David Hockney

Feature due to appear shortly in The national magazine.


DAVID HOCKNEY
By John Kelleher for The National

When you ask David Hockney how many cigarettes he smokes a day he simply shrugs, though five minutes into a conversation in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London he is already lighting-up for the second time.

But he is clearer about his art. He produces a new work every day.

Hockney, now 74, is the grand old man of British art and doesn’t suffer rules gladly. An Internet search reveals smoking as a present preoccupation but if you graze for images, his popular California swimming pools paintings from the 1970s predominate.

California seems a lifetime away in London’s autumn sunshine where, as he puffs, Hockney fulminates. “I am sick and tired of people telling us what we can and can’t do. Smokers get a very rough deal.”

His voice is rising, to the consternation of an Academy minder. “David. You promised you wouldn’t.“

But the artist is in full stride with a captivated audience. “People say cigar smoking kills you. I would like to say loudly” (his voice now booming out and attracting the attention of tourists) “that smoking cigars never killed anyone.”

He adds: “We are all addicted to something. I am addicted to lots of things. In particular I am addicted to art.“ And it is the art that matters most.

His latest works as an artist, due to go on show in London after Christmas, will reveal another newer addiction – the landscape of his childhood – the woods and fields of East Yorkshire presented with a luminous intensity.

From the playful young artist who dyed his hair in the 1960s – “because blondes have more fun” – through his frank depictions of the hedonistic lifestyle of Los Angeles to his current persona as an ageing curmudgeon, Hockney has always been uncompromising.

But controversy has always been counterpointed by a constant flow of terrific art - enjoyed around the world and attracting both increasing acclaim and ever higher prices. The Yorkshire-born artist is in London on a brief visit from his present base at Bridlington in Yorkshire for a sneak preview of the Academy’s big Hockney show, coming in January, entitled “A Bigger Picture.” It is part of the cultural Olympiad running up to the 2012 Olympic games.

“Its not two thousand and twelve” he scolds a representative from the show’s sponsor BNP Paribas during a press conference. “It’s twenty twelve. Perhaps by the time we get to 2066 people will have got it.”

In cold print Hockney may sound testy but in person all his anger is delivered with a wry smile and a northern sense of humour. It’s a personality that has made him one of the best-loved artists in Britain. His work has made him one of the most admired and respected. And he has long been one of the most articulate of the nation’s painters.

Hockney has avoided the post-modern provocations and conceptual japes of younger British artists like Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin. Instead he has devoted most of his career to painting but with regular forays into other media.

But to label him old-fashioned would be to misrepresent the radicalism at the heart of his art and his constant willingness to experiment.

His latest departure will be unveiled at the January show – a way of representing the landscape of his beloved Yorkshire in a series of multi-screen films produced by locking together nine video cameras.

The cameras were clamped into a frame and mounted on the front of a jeep. As the vehicle moves slowly through the woods the images captured force the viewer to look much more closely at the details of the landscape.

They’ll be given their first full exposure in January, but Hockney confides he hopes to smuggle them into the public’s awareness earlier by persuading TV shows like the BBC’s Countryfile to show them.

One of the films portrays Woldgate Woods through four seasons. “It took a whole year to make this and each of the films is an hour and a half long. We could have filled four walls with it.”

And once again Hockney has no time for rules that get in the way of creativity. “If you tried to do this in California they’d stop you immediately and say you need a permit to do that. Here in Yorkshire no one ever stopped me.

“I did get a ticket one day for not wearing a seat belt. If they’d found us driving along with all this stuff, all these cameras, on a jeep, I’d probably be in prison. But you have got to bend the rules.”

In the past Hockney has been what the digital age dubs “an early adopter.” He believes that throughout history, technical innovation has created dramatic new ways for artists to work.

In 2006, when he first unveiled some of his large scale Yorkshire landscapes in at London’s Annely Juda Gallery he said: “Constable would have been thrilled to work on this scale, but his problem was that he did not have tubes of paint. The invention of the collapsible tube was necessary for the burst of plein-air painting that was Impressionism.”





In his long career he has experimented with photocopiers and fax machines and, 20 years ago, used a Quantel digital paintbox – a television graphics tool – to create art live on TV. He has used montages of photographs to offer a more incisive exploration of landscapes, interiors and portraits with multiple viewpoints through time and space (echoing the Cubist experiments of his beloved Picasso).

In his 1993 book “The Way I See It” he said of Picasso; “What he did may appear distorted, but only if you think of one particular way of seeing, which is from a distance and always in a kind of stopped, frozen time. The minute you realise what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well and that is why you can see around the back of a body as well as the front, once you realise that it becomes a very profound experience.”

“A Bigger Picture” isn’t actually a retrospective as it focuses solely on the landscape paintings Hockney has produced since the late 1950s. An equally vast show could be devoted to his portraiture and other work.

The earliest piece here is virtually juvenilia – a sketch of his Yorkshire countryside made early in his art school days. His vivid work in California and in other parts of the world will also be represented.

But the undoubted star attraction will be a huge collection of new work made since he returned to the landscape of his earliest years in the woods and fields of East Yorkshire in 2005. He says it’ll make the region look as exciting as the Grand Canyon.

They range from a vivid series of coloured works drawn swiftly on his iPad to vast multi panelled paintings of woods and fields, transformed from seemingly unremarkable places few would notice to groves of luminous beauty.



Throughout his long decades abroad, Hockney had returned to Yorkshire regularly to visit his parents at Christmas and, after his father’s death, to see his mother and sister. He also spent a long time there during the final illness of his friend Jonathan Silver, founder of the Salts Mill Gallery near Shipley that is largely devoted to Hockney’s work.

“I spent 30 Christmases in Yorkshire, but though it's a landscape I knew from my childhood I never really thought of it as a subject until about ten years ago when I realised that at my age it would be a wonderful subject – a marvellous place where it was quiet and we would be left alone.”

One of the revelations was the change of the seasons – something he says he missed in California.

“Not many people would think this landscape is unique and there’s not many people here which is nice because you can drive and walk around and there is no-one else. It’s unknown. It is actually very lovely. Little valleys with no rivers in them because it’s a glacial landscape and they’re hidden.”

Now he has spent years in these woods looking and learning about when the best time to paint is, the direction of the sun, the changing play of light.

“A friend came up recently and I got him up at 5.30 and took him into the woods and I said – ‘look now everything is incredibly clear, everything is well defined.’ It is only like this at 6.30 in the morning when the sun is low on the east coast. I said you’ve got to know the optimum time to look at something in nature. Look at the way van Eyck painted his foliage. He must have known the best time.

Hockney used to do opera set design, but his increasing deafness forced him to stop. But deafness has helped him in other ways. “ As I was losing my hearing I noticed I was seeing Yorkshire more clearly. I can’t hear spatially now, but my visual spatial awareness has increased dramatically. So for me this disability is an advantage.”

For Hockney, his art is about an intensity of looking and seeing the world anew. It is also, he says, about sharing this intensity – making people look at things differently.

He says: “To get the most out of the world around you you’ve got to really look hard. Most people out walking in the woods don’t really look. They just glance around. They scan.

“Before I start a painting I spend a hell of a lot of time looking and thinking, I go out in the car and pull a chair out of the boot and sit in the woods. I sit there and smoke and just look.”

The way Hockney talks about his art, nature and the world you get a sense of spiritual intensity. He once wrote: “I think the world is beautiful and, that if we don’t think it is, then we’re doomed as a species. I don’t think there is a place in the natural world that we would call ugly. It tends to be the man-made things that can be called ugly.”

But he is not religious. “ I lived in Los Angeles for a long time and I was always aware of the power of nature there because the earth trembles. But I’m touched by what Van Gogh once said. He’d lost the faith of his father, but found another one in the infinity of nature. I feel that.”

Of the show’s likely impact he says:” Maybe people will watch the following spring more carefully. Get more pleasure, more enjoyment from the world. Enjoy the world. That’s what I say.”


DAVID HOCKNEY BIO BOX By John Kelleher

When the 1960s started to swing David Hockney was there to help get the party started – still an art student when he was declared one of the founders of the British pop art scene.

Less steely than its American counterpart, the pop art visions of Hockney, Peter Blake, Patrick Caulfield, Allen Jones and Richard Hamilton were at the playful end of the spectrum. Hockney’s mop of dyed blonde hair, funny glasses and Northern sensibilities placed him at the heart of that era’s revolt into style alongside The Beatles and Rolling Stones, the photographer David Bailey and Twiggy.

But he was a bit older than most of them. He was born in Bradford in Yorkshire in 1937 to working class parents and after going to Bradford College of Art spent two years doing National Service as a hospital orderly before going off to the prestigious Royal College of Art in London.

