However, the added difficulty comes with the heavy connotations the notion of ‘Arab world’ is loaded with. There are layers of connotations. Some inherited from past colonial ties, others from tales that feed an everlasting ‘orientalist’ vision of this part of the world, and others still directly linked with contemporary history, politics and media. The ‘Arab world’ is both very familiar, but also unknown to most people. At each meeting with an editor, as a literary agent, I am naturally confronted to various stereotypes. And stereotypes have a hindering effect. They influence rights acquisition because they shape editors’ expectations, both positively and negatively. By positive expectations, I mean expectations that fit the stereotype. ‘We want stories by women’, is most probably the expression of an underlying positive stereotype. The interest in female authors unfortunately more often than not stems from the preconceived idea one has about Arab women in the West. What is sought is a ‘feminine voice’ – understand women telling stories of abuse, or of struggle for freedom and equality, etc., from their perspective. By negative expectation, I mean expectations that contradict the stereotype. If the expectation positively shaped by stereotypes is of women being abused, and of a conservative society, the negative expectation in this context is of stories featuring empowered women, and an overwhelming presence of sex. This dichotomy distorts the perception of Arab books. Take a novel depicting in detail the mechanisms of crimes of honor. It may be a well-written, smartly structured book, and play an important role in Arab societies, in the sense that it raises awareness and denounces brutal injustice. In the rights acquirer’s positive/negative prism just depicted, it is either a great book, because it sensationally feeds the stereotype one already has; or it is a terrible book because it is seen as riding on the stereotype, and not offering anything new. The complexity of the book’s meaning escapes the dichotomy, and the book is consequently not judged for its own value. Another case is that of a book that does not fit anywhere in the positive/negative expectations scheme. Take a modern urban tale, for instance. Such a book is often considered an interesting read, but not interesting enough to be acquired. Although it does tell something different in the acquirer’s perspective, either this is not the difference that editors think their readers seek (based on negative expectations), or the book is too universal, and the magic of foreign literature would be lost to the reader, and in the process so is the reason to translate it (based on positive expectations).

It is important for acquirers of Arabic literature to realize the mechanisms that most of them are unconsciously activating as they read. I believe that books have an intrinsic aesthetic and narrative value, and this value is bound to escape us if we approach them with reductive categories.

Nevertheless, I would like to stress on the fact that the picture I just sketched of the difficulty of selling Arabic fiction is not complete. Having stereotypes is not a bad thing in itself. This is how cognition works. We need categories to navigate efficiently in the world. We need to group things together to be able to identify them, and know them. Arabic written literature is not the only literature to suffer from stereotypes, and it would be wrong to say that Arab editors don’t apply stereotypes to French, German or American literature themselves.

The question is why do these stereotypes have a particularly bad impact on Arabic literature? Quite simply, the reason is because there is nothing else; nothing to compare them to, and counter them with. And this is where, as Arab book people, our crucial responsibility lies.

Clearly, more information is needed, and more communication channels with the rest of the publishing world are required. Communication channels include the substantial efforts witnessed in the area in recent years, mainly in the UAE. It is key for international publishers to be exposed to Arabic written literature, and to actors of the industry. Coming to an Arab book fair gives more than information on books. It gives a sense, however superficial, about countries, people, working cultures, problems, tastes; it puts flesh on the abstract concepts one perhaps had, and introduces an array of nuances where things were more clearly cut. Thus, these efforts are important. But they are not enough.
Information directed to international publishers, and tailored communication channels only promote translation rights. And they do so punctually. What we need is continuous, reliable, general information. It is true we are getting better at exporting ourselves. But we also need to ‘import’ ourselves, so to speak. Most notable efforts mainly have an impact on the image of the Arab book outside the Arab world. They have less impact inside. Prestigious literary prizes and translation grants are necessary. Without the prizes, less people would have heard of Baha’ Taher, or Rabi’ Jaber, for example. Without translation grants, no publisher would have acquired the English rights of Samar Yazbek’s work – and her book would not have been number one of its category on the Amazon’s best seller list (!), a first, in my experience.
Still, we need more. We need more Baha’ Tahers, Rabi’ Jabers and Samar Yazbeks. And this can only be achieved with a different kind of effort on our part.

