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Cross-Pollination on Baraza

 

Fig. 5: Drawing by Sayed Ibrahim (n.d.)

 

Cross-Pollination

Joy Garnett

My short article on Abushâdy and hybridity has been posted to Baraza, a meeting space for critical collaboration run by graduate students in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS) at Columbia University:

 

"This week on Baraza, we're buzzing with excitement over Joy Garnett's essay on the archive of her maternal grandfather, the well-known Egyptian poet and beekeeper Ahmed Zaki Abushady. Edited by Rosa Klein-Baer, Garnett's piece explores some of the cross-pollination between Abushady's diverse intellectual, artistic, and scientific pursuits."

 

Excerpt:

...The variety of the illustrations contained in Abushâdy’s publications, as well as the artworks preserved in his archive, indicate an interchangeability of roles and the blurring of genres for artists working in Egypt in the 1930s and 40s. As I thumb through Apollo, I am struck by the eclectic nature of the illustrations, which include reproductions of fine drawings, caricatures, cartoons, and color plates. Likewise, in the pages of The Bee Kingdom, we find numerous small line drawings. When I first discovered these drawings, which are remarkably stylized, I assumed they were unsigned elements of graphic design produced by the same anonymous hand. On closer inspection, I found each piece to contain the minuscule signature of the celebrated Egyptian calligrapher Sayed Ibrahim (1897-1994) (Fig.5). Ibrahim was a member of Apollo’s Society, producing copious illustrations for Abushâdy’s many publications, including Apollo, as well as poetry. [...]

 

 

Bee World: Blazing the Trail

60 Rue Menasce, Alexandria, Ahmed Zaky Abushady’s Egyptian Home and head-quarters of the Bee Kingdom League, circa 1937. Photo courtesy of the Abushady Archive

 

My short article for Bee World,  published by the International Bee Research Association, is now in print. Bee World is the bee science journal founded by my Egyptian grandfather, A.Z. Abushady, in 1919 when he was living in the English countryside outside Oxford. Bee World is still published, and I was asked by its editor to offer their readership some forgotten Bee World history.

Joy Garnett: “Blazing the Trail: A.Z. Abushady and The Apis Club,” Bee World, Vol.91, no.3 (Sept 2014), International Bee Research Association (IBRA), Cardiff, Wales.

Download Blazing the Trail pp. 65-67

 

For more information about The Bee Kingdom visit: http://TheBeeKingdom.com

...

Memory Loss: Excavating the Abushady Archive at NYU's Radical Archives Conference (April 11-12)

Figures and Sphinx, Gizeh, c.1945. Courtesy the Abushady Archive.

 

On Saturday April 12th at 4:45pm I'll be giving a talk about my archive project 'Memory Loss: Excavating the Abushady Family Archive' on a panel at NYU's Radical Archives Conference (April 11-12, 2014):

 

No Instructions for Assembly: Case Studies in Radical Archiving, with artists Joy Garnett and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Michelle Wong on her research at Asia Art Archive and Ian Alden Russell on his work with the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. Moderated by Steffani Jemison. Saturday 4/12, 4:45-6:00 pm

 

The conference and its website are ...organized around the notion of archiving as a radical practice, by which we mean: archives of radical politics and practices; archives that are radical in form or function; moments or contexts in which archiving in itself becomes a radical act; and considerations of how archives can be active in the present, as well as documents of the past and scripts for the future.

 

ABOUT the conference http://www.radicalarchives.net

Radical Archives is an online companion to the April 2014 conference at NYU, organized by Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh of Index of the Disappeared (with the invaluable assistance of Amita Manghnani) and presented by NYU's Asian/Pacific/American Institute as part of our 2013-14 residency at A/P/A. The conference is co-sponsored by NYU's History Department, Moving Image Archive Program, and Archives and Public History Program, along with the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, the Asia Art Archive in America, and media partner Creative Time Reports. [...]

 

Full Schedule: and Registeration (register by Wednesday April 9th)

On Facebook

Conference participants

Both the conference and its website are organized around four threads of radical archival practice: Archives and Absence, or lost and counter-archives; Archives and Affect, or embodied archives; Archives and Ethics, or stealing from and for archives; and Archive as Constellation, or archive as method, medium, and interface.

