We are very excited here that only few days separate us from the 7th IPA Symposium. This represents a great chance for all those involved in publishing, and more importantly for all literature enthusiasts and lovers. For the latter, we give you our last newsletter containing two critical reviews of two world-renowned authors who will be speaking at the IPA conference. Dr. Ahdaf Soueif will be giving the writer's keynote speech in the opening ceremony on the 28th of February, and Dr. Azar Nafisi will be giving the writer's keynote speech in the closing ceremony on the 1st of March. See you there.

Aspirations for a Common Ground
Ahdaf Soueif is world-renowned author who falls into what has often been called “the culture of hybridity”, hybridity being a natural byproduct of post-colonialism as well as globalization. The thematic interplays at the heart of Soueif’s fictional writings are the tug between individual and history, East and West, often bringing to focus the perpetuated stereotypical reductions of Eastern societies. Similarly, her writings seem to transcend pace and time, to deal with more universal and existentialist issues such as identity, individuality, self and other, and the ever-recurring issue of self-portrayal and self-actualization. Read more…
Two of her novels, In the Eye of the Sun and Map of Love, as well as her regular columns in the British Guardian and the Egyptian Al Ahram Weekly, make her a recognizable name in literary realms, both in the Arab and Westerns worlds. Possessing a natural knack for details and having been educated in the UK with a PhD in linguistics, Soueif has mastered the art of the English novel engaging the Western reader arguably more than native English writers do. She belongs to the group of writers who write in English and have “dominated” the English novel while having different mother tongues. As Andrew Marr points out that the English novel has been monopolized by non-English native voices as evidenced by the 1999 shortlisted nominees for the Man Booker prize, among which was Soueif’s Map of love, who were all written by natives of nations formerly colonized by the British. Ironically, Easterners have criticized her for writing in English and not Arabic. Soueif who spent most of her adult life in the UK, simply states that she has a stronger mastery of the English and that the meaning she wants conveyed may elude her in the richly nuanced Arabic language.

Ahdaf Soueif’s life and writings brings forth the issue of identity and self-actualization; can a person really be of one place only, does the origin own or constitute our identity or is the identity a continuously shifting entity that is perpetually influenced as the journey continues. Often we see her characters going through a process of constructing an identity all the while resisting the elements that attempt to deconstruct it, in a place far from that of origin.

 
Proving, As Edward Said before her did, that you can be “out of place”, an “in-betweener”, yet carve a solid place for yourself, not having to belong to one place or the other; that identity, if reconciled, can be a home in itself.

In an era split between the need for globalization and the schism between East and West, hybridity can often enrich all the while drawing attention to issues of difference and sameness between cultures. An Anglo-Arab woman whose Corpus focuses on bridging rifts between East and West, men and women, the past and the present, Soueif uses her hybridity to bring the two point of views closer. She proves that in turn hybridity can further promote globalization and cross culture gap-bridging as discourse between nations, or minds, can never be seen or treated as cul-de-sac. Like most of us, if not all, Soueif, through her work, strives, and urges each of us, to find a Mezzaterra, a common ground.

Ahdaf Soueif is the celebrated author of the bestselling The Map of Love which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1999. She is a political and cultural commentator. A collection of her essays, Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground, was published in 2004. Her translation (from Arabic into English) of Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah 
also came out in 2004. 
For more information on Ahdaf Soueif’s life, and for a full lists of her novels, articles, and translations, please visit her website http://ahdafsoueif.com/

Nafisi’s Republic of the Imagination
Between praise and criticism, Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran has propelled her to the world of literary fame as an international bestseller. Nafisi, an Iranian national, educated in Europe and the United States and a resident of the latter since 1997, brings forward issues of estrangement, intellectual freedom, censorship and misogyny. Read more…
The backdrop of Nafisi’s quasi memoir is post-revolution Iran in which the new regime looks to exorcise Iranian life of secularism, individualism and liberalism by imposing sanctions on all sorts of liberal arts and forms of individual expression, naturally including literature and all its soldiers: writers, readers and professors, categories to all of which Nafisi belongs. The book recounts Nafasi’s experience with life in Tehran, her teaching, expulsion and, ultimately, resignation and emigration to the United States, interlaced with scenes from her book club, composed of Nafisi and seven of her female students, that discusses banned and forbidden literature by Fitzgerald, James, Nobokov and Austen.

Reading Lolita in Tehran was hailed by many as an engrossing book about the healing powers of literature. On the other hand, it has earned the author accusations of being a tool to American hegemony and an advocate of neo-conservatism, implicitly promoting and supporting a regime change at the hand of an outside force. In a time when the eyes of the world are dubiously focused on Iran, and concurrent with the US war on terror and, ipso facto, on extremist Islamic regimes, the novel was accused of feeding the negative public opinion against Iran and of being an invitation for the West to rescue the Iranian women from the oppression exerted on them by their countrymen. In the face of such accusations, Nafisi has maintained that she does not advocate any Western interference, political or otherwise, to "rescue" Iran from its oppressors, but rather that she believes that change should be from within and that literature is one essential tool that can empower the mind and consequently the Iranians into rebelling and taking what is rightfully theirs. Further, she has repeatedly asserted that she has no interest in talking about politics but rather that literature was her concern. More relevantly, the book has also been criticized as a piece of Western propaganda that glorifies Western literature and refocuses attention away from world and third-world literature back to Western Classics, thus further encouraging the West in its attempted domination of geography and of the mind.
Whether an emigrant, exile or as she prefers it, a "citizen of the portable world" and due to both criticism and praise bestowed on her, Nafisi has managed to bring attention to the dire need of the Iranians for the alleviation of censorship, misogyny and infringements on basic human rights. On a more broad and universal level, Nafisi had brought forward the power and significance of literature as a sanctuary and the dangers of mental censorship and intellectual exile and the importance of what she calls "the republic of the imagination" as the only place where one can experience true personal autonomy.

For more information on Azar Nafisi's life, her latest book Things I have Been Silent About, a second more personal memoir about early childhood and the effect of miscarried and interrupted personal development, and other works, please visit her website http://azarnafisi.com/