Maktaba Recommends: Tamer Institute for Community Education
Coo-coo!
For this second blog post, we enter worlds beyond words, of pretty pictures, talking animals, dreamful songs and tales of metamorphosis. These come straight from Palestine to London’s Maktaba thanks to the Palestine Festival of Literature putting us in touch with Ramallah-based مؤسسة تامر للتعليم المجتمعي / Tamer Institute for Community Education.
Established during the first Intifada in 1989, Tamer is a non-governmental non-profit organisation working to encourage and enhance reading, writing and overall learning among young people through access programs and online resources. They publish children’s and youth books in Arabic, both بالفصحى / standard literary and بالعامية الفلسطينية / Palestinian Arabic, and we stock a few of them! Whether you’re looking with your littlest or oldest, or for yourself – to fuel your hopes and linguistic ambitions perhaps – come by Ibraaz to learn from friendly storytellers.
In a magnificent zigzag book, يحيى عاشور / Yahya Ashour, an exiled Gazan poet, writes of صديق قديم / an old friend, who visits him at story time and in his dreams. نص نصيص / Nus-Nusais is ‘a friend not of the world of words we read, but of the world of words we tell’ – his tale is inspired by one of 45 Palestinian folktales once first told by women, and gathered by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana in Speak Bird, Speak Again (University of California Press 1989) / (قول يا طير (مؤسسة الدراسات الفلسطينية 2001. In Ashour’s retelling, the child narrator reflects on the parallels between the adventures of the half-grown, doubly-witted Nus-Nusais and his own, developing an outspoken sense of in/justice about his disability, and apartheid against Palestine.
A thread of colourful creatures drawn by رؤوف الكراي / Raouf al-Karai guides you, as you unfold the book accordion-style, through a vision of equality on environmental and collective terms. The idiomatic ‘once upon a time’ is rephrased here to: سيكون يا ما سيكون في المستقبل المجنون / ‘what will be will be in the mad future.’ Far from leaving the mad future to the whims of the powers that be, Tamer books centre children and Palestine, as well as all things cuckoo in their world-making.
For the littlest, we have another fold-out board book. من المفيد أن تكون لديك بطة / It’s Good to Have a Duck by إيسل / Isol unfolds over a day to tell two different stories of one relationship: one from the duck’s perspective and another from the boy’s perspective.
زكريا محمد / Zakaria Mohammed’s شعشبون / Shaashaboun, as indicated by this dialect word, is a spider on the hunt for their first prey. They’re an ambitious fella who, encouraged by their elders’ chants, goes big: they set their eyes and spinnerets on الفيل / the elephant… and thereafter gradually learn to downsize. They say practice makes perfect, and even though perfection’s a fib, why not try, it’s good fun! You can watch Shaashaboun twist and turn here, and if you find the book in the Maktaba, you can sing along!
For the studious amongst us, discover your dream world in طابور المتأخرين / The Latecomers by محمد الزقزوق / Mohammed al-Zaqzooq by joining a group of friends who climb their school walls after school and play-learn all night long!
And for expert readers, young philosophers and budding activists, we have the only YA novel written by وليد دقة / Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian prisoner, thinker, writer who studied, married and smuggled his sperm out of prison. He wrote for his child he never met, and in حكاية سر الزيت / The Tale of the Oil’s Secret, this child gathers a cast of chatty animals and the olive tree’s secret oil to go and meet his Baba. Arablit have written a full synopsis of the story here.
That was a little selection of our Tamer titles, but there are more. Come by to learn from kids’ force and vision for revolutionary futures. Let’s listen, and buzz, bleat, purr, laugh, sing, etc.
Mooo…
Elena is a French-Swiss-British writer and emerging translator from Arabic and French into English. They work at Burley Fisher Books alongside her MA in Gender Studies at SOAS.