He was still studying when his work was included in the 1961 Royal Academy show Young Contemporaries - alongside Peter Blake - that proclaimed the arrival of British Pop Art.

Hockney has been a rebel without a pause ever since, making waves and ruffling feathers with his uncompromising stance on everything from smoking and gay sexuality to controversial claims about how the Old Masters made their work outlined in his 2001 book “Secret Knowledge.”

But Hockney’s work has always transcended mere fashion and could never be caged with one movement.




In 1963 he had his first one man show in London at the Kasmin Gallery and that same year he started to travel internationally, actually spending much of the hedonistic party decade of the 1960s outside the UK. In 1963 he visited New York and was then commissioned by The Sunday Times in London to produce a series of images in Egypt.

That year he also moved to America – living in and teaching in Los Angeles, Iowa and Colorado. In 1968 he came back to London, then lived and worked in Paris from 1973 to 1975

His reputation grew throughout the 1960s with several solo exhibitions in London, Paris and New York and participation in many group shows. But his real fame grew after he moved to Los Angeles and started to produce his popular images of swimming pools and the California landscape and lifestyle with allusions to his gay sexuality. The period was celebrated in the highly successful movie “A Bigger Splash.” (1973)

In the decades that followed Hockney worked widely in different parts of the world – travelling to China in 1981 with the writer Stephen Spender with whom he collaborated on a book, “China Diary.”

He has designed widely for the theatre and Opera, has been bold in experimenting in unexpected media and trying such new technology as the Polaroid camera, fax machine, photocopier, the iPhone and the iPad. The show in London in 2012 will unveil innovative use of video.

Hockney lived and worked in Los Angeles for nearly 25 years, but at the end of the 1990s returned to Britain, settling at Bridlington in East Yorkshire to be near his ageing mother. He was worked on landscapes there ever since.

His first giant scale work “A Bigger Grand Canyon” was unveiled in Paris in 1999 – a vast study of the Arizona landmark. It featured sixty painted panels. The 2012 show will feature many more large works made up of multiple canvases.

Arabs in London

Feature published today July 23rd by The National in dubai... cover story for their weekly colour magazine.

http://www.thenational.ae/lifestyle/why-arabs-love-london


Why Arabs love London
John Kelleher
Jul 23, 2011


When the world arrives at London's 2012 Olympics site, one of the first buildings visitors will see is the Aquatics Centre - a beautiful structure designed by one of London's most illustrious Arab citizens.

Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad, is renowned as the greatest architect to emerge from the Middle East since the Ottoman mosque builder Sinan - and is adept at building bridges that are both physical and metaphorical.

Hadid's canvas is global. Residents of Abu Dhabi using the new Sheikh Zayed Bridge can see her remarkable design skills every day, and she is behind the performing arts centre being built on Saadiyat Island. But she is also one of the architects of a deeper bridge of understanding between Arab nations and the rest of the world.

Hadid is one of more than 300,000 Arabs who live in London, with more than half a million across the UK. Numbers are boosted in the summer months by up to a million and a half visitors from the Middle East, mainly the Gulf. For many, the city's cosmopolitan appeal is the magnet.

"London is fantastic. There is nowhere like it in the world," says Sulayman Al Bassam, a British-Kuwaiti theatre director and playwright. "It is everything and anything to anyone."

Al Bassam, whose trilogy of plays inspired by Shakespeare is nearing completion, has lived and worked in the UK for almost two decades. His production of Richard III was the first Arabic-language production staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Building cultural bridges is at the heart of Shubbak - the name means "window" in Arabic - the capital's first celebration of contemporary Arab culture. The three-week festival is showcasing the work of more than 100 creative figures at 30 venues across the city.


"Shubbak is an opportunity to see the world through new eyes and to strengthen the relations between artists working in London and across the Arab world," says London's mayor, Boris Johnson. "It also celebrates the influence of London's significant Arab population in our city today and demonstrates the importance of London as a capital of international cultural exchange."

Karima Al-Shomely is an Emirati artist in London for Shubbak. "I love being here," she says. "Back home in Sharjah in the summer, it is too hot to go outdoors much. Here you can walk in the streets, all over the place, and enjoy things."

She is working with Khalid Mezaia, a graphic artist and illustrator from Dubai, on a project called Shopopolis that engages with the staff at Westfield, London's largest shopping mall. Mezaia says: "In Dubai the art scene is really young and anyone can be an artist. But in London there is a long tradition."

Arabs have been visiting Britain for centuries; Phoenicians and other ancestors of Arabs came as traders before the Roman invasion. But the first significant Arab community was established when Yemeni seamen settled in London's docklands.

The flow was two-way. Westerners had made forays into the Arab world since the dawn of Islam. One of the first was an Anglo-Saxon pilgrim named Willibald who died in 787 after spending several years in the Middle East.

Medieval religious writing abounds with references to Saracens and Arabs, but the first notable Arab character in English literature was Othello in William Shakespeare's tragedy. The playwright is believed to have been inspired after joining crowds thronging London's streets to witness a delegation from Morocco led by Abd El-Ouahed ben Messaoud ben Mohammed Anoun to the Court of Queen Elizabeth I.

Few great Arabs came to London after that until more modern times - not even the great traveller Ibn Battuta, though the Ottoman traveller Evliya çelebi, inspired by a dream, did visit in the 17th century.

Some who have arrived more recently have included dissidents, political exiles, resistance figures and radicals outlawed at home. Palestinian groups have long used London as a base, as have such radical Islamist groups as Hizb ut-Tahrir, banned across most of the Middle East but still a shadowy presence in London. The government has expelled other radical Arab clerics such as the Egyptian Abu Hamza and Abu Qatada from Jordan, judging them a security threat.

Politics and culture often intersect. Shadia Mansour, who was born in South London but is of Palestinian descent, is acclaimed the "first lady of Arab hip-hop". She is an active voice in opposing Israel's occupation of Palestine. "My music sometimes sounds hostile. It's my anger coming out. It's non-violent resistance, " she says. "It's about showing support and that there are Palestinians in the diaspora who want to promote their identity and culture."

Political issues often arise for younger Arabs when they meet non-Arab friends. Nadia, a Bahraini who has lived in London for more than three years, first as a student and then pursuing a career in the media, says: "I find a lot of mixed attitudes to me as a young Arab and Bahraini - but I enjoy listening carefully to the opinions people have of what is going on in Bahrain. There isn't much prejudice. I've moved around quite a lot in my life, but London seems to be perfect."

ondon is a global city, but Arabs often fall back on old colonial and linguistic connections when settling in Europe - Algerians or Tunisians choosing France or Moroccans heading for Spain. The bulk of Britain's resident Arabs come from Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon and the Gulf - which also provides the majority of visitors, especially Saudi Arabians.

"Arabs from the Gulf come only to London when they visit Britain," says Said Chaarawi, a Lebanese businessman. "You'll hardly ever find them travelling to places such as Manchester or Birmingham. They feel London is the ultimate luxury destination. They may visit Paris or New York but spend much longer here. It's partly to do with language and history and, these days, with tightened security. It is harder to visit the US."

Chaarawi recently established Understanding Arabia, a consultancy that schools retailers in the etiquette of handling Arab customers. These visitors are important. Up to a third of retail revenue in London's West End comes from Arab customers, who spend about £1.5 billion (Dh8.85 billion) a year.

Chaarawai worked at Harrods and saw the often innocent blunders salespeople can make with Arab customers: "If I am an Arab, quite religious let's say, and I have my wife with me and I came to buy a watch for her, I wouldn't be really happy if the salesperson was a man and he tried to put the watch on her wrist. The Arab etiquette is to give the watch to the husband and the husband would help his wife."

Saudi Arabians remain the biggest customers for London properties - and spend fortunes on homes they may occupy only during the summer. The estate agents Hamptons says the Arab Spring has led to an upsurge of Arab investment in the capital.

And the spending power is vast. Some buy properties that range from £30 million (Dh177mn) to £100 million (Dh590mn), mostly in such upmarket areas as Belgravia, Chelsea, Kensington, Knightsbridge and Holland Park.

"The likely buyer of one property I am handling will probably use it herself for only about three months a year, but other family members will also visit and, for instance, her son will be marrying this summer and they plan a big party," says Mandy Craig from Hamptons.

Another palatial property near Hyde Park with parking for 30 cars was sold to a Saudi princess years ago but has stood empty ever since. Even so, it remains fully staffed and thousands are spent on filling it each week with fresh flowers - just in case its owner visits.

Such images of the oil-rich distort the wider picture and promote envy. But older clichés also abound. The Piccadilly department store Fortnum & Mason presently has an Arabian Nights-inspired window display replete with bejewelled emirs and turbaned djinns.

