By hook or by book

• Last Updated: January 17. 2009 9:30AM UAE / January 17. 2009 5:30AM GMT

Nadine Touma started her Beirut publishing company with two clear goals: to bring art into people’s lives at a young age and to bring Arabic spoken dialects into written text. Kaelen Wilson-Goldie meets an artist on a mission.

The Beirut International Exhibition and Leisure Center is a complex of temporary buildings plopped on to an otherwise empty stretch of reclaimed land. Pronounced “biyelle” in local parlance, it stands on the northern edge of the Normandy Landfill, which was used as a rubbish dump during Lebanon’s long and dirty civil war. The main hall, in which the 52nd edition of Beirut’s annual Arab Book Fair was hosted last month, is little more than an aluminium aeroplane hanger – functional yes, but utterly lacking in character or charm. A gusty storm swept into Beirut on one of the last days of the fair, and the sound of rain pounding on the roof drowned out even the formidable voice of Fairouz, the Lebanese singer, whose piercingly plaintive songs were being piped through a sound system into the hollow space.

Beirut boasts the highest concentration of publishing houses of any city in the Arab world, and more than 150 from across the region had come to set up shop in the aeroplane hanger. But it was still midmorning and the crowds had yet to materialise. The fair felt gloomy and sad.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, Nadine Touma appeared, resplendent in a black turban and what appeared to be two full bolts of red and black fabric that screamed Issey Miyake and Orientalist chic all at once. She came barrelling down an aisle – robes flowing, voice booming, arm looping crazy circles – grabbed a visitor who was hopelessly lost in the vast maze of makeshift bookstalls and cut a clear path back to her stand in the middle of the fair, all the while tossing out a barrage of commentary on the day, the weather and the state of art and culture in the Arab world.

Touma is the director of Dar Onboz, a publishing house she established two and a half years ago with Raya Khalaf, who handles the art direction for the printed matter, and Sivine Ariss, who oversees a series of complementary animations and audiobooks. Given the multidisciplinary nature of the Dar Onboz staff, the stand, topped with a Calder-esque mobile embellished with origami birds, was a suitably multimedia bonanza of posters, video screens, flip books, knick-knacks, freebies and functional storage lockers that doubled as colourful benches on which to sit and read or watch cartoons. And yes, there’s the catch. Dar Onboz is primarily, though by no means exclusively, an initiative for kids.

When I first came across Nadine Touma’s work five or six years ago, I never imagined that she would end up as a purveyor of children’s books. At the time she was a visual artist, one of a small clutch of creative figures who were putting Beirut’s contemporary art scene on the international map with videos, installations and performances that were bracingly critical of political conditions. Such works were – and for those who are still producing them they remain – deeply embedded in material that was, certainly meant for mature audiences. War, violence, trauma – whatever the subject, it wasn’t kids’ stuff.

Touma was among a group of artists that included Walid Raad, Akram Zaatari, Walid Sadek and Rabih Mroué. She was giving a predominantly male art scene a feminine twist and a humorous turn. She was also on the road to becoming a star at a time when Lebanese artists were just beginning to be selected for major international museum exhibitions, biennials and festivals. But then she dropped off the radar.

“As an artist, you have to understand what it means to complain about not having viewers,” says Touma. In Lebanon in particular and in the Arab world in general, she adds: “You have to understand how little effort is being made in schools and museums to get culture started.”

In other words, Touma got tired of complaining about how few people were participating in the art scene and decided to do something about it. Dar Onboz, she argues, is an attempt to bring art into people’s lives early. The 10 books that the publishing house has produced so far are an effort to forge not only an audience but also an entire generation of future creative figures.

“I almost feel as if what I am doing now is an extension of my artwork,” she says. “Writing has always been a part of my artwork and I haven’t let go of that. My books are my artworks now.”

Dar Onboz is named after the roasted and salted hemp seeds that Touma’s grandmother used to pass around for friends and family to eat while she told outlandish folk tales about flying horses and weeping trees, like buttered popcorn before the advent of cinema. In addition to making art a core component of a young person’s education and experience, Touma wants Dar Onboz to play a part in reviving cultural traditions. She wants the books to reinvigorate the art of storytelling and to wrestle spoken dialects into written texts, something that rubs up against major, long-standing pedagogical debates about the instruction of classical versus colloquial Arabic.

“How do we tell stories? I think we have to read them as we tell them. We cannot put the weight of a dying language on these stories.”

Since 2006, Dar Onboz has produced 10 books and four more are on the way this year. Touma writes most of the text, and the stories for children, young readers and adults range from whimsical to surreal. Seven + 7 is about a moon that eats a fish and breaks into pieces, and a female frog who helps to put the moon back together again. Where Did My Fingers Go? is about a little girl who has lost her fingers and sets out on an adventure to find them again.

For the illustrations, she is creating a vast network of contributing artists, and to the line-up of young Lebanese artists such as Lena Merhej, Zena al Khalil and Ghassan Halwani, she recently added the Syrian artist Fadi Adleh. “Bit by bit we are becoming a pan-Arab platform,” she says.

Last year, Dar Onboz received an award from the Al Maktoum Foundation and participated in the guest programme of the Abu Dhabi Book Fair. “We covered our costs, we created new readers and we met new people,” says Touma, who knows that among young parents in the region, particularly those agonising over which language to teach their children and how to maintain a link with Arabic, she has a huge and vital market. But the question is, can she reach them, and can she satisfy them, when Dar Onboz is only capable of publishing 1,000 copies of each book?

“We are growing very organically,” says Touma. “We don’t produce 10 books a year. We only do three or four. A print run of 1,000 is very little. The risk is very high. But already we’ve sold out of four books. So after the first run, now I know I can print 2,000 or 3,000 copies of the second.”

The Lebanese novelist Rabih Alameddine is a vocal critic of the Arabic publishing industry. “Look at the books,” he says. “The covers are so boring. It’s a writers’ problem. It’s a publishing problem. It’s a distribution problem. And it’s an educational problem. It’s rare that students read and think.” He does, however, see Touma’s work with Dar Onboz as a step in the right direction. “I know Nadine rather well. I think Dar Onboz is amazing. I love the books that I’ve seen so far. Of course I think it is helping the situation. Every little bit helps. And the lovely thing is that Dar Onboz is original, which is a rare thing in our part of the world.”

Though modest, Dar Onboz is tackling all the problems Alameddine lists at once. Ensconced in her vibrant world amid the dreary setting of the exhibition centre, Touma is reflective but undeterred. “It’s lonely being a publisher, and not that creative loneliness that we all need.”

But she has reached out to new readers she would not have encountered otherwise. And each day, she has handed out 500 free copies of a book called What Is The Colour Of The Sea? Illustrated by Areej Mahmoud, it is both a highly effective public-relations tool and part of countrywide campaign promoting tolerance in a place where “others” and “enemies” have piled up as high as the rubbish that once filled the Normandy dump.

A shy five-year boy shuffles up to Touma’s booth and eyes the book. “Can I take this?” he asks. “Can I just read it? Or is it for school?”

“It’s for you,” Touma says. “It’s for you.”