Palestinian Festival of Literature begins tonight!
I am writing this in the car on the way from the northern, Israeli-controlled city of Haifa, to the West Bank city of Ramallah. Cell phones beep as we cross between Israeli and West Bank coverage. The view out the window has changed from the north’s dark green mountains and Israel’s manicured landscapes to the rocky textures of West Bank southern hills, the greens and reds and browns of mountain terraces dug painstakingly, precisely, over hundreds of years.
In a few days, over a dozen writers will arrive in Ramallah from different parts of the world to take part in the Palestine Festival of Literature, which I help organize. It is a traveling roadshow that puts on public literary events featuring Palestinian and visiting writers in different cities in the evenings. Over the course of the week, it also aims to show writers something of Palestinian histories and present-day realities. A lot of time is spent on the road, traveling in and around the geography of occupation: the checkpoints, walls, and segregated motorways.
Source: mondoweiss.net