kotobli's April newsletter ft. pascale ghazaly

Updates, new lists, and our first exclusive interview

Hello friends and book lovers! We hope you are having a lovely and colorful spring. Welcome to kotobli’s first newsletter since our move to Substack. You already know what to expect: we’ve got some updates, new lists, aaaand we’re switching things up a bit this time around: we’ve added a brand new interview section where we speak with authors and publishers to dive deeper into their literary world.

In this season’s newsletter we spoke to visual artist and author pascale ghazaly about the unjust misconceptions about May Ziadeh, the right to reclaim the narrative, and the process behind her latest graphic novel Rehlat al Bahth ‘an May (scroll down to read all about her insights or watch it on Youtube with sneak peeks of the first sketches).

Website re-design: topic & genre pages are here

Our makeover is more than a prettier homepage: we’ve added some new functionalities to help you dive into our book database so you can find your book match in different efficient ways: you can now explore:

• genre pages that include books and lists that fall under each category (for example all poetry books or all memoirs)

• topic pages that include books, lists, and related pages that fall under each topic (which can be broad like Politics or specific like Lebanese Presidents)

• and geography pages that includes books, lists, authors, publishers, and literary magazines from the region (Levant, Gulf, etc) or country

+ all of them have many filters to refine your search.

For example, on the poetry page, you can filter by Kurdish authors, and on the Sudan page you can filter by fiction/non-fiction, language, and more.

Our platform is an ever-growing work in progress and we take feedback to heart, so we love to hear about your experiences looking for books or just going into rabbit holes on our website and we’d appreciate any criticism or suggestion so we can make things more user-friendly and useful.

Welcoming collaborations on lists

You may have noticed that our recent awesome lists were put together by experts who volunteered their time to bring you the best recommendations:

• Sudanese Novels through Time by Sudanese-American writer Razan Idris

• Palestine in YA literature by Palestinian author Taghreed Najjar

• Children's Books on Palestine: Beyond Erasure and Censorship in USA by educator Nora Lester Mourad

• The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature by AUC Press

Do you have a topic you’re passionate about or knowledgeable on? Hit us up to curate your own list on kotobli!

Welcoming new publishers

Thanks to the Culture 3.0 grant from Culture Resource, we’ve been digitizing the offline catalogs of local publishers + linking to online ones! In the past few months, we’ve welcomed to our community:

• Dar al Saqi (Lebanon) and Saqi books (UK)

• Dar Hunna(Egypt)

• Dar Onboz (Lebanon)

• Dar Atlas (Syria)

• Kayfa Ta (Egypt and Jordan)

More to come soon! If you’re a publisher and would like to be added, drop us a line.

Welcoming our first Literary Magazine

Shout out to Rusted Radishes for claiming their kotobli profile and adding the information for their issues! You can now scroll through here and find digital issues on their website.

Mid-Newsletter PS

kotobli is currently run by a volunteer team of four, and two grant-supported members. Your support helps us cover the costs of keeping our website online and free for all! Consider donating any amount you can (and get some bookish perks) by subscribing to our Patreon.

Meeting pascale ghazaly

pascale ghazaly is a feminist visual artist and author with a MA in painting from the Lebanese University - Fine Arts Institute II. ghazaly is interested in developing tools that combine arts, knowledge and history. Her work focuses on personal stories, documentation and the evolution of places and memory.. She began writing and illustrating her book رحلة البحث عن مي (Rehlat El Bahth ‘an May - A Journey in Search for May) around 5 years ago during a workshop with Lena Merhej and it was recently funded by AFAC. The book is a graphic biography that traces the life and work of the celebrated writer May Ziadeh and is now available for purchase from Snoubar Beyrout, Halabi Bookshop, Beirut Art Center, Aaliyah’s Books and Barzakh Bookstore in Lebanon. It will be available to purchase from Khan Aljanub in Europe soon. 

kotobli’s Yara El-Murr met with pascale to talk about the inspiration and process behind Rehlat El Bahth ‘an May. The interview is lightly edited for clarity and length. You can watch the full conversation (in Arabic with English subtitles) and see some sneak peeks of the book’s early drafts on Youtube.

Yara: You dedicate your book to your teacher, Nazira Julien, the first person who told you about May Ziadeh during class. What stayed with you all this time since then, so that you would dedicate the book to her and write about May Ziadeh in particular? 

pascale: I remember two main things about my teacher. The first is that she was the first person I had the courage to show my writings to and to let her review them. She used to assess my writings and one day she said “you’ll write a book too”. I was in secondary school at the time and when I told her: “Of course not”, she just replied “Why not?”. This “why not?” attitude has stayed with me because I didn’t seriously consider myself a writer. Sadly, she passed away before I started working on the book. 

The second thing is that she was also the first to teach me about May. Every student in the Lebanese curriculum has to learn about the Nahda literature: Gibran Khalil Gibran, May Ziadeh, Mikhael Neaimeh... We learned that May was living in Egypt, that she and Gibran wrote to each other for 20 years without once meeting, and that people said they were in love with each other. It’s a catchy story, especially when you’re 15. 

