Ten Questions Eastwards — Daithidh MacEochaidh talks to Bulgarian writer Zdravka Evtimova about her writing, translation and political change.

Daithidh: As a writer what are your fundamental concerns? Fundamental concerns, may be too loaded a phrase, food in your belly, a roof over your head, these are fundamental; yet, something beneath the pomposity of the question remains: when you put words down on the page,what do you fundamentally wish to achieve?

Zdravka: Yes, I do care about the roof over my head, about food, but when I put words down on the page I want to make people who read them unable to forget it for a long time.  The words give me a chance to open a door for people of other cultures and let them come and sense life in Bulgaria – the only life I know.  Words prove that all people no matter where they live have something in common – strife after justice, freedom, understanding and love. Sometimes words are the only path to justice.

Daithidh: You have work published both in Bulgarian and English, are your translated writings just that or are they, in a sense, a re-write for a different market, audience and culture?

Zdravka: My translated writings are not a re-write for a different market. I understand that there are certain situations when I have to explain what I mean, sometimes I shorten the Slavic names for they are very difficult to pronounce; that however happens quite rarely and in these cases I try to keep the first four or five letters of the name, so that  a Bulgarian reader who lives anywhere in the world can guess what the real name of the character or of the town is. Bulgaria is a small country, there are 7 million Bulgarians. Bulgarian writers have never been rich; they cannot give their countrymen money, but they can give them truth.  In thirteen hundred years of Bulgarian history, truth meant courage to speak it, to stand up for it and to die for it. In the 1300 years of  Bulgarian history truth was Bulgarian survival.

]]> http://www.route-online.com/uncategorized/zdravka-evtimova-east-of-no-east.html/feed 0 http://www.route-online.com/uncategorized/route-short-stories.html http://www.route-online.com/uncategorized/route-short-stories.html#comments Wed, 07 Apr 2010 08:51:00 +0000 idaley http://www.route-online.com/?p=3830 ‘Exhilaratingly conceived books.’ – Metro
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Jerusalem, October 2009

Dear everybody,
There are many disturbances in Jerusalem this week: clashes between police and Palestinian youth, beatings, teargassing, settler harassment, and many arrests. It all revolves around the week of the Jewish festival of Sukkoth and renewed Palestinians fears over the fate of Haram al Sharif where the Al Aqsa mosque is. As usual there are many versions of what is happening, accusations, and counter accusations, but concern is heightened by the knowledge that the last Intifada started in Jerusalem in a similar fashion. Tension mounts whenever the mosque is involved, and either side could exploit it.

However, I’m not actually in Jerusalem to witness it so you’ll probably know as much as me from your own newspapers.

I’ve come to pick olives in Yanoun, a small farming community in the north east of the West Bank overlooking the Jordan Valley. It is hard to describe how beautiful it is. It has that timeless quality, you can imagine it having been like this for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Even in the West Bank, there are not many places like it still left. Yet its beauty is not the only thing it is famous for. In October 2002, it became the first Palestinian village since 1948 to be completely emptied of its inhabitants, by violence from the fundamentalist settlers of Itamar about 10 km away. Established in 1986, Itamar began spreading its outposts over the hills encircling the Yanoun valley in the mid 1990s. Water tower, electricity pylons, vineyards, chicken farms, mushroomed. Settlers encroached on Yanouni land, terrifying its inhabitants. A decade of violence culminated in the October attack and the villagers finally fled. Israeli human rights activists eventually persuaded them to return if an international presence was established, and that was the genesis of EAPPI in the village.

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Click here to open this journal as a PDF

Jerusalem, October 2009

Hello everybody,
Given that the news has swung away from settlement freeze to Iran’s nuclear threat to Israel, I want to bring my friends’ focus back to what is happening in Jerusalem.

Attention on Iran serves to minimise the ‘local’ Israeli occupation, which is after all why I am here. But I do very much regret Iran’s misdemeanours coinciding with the UN debate on the Goldstone Report on war crimes in Gaza. It means opinion changes back once again to what might potentially be done to Israel rather than what Israel is doing to the Palestinians. (Also Yasmin Alibhai-Brown pointed out in the Guardian the other day, what price the IAEI inspecting Israel’s undisclosed nuclear facility at Dimona when it has finished at Qom?) Obama’s tiny window of opportunity for an even-handed consideration of the Israel/Palestinian conflict is closing as the West seems now back to Israel’s view of itself as the tiny state besieged by the huge Arab world. When we went to the settlement of Efrat the other day (see below) the PR man started with a map showing how small Israel is and how the Muslim enemy stretches all along North Africa, down East Africa, over the Indian subcontinent, to the Far East etc. I pointed out that I was from an equally tiny country that had nonetheless bullied the world (including its neighbours) for three hundreds years or more. The size doesn’t matter argument didn’t impress him. And I wasn’t impressed by his view either.

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Jerusalem, Tuesday 22nd September

Dear everybody,
For me, everything is going well here. I am enjoying the diversity of the programme. But for East Jerusalemites things don’t look so good. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu seems to have managed to get East Jerusalem off Obama’s settlement freeze agenda. Not that East Jerusalemites really believed it anyway. Years of hearing about peace while they watch their half of the Holy City gradually being swallowed up have made them sceptical. As some commentator put it recently ‘the world discusses how to share the pizza, while Israel eats it.’

However, settlement expansion is still a priority concern for our team because behind the statistics we see real human tragedies. For example, the Hannoun and Ghawi families I spoke of in my last journal are still on the street in Sheikh Jarrah in front of the houses from which they were evicted two months ago. They have a board on the olive tree, like a cricket scoreboard. Today is Day 54. (Check out the Hannouns’ website www.standupforJerusalem.org)

It may only be a street camp, but they get some pretty heavyweight visitors: religious leaders, diplomats, politicians of all shades, women’s delegations, and the other day, lo and behold, came The Elders! Unfortunately, it was a bit hush-hush for security reasons and by the time we rushed down there, Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, et al. had been whisked away. But it gave the families’ a boost, and Mr Hannoun’s daughter says she’ll never wash her hand again.

Jerusalem, Sunday, August 23

Greetings, everyone.

I can’t believe I’m here again, starting a journal four years after my last stint in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Much has changed in my own life in four years, most importantly I have three new grandchildren. Yet the Occupation is still both depressingly the same and, even more depressingly, changed by hi-tech ‘improvements’.

Plenty has changed on the political front. In the Israeli elections earlier this year, the ruling Kadima Party’s Tzipi Livni won a larger share of the vote but was unable to form a government. Binyamin Netanyahu’s right wing Likud party eventually formed a coalition with Avigdor Lieberman’s further to the right Ysrael Beitenu party together with an assortment of smaller religious and settler parties. Netanyahu is prime minister, ex-IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon is his deputy, and Lieberman is Foreign Minister, a huge lurch to the right by any standards.

On the Palestinian side, when I was last here, Hamas had just won the elections. They were, however, prevented from governing when the EU cut off funding to the PA. They were also unable to form a coalition government with the previous ruling Fateh party, and the subsequent infighting between the two sides resulted in Fateh taking control of the West Bank and Hamas ruling in Gaza. (There is much more to this, of course, including the West and Israel choosing the loser in the elections Abu Mazen as the man to fund.).

Then the two year siege of Gaza started, followed by Qasam rockets, and earlier this year, the Israeli onslaught which killed 1,500 people, dropped white phosphorus on a captive civilian population, and left Gazan infrastructure in ruins…

His stories appear in Warehouse.