You do that by maintaining the hope and the web of connections, people, possibilities that can come to something in the future. We have 60,000 young people in prison in egypt, one of them is my nephew, hes just one of them. We have people being disappeared off the streets because the regime has two have elections next year it started three weeks ago just picking up anybody who could be thought of as an activist across the country and vanishing them into prisons. Since general sisi took power, 19 new prisons have been built in egypt. 19 new prisons and the contracts for building the prisons go to the military, and the contracts for refurbishing the prisons go to the home office. So basically you would be letting the 60,000 kids down if you just decided to be pessimistic. So you work in whatever space is allowed, and actually when youre on the ground you see lots and lots of grounds for hope because people dont stop working, people dont stop agitating, trying to build, creating organisations, writing, having photography exhibitions, whatever it is that people do, they carry on doing. You talk about working in whatever space is available to you, the space youve occupied for a very, very long time has been this Halfway House if you like between the orient and the west and the 0ccident, youve written about it in mezzaterra, but i think you say now that that space is becoming smaller and smaller, youre finding it more and more awkward, with that the right . Actually mezzaterra was published in 2004 and after 2011 i actually think in different terms i think there were many of us who occupy what i would call the common ground. The people who actually do see difference as interesting and exciting and productive. I think that everywhere in the world there is a push to try to create a better and a new world that is more hospitable to the young, and more hospitable to the planet and that allows for a Better Future, and that that is being clamped down on by a system and that is the fight we are having. Its not between east and west, its between the people who want a Better Future for everybody and the people who want to keep things as they are and clamp down on it and use it and exploit it even more. 0k, ive sort of broken all. Applause ive broken all the rules i set myself at the beginning about timings. One last question very quickly before i let you have a go. Youve talked about all of this not just as a journalist, notjust as an activist, but youre a novelist too. Let me just ask you, the most famous book perhaps is the map of love, what is it you were able to do as a novelist in exploring some of the ideas weve already talked about that you cant do as a campaigner or as a journalist . I think that its very dangerous to embark on a novel or an a purely artistic project with an agenda in mind. I think that the map of love explored, asked questions about things that were very much on my mind at the time, about whether when i say, i love you, you understand by love you understand the same thing. Language is communication, whether it was possible to actually love properly across culture, what was the relationship between the past and now . So, yeah, it asked questions and it explored them and i guess that is what. That is what fiction or art can do, that it can throw out these questions and lets readers make up their own minds, although of course that is also what we do with palfest, we put things out there and let people make up their minds but of course articles are much more direct and much more immediate. A novel is a very, very different project. I mean, in a way you have to kind of absent yourself completely from the day to day and the detail of the day to day in order to be able to just, sort of, have the space to fashion a world in which your novel can happen. Time for you to ask some questions. Yes . My question is a bit of a follow up on what george was just asking, its about the craft itself. How do you go about, thinking of the map of love, with Historical Fiction integrating rather seamlessly as you did the political and social history into your story and your plot without letting it dominate the story that probably is going to attract some group of leaders, because as you said you cant come to it loaded with a political message. How do you do that, what advice would you give . If youre lucky and youve got a good book on your hands your characters will come to life and when your characters come to life you kind of do whats best for them. And therefore they then move to occupy their space and the politics and the history become the scaffolding. Obviously it controls what they can or cant do, but it is not their entire life and ultimately ones interest really in politics and history is because they affect the individual life, its not some abstract interest, its because they cause misery and they cause heartbreak and death and they can cause happiness. So in the end it is the individual life that is centre stage. Yes, sir. You made two comments about writing novels. The first one was that you dont think its right to embark on a purely artistic project with an agenda, or i think what you meant was a political agenda in mind, and then you also said that in the paper, the palfest, everything is political, and one can think of so many novels that do have a political message, like for example in south africa, alan patons cry, The Beloved Country and there are many, many, many novels, dickins for example, who make a political point with everything they write. How can you reconcile these two statements . I think a novel or a work of art can be political, will be political, ijust dont think. I would not be comfortable sitting down and thinking, i am going to write a novel to show that oppressing women is bad, for example. 0bviously Oppressing Women is bad and middlemarch is a great feminist novel for example, but i think when youre creating a novel or a film you need to be willing to let it have its own integrity. I mean, you set out, obviously you are yourself and you have your political beliefs and so on and they will get in there, but its not there to serve them. Yourjob is to conceive of a novel and then allow it to go its own way and see what it does rather than to hem it into a particular message you want to get across i think. Im afraid our times up. Ive been a journalist for 30 something years and this story in The Middle East has been told in such stark and sometimes ugly terms, thank you for civilising the debate. Thank you. Ahdaf soueif. Applause hello again. All sorts of weather to come this weekend. A very mixed weekend on the way. This sums it up really from recently. This was taken today by a Weather Watcher in highland scotland. At least we had some sunshine in between the showers. We are seeing more persistent cloud and rain moving across england and wales, which will push into the north sea. And clearer skies eventually follow into many areas. The rain still in the English Channel. We still have showers in scotland, Western Scotland in particular and northern ireland. Lows of 12 13, similar to the past few nights. Into the weekend and more showers into the north west to start with. Northern parts of northern ireland, Western Scotland, dryer with sunshine. A couple of showers to begin with in northern england. Not a bad day on the way, at least by recent standards. The odd shower in wales. A dry start. Sunny through the midlands and east anglia. More cloud in the southern counties of england, with the rain from overnight still sitting through the English Channel and working its way northwards. So we may not be quite so lucky at the oval for the cricket. Rain expected in the afternoon and continuing into the evening. The rain is moving Back Northwards in Southern Parts of england and wales. How quickly it gets north, thats the difficult thing, but for a good part of the day should have sunshine in wales, the midlands, east anglia and northern england. A slice of Better Weather in between the rain in the south and those showers are still there in scotland and northern ireland. Some of those could be heavy with hail and thunder. Similar numbers to recently. The rain does develop more widely across england and wales on saturday evening. Some are heavy with strong winds again. That tends to sweep into the north sea and should be gone by sunday morning. That Weather System out of the way, but we still have low pressure on the scene, which has been sitting here for days, it will still be there on sunday. Quite a few showers. Sunday starts dry and sunny. Showers in the west, developing more widely and pushing eastwards. Some of those could be heavy with hail and thunder again. In the south east it isnt quite as wet. As we go into the beginning of next week, heavier ones on monday in scotland and northern ireland. Fewer and lighter showers on tuesday and hopefully more sunshine. This is bbc news. Im kasia madera. Our top stories all change at the top of the white house. Donald Trump Replaces his chief of staff, reince priebus, with the current Homeland Security secretary, john kelly. After north korea test fires a second intercontinental ballistic missile, the us and south korea react with a Live Fire Exercise of their own. Charlie gard, the terminally ill british baby at the centre of an International Row over his treatment, has passed away. And remembering the fallen of world war i commemorations for the 100th Anniversary of the battle of passchendaele
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