(1) More room should be made at home for writers and intellectuals to be heard, to develop and to grow, more opportunities created
(2) The golden era of web may have allowed for a multitude of communication platforms, literary blogs and so forth, but none reached a sufficient mass or gained sufficient authority to make a real difference on the quality of the production at large
(3) Reliable information on books is still lacking, and this lack of transparency not only allows for piracy, but also prevents a true assessment of the market, both in terms of size and of content. As a consequence, the efforts of professionalization brought by external actors only reach the most visible part of the books people, and this is not enough to make a real structural change
(4) Distribution of physical books across the Arab world will perhaps be partly solved in the future with the development of e-books in the area, but this will not necessarily empower publishers, whom either for lack of means or of professional resources are for the most part already unable to proceed with a deeper, qualitative, editing of the books they produce

In a nutshell, these are structural problems that impact not only the economy of the book industry, but also more importantly, the quality of books, as well as readers. These problems need to be addressed if we want a deep positive and qualitative evolution of the book industry.
Without going too far, and focusing on what I know best, namely the agency I’ve been running since 2004, below is a concrete example of how, on different levels, the problems listed above limit growth:

(1) With the absence of opportunities for writers and intellectuals, only marginal parts of our societies consider following this path. Most people working independently in this environment, including myself, have more than one job to cover for life expenses. This has two types of consequences. Not only I cannot dedicated my time fully to the agency, had I wanted to, but this also limits my capacities to hire people and develop for lack of qualified and interested personnel.
(2) The fact that there are no real opportunities for writers and intellectuals to grow, coupled to the fact that there is no authoritative instrument that seriously promotes quality affect my activity in a different way. It also reduces the pool from which I can choose clients. RAYA was conceived as an agency dedicated to high quality fiction. If quality is not seriously valued and assessed (outside academia), the quality of the production will remain highly unequal across the board, with effectively a smaller proportion of books that are both good enough to be promoted, and interesting to a foreign audience. As a consequence, as long as I only wish to work with a certain quality of books – a guarantee of my credibility on the international scene – I can only be small by definition.

(3) The lack of information on books has an indirect impact on quality, and a direct impact of the difficulty one has to stay informed about what is happening on the literary scenes of different parts of the Arab world. The multiplication of small information platforms is not a solution, and the overload of information does not mean it is reliable, or easily accessible. In this context, looking for information and staying informed is time consuming, much more than it should be.
(4) The absence of distribution makes it hard not only to hear of the book, but also to get your hand on it. This basically forces you to contact the author in order to get an electronic file of her or his book, a delicate enterprise given that you might turn the author down after reading her/his book, knowing that you were the one to have solicited her/him.

These may seem like small details, but they add up and feed each other, creating a vicious circle. They also scale up when applied to bigger institutions. Although things might be easier for bigger institutions, if we want the book sector to truly develop, it must be possible for smaller initiatives to exist. Small institutions are what will guarantee a growth that is organic and adapted to the local market. We need to take information and its impact on society, quality of books and the economy of the publishing industry seriously to give all its chances to the improvements we are waiting for. I believe these things can change. And my desire for them to change is the reason why I do what I do. My only hope lies in the fact that this is why most book people also do what they do.

D’une simplicité enfantine, cet “alphabet” des couleurs est pourtant le fruit de plusieurs années de travail. Alors qu’il cherchait un sujet de recherche pour son mémoire de fin d’études, Miguel Neiva se penche sur la question du daltonisme.“Faire du graphisme uniquement pour la technique ou pour des publicitaires ne m’intéressait pas, explique-t-il. Au moins 90 % de la communication visuelle passe par des couleurs. Or, les problèmes d’altération de la vision des couleurs ne sont jamais pris en compte. Je voulais trouver une solution graphique qui aide la communauté.”

Pour obtenir un outil efficace, Miguel Neiva peaufine sa méthodologie, rencontre des ophtalmologues, cherche des études sur le sujet - mais il en existe peu - et fait circuler, par le biais du bouche-à-oreille et du Web, un questionnaire à destination de daltoniens. Les réponses affluent de France, d’Israël, du Brésil…“Mon enquête a montré que les daltoniens ne veulent pas être étiquetés comme tels. Il fallait donc que je réfléchisse à un langage qui soit positif, non stigmatisant. J’ai vu que dans certains cas, la forme peut apporter du sens, au même titre que la couleur. De là, j’ai cherché à traduire les couleurs en symboles simples.”

