"Alas, poor Syria"!

This editorial cartoon by Habib Haddad just ran in Al-Hayat.  Poor Syria takes the place of the skull.  It's macabre and effective, partly because it follows the usual polemical pattern of personifying the nation as a single person with a single uncertain fate: in this case, Yorick.

h/t David Karjala.

Bashar as "Brutus or Macbeth"

Franklin Lamb at Countercurrents writes of Bashar al-Asad's most recent non-concession speech, delivered in operatic style at the Damascus Opera House:

The nearly 1,400 seating capacity Opera Theater was packed for yesterday’s presidential address, and as in the final scene of Mozart’s Opera, the conclusion of Bashar Assad’s performance was followed by, as Mozart wrote, “a night-long celebration” among many of his supporters here in Damascus. Basher Assad’s glory, as he tried to leave the stage last night and was swarmed by scores of admirers, may not have been that of Caesar’s, during the Gallic wars as the latter also portrayed a domestic crisis and challenge as a defensive struggle to save “Rome”. And granted, it is unlikely that Syria’s president will appear to his critics as posh as John Kennedy at Vienna’s Opera House. But the man connected with his audience (s) during his watershed speech. He excelled in delivery, content and, most critically, stating and advocating what he believes is his countryman’s case. While welcoming foreign advice on how to end the current crisis, he insisted that the Syrian people throughout their history of resistance to occupation and hegemony have rejected the orders from certain governments he referred to, in the current crisis, as the “masters of the puppets” who are every day causing death, destruction and deprivations across the Syrian Arab Republic. Admittedly sleep deprived, this observer, as he listened to Bashar Assad’s address was reminded of a Macbeth or Brutus soliloquy. I could not help but transpose in my mind Brutus’ plea in Act 3, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“Who is here so rude or unpatriotic that would not be a Syrian? Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak–for him

I have not intentionally or unjustly wronged. I pause for a reply.”

Following his presidential address to the nation, one local journalist, who is sometimes critical of the regime, elaborated–in answer to my question about Assad’s apparent enduring popularity during this tragic period for people of Syria: “It’s true. And it’s partly due to the fact that he is modest, even humble– and well-educated in contrast to some regional monarchs who are essentially illiterate and uninterested in the world outside their fiefdoms palaces.”

  ... but which is he, Brutus or Macbeth? 

I'm not usually a big fan of Fouad Ajami, but in this case (talking about John Kerry) I think he has hit on the right allusion:

Kerry said Assad delivered on the requests he made. But Fouad Ajami of Stanford's Hoover Institution says Kerry was "snookered."
"Bashar was a very, very talented man with his lovely lady, with his Lady Macbeth, with his wife, at charming foreign visitors and I think the charm worked on John Kerry," Ajami said.

 Because, as in Macbeth, the charm is an inextricable part of the slime.

"A Naughty World": Syria - Shakespeare on... Wikileaks

My jet-lagged friend Elias alerted me early yesterday morning that the latest batch of Wikileaks Syria emails includes some correspondence with one Lamis Ismail Omar, an intimate friend of Bashar al-Asad who's completing a PhD at Durham University in the UK.  She's in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures: Translation and Linguistics.
Dissertation topic: "The Translation of Metaphor in Shakespeare's Drama from English into Arabic."
Dissertation advisors: Daniel Newman, Paul Starkey, David Cowling.
And forgive me but: she's very hot, for a Shakespeare studies grad student!

By the time I've gotten to look into it, the press in several languages is alleging that Lamis is Asad's lover, citing the extremely affectionate tone of their email and the large portrait of him on her wall in Durham.  Durham university is scrambling to deny any formal links with Asad or knowledge that he or his pariah regime (but she enrolled in 2006!) paid Lamis Ismail Omar's tuition. Wikileaks' copy of Lamis' fourth-year-student review is down (probably from excess traffic) and a search for Lamis Ismail's profile on LinkedIn, with what seems to be her correct dissertation title, mysteriously re-routes to another profile named Janah Rahman.  No further information to be gleaned from Academia.edu. In a more recent photo she looks more grad-studenty, or perhaps just harried by the press.

