Arab Voices

Guest post by 

Abdulrahman Matar

 In April 2019, the Syrian Mediterranean Cultural Forum organized a new poetry evening, ‘Arab Voices,’ at the public library in Aurora (Ontario, Canada) as a part of its annual program.

Many Arab writers and artists living in Canada participated in the program and included poets Rula Kahil (Lebanon) Naeim Helene (Syria) Suzan Sami Jamil (Iraq) Younes Al-Atari (Palestine) Abdulrahman Matar (Syria), Jacqueline Hanna Salam (Syria).

The Syrian artist Ismael Abu Fakher also played the Bezek (solo, accompanied by poetry readings). A short film ‘The 11th Commandment’ was presented by Mowafaq Katt (Syria).

In addition, Abdul Rahman Matar and Mowafaq Katt created a calligraphy of Arabic characters and dedicated it to the people of Aurora.

The readings were conducted in both Arabic and English, with the technical assistance of the library team which included the projection of texts on a large screen at the Aurora Public Library.

In attendance were a number of distinguished individuals from the Canadian public life including the Mayor of Aurora, the local Member of Parliament, Members of PEN Canada.

Arab Voices is a cultural project aimed at introducing the Canadian public to the contemporary cultural of Arab creators living in Canada.

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The Syrian Mediterranean Cultural Forum has held cultural evenings in Istanbul and Toronto since February 2014.

The founder of the forum is Syrian writer, poet and novelist Abdulrahman Matar, who has lived in Canada for the last four years, having come here as a refugee.

Syrian Mediterranean Cultural Forum is a Syrian cultural forum, NGO, Non-profit, currently located in Toronto – Canada. The purpose of the Forum is to enable a cultural expression of Arabic culture especially in literature and the arts. 

Specifically, through hosting a variety of activities, which bring out, and express the general cultural sides of life.

The forum aims to open up to different cultures, and to share ideas and activities, and it sees the important diversity behind that. It also aims to be a stage of cultural fertilization and debates. Also to form a support for the Syrian refugees who are merging with the new societies that are receiving them.

This forum was founded in, March 2013, in Istanbul. It emerged from the Mediterranean studies center (which was founded in Damascus, 2012) where it also continued its activities in 2013, in Istanbul, where it’s officially registered. It had organized many cultural events, like poetry and musical events. 

Many of the Syrian poets, writers, and novelists, had attended and been part of.

The Forum's Vision

• To spread the culture of debate, civil work, peace, and tolerance.

The goals of the forum

• To express the different sides of the Syrian, Arab, and global literature, and the art.
• To be a bridge of cultural connection between the motherland and the residents in other foreign countries.
• Contributing to the process of merging people within new societies.
• To connect and exchange with other cultures, through expressing the importance of diversity, while defining, and recognizing it.
• Support and encourage young talents.

Activities:

• Horizon from perfume Soul: poetry and music - Istanbul / Feb 24, 2014.
• Poetry readings with music: Istanbul / Jan 25, 2015
• Poet Nuri Al-Jarrah: Poetry readings and book signing / Istanbul, April 11, 2015
• A solidarity stand with the Syrian detainees: Toronto Sep 08, 2018.
• Arabic Voices in Toronto: Poetry Reading / Heart House – U OF T- Toronto Nov 03, 2018
• Arabic Voices:  Poetry - Music - Movie - Arabic Calligraphy Sketch / Aurora Public Library Apr 06, 2019

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About Abdulrahman Matar

Writer and journalist from Syria, resident in Canada since 2015, poet and novelist. He worked in the culture field and media in Syria and Libya. He is a researcher in Euro-Mediterranean relations, human rights, and terrorism issues, and he is an activist on freedoms and civil society issues. Founder and Director of the Mediterranean Studies Center & Syrian-Mediterranean Cultural Forum - SEEGULL.

He continues to publish the research and articles in the Arabic press.

He has published five books: Blood is not red (common stories 1983), Rain leaves - Poetry 1999 , The evening Rose - Poetry 2000, Mediterranean Studies 2001,Wild Mirage - Novel 2015,and a some manuscripts.

His books have been well received, and dozens of articles have been written about them in various Arab media.

He was arrested five times and spent nearly ten years in prison as a result of his writings, freedom of expression, and his positions on issues of freedom and human rights.