“Dans les écoles, on donne aux enfants cinq tubes de gouache : les trois couleurs primaires, le noir et le blanc, qui permettent d’obtenir toutes les nuances. Je suis parti de là, en associant à chacune de ces couleurs un symbole.” Miguel Neiva s’impose plusieurs contraintes : les formes doivent pouvoir se retenir facilement, mais aussi se marier aisément entre elles pour obtenir différentes tonalités. Enfin, ces formes doivent être universelles et ne pas avoir de caractère offensant selon les cultures. “Le langage doit être compréhensible par tous.” Au final, de simples barres obliques, triangles et carrés blancs ou noirs permettent d’obtenir quelques dizaines de nuances.

“I downloaded ~ 35k thumbnailed-size images (yay wget — “The Social Network” inspired me to not use curl) from a site that has a lot of movie posters online. I then grouped the movie posters by the year in which the movie they promoted was released. For each year, I counted the total number of pixels for each colour in the year. After normalizing and converting to HSL coordinates, I generated the above visualizations.

Inspirations:

I was inspired by Tyler Neylon’s great work on colour visualizations. I ended up writing my own code to do these image analysis visualizations, but I will try to integrate it with his work.”

Some of Tyler Neylon’s work is below — also great:

Photo credit: Andreas Jones | Hue histogram: Zillabyte's blog

Photo credit: Maoro Maione | Hue histogram: ZIllabyte's blog

Artist Neil Harbisson is completely colour-blind. Here, he explains how a camera attached to his head allows him to hear colour.

Until I was 11, I didn’t know I could only see in shades of grey. I thought I could see colours but that I was confusing them. When I was diagnosed with achromatopsia [a rare vision disorder], it was a bit of a shock but at least we knew what was wrong. Doctors said it was impossible to cure. When I was 16, I decided to study art. I told my tutor I could only see in black and white, and his first reaction was, “What the hell are you doing here then?” I told him I really wanted to understand what colour was. I was allowed to do the entire art course in greyscale - only using black and white. I did very figurative art, trying to reproduce what I could see so that people could compare how my vision was to what they saw. I also learnt that through history, there have been many people who have related colour to sound.

At university I went to a cybernetics lecture by Adam Montandon, a student from Plymouth University, and asked if we could create something so I could see colour. He came up with a simple device, made up of a webcam, a computer and a pair of headphones and created software that would translate any colour in front of me into a sound.

If we were all to hear the frequency of red, for example, we would hear a note that is in between F and F sharp. Red is the lowest frequency colour and the highest is violet. I started using it 24 hours a day, carrying it around in a backpack and feeling that the cybernetic device, the eyeborg, and my organism were completely connected. I haven’t taken it off my head since 2004, except to change the equipment when it breaks. It looks like an antenna that comes out from my head and goes up to the front of my face. At the back of my head there’s a chip which transforms the light waves into sound, and I hear the colours, not through my ears but through my bone.

At the beginning I had some strong headaches because of the constant input of sound, but after five weeks my brain adapted to it, and I started to relate music and real sound to colour. I also started dreaming in colour.

It has changed the way I perceive art. Now I have created a completely new world where colour and sound are exactly the same thing. I like doing sound portraits - I get close to someone’s face, I take down the sound of the hair, the sounds of the skin, eyes and lips, and then I create a specific chord that relates to the face. I’m starting a sound portrait gallery of famous faces which began with Prince Charles, who came to Dartington College of Art, where I was studying in 2005. He asked me, “What’s this that you’re wearing?”, so I asked him if I could listen to his face, and he sounded very harmonic. Some people might be very beautiful but they might not sound very harmonic, although harmony is subjective.

When people see someone with something electronic sticking out of their head, they automatically laugh or they ask you what you are doing. Sometimes they don’t allow me in to places because they think I’m doing something strange. Last year I was attacked by three policemen at a demonstration who thought I was filming them. I told them I was listening to colours, but they thought I was mocking them and tried to pull the camera off my head.

