The 'Reflections' space of the Tres Culturas Foundation offers our users tools designed to enable a more leisurely meditation on the topics dealt with in the various activities organised by this Foundation, whether they be seminars, workshops, book presentations, exhibitions, etc. Tres Culturas' 'Reflections' also aims to be a place to find analysis and specialised opinions on current affairs or relevant issues in the Euro-Mediterranean and Middle Eastern context.
During the month of July, the Tres Culturas 'Reflections' space will host, in video format, some of the most interesting interventions from two of the international meetings organised by this institution in recent months within the framework of the programme. AlQANTARA: bridges for dialogue and coexistence. This initiative, the result of cooperation between the Three Cultures Foundation and the Ministry of Moroccans Living Abroad and Migration Affairs, aims to address the major issues that make up today's Mediterranean in all its aspects, from literature and the arts to the media, the economy and immigration, recognising the necessary cross-cutting nature of these issues at a time of particular complexity.
The first of these videos shows one of the encounters of the Three Festivals, voices of the Mediterraneanwhich took place in Granada from 28 to 30 April, and which brought together more than 30 authors and intellectuals from Mediterranean countries, from established figures to emerging authors, coinciding with the city's Book Fair. Almudena Grandes, Mahi Binebine, Rachid Boudjedra, Nawal el-Saadawi, Abraham B. Yehoshua, Mircea Cartarescu and Hubert Haddad participated in this forum.
At the same time, we would like to take advantage of the coming months, when a large part of our public may have more leisure time available to them, coinciding with the summer holidays, to launch some Literary RecommendationsThe material published by the Fundación Tres Culturas itself or available on loan from our Specialised Library.
Migrations and returns'. Three-way conversation: Buket Uzuner, Najat el-Hachmi and Javier Valenzuela.
The evocative title of this literary roundtable allowed the participants to address a wide range of topics, from the scarce presence of women in literary prizes, to the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey or the concept of limbo in Islamic culture.
Turkish writer Buket Uzuner, one of her country's most internationally renowned authors, masterfully spun several stories in which she mixed her literary influences such as Don Quixote, The Divine Comedy or Hemingway's stories told on Turkish radio, with her vision of immigration and the diversity and similarity between cultures. This is the second collaboration of this author with the Fundación Tres Culturas, whose programme she was part of during the Seville Book Fair in 2011, where she presented her work People of Istanbul.
For her part, Najat el-Hachmi, a Moroccan writer based in Spain, agreed with Uzuner on the importance of women as storytellers and transmitters of stories throughout history, emphasising in particular their influence on her vocation as a writer, above and beyond the authors of literary works. For El-Hachmi, for whom literature cannot be separated from life itself, she claimed the cultural diversity of the Mediterranean countries, even within each country.
This literary round table of the 'Tres Festival, voces del Mediterráneo' counted with the presence as master of ceremonies of the journalist, correspondent and writer Javier Valenzuela, a great connoisseur of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, where he served as a correspondent in some countries, dedicating several books to this region. The meeting took place on Thursday, 28 April 2016 at the Federico García Lorca Centre in Granada and was organised in collaboration with the Andalusian Studies Centre.
Authors' biographies
BUKET UZUNER (Ankara, Turkey, 1955). This Istanbulian by adoption - a molecular biologist by training - made her name in Spain with Ada de Ambar (2009) and later with People of Istanbul (2010). A small sample of his extensive bibliography, which jumps from historical novels (A long white cloud - Gallipoli) to the futuristic (The sound of fish footsteps o Mediterranean Waltz), including eight collections of short stories, with titles such as The gypsy who ate the sun. His books have been among the bestsellers in Turkish bookshops since 1992, and have been translated into eight languages.
Najat El Hachmi (Beni Sidel, Morocco, 1979). At the age of eight she moved to Vic, the city where she grew up. She studied Arabic Philology at the University of Barcelona and has been a cultural mediator in Vic and a reception technician in Granollers. In 2004 she published her first book, Jo també soc catalana. It was followed by The last patriarch (Ramon Llull Prize, Prix Ulysse and finalist for the Pris Méditerranée étranger), translated into ten languages, and The Body Hunter. With her latest novel, La hija extranjerawon the BBVA Sant Joan prize for Catalan literature.
Story: Istanbul Blues'. By Buket Uzuner. Magazine culturesnumber 11, 'Emerging Turkey'.
A bull with a single golden horn' is the Turkish writer's allegorical vision of the city of Istanbul, for which she has had a special fascination since childhood, passed down through her mother's stories. Originally from Istanbul, her mother had moved to Ankara, where her husband came from. Even so, the family travelled to Istanbul every summer and Uzuner was able to experience her first intense friendships in this city, 'the only one crossed by the sea'. These reflections serve as the author's starting point for a short, intense story in which personal freedom, love, belonging and exile revolve around the ubiquitous protagonist of the story: the city of Istanbul itself.
The full story can be found at the following link: http://revistaculturas.org/blues-de-estambul/
Tres Culturas' literary recommendations for this summer
The participants in the first round table of the 'Tres Festival, voces del Mediterráneo' are the protagonists of our literary recommendations this week. Two authors who, in the words of Javier Valenzuela, represent the two furthest extremes of the Mediterranean, from Algeciras to Istanbul, while at the same time demonstrating the important place that women are occupying in the contemporary literature of this region.
All the readings recommended in this section are available in the Specialised Library of the Fundación Tres Culturas, which also offers the possibility of collective loans of some of these works (for more information: http://www.tresculturas.org/club/PAUTAS.pdf). The opening hours during the summer are Monday to Friday from 9:30 to 14:00. The Library will be closed during the month of August.
People of Istanbul. Buket Uzuner
"Geneticist Belgin Doruk flies back to her native Istanbul after several years in New York. During the more than ten hours of the journey, haunted by her doubts, she has not stopped thinking about the step she is taking, about what it means to return to Turkey, above all because she is doing it for love. Her boyfriend, the sculptor Ayhan Al Adana, is waiting for her, both excited and scared (...) Just as Belgin's flight has landed, it is announced that a computer failure has paralysed the system and the airport is thrown into chaos. (...)
People of Istanbul shows us the polychromatic human mosaic that this capital, hinge between East and West, with all its complexity, all its contradictions, but also with all its charm". (Editorial edebé).
The last patriarch. Najat El Hachmi.
"The Last Patriarch is the story of a personal rebellion against an order that has been established for thousands of years. It is also a lucid look at victims and executioners. Mimoun and his daughter are born to fulfil the role that the patriarch has assigned them, but changes in the circumstances surrounding them will be decisive in bringing about a change in the order of things. This is a family story, a story where the internal contradictions of the characters come to the surface to mark relationships made up of misunderstandings. A story defined by the rupture that separation entails". (Editorial Planeta).
The foreign daughter. Najat El Hachmi.
Originally written in Catalan, it narrates the contradictions in the life of a young woman who moves between two universes, that of immigration and that of the culture of the country in which she lives. Thus, the protagonist 'is torn between accepting an arranged marriage with her cousin and going to Barcelona to develop her talent. The mother tongue, a variant of Berber, symbolises the difficulties of communication and the conflict of identity that the protagonist experiences throughout the story, while reflecting on freedom, roots, generational differences and the complex personal, social and cultural reality that her condition as an immigrant imposes on her. To this is added the complicated access to the world of work faced by today's youth" (Editorial Destino).
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