> Zed Book Club / Ulrike Al-Khamis Curates a Reading List as Culturally Relevant as the Museum She Oversees
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Ulrike Al-Khamis Curates a Reading List as Culturally Relevant as the Museum She Oversees
A tour of the curator's library includes Indigenous Canadian writers, Russian classics and award-winning Arabic fiction / BY Shinan Govani / August 10th, 2023
The place where art meets anthropology is where Ulrike Al-Khamis feels most at home. As the director and CEO of the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto since 2021 — the only such museum devoted to the Islamic arts on the continent — she loves connecting those disparate dots. And her personal reading list clearly reflects that.
As a woman of the world, she began her career in Scotland, where she earned a PhD in Islamic Art from Edinburgh University. Later came a stint in the U.A.E., where, among other things, she served as co-director of the Sharjah Museum of Islamic Civilization. With tastes as eclectic as her background (she counts Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Fyodor Dostoevsky among her favourites) Al-Khamis gave us a glimpse into the literary side of her life.
What’s the best book you’ve read this year?
Since coming to Canada six years ago, I have been drawn in particular to the voices of Indigenous authors. One of the most powerful books I have read so far in this respect is Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. It shook and humbled me existentially, and taught me the need to keep learning and growing as a human being and as an ally.
What book can’t you wait to dive into?
One book I have just started reading is Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth. I love the raw, utterly unique and lyrical quality of her work in general — not only as an author but also as an artist and musician. In all she does, she opens up kaleidoscopic dimensions of being that are totally unexpected and profoundly inspirational to me.
What’s your favourite book of all time?
Without a doubt, this must be Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. The way Márquez uses the love story of Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza as the central thread in a complex storytelling fabric, woven to make us contemplate all the myriad facets of ‘love’ — well beyond how humanity conventionally defines and experiences it — is mind-blowing. To me, this book is the ‘dictionary of the definitions and possibilities of love.
What book completely changed your perspective?
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot completely changed me when I first read it as a teenager, and I return to it again and again, because of its story in which a genuinely good human being is exposed to, and ultimately destroyed by, an insincere, corrupt and greedy world that views goodness as weakness. It is as thought-provoking today as it was when it was first written.
If you could have dinner with any author, living or dead, whom would it be?
One of the authors I would love to have dinner with is the Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher. He was a powerful voice in Arab literature and his Sunset Oasis, the winner of the first International Prize for Arabic Fiction, is an incredibly insightful and critical exploration of the complexities, tensions and hybridities that define East-West encounters — be it at the political, societal, intellectual or, indeed, the personal level.