BY STEPH BECK FEY
“Our goal is to bring Arab culture closer to home.” This is the mission statement from the program of the Olympia Arab Festival, hosted biannually during Artswalk by the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice.
This year marked the fourth festival since 2012, and “each year has been better than the last,” said Cindy Corrie, Rachel Corrie Foundation Board President and a main organizer of the event. As she put it, “one of the gifts of the festival is that we can make connections that can lead people to action, to learn what’s going on and to get involved, but at the same time we can celebrate things that are pretty universally enjoyable from all of these cultures.”
Walking into the Olympia Center for the event, the celebration of Middle Eastern culture and identity was strikingly front and center. The walls were colorfully decorated with the flags of Arab countries. The food truck outside the entrance sold halal gyros. The vendors’ tables showcased a variety of traditional arts and clothing. The bands played Moroccan reggae and Egyptian folk music, and when a band wasn’t onstage, arabic pop music blared from speakers. Overall, the atmosphere in the main ballroom was appropriately festive and the sounds of conversation, commerce, and music all combined to make the relatively cozy space feel much larger than it was.
As Corrie suggested, all this celebration was not without its more serious elements of advocacy and education. At the vendors’ tables, organizations such as the Palestinian Heritage Group and A Piece of Peace raised money for Palestinian causes. Off to the side of the main ballroom, an art room exhibited Luke Somers’ “A Day In The Life of Yemen,” documenting both the joys and suffering of the late photographer’s war-torn adopted country. Down the hall, even farther away from the ballroom, a quiet space was set aside for panel discussions on current issues in the Middle East as well as heady topics of history and identity.
Questions of identity in particular ran through almost all of the discussion. As the Arab world is made up of many individual nations with their own cultures, there was a distinct push-pull between identifying with a nation and identifying as Arab in a broader sense.
Discussing this divide at the “Arab Youth Culture” panel, student activist Samia Saliba described her own experience. “Growing up here in the [Arab] diaspora, I tend not to identify as Lebanese-American as much as just Arab-American,” she said. She expressed hope that connecting people from the Middle East with people from the diaspora could lead to a pan-Arab movement that “[recognizes] differences between experiences while building communities across borders.”
Building those communities is never easy, and the presentation immediately following came as a harsh reminder of that. In his presentation, “Embracing Yemen”, Dr. Mohammed Ali Alawadhi reviewed the recent history leading up to the ongoing Yemeni civil war as well as possible political solutions. Discussing Yemen’s current poverty, he emphasized the wealth of natural resources in the country and the industrial advantages it should theoretically have. “We’re not supposed to be poor,” he said. “This was done to us.” He went on to condemn international exploitation of Yemen’s resources and termed the Saudi intervention in the war “a genocide.” Dr. Alawadhi wasn’t speaking as an Arab in any pan-Arabist sense; he spoke as a Yemeni concerned for his country. Discussing an intra-Arab conflict, national identity comes first — context is everything.
For the final presentation of the afternoon, “Contemporary Arab-African Relations,” Dr. Sarah Eltantawi (professor of comparative religion here at Evergreen) looked at that fungibility of identity in a specifically North African context. She said that, when she asks Egyptians whether they consider themselves “African,” a common joke she hears is that “when African teams do well in the World Cup, we are African.” After a presentation covering over a millennium of history and a multitude of current events, she said, for her own part as an Egyptian, “Of course I identify as African. And Arab. And a lot of other things at other times. But what does that even mean?” As the preceding few hours had demonstrated, that question never has just one answer.
The festival concluded with a performance on the main stage by Jafra Dabke, a troupe from Seattle that specializes in a kind of folk dance called dabke, common throughout the Levant. The dance was joyous and energetic and everyone clapped along. As the show ramped up, the performers began to dance off the stage until they were all dancing in a large circle around the room. As they danced, audience members began to get up and join. It was an exhilarating end to the event and a fairly on-the-nose metaphor for its mission of community-building through sharing culture.
After what seemed like both forever and no time at all, the dance ended, and the Olympia Arab Fest concluded with some brief closing words from the Master of Ceremonies. Hopefully the Fest will return in 2020, better than ever.
Webmaster Note (10/17/18): This article originally ran under the headline: “Celebrating Culture & Building Community: The Olympia Arab Festival Returns to Olympia.”