The conference website is built to grow over time and serve as a resource for teaching, research and networking.....

My talk and panel are part of the latter (via conference site):

Archive as Constellation at the Radical Archives conference

The Archive as Constellation strand at the conference will include the following:

KEYNOTE by Lara Baladi (Cinema Tahrir, Arab Image Foundation) on the archive as site of resistance, Friday 4/11 at 10 am

PANELS
Disrupting Standards, Remaking Interfaces. With Hadassah Damien on OpenFlows, Eric Goldhagen on the Queer Zine Archive Project and xxZineCorexx, Jenna Freedman & Martha Tenney on the Barnard Library’s feminist approach to process and access, Zack Lischer-Katz on memory traces, and Anne Gilliland on a platform for radical archival description. Moderated by Alexander Provan of Triple Canopy. Friday 4/11, 11:05 am-1:00 pm (Cantor 101).

Collaborative Preservation Strategies: A Look Into XFR STN. With Johanna Burton, Andrea Callard, Colleen Fitzgibbon, Tara Hart, Alan W. Moore and Leeroy Kun Young Kang (moderator). Friday 5:00-6:30 pm (Cantor 102).

Radical Sampling: Archives Remixed and Remade. With Jennifer Burris and Park McArthur on Beverley Buchanan, G.D. Cohen on the Valaco Archive, and Brian Harnetty on the Sun Ra archive. Moderated by Sukhdev Sandhu. Friday 3:45-4:45 pm (Cantor 101).

No Instructions for Assembly: Case Studies in Radical Archiving, with artists Joy Garnett and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Michelle Wong on her research at Asia Art Archive and Ian Alden Russell on his work with the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul. Moderated by Steffani Jemison. Saturday 4/12, 4:45-6:00 pm

SPECIAL PRESENTATIONS
Once More to Pfaffs! A Walking Tour of A Living Archive led by Karen Karbiener (Space limited, not handicapped accessible). Saturday during lunch break, 1:30 – 2:15 pm.

SPAN Listening Sessions with Jules Rochielle and Carol Stakenas, times TBA (A/P/A Institute seminar room).
pilot press… (Jen Kennedy and Liz Linden), 10 am – 8 pm, Friday & Saturday (Cantor lobby)

XFR STN Viewing Station, Friday 10 am – 9:30 pm, Saturday 10 am – 6 pm (A/P/A Institute gallery)

 

Interview in Arabic Lit: AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More

In Arabic Literature (in English): the excellent M. Lynx Qualey's interview with me about Abushady:

AZ Abushady: Revolutionary Egyptian Poet, Feminist, Beekeeper, and More

By mlynxqualey on August 26, 2013

Artist and writer Joy Garnett (@joygarnett) is working on a book about her grandfather, Ahmed Zaki Abushady, the Egyptian poet and bee scientist. She answered a few questions about AZ Abushady, his work, and her book project:

AZ Abushady as a young man. 1909.

 

ArabLit: When did you first become interested in your grandfather’s life and work (in a serious way)? What role did family stories play? Can you describe your current book-project and what it will encompass?

 

Joy Garnett: The book is a family memoir and an adventure story – a love story – that focuses on Abushady’s life, his work as a poet and bee scientist, and his premature death in relative obscurity in the US. It’s not a biography in the conventional sense. I have an inside story to offer, told through family members and Abushady’s own voice. My discovery of  an archive containing his letters and decades of correspondence was a pivotal moment. They reveal how his personal story is entangled with political and cultural conflicts played out from 1922 to 1946 in Egypt. Central to the story is the point of view of my aunt Safeya, the source of so much of this material. She is Abushady’s oldest daughter and the last living family link to that time. So, I am telling an idiosyncratic story partly through her, and in a way that I think anyone will relate to, whether or not they’re interested in Egypt. Specialists in Modern Arabic poetry and Egypt between the wars will, I hope, be interested as well.

