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From Dance to Transcendence
![[Image from www.jocelynesaab.com]](/content_images/3/sm_duniadance.jpg "[Image from www.jocelynesaab.com]")
Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes. Directed by Jocelyn Saab. Egypt/Lebanon/France, 2005. It might seem that a dance film about female circumcision can only devolve into a cliché-laden take on an over-exhausted (and over-analyzed) subject, but Dunia: Kiss Me Not on the Eyes manages to encompass both the drama of dance and the complexities of female circumcision without being hijacked by either. Refreshingly, Dunia is less about female circumcision (or khittan, as it is referred to in the film) or rigidly defined gender categories than it is about mothers and daughters and contestations of sexuality and the body. Although Dunia was written and directed by a Lebanese ...
Keep Reading »Dawn
![[Hamdy El-Gazzar, Photo: Iowa Writers Workshop]](/content_images/3/sm_hamdy.jpg "[Hamdy El-Gazzar, Photo: Iowa Writers Workshop]")
— Translated from the Arabic by Amira Hanafi Dawn on Saturday, January 29th, the world around us a vacuum, an emptiness steeped in solitude and silence after yesterday’s volcano. Yesterday—day, evening, and night—the day of resurrection, everywhere ablaze, the voice of horror rising, and the pointless beast of death, all across the country. And today dawns, Ash Saturday. The sky above us is still black, without a punctuation of light—darkness in the alleys, the boulevards, the streets, the thresholds of houses, the entrances of buildings, above the courtyards and the squares. The country’s air is black smoke, the oxygen we breathe like iron filings. The hearts of men ...
Keep Reading »The Imagination as Transitive Act: an Interview with Sonallah Ibrahim
![[Sonallah Ibrahim, Cairo, Spring 2011, Image from Elliott Colla]](/content_images/3/sm_IMG_0774_2.jpg "[Sonallah Ibrahim, Cairo, Spring 2011, Image from Elliott Colla]")
Last month, the Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim sat down with Jadaliyya to talk about revolution, literature and the imagination. As always, the author was generous -- presenting a broad view of literature politics, and life. (Recorded in Cairo, May 14, 2011; the Arabic text can be found here. A Spanish translation can be found here.) Elliott Colla: Was what happened in January and February a revolution? Sonallah Ibrahim: It certainly was not a revolution. A revolution has a program and goal—a complete change of reality or the removal of one class by another. What happened was a popular uprising against a standing regime. Its primary demand was “regime change,” ...
Keep Reading »Revisiting Arna's Children
![[Image from Google Images]](/content_images/3/sm_arnajule.jpg "[Image from Google Images]")
Arna’s Children. Directed by Juliano Mer Khamis and Danniel Danniel. Israel-Palestine, 2004. It has now been two months since the murder of Juliano Mer Khamis. I have not yet found the words to follow that statement. For me, as for many, the horror of this assasination has compelled a revisiting of Arna’s Children, the masterpiece Juliano made with Danniel Danniel in 2004. I will not follow standard practice here and provide a plot summary. If you have not yet watched this film, stop reading now and watch it. (And once you have watched it, buy a copy of the DVD to help support The Freedom Theater.) I first wrote about Arna’s Children as part of a review essay for Arab ...
Keep Reading »Translating Palestine: Dispatches from the 2011 Palestine Festival of Literature
![[Palestinians and Guests of the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Local Market in Al-Khalil. Image by Taline Voskeritchian]](/content_images/3/sm_لوز.jpg "[Palestinians and Guests of the Palestine Festival of Literature at the Local Market in Al-Khalil. Image by Taline Voskeritchian]")
Finally, on our way to Jerusalem, the first stop of Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest). There are some twenty of us mainly from the UK, persons engaged in literature, writing, publishing, and teaching. We’re young and old; white and black; from the US, UK, Pakistan, and beyond; speakers of smooth-English as well as its accented variations. Pal Fest activities will include writing workshops, readings, panel discussions, and meetings with local individuals and organizations. The venues will be diverse, as well: refugee camps, community centers, open air cafés, classrooms, cultural sites, and homes. But most of all, we will be on the road, crisscrossing the ...
