Maktaba Recommends: other than books: notebooks, magazines and nonetheless, a couple of books

Autumn is only slowly, still warmly drizzling down on us, but regardless, the book industry is hardbackedly charging ahead in this busiest of seasons. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by the excitement of BOOKS HARDBACKS EVENTS MORE BOOKS to come (to Burley Fisher, Ibraaz and to this blog series), I engage in this third post with some of the other-than-books paraphernalia of the Maktaba.

Thanks to PalFest emissaries’ suitcases, Abdelzaher’s notebooks are back in stock. Tucked behind Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, Abdelzaher’s Atelier has for the better part of a century maintained traditional bookbinding techniques. Their notebooks, hand-bound between leather covers in the home of papyrus, invite feeling fingers and bursting heads to gather their thoughts. The staff here at Ibraaz depend on them. (While I still remain loyal to Emma’s made-in-Hackney productions, Abdelzaher’s gold spredges do twinkle in the corner of my eye.)

Also sparkling reflectively on the Maktaba’s stainless steel shelves is the gloss of fresh magazines: this September issue of Art Review and Wasafiri 127: Solidarities. They join issues of the SWANA-centring journal Mizna and Translator’s world journalism in gathering artists and writers to think through decolonial and liberatory processes collectively. Questions of solidarity appear key to understanding and surviving the present conjuncture.

They are central to the work of Indonesian Yogyakarta-based collective Taring Padi, featured in this month’s Art Review in light of their current installation in Ibraaz’s Majlis. Adeline Chia teases out a tension between their agitprop’s street-present activism and their aesthetic appeal to the contemporary artworld, but the collective is directed by solidarity and justice.

In the following pages, Clive Chijioke Nwonka writes about the ‘unevenness in the beneficiaries’ of urban redevelopment projects enlisting cultural institutions such as the V&A in London’s Hackney Wick: ‘a new creative class that is less defined by economic austerity and a collaborative spirit, and more by cultural consumption, distinction and security,’ pushing out those who shaped the aesthetic now capitalised on.

‘Can anything else be written about solidarity?’ asks Lola Olufemi in Wasafiri 127. Solidarities launched at Ibraaz on Wednesday 23 September, an evening co-hosted by Wasafiri and English PEN and tellingly entitled ‘The Page as Frontline.’ The activist role of literature is an established though ongoing conversation; we ‘recognise that revolutions are carried not only by rifles and roving revolutionaries, but by paper trails,’ write Rami Rmeileh and Sorcha Thomson in an article presenting their recovery of vital student archives, ‘Students as the Vanguard: British-based Solidarities with the Palestinian Revolution.’

Lola Olufemi takes us beyond a sometimes hollowed, idealised solidarity by flipping the coin of institutionalised literature: she suggests ‘reading solidarist action as literature’ to analyse resistance in cultural formations and find an imaginative ‘grammar of ungovernability,’ or as Sana Goyal phrases it in the editorial: ‘a new lexicon, a new set of rules with which to understand organising as literature as organising…’

Massoud Hayoun’s art, featured in and on the cover of Wasafiri 127, can be read as such an unruly text, in that it twists contemporary narratives of protest it is simultaneously implicated in. In an interview with Vamika Sinha, he says: ‘I’m always toeing the line between a kind of nationalism that undoes nationalism … My paintings are Arab paintings. They are by and for Arab people, but they are, above all, by and for humans – a broader human liberation that doesn’t depend on this man-made lethal fiction that is borders and papers.’ A solidarity webbed by imaginative human storytelling then?

The Maktaba’s open.

On the topic of being overwhelmed, on thinking and solidarity work, here are a couple of book recommendations to leave you with:

Transitions: On Culture, Crisis, and the Human, a dialogue between Sita Balani and Jay Bernard published in Mack’s DISCOURSE series, comforted me through the apocalyptic summer, surprisingly. They reckon with this present moment (or ‘conjuncture,’ following Stuart Hall), turning to the humanities to recover universal human horizons from the wreckages of Thatcherism and AI.

Exposing the supremacist survivalist hard right alliance that spews apocalypse, End Times Fascism by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor is now also on our shelves; a hardback to hit fascists on the head with this autumn!

And as a final note, back to paraphernalia: Maktaba bookmarks and gift cards are in the works!