There is no end to the evolution of this electronic eye. At the moment, I can see 360 colours and I have extended this to infrared so I can hear colours that human eyes cannot see. I’m currently working on seeing ultraviolet, which is very important because it can damage our skin. But my favourite colour is aubergine. It looks black but it is actually violet or purple, and it sounds very high-pitched.

Adam Montandon
Inventor
“The first prototype was made in just two weeks. It was held together with tape and cost less than £50.

“The entire idea was dreamt up and planned during a 20-minute train ride. I never expected it to change Neil’s life. The first version could only see about 16 different colours - now it can see the whole spectrum.

“In the future, I believe that many people will use cyborg technology, not just those with a disability.

“A similar technology could allow people to see in the dark or experience infrared and ultraviolet light. Just because something is invisible no longer means we can’t see it.”

Adam Montandon’s website

84 meanings are cross-culturally compared (Wester/American, Japanese, Hindu, Native American, Chinese, Asian, Eastern European, Muslim, African, South American). Meanings range from happiness to success, to jealousy, money and self-cultivation, and their color association have been harvested from several specific sources on the web, and with the help of John Gage’s research on color, art and anthropology.
Information is beautiful.

On the eve of their fifth birthday, Twitter published some remarkable stats. On average per day: 140 million tweets and 460,000 new accounts. Without a doubt, we are living interesting times. The dematerialization of cultural products is in the process of revolutionizing the notion of “book”. User generated content, online publishing tools and mostly social media are empowering individuals both in the virtual world and on the streets, and appear to be in the process of revolutionizing the notion of “authorship”.

Earlier this month, OR publishing announced the publication of Tweets from Tahrir, a book that collected the tweets from most of the active tweeters in Egypt, who greatly contributed to the revolution and to the spread of information. Colin Robinson, co-founder of OR, was quoted as saying: “The book would help preserve tweets that may have been lost or forgotten”. And he is right.
The book covers a unique period in modern Arab history, including the crucial role played by social media. In this sense, the book is a valuable testimony. However, it raises an interesting question: knowing that none of the tweeters – the actual creators of the book’s content – are to receive any royalties, who is the “author” of this book?
On Twitter’s terms of services, it says:

“You retain your rights to any Content you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through the Services, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed).”

Twitter’s short version of this clause is:
“This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours – you own your content.”

So you own your content and authorize Twitter to make it available, but you also theoretically authorize Twitter, on a worldwide basis to “copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit in any and all media or distribution methods.” Presumably, this includes books, then.

The relationship between you, as content producer, and Twitter, is in many ways similar to that of an author with a publisher. Except that Twitter is not exclusively licensed to use this content, that Twitter does not sell the content you’re producing, because its economic interest in this content lies elsewhere, and that you, as an author, do not receive royalties.
To make a long story short, Twitter could have sold the tweets of Tahrir to OR, and, legally at least, that would have been fine. Except that Twitter did not sell the tweets.

While in the process of producing the book, OR books did not seek Twitter’s approval. Instead, they went directly to the tweeters themselves and asked their permission. Given that one tweet is too short and usually does not reach the level of creativity required for copyrightability, at least in the US, asking for tweeters’ permission is then arguably the most that OR could do (for more on copyrights and Twitter, see Jonathan Bailey’s post.

Because tweets are not copyrightable because they are too short, the approach to the question of a tweet’s copyrightability only applies in a quantitative fashion and appears to be relatively straightforward.

Yet, there remains something troubling in OR’s arrangement with Tahrir’s tweeters.

Take the example of Mujeeb Rahman, aka @MujeebJaihoon, whose travelogue was published and presented at last year’s Sharjah International Book Fair. Jaihoon’s book is a travel diary based on the tweets he had posted while travelling through India. Now, imagine that someone else had gathered Jaihoon’s tweets with his permission, made a book out of them, and sold it, without Jaihoon receiving any royalties. Yes, the situation is unusual and unlikely, as Jaihoon would probably have not consented at not receiving any royalties.