His novel "Wild Mirage" deals with his experiences in political imprisonment, torture, deprivation, abuse and the oppression. Matar is a Membership of Syrian writers' Association, and the Association of Journalists.

Membership of "Writer in Exile" / PEN Canada.

Membership of Writers’ Union of Canada.

The World is Here: Novels Navigating Love and Conflict

From L to R: Manjushree Thapa, Josh Scheinert,  Eva Salinas
Uzma Jalaluddin and Sharon Bala
at a discussion on
'The World is Here: Novels Navigating Love and Conflict
at the Festival of Literary Diversity  

The Festival of Literary Diversity’s fourth edition was held recently in Brampton. The festival has grown steadily in participation and popularity over the years, attracting the best literary talent that Canada offers.

In 2016, just prior to the launch of the first festival, I interviewed Jael Richardson, the founder and artistic director of the festival, for TAG TV (see the interview here: https://youtu.be/vDklJugI6Xg). Jael said the idea of the festival came to her in 2014 when she participated in a book conference in New York and was stunned at the lack of diversity in the lineup of the authors. Dalton Higgins, author and events organiser, pointed out to Jael that the situation wasn’t too different in Canada.

Jael and a group of people who shared her interests got together and decided to launch a Festival that would celebrate diversity in all its forms – race, faith, sexual orientation, abilities (physical and mental). The purpose was to create space in the world of literature that would reflect the Canadian reality of multiculturalism. Earlier this year, the Writers’ Union of Canada recognised Jael and FOLD with the 2019 Freedom to Read Award.

Since its start in 2016, I have attended all the four festivals in Brampton. In 2017, I was privileged to be invited as an author. And every year, the festival has featured many authors who congregate in the first week of May to talk about themselves, their books, their readers, other authors, Canada, diversity, multiculturalism, and have fun.

This year, the festival’s main venue was the landmark Rose Theatre in Brampton. Spring had finally arrived, and the longish commute from Toronto didn’t seem too arduous, especially because the session that I’d chosen to attend – ‘The The World is Here: Novels Navigating Love and Conflict’ – had fine authors, all of whom had their debut novels published in Canada recently.

The panel included

Sharon Bala (The Boat People which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2018 and was awarded the 2018 Amazon Canada First Novel Award);

Uzma Jalaluddin (Ayesha At Last, a revamped Pride and Prejudice that is soon to be made into a film);

Josh Scheinert (The Order of Nature, set in Gambia, portraying the struggles and fears of being gay in West Africa) and

Manjushree Thapa (All of Us in Our Own Lives is her first novel to be published in Canada).

Eva Salinas, managing editor of foreign affairs news site OpenCanada.org and a freelance journalist, moderated the discussion.

Sharon’s and Uzma’s novels are about their protagonists coming to Canada, and Josh’s and Manjushree’s novels are about their protagonists leaving Canada. In all four novels, the borders between home and away get blurred, and lives are transformed because of physical and emotional dislocation.

Eva asked the panelist about the different kinds of borders in their stories, and how their characters and they as writers respond to these borders.

Sharon, whose novel is about Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka, landing off the coast of British Columbia, says that more than personal, physical, and geographical borders, her characters navigate the liminal spaces of silences and secrets. 

In Uzma’s Ayesha At Last, the boundaries are purely personal. A character in the novel, Khalid, knows he appears weird to the world because of in-your-face refusal to abandon his ethnicity and cultural rootedness; but he doesn’t worry overtly about this because he contends that he is who he is because of his belief; the reader is not expected to like him rather spend time with him to understand him.

“People cross borders often without having a choice,” Josh says. In his novel, which explores the relationship between an American (Andrew) and a Gambian (Thomas), the protagonists cross the continental borders, and the borders of control drawn by the society and families. In Manjushree’s All of Us in Our In Our Own Lives, Ava Berriden goes from Toronto to Nepal to find meaning in her life, but realises that she is unwanted despite her power.

The discussion dealt with issues that are common to Canadian milieu – issues such as acceptance, belonging, identity and home. “What gives us our identity, and how much of it is related to race?” asked Eva, whose careful choice of questions accentuated the inherently Canadian character of these authors.

Dani Rodrik - 1

Dani Rodrik is a superstar economist whose radical interpretation of the trilemma of globalisation has become an important method to understand the imbalance that globalisation has caused in the last three decades. He wrote about it in 2007, just prior to the financial crises of 2008.