The Libyan-born writer Nahla Al-Ageli is frustrated by such stereotypes, especially images of Arab men sitting in shisha cafes in the Edgware Road and ogling passing women, even though its coffee shops and delicatessens are a magnet to generations of Arabs.

"This is so wrong," says Al-Ageli. "The beauty of London is its cosmopolitan nature. People come from all over the world and I have British friends, Arab friends, people who are Christian and Muslim and Jewish and Hindu. That's why I love it."

But many Europeans and Arabs are challenging these stereotypes, preferring to reveal our cultural interconnectedness and the deep debt western civilisation owes to the Arab and Islamic world.

The Swiss-born Egyptian intellectual Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan Al Banna and now a professor in the UK, argues that Arab and Muslim culture should not be seen as something new in Europe, but instead as an intrinsic part of European heritage.

The Iraqi-born professor of theoretical physics, Jim Al-Khalili, one of the UK's premier science popularisers, highlighted the essential role played by Arab science and scholarship in the development of modern civilisation in a book and TV series.

"What is remarkable, for instance, is that for over 700 years the international language of science was Arabic," he says. "One of the greatest rulers the Islamic world has ever seen was the ninth-century Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far Abdullah Al-Ma'mun, who came to power in 813AD, and who was to truly launch the golden age of Arabic science. His lifelong thirst for knowledge was such an obsession that he was to create in Baghdad the greatest centre of learning the world has ever seen, known throughout history simply as Bayt Al-Hikma: the House of Wisdom.

"At a time of increased cultural and religious tensions, misunderstandings and intolerance, the West needs to see the Islamic world through new eyes. And, possibly more important, the Islamic world needs to see itself through new eyes and take pride in its rich and impressive heritage."

Shubbak's mission is to open eyes, too. Munira Mirza, the director of arts and culture for the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, says: "The aim is to surprise people, to give them a new perspective on what the Arab world is like. And it is more timely to be having it in the current climate. Arab artists were thinking about political change long before the politicians were."

Change is happening at grass-roots levels. Bahraini Amal Khalaf, a London resident for 11 years, works to promote art by British Arabs and is part of the Edgware Road project featured in Shubbak. She has a wide range of Arab and other friends. "I like people from everywhere," she says. "I love living in London and feel very lucky. It is a great, transient city."

Arab culture is visible throughout the capital and increasingly knitted into its multicultural fabric - from Lebanese kebab shops to the clubbing and music scene and the pervasive Emirates football shirts worn everywhere by fans of Arsenal, the North London football club that agreed to a £100 million sponsorship deal with the Dubai airline in 2004.

The global coffee shop culture has its roots in the Middle East, and for London's Arab visitors and residents there is an expanding range of sophisticated Middle Eastern and North African restaurants. One of the most fashionable is Momo in the West End, started by Mourad Mazouz, the son of an Algerian Berber. He also has restaurants in Paris, Dubai and Beirut.

Mazouz says that when he first arrived in London he rode around on a scooter looking for the sort of food he loved back home, but couldn't find it anywhere. So he started a little restaurant. It has become one of the most fashionable in London. He still uses the scooter to get around town.

On his journeys Mazouz will pass newsagents overflowing with Arab-language newspapers, many published here. London has long been a media hub for the Middle East, hosting dissident voices and exiled critics. One long-established publication is the Maghreb Review, founded in 1976 by the Algerian-born writer and bookseller Mohamed Ben-Madani. He is one of the foremost Arab commentators in London and has been in constant demand since the Arab Spring.

London was the first home for the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Company. Al Jazeera has a bureau here, as does Al-Arabiya, and there are many home-grown Islamic broadcasters. And of course the BBC is now running an Arabic Radio and TV operation.

Film production companies such as the Saudi-owned ORTV in Soho are a part of London's vibrant creative scene. Its founder and chairman is Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, who is also general manager of Al-Arabiya. ORTV produces films for British and Gulf broadcasters. Its output includes a profile of King Abdulaziz, and a documentary about German Cold War politics.

London has many organisations that aim to support the disparate threads of the Arab community. One of the newest is the British Arab Association, founded in 2009 by the Palestinian-born businessman Atallah Said.

"British Arabs have come to recognise the UK as a home, for us and our families," he says. "That is why we believe in integration in the communities in which we live. We have to recognise that Britain is our future and we should become active participants in its civic and political life."

Arvon

Some images from my stay at the Arvon Foundation - before Christmas 2010 at Lumb Bank in Yorkshire and in late May/early June 2011 at The hurst in Clun, Shropshire.

Leviathan

A short story I wrote just before going on n Arvon Foundation course.

LEVIATHAN

“All those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again”
Walt Whitman

An image as lucid as a photograph. My brother’s body vaulted high in a vast rise of water, vanishing amid a tumult of splintered light amid sudden walls and the lurching gape of cathedral spaces. A final image. Shutter in the mind snapping shut.

My shrieks drowning in the roar of the night and the gulp of salt.

But this is no photograph. Those images fade. This replays in slow motion in my mind. Night after night. Year after year. Always vivid seventy years on.

A memory that revivifies that first ocean-dark despair. Afterwards amid the bobbing remnants of the ship there was just the struggle to survive – and long hours of drift and desperation. Hot grief, sodden cold and gnawing hunger. Empty lifeboats nearby.

Eventually helping hands hauled me aboard something adrift and the balm of a precarious sleep took me, cradled on the bourne of the deep.

But out there lost forever, both my brother and the ebb tide of faith.

But I survived along with a handful of others. Until we were received back into the realm of life.

After that, the long years of remembering and forgetting - trying to honour the future we’d taken for granted as children and appreciate the wealth of the long life I have been given in the aftermath.

He was seven and I was eleven. Refugees being shipped to safety from the darkening dangers in wartime London. He was lost. I was finally found, out there in the Atlantic waters. But much else was lost.

Now I am eighty-one. A widower living alone. My family are dispersed. My wife long ago gone and my sons living far away. One in the North, the other in Canada, the country that should have become our temporary homeland. But for that night.

Everyday now I wake early. In the growing dawn sit quietly cradling a teacup and listening to the birds chattering on the lawn. Noisy magpies today, stealing the calm of the early hours. And further away the ever-present murmur of the sea.

People talk of the habits of a lifetime, but new behaviours modified by age overlay them and become the new habits of this late segment of a lifetime. Today as for some years now I await the arrival of the morning paper. The gate will squeak open and I will hear the thud on the doormat.

It is the same newspaper I have read since adulthood. It has changed of course. But so have I. Now it is trawling for younger readers. The reviews of music I have never heard and the denizens of a dozen fashionable worlds I have never heard of make the paper a briefer read. But its snapshots of the troubles of a troubled world still dismay me.

Then a light breakfast. That has changed too. My appetite is diminished and my digestion less easy.

With marriage and children and a demanding profession, there were structures and patterns. But they were the warp through which the crazy weft of events drove to offer a life that never seemed predictable.



Now long into retirement more evident patterns emerge. Today, for example, I will walk to a pub near the shingle beach. With other men, who to outsiders appear like me, we will discuss the affairs of our town and of the world. Much of what we discuss will aggravate us. But we do know clearly that any power we had to change the world, if it were ever within reach, is long gone, like reaching out in the tumult of the sea.

My wife Margaret used to hold me on those nights when I awoke wracked by nightmares. Now I face these nightly dreams alone.

The town I now call home is by the sea. My house is where that community begins to straggle back into the countryside and where the cliff, surmounted by a lighthouse, begins to swell.

Is it strange of me to choose to live here, beside the element whose casual brutality so transformed my life? I think not. The old so often choose to live by this transformative element, the protean sea catching the disquiet of old age,

For me absence has been so profound that it has offered a way to navigate the mysteries of life. Faith otherwise drowned in the sud and foam of the ocean.

My son Robert lives in Scotland with his wife Joni and their two children, my grandchildren, Britney and Max. They do not visit often and I no longer travel.
But Robert bought me a computer and a webcam and so, each week. we spend some time talking via the screen. An electronic telescope bringing my scattered family into focus. Modern technology amazes me.

It also enables me to see that even more distant son – my oldest –who lives in Toronto. Jimmy is now a Canadian. He was named in memory off my brother.

And so another anniversary of that day has passed. I have just one old photograph of my brother taken when he was still a toddler. A smiling child sitting with our mother.

But that was long ago. Another lifetime. Things split off after he drowned. I was finally returned home to my parents. We never got news of James. No official confirmed his death. The sea and the swirling tides of wartime swallowed him entirely.

Until my son telephoned me early one evening.

I had just awoken from my habitual late afternoon siesta into early evening dark. I was still caught at the bottom of what was always now a long ascent. Usually it took an hour to return to wakefulness from a sleep that never refreshes but whose onset was not to be resisted.

