Mai Ghoussoub; Writer,artist and publisher
Hyfler/Rosner
Writer, artist and co-founder of Saqi
The Independent
23 February 2007
Morris Farhi
In the late 1960s a terrible murder shocked Lebanon. A young
servant killed her new-born baby by throwing him from the
ninth floor of a building. For days, the media pilloried her
as a monster. Then, a student, barely 18, discovered that
the maid had been raped by her employer and that, unable to
endure this "shame", had chosen to expiate it by killing the
evidence of that rape. The student went on to write a
searing plea for the maid and offered the article to every
newspaper in the land. Not one dared publish it. In
patriarchal Lebanon, men could not be guilty of rape; the
fault always lay with the woman.
So started the extraordinary career of Mai Ghoussoub,
sculptor, writer, publisher, human-rights activist and one
of the most remarkable women of our times, who died suddenly
last week.
Born in 1951, Ghoussoub graduated in maths from the American
University of Beirut, then studied literature at the
Lebanese University, then sculpture at Morley College in
London. She participated in the Lebanese civil war (1975-90)
as a Trotskyite. Soon, disillusioned that, in pursuit of
expediency, even idealistic leftist movements reneged on
their moral and progressive values, she devoted herself to
humanitarian work. On one occasion, as she was driving a
wounded victim to hospital, her car was hit by a shell and
she herself was badly injured. Despite treatment both in
Lebanon and England, she lost an eye, a fact known only to
her relatives and a few friends.
Mai Ghoussoub lived and worked as one unscathed - or rather,
as one for whom being scathed was just one of life's quirks.
Her book Leaving Beirut: women and the wars within (1998) is
one of the most poignant testimonies to that fratricidal
war.
In 1976, she moved to Paris and worked there as a journalist
for Arab newspapers and, in collaboration with her childhood
friend André Gaspard, then working in a bank, wrote
Comprendre le Liban, an exposé of Lebanon's contradictory
identities that appeared over the pseudonyms Selim Accaoui
and Magida Salman. (Magida Salman survived to write
elsewhere, contributing, for example, to another book, Women
in the Middle East, 1987.)
Two years later, during a trip to London, Ghoussoub noted
that this cosmopolitan city did not have a bookshop
specialising in Arabic works. So she rang Gaspard and
suggested that they should start one themselves. Gaspard
came over immediately. And the two, as yet without funds or
premises and, not least, without residency permits, set
about achieving this. Thus, in 1979, they founded the
Al-Saqi bookshop, in Westbourne Grove, which, over the
years, has become a treasury for anyone interested in Arab
culture and scholarship. The bookshop soon engendered a
publishing house. Today, this house, with its imprints, Saqi
and Telegram, has established itself as one of the most
vibrant, daring and humanist independent publishers in the
world.
Early in 1991, Mai Ghoussoub married a compatriot, the
distinguished writer Hazem Saghieh, an astute commentator on
Middle East affairs. If there really are marriages woven by
a divine authority, this was one of them. Dynamic at every
level, the couple enjoyed an enviable diet of heated
political arguments, hilarious laughter, explorations of the
arts and love of the most caring kind.
Mai was a life force. She vivified every social gathering,
every professional engagement and, above all, every one she
met. I don't know - nor can I imagine - a single person who,
whether he/she agreed with her powerful views or not, was
not captivated by her at first sight. She had many
interests, she excelled in many disciplines. She never
admitted to having one identity. She maintained she had many
identities or, rather, many identifying elements.
True to the spirit of her beloved Beirut and its diverse
cultures, she loved words. Consequently, she campaigned
ardently against censorship. Though she acknowledged that
words, misused, could incite hatred and conflict, she
defended their right to be voiced. Exposing their evil, she
maintained, was a challenge we all had to face. Her keynote
speech for Freemuse in 2005, "It is Banned to Ban", is a
passionate defence of freedom of expression; and her 2006
play Texterminators is as moving a paean to the sanctity of
books as Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. "Words," she said,
"don't kill; humans do."
Always non-judgemental, as evinced by her defence of the
unfortunate maid who committed infanticide, she constantly
defied, through both her sculpture and writing, all forms of
inequity, injustice and taboos. In many articles and from
many platforms, she censured political transgressions and
human-rights abuses, not least the tortures in Abu Ghraib.
In her installations Displaces and What is the Purpose of
Your Visit (Berlin, 2005), she attacked the prejudices
against "identities" and refugees.
She explored the vagaries of masculinity in Imagined
Masculinities: male identity and culture in the modern
Middle East (2000), a collection of essays that she edited
with Emma Sinclair-Webb. She fathomed the mysteries of
femininity and transvestism and the metaphors of dressing in
her 2002 performance play Jamil/Jamila, in her sculptures of
such iconic divas as Um Khaltoum and Josephine Baker, and in
her installation Penelopeia Project (Hellenic Museum,
Chicago, 2006). And she grieved for her beloved,
conflict-ridden Lebanon in such exhibitions as "Under
Different Skies" (Copenhagen, 2006), "Beirut Out of War"
(Museum Man, Liverpool, 2005-06) and "Lebanon - Image in All
the People" (Liverpool Biennial, 2006) - the last with her
fellow artist Souheil Sleiman.
Her works, I believe, will live on. So will Saqi, the
publishing house she co-founded. Its staff, its editorial
team and its authors may feel like orphans, but they know
that she remains everywhere around us.
Moris Farhi
Mai Ghoussoub had a unique combination of formal
intelligence and joyous creativity, writes Maggie Gee. She
saved my career as a writer; it is as simple as that.
Without her, my 2002 novel The White Family would not have
been published and subsequently shortlisted for the Orange
Prize and the International Impac prize.
She read the novel, loved it and rang the same day to accept
it, after all London's mainstream houses had turned it down.
Perhaps the book's frank description of racism struck a
chord with her; also, she knew that the censorship of
unacceptable thoughts does nothing to deal with their root
cause, fear breeding hatred.
Mai was an artist in everything she did, and in her physical
self as well, slender, warm, curvaceous and intensely
graceful, a trained dancer who still had long dark hair in
her fifties and dressed in dramatic deep reds and blacks.
Her autobiographical book Leaving Beirut is a gripping and
enlightening meditation on how you can live beyond the
horrors of the past and find new hope without forcing or
falsifying forgiveness.
Mai Ghoussoub, writer, artist and publisher: born Beirut 2
November 1951; twice married; died London 17 February 2007.