Rodrik was in Toronto recently for the Cadario visiting lecture in Public Policy. He spoke on ‘Globalisation’s wrong turn: What’s wrong with globalisation, and can it be fixed?’

According to his thesis, the process of globalisation involves three sociopolitical and economic variables:

The trilemma is a triangle and we have three corners.

Hyper globalisation as a model of the world which is frictionless mobility of capital, goods, and services

National sovereignty – the ability of nation states to administer their own systems

Mass politics and democracy the degree to which governments are accountable to the people through democracy or other means

The claim of the trilemma is that in a political economy, you can have at the most two of those three things and never all three simultaneously, so people must make a choice.

Rodrik says, all the three forms couldn’t achieve an equilibrium on all the three parameters.

The gold standard combined national sovereignty with hyper globalisation while keeping mass politics at bay

The post 1945, Bretton Woods globalisation combined mass politics with national sovereignty keeping hyper globalisation at bay

The post 1990s globalisation contends that who needs national sovereignty at some level, we can have a hyper globalised economy, increased integration of the market economy – goods, services, finances, not so much labour, which is an exception, and we can deal with mass politics by making our global institutions more representative, more accountable. Politics moves beyond the national to encompass the transnational.

This is a radical interpretation of the relationship between democracy and capitalism, a relationship that has often sought to be portrayed by the votaries of capitalism as natural and deeply intertwined. In fact, Rodrik’s as trilemma indicates, at no point in the history of modern capitalism (since the late 19th century) has this relationship been natural. This is analysed in more details in the third part of this blog.

As per Rodrik’s analysis, globalisation has gone through three distinct forms during three eras in the past century or so. These were:

The gold standard – began from the mid-19th century

The Bretton Woods era that began in 1945, and led to the post-World War II economic reconstruction

The hyper globalisation era that began in the 1990s and we have experienced for the last three decades

Rodrik says that while all the three eras espoused globalisation, they were inherently different in their key characteristics.

Free mobility of capital and free trade in goods

Degree to which governments could enforce regulations across international borders – indicating how the governments felt compelled to pursue economic policies

The presence of multilateral governance institutions

The gold standard we had free mobility of capital across the world free trade in good and free mobility of labour. The Bretton Woods era onwards, the free mobility of labour was curtailed and controlled by developed economies.

According to Rodrik, during the Bretton Woods era of globalisation, governments were free to follow economic and social policies unconstrained; they could follow macro economic policies, taxation, regulatory and industrial policies without the fear that these policies would be viewed as barriers to trade.

Rodrik explains that during the gold standard and the Bretton Woods eras, we did not have any mechanism that imposed on governments rules and regulations that ensured good economic behaviour.

Financially open economies had norms internalised by policy makers; you had to pursue a policy of parity to gold, you were always paying your external debts, no matter what, and when if you didn’t do that, you were not punished by international institutions because there was no such thing.

He adds, however, with the onset of the 1990s hyper globalisation model, the rules of the global economy reached behind the borders in ensuring the regulations promoting globalisation.

In this era, we entered a phase where national economic policies were viewed from the perspective whether they hindered or encouraged the integration of the global economy; rather than from the perspective of the domestically articulated economic and social costs.

After providing this background, Rodrik then relates the history of globalisation to the present discontent over its effects. How does this relate to the backlash to globalisation and the reactions to hyper globalisation of the last three decades, he asks and provides the trilemma explanation.

He explains that the three different models of globalisations are the choices we make of the two out of the three options we have. In gold standard where we combined the free flow of finance, capital, goods and even labour, and national sovereignty and all the sovereigns ensured gold standards and there was a limited role for the sovereigns to take care of the aspirations of their people.

In today’s terms there was a narrow space for governments to implement macro economic policies as those policies may be viewed as re-imposing barriers to trade and goods.

If international finance and trade are to be fostered, the sovereigns didn’t have much freedom to look after the needs of the people.

Mass politics including democracy had to be kept at bay; gold standard was fundamentally incompatible with mass politics especially as participatory democracy developed in the West.

Rodrik explains because the gold standard kept people’s aspirations at bay, it was unsustainable when mass politics began to gain ascendency. He says that the gold standard was abandoned in Britain in 1931 was it had been transformed into a much more developed democracy and mass political movements against gold standards left no choice to the government. FDR followed suit soon after. Countries that abandoned the gold standard experienced more rapid economic growth.