I remember my school teacher saying: If May Ziadeh and Gibran Khalil Gibran were to meet, they probably wouldn’t have loved each other. I didn’t like the idea then; why wouldn't they love each other? But it stayed with me. 

Yara: You mention that you gathered May Ziadeh’s life from our collective memory. What does it mean to do so for someone who lived almost a 100 years ago and how did this process result in a graphic biography? 

pascale: Like everything else, we do not have any official archival process in Arabic for what we’ve lived during the past hundred years. Since I prefer listening to what people say, rather than reading about the kidnappings, the previous financial crisis, the famine, it meant much more to me to hear people talking about their experiences and how they survived them. So I collected [these stories] and memorized them. 

While writing this book, I came across someone who knew about the cottage gifted to her. Someone else had heard of the house that she lived in, near Amin El Rihani. Someone else told me to look for her statue. I went to Egypt to look for where she lived, but nothing was the same. Older buildings were replaced with either newer ones or other spaces like a gas station. 

I didn’t understand how these things were related at first, but luckily, this history had been gathered by Salma Al Haffar Kuzbari, who was a great resource. She spent 17 years searching and interviewing the people who lived around May Ziadeh and wrote books about her. Then, I gathered those pieces and the memories of people from my own time for this book. It’s like we’re stitching things together, more than just writing. 

I initially wanted to draw and write about the letters between May Ziadeh and Gibran Khalil Gibran as if they were happening in our present time. Then, the book’s emphasis shifted and Gibran was not as present anymore. I also wanted to know: why was May in Asfouriye? How did she get out? I was writing all about things that were known and unknown about her, but what would  I be doing if I was just retelling the same story? This question of how I wanted to write about May haunted me up until I finished the book during the summer of 2022. 

I applied to several grants and workshops to be able to write and draw the book, and you can see how the sketches and my perspectives changed over time: with AFAC, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) and the workshop with Lena Merhej. Throughout the process, I was always excited about what I had found about May, how I found it, so I wanted to tell this story, because it is part of our history as well. One day while walking, I sat down for coffee and rewrote the entire script with colored papers on my sketchbook. My black and white sketches became blue pages for Lebanon and yellow for Egypt. Different colors for different time periods, too. 

I removed the parts about May’s life that I wasn’t sure of. I also didn’t want to end the book with her time in Asfouriye. I used the Women and Memory Forum resources to read more about her.

There was a gap in our knowledge of her, between the time she stopped writing and running the salon after her mother passed away and when she was taken to Asfouriye. I couldn’t know what happened. I had applied to a grant by the ACSS  where I wrote a paper on why I’m doing this project, and this is where I began to structure a feminist perspective to storytelling.

Yara: What impact did a feminist perspective have on your storytelling? What does the “right to narrate” mean, when it comes to May Ziadeh specifically? 

pascale: When I wrote the paper for ACSS’ Gendered Resistence, I was working with Dr. Hoda Elsadda, who’s built a large feminist archive. The idea that there should be a feminist archive, with oral interviews by women across different time periods is important. I was also reading what May wrote about Bahithat Al Badiya, so I decided to write about May the way she wrote about her [Bahithat Al Badiya]. May looks at her through different lenses such as: the Muslim, the Teacher, the Reformist, and then describes her for each of these angles. 

I followed the same structure for May in my paper. There is the feminist May, the immigrant May, May the writer, May the Asfouriye prisoner. There are many people who talk about that last part and say "Oh haram she was a genius but she went mad" or "She went crazy". May as an immigrant in Egypt is not something I had especially paid attention to before writing the book. Even if the difference is not stark, she did move to a different country and region, and had a different religion. There was also the May who founded the Tuesday Salon. She was not the “host” of the Salon, her role was foundational and it took a lot of skill to run the Tuesday Salon for twenty years, at a time when there were so many political and cultural disagreements. I insisted that each adjective takes its own proper weight in the book. 

I hadn't read how she left Asfouriye but I started to see how she began to rebuild her life after Asfouriye, not just how she was forcefully admitted. I think, as women, this is what we can learn from each other. Most of the time, you do not have another resource – only the women who have lived these things, your friends, mother, sisters, grandmothers. There are so many female writers whose writings touch you because we live in a world in which men do not really write about [our issues], because they haven’t lived these things. I feel that it's important that women write about female writers, and write for other women, to reclaim this narrative. It’s actually important for any oppressed person anywhere to tell their own story, with their words. I wanted to retell the story of May, in the way that I had wanted to hear it, how I’ve come to know her over the years, and hopefully, the way that she would’ve liked to hear it as well. 