In the case of Tweets from Tahrir, the only difference is that there is not just one, but many authors. Because they are many, they cannot have the same kind of control on their common book as Jaihoon does on his. And the way OR seems to have asked for the Egyptian tweeters’ permission, “Would you be happy to be part of this book?” as one of the tweeters confirmed, hints at it. The question implies that no individual is irreplaceable, and that the book, which covers a historical event, exists independently of an individual tweeter’s permission. The line of reasoning is that no single tweeter is necessary and sufficient for the book to exist. It omits that they jointly are.

Again, approaching the question from a quantitative angle misses an important point: bringing individual voices into existence on the web is all that Twitter is about. As the web is more and more about user generated content, every little counts – and can count tremendously. Even if by traditional standards the length of the tweet makes it not copyrightable most of the time, one single tweet does have some value, at least to the extent that tweets compiled together can lead to a book worth $12 on the market. In the same way, every individual tweeter’s 140 characters should be perceived as an original contribution.

Tweets from Tahrir is a good example of the limits that the traditional legal framework, in which books have been produced for centuries, seem to have reached. The web made it possible to create a book with interesting and valuable content, but with no author — in the traditional sense — to exist. This should not lead to our ignoring the author’s rights, but to a revision of our understanding of authorship.

As Twitter has empowered individuals on the web, there is a need for other forms of licenses and copyright laws to be developed to frame their productions. Perhaps the kind of licenses developed by the Creative Commons association are a good place to start:
“Creative Commons licenses are roughly based on a commonsensical idea of fairness and rights’ owners being protected, while at the same time not preventing sharing, modification, re-use, and profitability” says Pierre El Khoury, copyright lawyer and professor of law, member of the Creative Commons community of Lebanon. The core idea is that the author is always credited for his content and is the one to ultimately decide how his content can be used. For example, I, as an author can decide if people are allowed to re-use or modify my content. I can decide if my content can be shared commercially or non commercially. I can also impose on the person who uses my content to share her content under the same license. So for instance, if my content is published under a “non commercial” and “share alike” license, the person who uses the content I produce cannot sell it, and must also use a ‘non commercial’ and ‘share alike’ license.

Clearly, if such a “non commercial-share alike” license was used in the case of Twitter, a book like Tweets from Tahrir would not have seen the light of day, unless it was not sold, but shared, and the profit made indirectly, in other ways. But with revolutions taking place on Tahrir square as well as in the publishing industry, surely there is room for new ways of fairly producing and profiting from written content. A persistent, if fuzzy idea of fairness suggests that either all contributors to an original work make a direct profit, or no one does.

I realize now, that is exactly Lamia’s point. Our whole life is marked by very specific objects, that she so beautifully illustrated in her book, and we didn’t even know it.

The images in ‘Bye bye Babylone’ speak as much as the text. Just flipping through the book, I would recognize the icons of my childhood, some of which have completely disappeared. Fortunately, hand grenades and RPGs are not as visible on the streets of Beirut as they were back in the early 1980’s, but along with them I lost track of the glass bottle of Libby’s ketchup sauce, the Bazooka chewing gum, and Attie honey sweets. Exactly as their alternation in the book suggests, horror stories went side by side with candy and cake in a life that was both hectic and colorful.

 
The stories were so atrocious that they were almost unreal. We only overheard them, given that our parents so desperately tried to protect us from them, and this contributed to the strangeness of their nature, somewhere between myth and reality, which augmented their power of fascination. True, they did taint life with a diffuse and remote fear. But life itself was more about the naive satisfaction at the thought of another day without school.

Of course, the events Lamia Ziade recalls are part of her own story, but they’re yet so similar to events any of us can remember, that the difference goes completely unnoticed. Her simple, almost childlike writing is straightforward and efficient. The identification with the narrator is complete. You would be surprised by the number of intact resurfacing memories, and by the power of the emotions that they evoke.

Reading Lamia Ziade’s book feels like accidentally finding a long lost beautiful diary that I have never written, recording happy and bitter moments, enriched with a collection of places, flavors, smells, and objects that populated my childhood, all of which I cherished dearly once, but somehow failed to notice.
 