“Pop”, he began. It always irritated me. This Americanisation. Why not dad, or father, or almost any affectionate diminutive? But I bit my tongue. His voice now had a North American tang.

“Pop, are you sitting down? Please sit down. I’ve some strange news.“ The cautionary note set me on edge.

“I am sitting down. Now tell me, what is wrong.”

“Nothing Pop. Nothing wrong. But erm, what I am going to tell you could be a big surprise. Heck. I wish I could talk to you face-to-face.

“Yes – what is it Jimmy? This news. Are you and Maxine okay? Has something happened? Is someone ill?

“No – no its nothing like that. Let me tell you what happened exactly as it happened. Its probably the best way.”

I listened without comment.

“My agent had a letter a few days ago. From a man living in the Northern part of Canada. A small place called Labrador City. I’d never even heard of it. Anyway this guy… somehow he tracked her down – from one of the TV shows I appeared in. “

My son Jimmy is a very minor celebrity in Canada. He appears in television drama, usually in supporting roles. He hasn’t yet made the big time and, in all probability, he never will. So not a star, but illuminated enough that his face prompts feelings of familiarity from strangers in his hometown.

“She gave me the letter when I went into her office a couple of days ago. Pop…. It’s from a man who says he thinks he is related to us.”

“Related? Well he can’t be a close relation. You’re the only Canadian bit of the family that I know off though I suppose there might be a distant cousin there somewhere.”

“Er no Pop. You see this guy reckons its something much more astonishing. He says he thinks we might be first cousins … that you are his uncle and, and… “At this point his voice took on a sense of strain as if the words would hardly leave his throat.

“I think I get it, “ I said.

Yes Pop… he, he thinks that his father is your brother… that you both survived… I know. I know. Seems impossible. And yet…well, he says he grew up like we did, thinking that this father’s brother had downed… but you didn’t. And so it seems possible crazily possible that somehow he survived as well.

I said nothing. The full gravity of what he was saying was rising up into me still. The impossibility and yet… I felt a rising nausea.

“Pop…. Perhaps you and he both survived that night. Do you think that is possible?”

I spoke softly with a sense of calm that belied my inner feelings. “No. It isn’t possible. I saw him lost. This must be a mistake or a lie. Someone who knows what happened and is lying.“

“Why would anyone do that? And how would they know? I know it’s not a family secret but its also not ‘out there’ is it – not something that is public knowledge. Really it’s just the family that knows – you, me, Robert – the girls.
I don’t think I ever really talked it to anyone, even as a kid.

“Dad… look. Maybe it is true. And if it is, don’t you feel we have to know? I want to know. Robert will want to know. I’m sure of that. You know, I figure what will probably be best is for you have to come here and meet him. “

“I don’t think so. I don’t travel anymore. You know….”

Pop. Thank about it. What if t really is your brother. How do you actually feel about the possibility it just might be true. I mean it is true then this is astonishing. You and he would have so much to catch up about. A whole lifetime. I mean, that is like, just amazing isn’t it?

“Calm down Jimmy. You know this can’t be true, surely. I don’t see how it could be,” I said. “I know what happened. I saw it. He cannot have survived. And Jimmy, as I say, I don’t travel anymore. I am too old. Just too old. I think we all need to take a deep breath here and ask what this is really about. Yes, we do need to know more. It might just be a crank or someone being malicious. You want me to travel half way across the world for that?

But in truth as I paused and awaited his reply I felt knowledge taking shape inside me. It was as if somehow the Red Sea of time was parting. And on the further shore…



“Pop…. I agree and I do think it is important for you and for us all to find out the truth here. The only way to be sure will be for you meet. And it has to be you who comes here. This guy, this man who may be your brother is old and far frailer than you. He’s in a home. Who knows how long he may have. Can you stand to not know? To not have him back. If it IS your brother.

“Even just to be sure… to know that the past as you understand it is maybe different. Maybe ….

I remained silent a moment and then I put the telephone down. It rang again and I ignored it.

How was I to make sense of this? Could it possibly be true? What was I to do with this? I felt the image of the water and that thin helpless arm embraced by turmoil reaching out and vanishing. I felt the maelstrom alive and real within me.

The telephone rang again and again. Finally I answered it again. It was my other son.

“Dad, Jimmy called me. He’s worried the news has shocked you. Are you all right? Look I am going to head down to see you tomorrow….”

“I am fine, Bob. “ And with that again I placed the phone back in its cradle.

I went to my computer. Found images of the region. Ice and haunting light and men in work shirts. An alien, hard and strange way of living.

Late that evening to escape the telephone I walked out and down to the sea. To be alone with my thoughts.

The streets were empty. A single street lamp cast a circle on the asphalt and beyond the scrub leading to the beach.

High above the town, the lighthouse blinked, guiding ships beyond the teeth of the sea to the deceits of the land. An ocean merging past and present, melting geography.

And so I walked out beyond these lights onto the moon blanched shingle strand, looking out at the tranquil bay.

Piercing the dark roiled clouds The Pleiades were suspended glistering clear. I feel something returning. A homecoming. The growing surge of a new tide.



C John Kelleher 2011

BAHRAIN - impressions from my first visit

Some five years go we were commissioned to make two films for the Government of bahrain - one was to promote tourism. The other was about it's progress towards a full democratic system of Government. The events of the past few months have underscored the unease we felt even then. This is what I wrote but never published.


BAHRAIN

The tiny young woman behind the cafeteria counter leant forward to talk to us confidentially. “Can you get me a job in England?” she asked, “I have a friend there somewhere.”

She was from the Philippines – one of thousands of young women who arrive throughout the Mid East region each year. They come to do poorly paid jobs working in the lowest echelons of society for Arab families and employers. Little of their income makes it home to their families for usually they have first to repay their employers the cost of getting to the region.

“I hate it here,” she added,” Please if you know anyone in England who wants a maid let me know… please.’

There are hundreds like her in Bahrain – girls from the Philippines and young men from the Indian subcontinent who find their lives increasingly intolerable as members of the imported working class in this tiny Arab nation – a scatter of islands off the coast of Saudi Arabia.

In the past year sixty young women – mostly from the Philippines – have fled their jobs alleging cruelty by their employers. A refuge for the girls has been set up in Manama, the island’s capital city.

Many allege beatings and of sexual abuse by their Arab employers.

But for all that, the girls in the shelter are among the luckier cases. This October, the local English language newspaper reported another case of a group of young girls trapped in this self-styled “pearl of the gulf.”

These girls had escaped their employers but without passports or money they were in limbo – unable to go home until the high price paid by their Bahraini families for their getting them to the island had been repaid.

But Bahrain’s immigrant workers are luckier than those from some of the other members of the Gulf Co-operation Council Nations.

Over Ramadan Saudi Arabians cross the causeway from their nearby homeland to flood into Bahrain for weekends. They bring with them less fortunate, young Filipinos who would have no escape route from their employers. These maids arrive trailing little Saudi Arabian children behind their employers, rich Saudis vacationing in Bahrain from the pious prison nation that is their home.

If they fall out with their Saudi employers, often because of sexual abuse, they have virtually no recourse. Complaints to the police would bring them imprisonment.

Thousands of Saudis descend on Bahrain every weekend and then for the long celebration of Eid al Fitr, at the end of Ramadan, Islam’s closest counterpart to Christmas. They stay in hotels where they can drink alcohol before boosting the nation’s road accident statistics. Every day brings wrecks involving young Saudi men – often very drunk.

Sometimes though it is Saudi wives at the wheel of the SUVS or shiny Mercedes. Most are novice drivers. In Saudi Arabia they are banned from driving at all but here they often have to drive their drunken husbands from one hotel to another.

One American businessman watched in shock and awe as a young Saudi woman, shrouded in her all-over black abaya, practiced driving on a piece of wasteland near their hotel – before zooming precariously out into the evening rush hour in Manama.

Everyone knows of the miseries of life for all but the most devout Moslems in Saudi Arabia.

Bahrain, a little kingdom with long ties to the West, seems in prospect, a far happier place. Presently it is furiously promoting itself as a tourist destination - hoping to draw new visitors to see its meagre historical sites, its tourist hotels and it poor beaches.

Bahrain’s virtues are few. While it lacks the intense modern face of Dubai its people are genuinely less aloof and warmer to that different class of visitors – the tourist. Bahrainis drive taxis, serve you in restaurants and, for the large part, speak English.

In the evenings the cafes are full of men laughing and drinking coffee and
enjoying long and fragrant hours smoking the water pipes called sheesha in these parts. Many play dominos.

In the early winter as the temperatures become cooler the ‘camping season” gets underway as families opt to leave the dusty city and towns and many spend weeks camping in tents – while the men motor back into the cities of Manama and Muharraq or smaller places like or issa Town to work.

