Carmen Callil on the Palestine Festival of Literature
April 28th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Over the past two months PULSE has been providing in-depth coverage of the Palestine Festival of Literature which will be opening on May 1st. As promised, here’s an exclusive PULSE interview with 2009 PalFest participant, Carmen Callil.
Carmen Callil
Carmen Callil founded Virago Press in 1972 and ten years later became managing director of the publishers Chatto & Windus & The Hogarth Press. She is the author (with Colm Tóibín) of The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950. In 2006, she published Bad Faith: A Forgotten History of Family and Fatherland, a biography of Vichy figure Louis Darquier, whose daughter was Callil’s therapist. Callil was born in Melbourne, Australia. She moved to the United Kingdom in 1960.
Jasmin Ramsey (JR): Why did you decide to participate in the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2009?
Carmen Callil (CC): Because I wanted to see for myself what I had read about Palestine and the injustices under which it was said to labour. I had written a book about the persecution of the Jews of France during the Second World War, and their despatch from France to the Nazi death camps. As I researched and wrote this book, over many years, I became increasingly disturbed by what the State of Israel (I do not consider this state to be synonymous with Jewish people) was said to be doing to occupied Palestine. There were historical similarities which disturbed me. I wanted to see the situation for myself.
At the same time, as a writer and publisher, I wanted to talk about writing and literature and books to students, Palestinians, Israelis, whoever.
JR: What stands out in your memory about your experiences with PalFest while in Palestine?
CC: How much worse it was than I expected. The checkpoints, the police everywhere, the curtailment of basic human rights under which so many Palestinians labour. The inability of Palestinians to travel from one part of Palestine to another; most particularly the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem at once both threatening and tragic to see.
The normal activities Palestinians cannot undertake, the fact that some students have to travel through many checkpoints to reach their place of study, and that often they cannot get through the checkpoints, according to the whim of the police on patrol. The hours of travel they have to undergo to get a little education.
The poverty. The lack of water, and, from a visual point of view, the exceptional ugliness of the settlements… it is not clear to me still why that should be so.
The terrible wall. The destruction of Bethlehem. I could go on.
All of it was much, much worse than I anticipated.
JR: In a blog post you did for PalFest you describe the unbreakable spirit of the Palestinians you met. Did you meet any Palestinian writers? How do you think Israel’s occupation has affected them and their art?
CC: Oh yes, I met many. Many different kinds of writers, old and young, well-known, and students writing their very first volumes of poetry.
The Israeli occupation affects all of them: the young, because they have no freedom to let their imaginations take their creative work in any direction their fancy might take them. Their situation of Palestine is all–absorbing to them. They feel imprisoned, physically, and also by the gross injustice of their situation. This means their writing is usually directed towards the plight of Palestine. In brief, the young should have the opportunity to write “Ode to a Nightingale”, if they want to. But how can they? It is hard to see them so confined, when one lives in a society where children and young people can grow to what they want to be, in an unfettered and so much more adventurous way.
In the older writers I met, I found such sadness. Some of them had known other lives: times when they could visit their relatives in Jerusalem, or anywhere, but now, the permits required, the checkpoints, the endless prohibitions, cut them off from family and old friends. Also, so many failed attempts to solve the impasse have caused great sadness to those who have lived through many years of increasing restrictions and brutalities. Finally, the actual land of Palestine: places where they played as children, have been removed from them, and utterly transformed before their eyes. The sadness was palpable.
JR: You are a writer and a publishing veteran. Do you think you would have achieved the same successes if you had been a Palestinian living in the occupied territories?
CC: I think I have described how Palestinians are circumscribed, artistically, by their political and physical situation. It cannot be otherwise until the state of Israel changes its policies and introduces justice for the Palestinian people. What Palestinians living in the occupied territories write, sing, invent, paint, do in every creative area is far more important than any of my successes, such as they were, because art in all its forms leaps over checkpoints and walls and reaches out to the world.
Thank god for the Internet, with this Palestinian artists can reach out to the world.
Visit PULSE’s archive of PalFest related articles and PalFest’s official website and Facebook page for regular updates.
Lovely to read of someone who has been open enough to change her attitude and care about the Palestinians after her previous work. I now know about Palfest too!
[...] Carmen Callil, who first attended PalFest in 2009, will be going again this year. Pulse magazine asked her why she initially decided to [...]