 
Lamia Ziade, “Bye Bye Babylone: Beyrouth 1975-1979″
Denoel Graphic, Paris, 2010

First published on RAYA

(1) Li al lazin yadjaroun - To those who are bored (a short poem by Rachid al Daif) (2) Moon as a fruit (3) Imagined Yemen (4) Nil

The issue of Arabic use was already brought up on several occasions, at different levels. I often heard complaints about the absence of a variety of fonts that could be used in graphic design and web interfaces to result in something pleasing to the eye (more on this on Nadine’s blog ‘Arabic type‘). And beyond aesthetics, Arabic is often simply not practical to use in softwares like Word for example or Powerpoint. Small repetitive inconveniences make of writing in Arabic sometimes a real hassle: punctuation signs or numbers, for example will sometimes force you to go to the beginning of the line, preventing you from continuing your sentence naturally – so much time wasted just trying to get the cursor at the right place! However trivial this may seem, it sure says a lot about Arabic on a daily basis: if the use of Arabic was more crucial in today’s pragmatic and digital world, solutions would’ve been found for these rather simple problems.

Beyond the absence of adequate tools, what the Emirati young free lance journalist was upset about was the lack of quality content in Arabic on the web. You can have a real hard time finding relevant information in Arabic when you need it. It seems like most working-browsing people, and these two activities are more and more tightly linked in today’s world, are condemned to search for relevant information in English. Obviously, a lot of relevant information on the Arab world is not always available in English, and this leads to journalists poorly informed on whatever Arabic subject they were researching, like our free-lancer friend, and more generally, to poorly informed Arab workers-browsers.

The paucity of information feeds into the absence of Arabic in the everyday life of the young new working-browsing generation, and both these factors may be suspected of leading to the slow death of the language by asphyxia. Arabic is mostly used on paper and for some reason, a non negligible portion of the working-browsing population rarely uses Arabic naturally for daily correspondences. This contributes to dragging us into a vicious circle where the less Arabic is used, the less Arabic is used.

In the absence of adequate and wide spread solutions to the impracticality of Arabic on technological devices, the young new mobile users had spontaneously invented a new language for text messages around the year 1999 (check Yamli though). If you’re an Arab, you simply know how to pronounce ’2′, ’3′ or ’7′ if they occur in a word. This latinization of Arabic substitutes some letters that do not exist in the Latin alphabet, with numerals chosen for their visual similarity to the original Arabic letter. First invented for mobiles, this language spread to all sorts of electronic communication devices, until it finally made its appearance into the real world.

At a wedding party this summer in Lebanon, the lyrics of an Arabic song were distributed to the guests for a sing-along moment of ‘intense joy’. The lyrics of the song were spelled out in this new-age 2-3-7 alphabet. The bride’s sister who had written the song’s lyrics confessed that she was afraid people wouldn’t know how to read the Arabic alphabet, or would find it too effortful – and we’re talking about a Lebanese wedding, which means that over 500 guests were suspected of not being able to read Arabic fluently enough. You might argue that this remains a private event, and that 500 people on a population of 4 millions, is not a very significant number. Fair enough. That same summer, in Beirut, I picked up a printed flyer in the street, it promoted a festival about heritage and folklore and was ironically titled ’3ALA DA2ET EL DABKE LA2OUNA’ – you would need to know Arabic to understand this sentence, so do not be surprised if you don’t.

Why not use the proper Arabic language? I thought to myself in frustration. A linguist friend to whom I told this story got very excited. He thought it was just so great, creative and amazing that people found a way to overcome obstacles and spontaneously communicate. His reaction puzzled me. As much as I had been amused by the emergence of this language, I was not in admiration. Was I wrong to think that this was a symptom of the Arabic language’s decay? Was I wrong of thinking of it as decay instead of simply change? Was I being too stiff and authoritarian when it came to language? Why did it matter so much to me?

Reading an article on language policy debates, and the link of language to identity made me realize that this question was not a simple one to answer. There is a thin line between caring about a language, trying to make sure that it is not neglected, and being a purist with fascist ideas about how, where and when, what language should be used. This blog post is after all written in English, so as to address a non Arab audience among other reasons. Nevertheless, by not providing adequate tools for Arabic to be at least as practical as any other language in today’s modern active life and by not providing enough quality content in Arabic on the web, we are not giving people the choice.

First published on RAYA agency’s website.