Literature
The Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre Foundation works at organising
projects that express intimately and creatively the Palestinian
experience. Developing programs exploring Palestinian cultural heritage,
and collective memory.
This section presents some of the most prominent and emerging living
Palestinian authors whose works are available in English.
Special Presentation: Dr. Salma Khadra Jayyussi
Poet, critic, literary historian, anthologist, founder & director of
East-West Nexus/PROTA, the Project for the dissemination of
Arabic literature and Arab/Islamic culture and history; a major
Palestinian and Arab literary and cultural figure: This space is
dedicated to Salma Khadra Jayyusi.
Jayyusi is the chief contemporary scholar, translator, anthologist,
analyst and disseminator of Arabic literature, both classic and
contemporary. The tens of books she has authored, introduced, edited,
and translated; the collections she has started, the projects she
launched and that have added considerably to our understanding and
knowledge of Arab literary and thought, have been achieved not by an
institution, but single-handedly, in decades of work highlighted in
this biography and summary bibliography. Many of the entries in the
Sakakini website on Palestinian literature are taken from her seminal
1992 book: Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature.
GROWING UP:
Salma Khadra Jayyusi
was born in Jordan to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother.
She grew up in Palestine surrounded by books on Arab/Islamic and
Western culture, listened endlessly to stories of Arab/Islamic
history and to the legends of courage, love and charity from both
Arabic and Western cultures; and witnessed her father's persistent
struggle to gain justice for the Palestinians.
She completed her
secondary education at Schmidt's
Girls College
in Jerusalem, and then graduated with honors in Arabic and English
Literatures from the American University of Beirut. Soon after her
graduation she married a Jordanian diplomat and lived, as a
diplomat’s wife, in several countries. She only began her career as
a writer and professor after raising her 3 children.
She began her
critical career writing in Arabic, then, when she came to London for
her Ph.D. which she obtained in 1970 from the
School of
Oriental
and African Studies, London University, specializing in Arabic
literature, she began and has continued to write also in English.
Her poetry and critical writings and her writings on literary and
cultural history (in both Arabic and English) have appeared in books
and in many journals.
Soon after obtaining her Ph.D. in 1970 she started her career as a University Professor teaching first at the University of Khartoum (1970-1973), then at the Universities of Algiers and Constantine (1973-1975).
PROTA (Project of
Translation from Arabic):
In 1973, she was invited by MESA (The Middle East Studies Association
of North America) to go on a lecture tour in Canada and the US, on a
Ford Foundation Fellowship. Then, in 1975, the
University
of Utah invited her to return as a Visiting Professor of Arabic
literature. She remained in the US since, teaching at several
universities (Utah,
Washington,
Texas)
and doing research as Visiting scholar at the
University of
Michigan
for 2 years, before leaving teaching to concentrate on the work of
disseminating Arab/Islamic literature, history and culture in the
English language.
It was in 1980, as
Visiting Professor at the
University of
Texas,
which she came to the final realization that the paucity of Arabic
literary and cultural material in world languages, which largely lies
behind the misrepresentation of Arab/Islamic culture in the West, must
be faced with determination. She took the decision to leave teaching
and dedicate her time to the dissemination of Arab/Islamic culture.
With the cooperation of other colleagues in both America and Britain,
she founded PROTA (Project of Translation from Arabic), which
she still directs. The project has created 8 comprehensive
anthologies, & many single author books in translation. These works
aim at introducing some of the best creative examples of Arabic
literature, classical and modern, to the English-speaking world. She
commissions the translations to efficient bilingual translators` as a
first stage, then does the finishing process with the cooperation of
established writers and poets in America and Britain. All PROTA
anthologies and many of its single author books have introductions,
mostly written by Jayyusi herself, elucidating their artistic and
semantic value.
Jayyusi has gone on
many lecture tours in the Arab world, America and Europe. She has
attended many conferences, and has lectured at cultural and academic
institutions in the Arab world, in the Far East and in the West.