The gold standard constricted the policy makers’ freedom to initiative economic measures that would generate employment. The tight monetary policy which was necessitated as it had to abide by the gold standards led to high levels of unemployment in the economy. Abandoning the gold standard led to inflation and an increase the money supply, reduction in interest rates and a control over unemployment, he says.

Dani Rodrik - 2

The economist then explains that by the time of the famous 1944 Bretton Woods meeting, the governments of the war-ravaged economies had realised that politics has become sufficiently participatory and labour markets have become sufficiently institutionalised to return to the gold standards.

Instead, it was now time to create space for domestic economic management by explicitly keeping hyper globalisation at bay.  So, it was a model of globalisation that was unambitious in terms of how many frictions could segment the national markets.

What that meant in the terms of international finance was that capital controls the ability of national sovereigns to manage domestic financial systems and segment them from global financial markets by limiting the ease with investors could move their money in and out of the country.

Capital controls had to be an integral part of this post-war economic system to create space for what we call today the Keynesian counter-cyclical macro economic policies. That was his idea that you cannot manage your economy and you cannot ensure full employment if you cannot have autonomy over your monetary and fiscal economic polices, and you needed to keep international finances at bay to integrate of the system, as a permanent feature of the system.

The post-war trade regime developed along similar principles. We have a series of multilateral trade agreements and the evolution of General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) that were equally light on the degree of hyper globalisation and in particular the GATT regime proscribed regulations on globally.

Pertinently, Rodrik says, the recommendation on tariff stopped at the border, they did not reach behind the border. They dealt with only tariffs, they did not tell the governments how to run their patent regime, how to run their subsidies, what kind of other regulations they should have.

The Bretton Woods globalisation – was explicitly incomplete, with one of its cornerstones as capital controls and therefore limited financial globalisation, the GATT model, which left countries pretty free to do what they wanted. The moment it looked like some of the domestic policies looked compromised by trade flows, it allowed countries to take remedial measures.

Clearly in favour of this mode of globalisation, Rodrik says, the Bretton Woods era globalisation increased rapidly under the GATT regime, and enabled rapid expansion of world trade. World trade and international investment increased under the GATT regime.

If you look at the world trade relative to world GDP, world trade expanded between 1945 and 1990 much more rapid pace since it did since 1990. This form of globalisation encouraged international trade and investments without unduly compromising domestic economic and social structure.

Then, coming to the latest form of globalisation, Rodrik says, the move to the latest revamped model of hyper globalisation in the 1990s changed the priorities. The world economies moved from becoming the means whereby you achieve domestic economic and employment goals, to the role where the domestic economy becomes an instrument to achieve globalisation goal.

The actual rules of the game involved creating the WTO in 1990s and the expansion of the regional trade agreements which mushroomed after the 1990s. This was different from the GATT model.

This model enabled the globalisation to reach beyond the borders, domestic regulations, investment rules, subsidy regimes, even health and safety regulations were being viewed from the perspective of whether they were a barrier to trade or not, and to the extent that they differed and seem to be discriminatory against other countries, they are treated as non-tariff barriers.

This form of hyper globalisation gave rise to agenda setters such as international banks, multinational corporations, and big pharma. There is a presumption that all major global economies are to eventually converge into a global economic model because complete freedom of trade and capital mobility requires convergence of regulations and policies, and globalisation becomes the end rather than the means.

And while nobody is looking at global political federal structure, political scientists through the 1990s and 2000s have commented on a sort of network of regulators, and global communities that are creating accountability that will eventually evolve into a global system of governance that will sustain this hyper globalisation, and simultaneously, national governments would become less of an obstacle.

However, this scenario envisages a limitation on national self determination and raises the question of who is empowered in this process. And who are they accountable to?

In the world economy at large, we never went the whole way to implement the third way because national sovereignty is far more important. Rodrik concludes by emphasizing that the trilemma gives us a choice of which of the two from the three things that we need to take.

“And I am of the view that the sustainable model of globalisation is the one that was developed in Bretton Woods era – not particular policies, but the spirit of that era – because it acknowledges that world economy constitutes countries with different economic and social models and that we have to recreate what we think that a reasonably good world economy can generate.”