I grew up hearing stories my mother told me about her childhood in Alexandria. Abushady loomed large, but his significance was related in broad strokes. It was all a bit vague and romantic. I was in college when I started to get a real sense of who my grandfather was. I started studying fusha at McGill’s Institute of Islamic studies and got into a conversation with an Egyptian classmate. She set me straight.

When I finally got to Egypt, it was on a student loan. I enrolled in the American University in Cairo’s summer language program. I was twenty. I made a point of looking for Abushady’s books and asking questions about him. I started to figure out who my family was. Once back at the Institute, I sought out critical articles about his poetry, but this was premature. The bulk of critical writing in English was still being written.

 

In my twenties, I stopped studying Arabic and Abushady altogether. I decided to pursue an art career instead. There was a point when I realized it was either him or me, and I had to make a choice. Many years passed where I barely thought about him, and then a few years ago I felt the pull. Even dead, Abushady is a force of Nature.

When my mother, aunt, and uncle started to grow old and sick, I was jolted back into thinking about this project. I taped interviews with them.  I had a day job in a museum library that gave me free access to things like JSTOR and interlibrary loans. And of course, this time around I have the Internet.

I’ve spent the past couple of years traveling to different archives and doing research independently to try to piece together the many parts of Abushady’s life, which is not easy. As a physician, bacteriologist, beekeeper, agricultural and social reformer, poet and publisher, he defies categorization. I want to bring together what I’ve discovered about his main achievements in a single narrative. I would like to show the extent of his influence on Modern Arabic poetry as well as his impact on bee husbandry in England and Egypt. For him, poetry and bees were deeply interconnected. But of course, no one in Arabic literature circles knows much about his bee science contributions and vice versa. The connections are interesting.

Read full interview......

 

 

Egypt: Police Arrest Canadians John Greyson and Dr. Tarek Loubani

    
L: John Greyson is a filmmaker and professor at York University in Toronto.

R: Tarek Loubani is an emergency doctor from London, Ontario.

 

For Updates:

Aggregated links at The Globe & Mail

Justin Podur's blog

For Letter Writing, see example.

Email addresses to send letters:

The Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs: [email protected]
Canadian Embassy in Egypt: [email protected]
Egyptian Embassy in Canada: [email protected]
Egyptian Embassy in the US: [email protected]

via The Toronto Star:

Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, physician Tarek Loubani arrested in Cairo

The fate of two Canadian men who were arrested in Egypt remains unknown amidst growing concern from family and friends of Tarek Loubani and John Greyson.

By: Sean Tepper Staff Reporter, Published on Sat Aug 17 2013

The fate of two Canadian men who were arrested in strife-torn Egypt remains unknown amidst growing concern from family and friends.

Tarek Loubani, an emergency room doctor from London, Ont., and John Greyson, a filmmaker and professor at York University, were arrested in Cairo Friday, according to Justin Podur, a mutual friend of both men.

At around 4 p.m., which is approximately 10 p.m. in Cairo, Loubani called Podur to tell him he and Greyson were being arrested.

“He basically said ‘We’re being arrested by Egyptian police,’” he told the Star, adding that the phone call was very brief. “I don’t know where they were arrested and I don’t know where they are now.”

Podur, a professor at the faculty of environmental studies at York University, says Loubani was on his way to Gaza as part of an ongoing collaboration between the University of Western Ontario and Al-Shifa Hospital. Greyson was tagging along as a filmmaker to do some exploratory work.

“Their plan was to travel from Egypt to Gaza,” he said. “They were in Cairo and the crossing was closed from what I understand so they stayed an extra day in Cairo and that’s when they were arrested. I haven’t heard from them since.”

Podur immediately contacted the Canadian government for help but has not received any updates on their status.

“We’ve got no idea of their condition or where they are right now.”

Caitlin Workman, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs, said they are aware of the arrest of a Canadian in Egypt.

“The embassy in Cairo is in contact with local authorities and we are prepared to provide consular assistance,” she said. She was unable to provide any additional details.

Hundreds of people have been killed in Egypt in the past week amidst clashes between supporters of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and security forces. Toronto resident Amr Kassam was shot dead while attending a protest in the Egyptian city of Alexandria on Friday. He was visiting Egypt with his wife Asmaa Hussein and their baby daughter.

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