EAST WEST NEXUS:
At the end of the eighties, Jayyusi realized that, aside from
translations and the offering
of critical introductions to the
translated works, it was equally important, to introduce cogent
cultural studies as well into the program. She then founded
East-West Nexus, & her first work in this field was The
Legacy of Muslim Spain, an 1,100 page edited book written by 42
world scholars. Published by Brill of Leiden in the
Netherlands, it has gone into several printings in hardback &
paperback and was declared by Brill as an absolute best seller.
She spent the
academic year 1994-1995 as a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin (Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin) where, stimulated by
its refreshing emphasis on interculturalism, she has become deeply
interested in Euro-Arab as well as in general East/West cultural
relations, the study of which she finds of vital importance in the
new cultural atmosphere prevalent in the world today.
In May, 1995, she,
in cooperation with the American Institute for Maghrebi Studies,
held a conference in Tangiers on “Language, Literature and Culture
in North Africa,” attended by major writers and scholars from Libya,
Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, other Arab countries and the United
States.
While also in
Berlin, she, in cooperation with German, Arab and other European
scholars of classical Arabic history, culture and literature, began
work on The Culture, Language and Literature in Pre-Islamic
Arabia
for which she held 2 workshops at the
Institute of
Advanced Study in Berlin. She feels that a study of the roots of the
large corpus of Arabic literature, one of the richest in the world,
will lead not only to a greater understanding of Arabic culture on
the whole, but also to a deeper understanding of how literature,
both prose and poetry, develop as a universal creative activity.
In 1997 she received a grant from
the Ford Foundation to edit a book on Human Rights in Arabic Texts.
This resulted in a 1,500 page book in Arabic detailing the history
of the notion of human rights even as early as pre-Islamic times,
showing the various patterns of applications and infringements of
human rights in Arab experience, concentrating mainly on modern
times.
In 1999 she received
a Fulbright Fellowship to do research on the Life of the
Palestinians in the XXth century as depicted in their personal
account writings, & spent the year 1999-2000 doing research in
Syria, Jordan & the West Bank, 3 places with a large concentration
of Palestinians.
It was also in 1999,
while doing research in the West Bank that she invited a team of
architects from Italy and America, led by 2 Islamic City
specialists, to do field study on the morphological aspects of old
Jerusalem.
In October, 2001, she held an international conference in Amman, Jordan, on the history of ancient Jerusalem, which resulted in a book in both Arabic and English titled, Jerusalem in History and Tradition.
AWARDS
She received in 2002 an award from
the State of Kuwait for distinguished services to Arab & Islamic
culture.
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A 1999, she received an award from the Palestinian National Authority for outstanding achievements in cultural dissemination.
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In 1988, when Najib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize, Jayyusi was invited by the Nobel Academy to attend the Prize giving ceremonies in Stockholm in recognition of the role her work played in showing the importance of Arabic literature and the work of Najib Mahfouz himself.
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In 1996, she received an award from the Arab American University Graduates Association of California, in the USA, for outstanding services to Arab culture. She also received that year an award from the Jumblat association of Lebanon, in Venezuela.
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In 1990, she received from the Palestine Liberation Organization a lifetime achievement award for her services to Palestinian Culture & literature.
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n 2001, she was profiled in the 2001 documentary film Zaytounat, directed by Liana Bader.
PROJECTS:
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The City in the Islamic World, edited by 3 Islamic specialists in collaboration with Jayyusi.
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The Classical Arabic Story, an Anthology.
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Studies in Classical Arabic Narratives.
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The Jocular Anecdotes: Juha as an example.
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The Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.
The planned work she envisages includes an edited book on Muslim Sicily, and an anthology of Classical Arabic Narratives: the Other Genres, i.e. genres other than story telling, such as the Prophet’s traditions, select biographies, philosophical writings, oratory, epistles, etc, in which the Arab heritage is very rich.