Takween Library inaugurates storytellers conference
The Takween Library inaugurated the story and storytellers conference on Sunday. It was sponsored by the American University of Kuwait, in the presence of the novelist and founder of the library Bothayna Al-Essa and the president of the AUK, Dr Tim Sullivan. In her opening speech titled “Once upon a..”, the novelist Al-Essa said “Once, I remembered thinking the absence of imagination could be the root of all evils in the world.
“We sometimes find human beings who can kill a man because he is simply incapable of imagining putting himself in his place. How can we understand oppression, fanaticism, and hatred in the presence of imagination, the bridge that connects both sides with each other? Will the world remain the same, if we all abide by our moral duty, to imagine?”
Essa quoted the words of Ghassan Kanafani “They judge you because they do not know you.” But how can they know you without imagination, without the ability to walk your own steps, to make themselves heroes in your own story, what the story does, it gives us the ability to understand the other, rather than judge him. “If we want to understand someone, we usually ask, what is his story? All of our side conversations, all our dreams, our nightmares, and all that we are looking for in art and literature is almost the same, we always want the story, because we want to understand,” she noted.
A video about the Takween library was shown during the opening ceremony in which Essa said that the goal is to make a radical cultural change in order to make reading become a lifestyle. “There is always an obsession to convince someone who does not read to be a reader and transform the concept of reading into a daily habit in every person’s life in society.” It is worth mentioning that the events of the conference will continue until March 24th. The sponsors of the forum include: The National Library of Culture, Arts and Letters, The American University of Kuwait, Boubyan Bank, Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, Contemporary Art Platform, Al Qabas Newspaper.