After sunset during Ramadan the island’s few shopping malls are jammed with families. The giant Seef mall boasts an indoor playground area where chortling children enjoy rides while proud fathers in Taubs and women in black abayas look on.

Pretty little girls are allowed to dress as any child their age – until adolescence sees them ushered, for the most part, into the black shrouds that wreathe Moslem women.

In Bahrain in common with the United Arab Emirates girls can dress in western clothing, but most prefer to wear Abayas – some cut very stylishly and trimmed with patterns, but others loose and shapeless gowns with fully veiled faces or mere eye slits… the Niqab favoured by the more devout. Some even wear black gloves.

In the early evenings the corniche in the capital is full of families picknicking and little boys playing football. Bahrain presents a moderate Moslem face to the world – a place of relative tranquility.

But appearences are deceptive. This is a far from happy country – and one whose fault lines lie not far below the surface. Its’ people are caught between Iran and a hard place. The Shi’ite Republic and Saudi Arabia offer alternative models of how Bahrain could end up as its wealth peters out.

Bahrain would prefer to model itself on the success of Dubai a few miles away across the Gulf.

The main volatile ingredients bubbling away in Bahrain are religion, greed and uncertainty as it seeks new sources of income. One model is to be a tamer but more stable version of Dubai – building its new future on attracting Western investment.

Building is underway across the country – especially in the capital – where the “dual” towers of the Financial Harbour complex and the smaller but more vivid architectural venture of the World Trade Centre are both symbols of its desire to pull in investors dubious of the hyperactive growth of Dubai.

The phrase “financial harbour” is both the name of a development and a metaphor used by local politicians and entrepreneurs for the more stolid and dependable financial climate they claim for Bahrain.

But Bahrain’s leaders lack the élan and imagination that is driving Dubai into its pole position in the region – allied to the still vast oil resources of its fellow Emirate, Abu Dhabi.

Bahrain has long since spent its oil wealth and now depends upon the charity of Saudi Arabia to keep its refineries ticking over. Its other resources are limited.

One much touted resource is its new status as a democracy – one of the few of any sort in this part of the world. The Emir of Bahrain, who came to power in 1999, decided to transform his little country into a constitutional monarchy – and so became King Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa.

Women were given the vote, freedom of speech was enshrined in the constitution, and other reforms were introduced. The democracy is, in fact a very limited one with real power still residing firmly in the hands of the royal family and their appointees.

But nevertheless the idea seems to be to convince Western governments and businesses that the king means business, that the place is now a stable democracy and worthy of inward investment.

Freedom of speech has certainly enabled local people to discuss, in guarded terms, the greed of their rulers.

The Khalifa family has long ruled Bahrain. Until recently they were near absolute rulers, but were content to call themselves Emirs. Now as a constitutional monarchy, portraits of the King, the prime minister (his uncle) and the crown prince that stare of billboards across the country are ubiquitous and oddly reminiscent of the portraits of obviously less benign middle eastern despots such as the late President Assad or Saddam Hussein.

Bahrain’s citizens now have the right to vote and will, in 2006, take part in the nation’s second general election.

But there are no political parties here. The main rift line is between the Islamists, who dominate the present parliament, individual interests and the Shi’ite majority who largely boycotted the last elections. It is still uncertain if they’ll participate this time around.

Not that much power rests with the elected assembly. There are 40 members and their constituencies were carefully contrived to prevent any real risk of representation. Some constituencies return two representatives but have a handful of voters. Others return one MP for ten times as many constituents.

Real power resides firmly with the royal family. The prime minister, a job for life, has been held since the 1960s by the present king’s uncle. And the king has the power to overrule anything the assembly might agree upon and to dissolve parliament if he feels things are out of hand. His family have controlling interests in most of Bahrain’s profitable concerns.

The parliament is completed by an upper house of 40 members, all directly appointed by the King and his court, which reinforces the values he dictates.

But things have improved. Public demonstrations are allowed – though they quickly get out of hand suggesting the depth of anger smouldering in this little country. This December a demonstration, notionally over unemployment became a riot after masked men – thought to be police – beat up the key organisers.

Other demonstrators supporters rioted and in the chaos following police tear-gassed protesting crowds who ran amok in running battles. Drifting clouds of gas forced the closure of a race meeting and police cars were set ablaze in the Souq – one of central Manama’s few attractions for visitors.

The police and army feel no loyalty to their fellow Bahrainis because they are, for the large part, mercenaries – tough men recruited from other Muslim countries to defend the Government.

Such disruptions are rare. When the king introduced democracy, dissidents were freed and welcomed home and women now have the vote.

Democracy is portrayed as benefiting many Bahrainis. But it seems more likely that its advent is designed primarily to play to outside investors - especially Western businesses. Here is a safe financial harbour for their money goes the refrain with neither the reigious extremism of Saudi Arabia or the flashy but insecure ostensiousness of Dubai. Bahrain is stolid and progressive.

Naturally economic reforms are of special benefit to the extended Khalifa family. Most of the major businesses on the island are owned by this dynasty. The Prime Minister, for instance, is reported to have bought some empty land for a dinar – about £1.50 - and later sold it to developers for millions.

He owns Bahrain’s top hotel, the Ritz Carlton, many others hotels, and other businesses including a shopping mall.

But some reforms can backfire. The press is now free here and recently the public were shocked after reports that the Prime Minister had told a courtier – who then passed his remarks on – that the Bahraini people were “like a rug and should be always walked upon.”

Portraits of this gentle soul gazes out at his people from posters the length of the land.

Meanwhile the devil is in the detail. Bahraini men for instance can no longer call themselves Bin…meaning son of … at least formally. That honorific is now the preserve of the royals of the land.

Equally Sheikh, a general name denoting the senior male member of the family, is also denied mere commoners. Only the Khalifas and their kith and kin can enjoy this title these days.

Meanwhile name registering is increasingly important. Every Bahraini carries an ID card and it’s all being turned into one of the world’s most efficient electronic systems.

It’s a good test bed for this. There are only around 300,000 people living here and soon their CPR cards will be linked to a central computer and all their life stories will be available to the authorities – health, tax, and much more. Other larger nations are studying this experiment with interest.

But for all this things have been liberalised. There are fewer people who get bumped off in the night for instance.

The government is anxious to persuade outsiders to invest here – rather than the flashier prospects of adding their finances to the shining towers of Dubai. So the new freedoms are proclaimed loudly.

But one respected intellectual – who manages to tread a line between the establishment and honesty – revealed that he had a foreign passport in case ‘things changed’ and said that at least now people did not vanish in the night to be returned dead to their families in the morning as had happened under the rule of the present King’s father.

And one young man recalled his own experiences of that much-loved ruler’s real nature. He once strayed with a young friend into the route of a royal motorcade. Police surrounded his car, dragged the two teenagers from their car and at gunpoint hauled them to the Emir’s Rolls Royce. An electric window slid down and they found themselves gazing at the ruler.

Slowly he spat into the faces of each boy and ordered them taken to prison.

Four long hours they were detained without contact with their family – and were only released when it was found they were from “good Sunni families’.

Interestingly it is actually ordinary Sunni Moslems who most dislike the royal family now – for they’ve traditionally enjoyed the bulk of the nation’s wealth while the Shiite majority have done more menial work.

Wary of the growing attachment of the Shia to outside forces – code words for Iran – liberalisation brought greater visibility and opportunity for this group. Their religious festivals were even featured on TV to the shock of a public who’d never before witnessed the bloody spectacle of self-flagellation involved in many Shia religious festivals.

Divisions between the Shia and Sunni are less sharp here than in many other countries but even young Bahrainis educated in the West still offer a loathing of the Shias when probed.

One young Bahraini, a successful businessman educated in Canada confessed: “As far as I’m concerned they’re not even Moslems”

Cars with pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini can be seen on the new highways of Bahrain offered visible support for the fear that the Shiites of the country look elsewhere for their inspiration.

The Shias themselves keep quiet about their poltical ambitions, though are probably similar to those in others parts of the mid-east, - content to be law abiding citizens but by tradition, ready to rise up if the opportunity presents itself and seek power.

But the Sunni Moslems are also challenging the King’s bid to enrich his family with western investment. The influence of the devout Muslims in the government prompted the King to impose an extraordinary last minute ban on hotels in Bahrain selling alcohol in the evening to their guests throughout Ramadan.

Hoteliers met with government ministers after the holy month to complain it had cost them millions. Some who’d defied the band were then ordered to stop selling alcohol until further notice.

Their ire was focused particularly on the man who’d had to enact the ban, the minister entrusted with the task of promoting tourism. In response he said they should realise tourism is about more than alcohol in hotels – and that their ideas were wrong.