Yara: There are so many common misconceptions about May Ziadeh. What do you think are some misconceptions which are unjust or harmful to our understanding of this history? 

pascale:  The idea that she wrote for her father's newspaper gives you the impression that if her father didn't run a newspaper, she wouldn't have written or that she could only write because of her wasta [connections]. We can't deny that her father running a newspaper gave her an advantage, but her family was already surrounded by Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese and Egyptian writers and literary figures who were at the heart of the Nahda movement. It was a peak time for writing, where anyone who could write was writing. The field was not as competitive, either. When May moved to Egypt, there was only one university, which I think was for boys. This is also where her feminist journey to call for girls’ education comes up. So it’s also really because of her capabilities. 

What I found online on May Ziadeh was distressing. Was she pretty or not? Was she tall or short? Did she love Abbas Al Akkad, Gibran Khalil Jibran, or Taha Hussein? Or did they all love her without her loving them back? Gossip! And while they all say she was a genius who spoke 8 languages, this type of information is presented in two lines. This bothered me because we've never heard this about a male writer, and why is it this important anyways [how she looked]? I couldn't understand it. 

Also the idea that she hosted the Tuesday Salon, as if the gathering existed and she just said "you're welcome to do this in my own house". The Salon wasnt already there. She invited them because she founded it. For the first two years, it was managed by [Yacoub] Sarrouf, because he was older than her but it was all her afterwards. She would invite people, and follow up and coordinate with them. Throughout the 20 years of her running the Salon, many things changed in Egypt and the region. There were charged discussions happening there, disagreements that arose because May would invite people who disagreed with each other but were “forced” to talk to each other in the Salon. This is a perspective that we don't discuss about her. 

Yara: Is there anything that surprised you while learning about May’s life and work? 

pascale: I think she's funny, she makes fun of society, she pokes fun at herself. When I read her work, she also came across as humble. She says in many instances that she can't imagine what someone would be feeling in such a situation. For someone who knew so many languages, she could have easily been very pretentious. 

She also used to write about politics! She wrote about the famine, the changes in Mutasarrifate in Lebanon. It seems like such a common sense thing to say that someone wrote about politics then, but when it came to May, I hadn’t known this about her before. It does make sense, though, now - given what I know of her values and how she envisioned a society. 

Many people are unaware of her trial, which is probably more familiar to Lebanese people than Egyptians since it took place in Lebanon. We used to think that this trial was about May defending her sanity, which is why the judge asked her to give a lecture. This wasn’t true. The lecture was set up by other writers of the time to introduce the judge and the Lebanese public then to May Ziadeh, because they didn’t know her. The relatives who filed the lawsuit were doctors and tradesmen from Lebanon, so they had more leverage than her. The lecture was supposed to rebalance the advantage the other party had in the trial. 

There’s a lot of speculation on what happened to her belongings, how many people would call her (when she went back to Cairo) but she wouldn't answer back. We can’t know if these things happened or not, but we do know that she cut contact with several writers in Egypt because she felt betrayed that no one asked about her during her time in Asfouriye. 

Another surprising fact which I didn't know is the story of Maroun Ghanem. He was a family friend, not a writer or anyone common in her daily life, but without him May would’ve probably stayed in Asfouriye for a long time, as many others did. The people rallying around her [e.g., Ghanem] didn't think that this situation was too bothersome to be involved in. It’s something that we lack now and avoid, this idea of standing up or speaking against the injustices we witness, giving ourselves a headache for our involvement. 

Yara: What would you ask May if you could talk to her? 

pascale: I would ask her if I messed up the book. If there were things she had wanted me to say or not say. Mostly, I would ask her a personal question: When she left Asfouriye and returned to Egypt, after all those ordeals, she had physical health problems with her teeth and couldn't eat well. She developed lung problems, but had refused seeing a doctor because of the Asfouriye trauma. She had also refused seeing lawyers, because of the committees' reports. I would just ask her, why didn't she try to see a doctor? She might have lived more, maybe, if she did. 

Yara: The book has Arabic dialect and Modern Standard Arabic. Why did you decide to use both? How did this help you as a storytelling tool? 

pascale: I tried to narrate the story as it had happened, so the book has Egyptian dialect in Egypt, Palestinian dialect for Joseph Ghanem, and our Lebanese dialect. I wanted the person reading this to feel as if they were there. I used the Modern Standard Arabic for the historical information, narration or analyses that had been already available.

Yara: I think this dynamic helped feeling immersed while reading and which is why it was so enjoyable. I felt it was a good start to read May Ziadeh’s work too. 

pascale: I wished there was a book like this one when I was in school. I wouldn't have wanted to read volumes about one figure, but I would've read simple books like this about different figures. We would've known more about our history, who we are, and our relationship with the Arabic language that way. Many people were surprised when I told them the graphic novel is in Arabic, because they thought people wouldn't read it in Arabic. It's sad not [only] because we need to know our language, but because if we think of the Arabic language in the way that we think of any other language, the way we learn any foreign language, Arabic still is a beautiful language to read and write with. I would like younger generations to still engage with Arabic, even if it’s under the pretense of a graphic novel, a funny reading that doesn’t take too much time.   

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