The Hay Festival Abu Dhabi kicked off on Feb. 25 as 99 internationally acclaimed writers across forms, including [“Booker International Prize 2019 Winner Jokha Alharthi and Booker Prize 2019 Winner Bernardine Evaristo,”] (https://www.hayfestival.com/abu-dhabi/home) descended upon Manarat Al Saadiyat to celebrate contemporary works of literature. For the next three days, the space transformed into a pastiche of cross-cultural thinkers engaging in individual talks, one-on-one conversations and panel discussions that teased out the nuances of literary practice, thematic concerns, storytelling and sociopolitical discourse.

Novelist and journalist Miguel Syjuco — a professor at NYU Abu Dhabi and one of the speakers at the festival — said, “In a way, it’s sort of a microcosm of the world; as Wole Soyinka said, ‘We can rub our minds together.’ Very suggestive, [but] absolutely accurate.” For him, events like the Hay Festival “become space[s] for connections [that bring] discourse, shared ideas, civil disagreements and debates that speak to a larger social and historical conversation we have in literature, journalism and all the things that we study.” In such close proximity, both with readers and other writers, Syjuco sees space for “respectful[ly] daring” ways to navigate issues — “… ultimately, these spaces serve as door openings. Sometimes we’ll not be happy with the way doors open, either because we think they’re not opening enough or they’re opening too much, [but] the fact [remains] that we can inhabit that space.”

In 2015, Syjuco became a contributing op-ed writer for The New York Times, writing on [“politics, culture and activism in the Philippines.”] (https://www.nytimes.com/column/miguel-syjuco) In his own identity as a writer, he often finds that the journalist and the novelist leak into each other. The craft of building narrative informs his journalism and the political climate he writes in finds its way into storytelling. This infusion of reality into fiction reverberated across the works in the festival, as indicated by the discourse about politics, identity, power structures, sexuality and immigration that marked the Hay Festival. “I propose that these things are inevitable. Literature is political. Writers talk about things that [are] often not supposed to be talked about; we invite readers to think outside the box and challenge themselves, and that is a very political act,” Syjuco shared. At the same time, Syjuco acknowledged that literary festivals are also a celebration of the craft of literature.

While political themes find their places in the narrative, literature has a broader scope of producing meaning. Tishani Doshi — a poet, novelist, dancer and visiting professor at NYUAD — said, “I feel in terms of literary festivals, we are talking about literature. In a way, it is pigeonholing literature [if you try] to make it fit a theme.” Doshi’s first public poetry reading was at the Hay Festival in 2007, where she sat on a panel alongside Maragret Atwood and Seamus Heaney. As a writer, she knew early on that her work would oscillate between poetry and prose. For her, spaces like the literary festival are “a kind of lifeblood as a writer; you spend a lot of time in isolation, working on a book, [and] it's lonely. Then you meet other people of your tribe.”

On the topic of theme-driven discussions of literature, she finds tension between searching for universality and acknowledging the individuality of the work. “The story or the poem...it has to have its own existence, but of course it's propelled by things that are around [you] and affect you. I don’t set out to write about certain themes when I’m writing fiction, but with poetry I increasingly [find] that the news is so absurd and so difficult that the way to respond is through a poem that allows [for] elasticity in the response.” In conversations that festivals facilitate, a similar duality emerges — individual speakers talking about their creative work can express particular concerns that dictate it while panels of diverse groups of writers allow underlying commonality to emerge.

In addition to this, Doshi emphasized the importance of pairings at the talks, “Sometimes….there is a ghettoization, the poets go into one room or the Indian writers go into [another]. When I did a talk at Hay Wales, [however], I was talking [to] a Welsh writer, and her book was really different but [still] had similar themes — it had to do with isolation and family structures. In a way, imaginative pairing is important because these stories are universal and we write from certain geographies, but they still speak to each other.”

The festival seemed to end almost as soon as it began — the sudden absence of 99 writers had the same effect as the breaking of a spell. Looking back at it, Syjuco observed that “the festival [is a] really great exemplar of what the UAE is with its diverse groups. The UAE brings all these cultures together in a very different way from all the other countries where you’re expected to assimilate. Here, we hold onto our own cultures and come together in different ways.”