But what is there in Bahrain to attract tourists?

One key thing is a sense of safe haven from the more troubled parts of the region. So far Al Queda’s only known attempt at a terrorist outrage here was stopped in its tracks years ago. Nevertheless the US gulf fleet who’re based here decided to send wives and children home after 9/11. There are few visible signs of US personnel around the capital.

There are plenty of westerners though ,joining the Saudi weekend exodus to swim and eat and drink, when they’re allowed, in Bahrain’s many luxury hotels. The pools are good but Bahrain has no beaches.

Few will stray out to visit the so-called attractions. There is the Souq in Manama but it has none of the exotic appeal of ancient Kasbahs in older Arab cities. Its mainly junk sold by the island’s vast and hard working immigrant population from India and Pakistan. There is also a small gold market – patrolled by armed guards.

For Westerners living in Bahrain the social life is limited. Many join the handful of British based social clubs in town. There are no bars to visit save those in hotels – which are said to be full of Russian and oriental prostitutes.

Manama itself has no other visible nightlife. The best restaurants are undiscoverable without local connections or based in five star hotels.

Otherwise the culinary delights are familiar ones.

In the islands three main shopping malls there are familiar global fast food outlets. The Seef Mall for instance has a Burger King and MacDonald’s next door to one another – and women in veils are tugged, like mothers around the world, to these places by their addicted kids. But hamburgers are off the menu at both places. Downstairs there is a Starbucks and the smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken wafts across to the Baskin Robbins concession and the Papa John’s pizza bar. Apart from the veils and accents you could be in Cardiff or Columbus Ohio.

The traveller in search of attractions other than shopping and water sport has slim pickings. There are a handful of badly preserved forts from colonial times, a good but small national museum, an old mosque and a grand new one, a dusty nature reserve with a few drab Oryx, antelope and non-exotic birds and a few other rather dull sites offering the paltry remains of the little understood Dilmun civilisation.

One for instance is the largest gravesite in the Mediterranean with thousands of burial mounds of the vanished Dilmun civilisation. In photos and in reality they look like sand piles. Many locals have never even stopped to look at them.

One proud natural wonder for tourists is the so-called tree of life. It’s a lone tree that grows in an otherwise barren part of the island’s interior. It was long said to be 3,000 years old – a botanical miracle. Recent tests have reveals its actually only 300 years old. It is a pleasant enough tree, though surrounded by garbage.

There is of course the Bahrain International Circuit. It opened for business and hosted its first grand Prix event last year. Tens of thousands visited for that – the Middle East’s first setting for motor sports.

More recently locals attended a long weekend of motor sports, drag racing that turned into a risible non-event as thousands jeered during hours of delays and technical breakdowns.

But for much of the year the circuit stands empty – a shimmering showcase that springs to life for a brief season each year. In 2006 it will open the world’s grand prix season – an achievement but one that scarcely touches the lives of ordinary Bahrainis.

It is part of the Khalifa Empire. In every major business and walk of life members of the Khalifa family own a share of the action and are often key members of the operation.

Bahrain is not a place of natural beauty. And development has removed much of the sort of period charm visitors might have found a brief distraction. The old town of Muharraq, near the island’s airport, once had the taste of an old Gulf culture with houses on the edge of the blue sea.

Landfill, which is underway across the island, has now moved the old houses inland where the drab and dusty alleys and lanes now have little appeal for visitors. Bulldozers and Indian workers now crowd the new foreshore amid a frenzy of building work going on across the island.

Bahrain ‘s owners have their sites set on becoming as modern as Dubai, especially if they can win back some of the money which once landed here after the island took over from Beirut as the Middle East’s banking capital . Now it floods into the coffers of the mirage across the waters in the UAE.

Bahrain is a curious country. Like most of its neighbours around the Gulf for the bulk of its history, one century was much like another. It was perturbed by the influx of foreigners – other Arab invaders who brought it Islam early soon after the hegira ion the Arabian mainland, the Portuguese and the British. But its people grew dates and made money from the harsh rigours of pearl fishing.

Until it became the first place in the region where oil was discovered. Pearl fishing had by then been overturned by the Japanese industry of cultured pearls. Oil quickly averted a catastrophe for Bahrainis and the oil revenues soon flowed to make Manama the first Middle Eastern oil boomtown.

It’s virtually all run out now and Saudi Arabia now gives Bahrain the entire output of one of its fields.

Bahrain’s single biggest success story is a thing called Alba… the world’s biggest aluminium smelting plant. It does offer awesome industrial statistics.

And it has Gulf Air, run by an Australian who commutes to London each week. His family live there and his children are being educated in England.

James Hogan has a tough job ahead. Gulf once served many of the oil rich sheikhdoms around the gulf, but one by one they are leaving – with just Qatar and Bahrain still supporting the airline. The emirates now have their own airlines and Abu Dhabi has the recently founded Etihad. Despite winning kudos as one of the world’s top 10 airlines, Gulf ‘s boss was barred from picking up his prize at the wards ceremony in jealous Dubai.

Old rivalries run deep here - fault lines not just inside nations but also between them

One of the shiniest developments in Manama is the financial harbour – dual office towers that will, at 53 stories, be by far the tallest buildings on the island – and will be outshone only by the scores of towers planned or already in place in Dubai.

Dubai though recently banned adverts for the new Bahraini venture on their cabs. And the Crown prince of Dubai still keeps secret the precise final height planned for the new Burj al Dubai under construction there. It will be the world’s tallest building – more than a mile high – give or take an undisclosed few feet.

Bahrain was once moving towards becoming part of the United Arab Emirates along with Qatar. At the eleventh hour it decided to withdraw – leaving the oil rich nation of Abu Dhabi to dominate the emirates.

Many Bahrainis rue that decision as its economic fortunes decline. A report published recently forecast 35 per cent unemployment in Bahrain within the next few years unless dramatic action is taken.

Inevitably economic woes like this breed further divisions. The government has an official programme of Bahrainisation of the workforce which will be bad news to the thousands of indians who work here on construction sites and in other manual labour and send money home to the sub-continent.

Already they attract sneers and dislike from many Bahrainis. Deepening recession could turn sneers to jeers or worse.

Eventually as Bahrain’s financial fortunes shift, and its citizens tighten their belts, girls like the Filipino who asked us to help her find work may no longer have the option of coming to this formerly oil rich nation.

Hopefully she will find a way home or out of her present dead end job that is less tragic than that of another young woman.

It was towards the end of the Holy Month of Ramadan that another young Filipino maid decided she could no longer stand the life she had with her Bahraini family. A virtual prisoner in their apartment she decided to literally climb to freedom.

But instead of escape she found death. She jumped or fell from a second floor window.

Edward Gorey

Image removed as requested

Cleopatra - revised links

Two linked features Published in May in The National in the UAE about the Northern Ballet's production of a new ballet Cleopatra.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-stage/cleopatra-reigns-at-the-ballet


Cleopatra Ballet
Published by The National in the UAE May 2011

What do we really know of Cleopatra, the tragic final pharaoh of Egypt who seduced the two most powerful men of her era, Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, and struggled to protect her Empire from Roman domination?

Over the centuries countless creative works have fed the myth of the femme fatale and obscured the historical facts.

“Pretty much everyone thinks they know about Cleopatra, but they don’t really know who she was at all, “ says David Nixon, artistic director of Britain’s Northern Ballet and creator of “Cleopatra”, a new full length piece of dance theatre. “And that provides a choreographer with a great deal of scope.” His aim was to get closer to the real Cleopatra.

“We don’t even really know what she looked like or if she was actually a great beauty.” An Egyptian coin is the only confirmed image of Cleopatra though a bust in a Berlin museum shows a woman who may be Cleopatra with her hair in the popular roman style of the era.

And yet the some of the most beautiful actresses of stage and screen have been cast to play this beguiling woman – icons such as Elizabeth Taylor and Claudette Colbert.

In the Northern Ballet production, a newer beauty plays the Queen, the American ballerina Martha Leebolt. Nixon built the ballet around the 28-year-old. The dancer, who moved to Britain ten years ago from her native California, has just been awarded the title of Britain’s Outstanding Female Ballet Performer. She sees Cleopatra as her career highpoint.



“What an amazing story. She is such an iconic woman. You couldn’t really ask for a better part to be created on you - to have Cleopatra be your ballet. She was such a strong and powerful woman, especially for her time when men ruled everything. To be able to play such a commanding woman on stage is hard, but is really rewarding.”

The music is by the French composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, whose successes include two international hit musicals “Miss Saigon” and “Les Miserables”. He first worked with Nixon ten years ago when the Canadian choreographer took over as artistic director of the company.