Newspapers have republished some of the 800 emails released by Wikileaks. The messages are mostly in English, with a lot of Arabic mixed in.  In some cases they're downright romantic, quoting Nizar Qabbani poems about roses etc.; elsewhere, Lamis shares worries about her mother's health.  Others reveal a shared interest (between Lamis and Bashar, who writes as sam@alshahba.com) in some subtleties of the English language: metaphors, catchphrases, stock expressions, lexical nuances. She coaches him on stock expressions to use in upcoming meetings. They share an iPhone app for idioms, and she sends him a very long writeup (with sample quotes from books by scholars such as Steven Heydemann who are of course critical of his regime) of the issues involved in translating certain politically loaded terms such as "revisionist."  As a translation professional she seems really smart. You can read a few more of the emails here  [update - does Lamis have a son??] and see Al-Akhbar's analysis of the whole cache.

[Update, which casts more light on how things work in academia than anything else. Wikileaks is back up. In her review, Lamis' committee writes:

As usual, the quality of her work is very high. She is currently working on the revisions of chapters submitted this session, as well as on a sample analysis of metaphors in her corpus (Shakespearean plays and their Arabic translations). Professor Newman has no doubt that Lamis will be able successfully to complete her PhD by 2012, and that her dissertation will make a significant contribution to her field of study; he adds only that it is imperative she does not lose momentum during her stay in Syria.

If she has other projects going on besides grad school, such as, e.g., translating Bashar's speeches or performing any other services in Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs (!), her advisors do not mention it and probably don't know or care.]

I should say that Arabic Shakespeare translations have been a staple topic for dissertations by Arab students doing PhDs in the UK (and, to a lesser but still important extent, in the US).  I catalog over a dozen such dissertations in the intro to my book.  Many of them are excellent, though some are unduly nitpicky (asserting the grad student's superiority over an Arab translation tradition portrayed as backward). None so far has been published as a monograph, perhaps because the students leave with their PhDs and go on to publish and teach in the Arab world, so English-language academic publications may be less important.  A dissertation on "The Translation of Metaphor in Shakespeare's Drama from English into Arabic" seems plausible, even potentially trendy.  I don't understand when and how Durham University is supposed to have intuited that Lamis Ismail was being sponsored by the Syrian regime, or why it's necessarily a scandal that she's due to graduate in September.  (If she's having an affair with Bashar, that's a scandal of a very different scale and kind.)

Finally: the sig quote that wraps up most of Lamis' emails is, you might say, weirdly a propos of the Wikileaks phenomenon:

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a weary world.

It comes from The Merchant of Venice 5.1- albeit in the Willy Wonka version rather than Portia's.  In Shakespeare it's a "naughty world" -- which seems apter still.

Something rotten

In Syria, meanwhile, recent Higher Academy of Dramatic Arts acting program graduate `Arwa al-`Arabi عروة العربي has directed what seems, according to this review in Al-Akhbar (also reprinted on the Iraq-based web magazine Alefyaa.com and maybe elsewhere), to have been a really awful production of Hamlet.  Mustafa al-Khani starred. Produced by the Ministry of Culture's Department of Theatre and Music, it opened at the Hamra theatre in downtown Damascus. 
Does the young Syrian intelligentsia really have nothing better to do??  Last February (is it possible?) the same young director seems to have put on a funny J.B. Priestley play. The text of his Hamlet was edited by none other than Dr. Riad Ismat, who himself directed a "contemporary" Hamlet in 1973, and who is now Bashar al-Asad's minister of culture. 

After a catalog of the new production's shortcomings (and alas it fell short only in quality, not length), the reviewer concludes:

كل ذلك، أضاع بوصلة المشاهد عن مقولة العرض التي أراد العربي إيصالها إلى جمهوره: جميعنا الآن نعيش صراعات وحالات ارتياب وتأمل مثل هاملت في بلاد تحوّل فيها الموت والقتل إلى وجبة يومية.

All this has ruined the show's chance to get across the play's message, which al-Arabi had wanted to communicate to the audience: we are all now living through power struggles and amid doubts and hopes, like Hamlet, in a country where death and killing are daily fare.

Rehearsals began this past February. For a glowing announcement in the government newspaper Tishreen, see here.

Chutzpah

Anyone for a night at the movies? Films about bloody dictators, perhaps?
As government troops fire on Eid demonstrators in cities including Hama and Homs, a Syrian newspaper announces a film festival in Damascus.  To wit: a festival will be held November 13-16 at the Al-Asad House for Arts and Culture, "under the patronage of Minister of Culture [and one-time respected playwright] Riad Ismat," devoted to the films of Shakespeare.  The newspaper notes that hundreds of Shakespeare-based films have been made, "among the most prominent of which are Hamlet, Titus Andronicus, and Macbeth."