Words Adorned: An Interview with Al-Bustan Executive Director Hazami Sayed
December 3, 2015 | by Tasnim Qutait, Arab Hyphen: Arab Arts and Literature
Blogger Tasnim Qutait interviews Executive Director Hazami Sayed, asking her about the Words Adorned project, the work accomplished over the past decade, and what the future holds for Al-Bustan.
Question: There is a pervasive rhetoric of nostalgia around the “golden age” of Andalusia which sets this idealized time against the present. For example Lebanese novelist Hanan Al Shaykh once noted that “we Arabs today have no connections with the Arabs of Andalusia” and then asked “why is it that we didn’t complete our cultural journey and how is it that we have ended up today in the very worst of times?” The melancholy look back to this Golden Age characterizes many adaptations and renditions of the muwashshahat. How would you situate the Adorned Words project in relation to these discourses?
Yes, there is indeed a nostalgic view of Al-Andalus, a longing for the Golden Age of Muslims/Arabs, an era that people keep yearning back to for many reasons. They are crying on the ruins of something great that happened and will never happen again, or they are evoking these great times with the hope they will come back. Either way we engage with the memory of Al-Andalus — it “now belongs to the landscape of the poem,” as Dr. Huda Fakhreddine noted in her lecture as part of our Words Adorned event series. Dr. Fakhreddine added that Al-Andalus has a special place in Arab history as the intersection point of contrasting ideas; such as East and West, or tradition and innovation—the latter visible in muwashshat’s simultaneous embrace of and breaking away from the traditional Arab qasida.
We were certainly aware of all these associations when we conceived of the project, and were intrigued to revisit this time period from a contemporary perspective — to revive the poetic tradition of Andalusian muwashshahat, not simply recreating history, but rather re-interpreting it in the present day, showcasing the development of Arab musical tradition (into the modern-day takht) and Western musical tradition (into orchestra and choir). The project brings together these two manifestations of Arab and Western music in a dynamic and contemporary way. It is an example of how our work is grounded in tradition, though not limited by it. Our view of cultural production is that of a dynamic process, continually produced in relation to myriad influences, rather than a static set of traditions and values handed down from generation to generation. Through our work we invite participants to produce new cultural forms that incorporate and transform the world around them.
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