The company is based in the Yorkshire industrial city of Leeds. “Cleopatra” is their first new ballet for two years and is touring Britain this spring and autumn. Nixon, one of Britain’s most prolific choreographers, was awarded an OBE last year for his work with the company and its dance academy.

Nixon and Schonberg’s first collaboration was “Wuthering Heights,” originally intended for another dance company. “I was quite new to the job and the chief executive said he had been sent this CD of a score for “Wuthering Heights” by Schonberg.

“ At first I was a little bit…I said, well who’s that? And he said he is just the composer of “Les Miserables” and “Miss Saigon”. I thought, ‘Oh my god! “Les Miserables” was my absolute favourite musical always. So I listened to it and it was really beautiful music.”

It was a big success and afterwards the two men agreed to collaborate again. Nixon had already been nurturing the idea of a ballet about Cleopatra for some years. But the first scenario commissioned, from a German dramaturge, didn’t work. The idea was put aside.

A decade later Nixon revived it and worked quietly with Schonberg before bringing in the company’s long-term co-director, Patricia Doyle to help re-think the story structure.

Schonberg became enthusiastic. He says: “When you talk about someone like say, Mother Theresa you don’t imagine her on stage, but with Cleopatra - it is easy to imagine seeing her danced on stage. I wrote ten minutes of music. He listened and loved it and I kept going and wrote and wrote music and so he surrendered and said, ‘I am going to do it.’ ”

So with a musical score and the lead dancer decided, Nixon had to grapple with translating the complexities of the history and the myth into a compelling piece of ballet theatre.

Cleopatra VII was a member of the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty who had ruled Egypt since the death of Alexander the Great. Her wider fame came after she began a romance with Julius Caesar with whom she had a child, and then, after his murder, with Mark Antony. This was her undoing. After losing in his rebellion against Rome, Antony killed himself. Cleopatra then ended her own life, famously by clasping a snake to her bosom.

The West has largely focused on this romantic tragedy largely ignoring her struggle to preserve a dynasty and an empire. But Medieval Arab scholars often referred to her as “the virtuous scholar” according to London based academic Dr Okasha el-Daly and marvelled at her intellectual prowess - a mastery of alchemy, philosophy, mathematics, languages and even town planning.

In re-imagining Cleopatra, Nixon and Patricia Doyle did extensive research. So did Martha Leebolt. “There is a lot of information, but how much is really concrete? There are a lot of myths. So in preparation I read a lot and saw as many films about her as I could. Even looking at pictures can get your mind going. You make your own character by taking information from so many different places.


“I became really intrigued with her. You wonder how she did what she did - to rule Egypt and have love affairs with the two greatest men of her time? She must have been very intelligent. She must have had more than just her sexuality to achieve what she did. “

Nixon says: “I don’t think beauty alone could sustain her fame for 2,000 years. To hold these two powerful men in her hands, there must have been much more. They must have felt she was equal in many ways or perhaps even superior.

“For me Cleopatra is an epic woman, like Alexander the Great. She had qualities above the normal and that includes intelligence. She spoke between seven to 11 languages and was trained as an orator and she would have used her training in how she spoke to these people. She was certainly more educated than Mark Antony, possibly than Julius Caesar. And at the same time, she was a woman, a mother, and a lover. Although she is often portrayed as a whore, there is no evidence she was unfaithful to either of them and in fact there is a strong suggestion she was a virgin when she slept with Caesar.”

Getting to the truth about Cleopatra has challenged scholars for centuries. The Roman poet Horace first created the notion of her as the great seductress and the popular perception of her has been dominated by Shakespeare and Shaw’s great plays about her love life.

The first account of her life was written by the Greek Plutarch two hundred years after her death. There are only a handful of accounts by people who actually met her and their objectivity is doubtful.




The newest biography of Cleopatra is by the American writer Stacy Schiff who says she deserves to be remembered not as a sexual adventuress but: “as the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in western affairs."

But Schiff adds: “She descended from a long line of murderers and kept up that tradition.” Cleopatra was one of five siblings. Her father killed the eldest and Cleopatra was behind the death of the others.

She says that by the standards of her time she was fairly well behaved. If the Romans had not defeated her, her own son might eventually have plotted her killing in the sort of dynastic struggle common in some places today.

Nixon’s ballet doesn’t avoid this darker history. There is a graphic portrayal of her killing of the brother with whom she joint ruler. Nixon says he wanted to tell the story of her whole life, not simply offer another version of the love story.

Martha Leebolt says: “Cleopatra was willing to do anything to be Queen and take care of her country. There are parts about her you do admire because she is so strong, but parts you certainly don’t want to have in your own character.”

How do you compress such complexity into dance, which must tell its tale through movement, gesture and music without words? Nixon says: “You can’t get everything across in a ballet over a couple of hours. The point of the piece was to give an overview of her. From that we arrive at the legend. We get the differences in her loves, that she is a woman who knows grief and sorrow and success. We get elements of her intelligence through the decisions she makes. We have given her the premonition before the Ides of March. She sensed the mood of the people and she was very protective of her child and she had to flee when things went wrong. I never profess that in dance we can tell everything, but it is the physical image of a woman in movement that captures something extraordinary – and in dance you can capture that element of Cleopatra better than in any other genre.”

The production draws heavily upon Egyptian iconography. Martha Leebolt adds: “A lot of the Egyptian characters use vocabulary in their movements that is slinky and fluid with hand gestures drawn from hieroglyphics. But not too much otherwise it would clichéd. The Egyptians are very fluid and the movement never ends. The Roman men are much sharper and more angular.”

Cliché is also avoided in the music. Schonberg eschewed familiar dashes of orientalism in his score or the use of trumpets and brass for the Romans.

One of the ballet’s most remarkable devices is to turn the snake the Queen used in her suicide into her personal God Wadjet, who tracks her from the beginning to the end of the play – a remarkable performance of serpentine sinuosity by the young Scottish actor Kenneth Tindall.

The company went into rehearsal with Cleopatra at the beginning of this year after a visit to China. The first night was in Leeds in late February. Now the company is on the road with the show – an entourage of around 100 people.

For Martha Leebolt 2011 will have been the year of Cleopatra – and she has no real sense of what role comes next. The life of a dancer is tough and injuries common.

But the emotional commitment is equally intense. “This is an exhausting role. You are on stage almost all the time and for all of the weeks of rehearsal and performance you eat, breathe and sleep Cleopatra – 100 per cent Cleopatra. On stage I am in Egypt and at night I dream about it. You have to live it.”

ENDS


http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/on-stage/cleopatra-in-the-arts-through-the-ages

Cleopatra in the popular imagination
Published in The National in the UAE May 2011

John Kelleher


Cleopatra the femme fatale has peered at the world through Kohl rimmed eyes for centuries – and the world has gazed back in wonder at the first great global celebrity.

The Greek writer Plutarch first wrote about her in a book called “Parallel Lives” sometime around 100 AD. He said she met Antony: “at the very time when women have the most brilliant beauty and are at the acme of intellectual power.” Roman historian Cassius Dio went further. She was, he said: “a woman of surpassing beauty.”

But neither actually saw her and were writing long after her death. They spawned an enduring myth which has been sustained ever since by books, ballets, operas, films and paintings. She remains one of the most famous women in history.

Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw both wrote plays about her famous romances and these have inspired a continuing flow of other dramatic portrayals.

Most great actresses seem to have played Cleopatra at some stage in their careers and she has featured in films since the dawn of the movies.

Oddly her first cinematic outing was as a mummy in a French silent film made in 1899 by Jeanne D’Alcy. The first full-length film about her was the 1908 American feature “Antony and Cleopatra” starring the Canadian actress Florence Lawrence, star of more than 270 films.

The first movie Cleopatra whose fame endures today featured Theda Bara, the silent screen’s greatest vamp. But only 17 seconds survive of her 1917 film “Cleopatra.”

As soon as the talkies arrived the most glamorous actresses of the day were cast in the role - Claudette Colbert in a 1934 film, Vivien Leigh opposite Claude Rains in 1945’s “Caesar and Cleopatra”, Rhonda Fleming in the 1953 saga “Serpent Of The Nile” and, most memorably, Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra” opposite her future husband Richard Burton. Their own romance blossomed though this 1963 film legendarily nearly bankrupted 20th Century Fox.

It was followed swiftly by the 1964 spoof, “Carry On Cleo” starring Amanda Barrie. A similarly playful take on the queen was offered in two French animated films “Asterix and Cleopatra” and “Asterix and Obelix meet Cleopatra.”

But the queen’s magic still seduces filmmakers. Two contemporary goddesses of the big screen are lined up to play her. Angelina Jolie is expected to star in a 3D blockbuster of her story based on a new biography by American writer Stacy Schiff.

And the Welsh actress Catherine Zeta-Jones is tipped to star in another 3D version of the story – this time a rock musical - opposite Ray Winstone.

Cinema may bring Cleo to mass audiences, but theatre, opera and ballet have also shown a continuing preoccupation with her tale. Handel, Berlioz, Massenet, Scarlatti, Samuel Barber are among more than 20 composers who’ve based operas around her.

Ballet companies have been presenting the Queen ever since Serge Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe staged Michel Fokine’s choreographed “Cleopatre” in St Petersburg and then Paris in 1908.

Most recently the Houston Ballet Company toured their 2000 production of “Cleopatra”, choreographed by Ben Stevenson to music by Rimsky-Korsakov. It was the Queen’s last dance appearance on a British stage until Northern Ballet’s production.

Poem by Wislawa Symborska

SOME PEOPLE by Wislawa Szymborska

Some people flee some other people
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.

They abandon something close to all they’ve got
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens

Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.

What happens quietly: someone's
dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone’s
bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp
child back to life.

Always another wrong road
ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across an oddly reddish river.

Around them, some gunshots,
now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane seems to circle.

Some invisibility would come in handy,
some greyish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or longer while

Something else will happen, only
where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes and what intentions.

If he has a choice
maybe he won’t be the enemy
and will let them live some sort of life.

Polygamy

Polygamy - one woman's experience

Lined up with the other members of the Coda choral group at a Christmas concert in Southern Spain there is little to single out Maryam Len Beetstra. Her soaring soprano blends in the swelling choruses of carols and Christian anthems.

But Dutch-born Maryam travelled for nearly 48 hours to the gathering in Andalucia from her home in a little town in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco - and left behind her Berber husband and his wife.

Maryam who has lived in Morocco for nearly a decade is the older wife in a relationship few modern European women experience – a polygamous Muslim marriage. And remarkably it was Maryam’s idea.

Maryam met her husband Brahim el-Ferouali when he came to work as the foreman of workers renovating her home on the outskirts of the little town of Kelaat M’Gouna. She had moved to Morocco after losing her job in real estate in Holland, though she had been visiting Moslem countries for years.

“He explained many things to me in a way that was very different from most Muslim men. We became very close.”

So close that when the time came for him to go home to Marrakesh they both dreaded parting so he proposed marriage and she accepted.

There was a big age gap. She was 49 and he just 32. “We were very much in love, so it did not matter, “ says Maryam. “For me relationships have to be equal in spirit and thoughts which has nothing to do with age.”

But there was one problem. She knew he might want children. “I had decided when I was sixteen that I never wanted children and now I was too old anyway, says Maryam. “So when I agreed to marry I told Brahim he should marry a second woman – a traditional Berber girl.”

At first he refused and his elderly parents also told him that Maryam was a good wife and he needed no other. But finally she persuaded them all it was a good idea. So Brahim then asked if she could find a second Dutch woman.

“That was not going to work for me,” says Maryam. “I told him I did not think I could find another girl from the Netherlands. So we agreed to find a local girl.”

They began to explore the emotional and legal issues around Brahim taking a second bride. Maryam, born in The Hague but raised largely in Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles was already a Muslim. She had already converted during the process of marrying Brahim in 2003 and their marriage was formalized four years later.

“I converted not because I wanted to go to paradise after I die, but because I was living in a Muslim country where Islam is a part of daily life, and because my husband is Muslim. Anyway I think Islam is basically, a much more realistic and tolerant religion than Christianity.”

“I was already living like a Muslim. I would not talk to strange men and I adopted the headscarf. I have always been a spiritual person anyway. If I had gone to live in Tibet and married a Tibetan I would have become a Buddhist, “ she says.

Another key factor in converting was inheritance. With the age difference in mind, Maryam wanted Brahim to be able to inherit her money. They were told this was legally very complex but that if she converted it was part of the marriage agreement.
But arranging for Brahim to take a second bride was much more challenging. In Islam men are allowed to take up to four wives at any one time though under very rigorous rules. The Qur’an insists that a man who chooses to marry more than one woman must treat her “justly” or not wed.

But in Morocco men are allowed only two wives. A few years ago Morocco adopted controversial reforms to the Mudawana or family code. Many of the measures were designed to give women greater equally under the law and its complex rules about marriage were widely seen as a bid to curb polygamy.

Maryam and Brahim had found a suitable girl – a young Berber called Zaineb from a nearby village. Brahim spoke with the parents of about six girls before finding Zaineb. Marrying is a joint decision between the two partners. “It is very democratic,” says Maryam.

There was a second reason apart from children for the marriage. “Traditionally the oldest son stays in the house and looks after his parents, but Brahim’s brother’s wife didn’t want this and always fought with her mother-in-law, so there was also this reason for Brahim to have a second wife who would care for his mother and father.”

“We had to go to a judge and ask for permission to marry and then there was a lot of fuss and it took six months and during that time we all went to court about three times. I also had to go to a doctor and buy a declaration that it was impossible for me to have children. Because, you know, there is corruption – everyone wants to make money out of this process. Finally the judge gave permission for us to marry Zaineb.”




Maryam and Brahim’s wedding had been a simple civic affair. Two years on, the families organised a traditional Berber wedding for Brahim and Zeinab, then 22, that lasted three days. On the third day the husband’s family welcomes the bride into their ranks. Songs are sung about her suitability to cook and clean and her other duties as a wife.

And then Zaineb spent the wedding night at her husband’s home. “I was in the house as well, but I did not feel jealous at all. I have a very big love with Brahim. They love each other as well, but it is very different from the way we love. It is in a different culture.”

For Maryam the relationship with Brahim, with Zaineb and with her in-laws is complicated by linguistic and cultural divides. Maryam speaks no Arabic nor the Berber Tamazight language and Brahim speaks no English or Dutch. “But we communicate very well together. We share some French and we can always understand each other.”

“Brahim and me are equal. Because we both have a long history, but completely different backgrounds, we can always learn from each other. There is never a boring day. Both Brahim and me are very much independent. I keep thinking that he is a very special man.”

It is harder with Zaineb. “I cannot talk to her at all, but I can hug her and massage her and we are very fond of each other.”

Zaineb now lives with and cares for Brahim’s elderly parents in their village ten kilometres from Kelaat M’Gouna. He visits regularly.

But there has been no child yet. Zaineb has had two miscarriages and Maryam says that if a third bid at motherhood fails, Brahim might divorce her. “If he decides to, then I will support him and we would look for another wife.”

But if there is a child Maryam says she will be like a grandmother figure. “The child will be culturally a Berber. I think that it is important.”

The relationship with Zaineb offers other challenges. One is the local girl’s level of education. “She is a very simple village girl and has no frame of reference at all to understand the wider world, “ says Maryam. “We do not try to explain it to her.”

And though Maryam has no jealousy of the younger wife, there are other cultural challenges. “In law I have seniority over her, though it is a bit more complicated because I am not Moroccan.

“The thing that worried me at first was Zaineb’s bad temper. She likes me but there is a big distance because she doesn’t understand me and I have disciplined her after she did very bad things, screaming at Brahim’s mother. Because I also helped choose her I felt responsible.”

Maryam has travelled a long distance from her childhood. As a young woman she developed a deep dislike of Western materialism and was drawn to something simpler and more spiritual.

She spent much of her life working in theatre and dance. She also travelled widely seeking a simpler life. In 2001 she went to Morocco and finally found her home, a partially derelict Zaouia or Muslim seminary, on the outskirts of Kelaat M’Gouna. “When I found this place I felt it was paradise.”





As a Muslim she observes key festivals such as Ramadan and Eid. She attends Mosque and prays with Brahim. “I was living as a Muslim long before I converted. I like the moral values of Islam. Here in Morocco they do not judge people. They say God will judge. But I am also very spiritual. I know there is something higher. Call it Allah or God or Nature. I have always felt this connection.”

At home in Morocco she lives simply. Neither she nor Brahim have fulltime jobs, but she says she is always busy in the kitchen or garden. Brahim has a range of part time work.

She has largely left Europe behind. Her remaining links are family – three brothers who visit her – and her regular trips to Spain to sing in the chorus. In Morocco she dresses as a Muslim but in Europe discards the headscarf.

But she never returns to her old homeland which is confronting deepening divisions between its Muslim population and the rise of an intolerant right wing, spearheaded by Geert Wilders' Freedom Party. Does this concern her?

“I used to follow the news and I was very concerned with the relations between Muslims in Europe and the others. I think things are getting bad now. There will be a war. Maybe it has already started. I used to think I could be a missionary to show people that Islam is not bad. But I think things are getting worse. I cannot change anything so now I live in Morocco and that is my life.”