Keep Reading »The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and the Burial of the Martyrs: Syrian Dances in the Arab Spring
![[Audience at the Bosra Festiva, Dar`a, Syria, August 2009. Image by Maria Kastrinou-Theodoropoulou]](/content_images/3/sm_Jumhur-Bosra.jpg "[Audience at the Bosra Festiva, Dar`a, Syria, August 2009. Image by Maria Kastrinou-Theodoropoulou]")
Some Fires Burn More than Others [August 10th, 2009] Bosra is on fire. Red lights shine through the night in the ancient Roman amphitheatre. The smoke pours onto the stage, where the famous pop singer, Ali al-Deek, and his orchestra have set the audience and the stage on metaphorical fire. Everyone is dancing: old men in traditional attire, women with children in their hands, with or without hijab on their hair, young men and women in groups, people in the front rows, at the back, on the stairs, officials, guests and dignitaries along with ordinary, village people. The impressive Roman theatre of Bosra, one of the world’s best preserved, located in the municipality ...
Keep Reading »Essential Readings: Iran
![[Image by Farhad Rajabali]](/content_images/3/sm_blockingtraffic.jpg "[Image by Farhad Rajabali]")
In recent years, there has been a deluge of popular English-language writings by Iranians in exile, as well as hand-wringing public policy books by U.S.-based think tank pundits, all insisting on the same basic message: Iran represents a geo-political problem of unparalleled importance. While the stated goal of these books and organizations is to educate the English-reading global public about Iran, very often the message comes laced with support for militarily enforced regime change and full-scale neo-liberalization. Case in point: the mission statement of the Iran Democracy Project, a well-established California-based think tank, claims that its “central goal is to ...
Keep Reading »Culture VII
![[Bader Mahasneh (b. Jordan, 1977). Image from foresightartgallery.com]](/content_images/3/sm_Mahasneh.jpg "[Bader Mahasneh (b. Jordan, 1977). Image from foresightartgallery.com]")
Spring is about to end (not the Arab one though). Sarah Palin wants to be Empress, but we still have culture. This week's picks: * Prose of a Growing Movement by Rayya El Zein * The Persistence of Jokes by Elliott Colla * To the Master of the Banquet by Sargon Boulus (tr. Sinan Antoon) You can read last week's section here. All previous culture posts can be found here. We look forward to your comments, queries, and contributions. Please take a look at our Call for Posts and contact us culture@jadaliyya.com
Keep Reading »The Persistence of Jokes
![[Ismail Pasha, Image from www.royal-photos.blogspot.com]](/content_images/3/sm_474px-Ismail_Pasha.jpg "[Ismail Pasha, Image from www.royal-photos.blogspot.com]")
My friends laughed and called me a “revolution tourist” — which wasn’t incorrect, since part of my reason for coming was to see what was happening up close. But the other reason, of course, was to visit the state archives to check on the status of my application. Last fall, I wrote up a vague proposal for research I intended to undertake on the inefficiencies of cotton pricing in the nineteenth-century. I submitted the proposal in triplicate: one to the head of the Ministry of Higher Education; one to the section of the Ministry of Culture which oversees the administration of the State Archives; and one to the head of the particular archive for which I sought permission. ...
Keep Reading »Kenyon Review Interview with Sinan Antoon on Literature and Arab Uprisings
![[Screenshot of Kenyon Review Blog]](/content_images/3/sm_sinankenyoninterview.jpg "[Screenshot of Kenyon Review Blog]")
[The following interview was conducted with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sinan Antoon on the relatonship between the Arab uprisings and literature. The interview was originally published on the Kenyon Review Blog.] 1. How do you think literature may or should respond to this spring’s events? What role (or roles) would you say literature has played, and how might those roles change? Literature always responds to history, of course, but works hastily written under the pressure of responding often risk being pedestrian, but there are exceptions! The revolts are still ongoing and unfolding and we are all still processing their effects, but they have definitely energized all ...
Keep Reading »Bin Laden's TV
![[Bin Laden Watching Television, image source: KATU.com]](/content_images/3/sm_Bin-Laden-Television.jpg "[Bin Laden Watching Television, image source: KATU.com]")
“An aging man crouched before a TV -- a junkie TV, I might add -- in a darkened room. Not exactly how most people picture the man who called for global jihad.” --CNN Over the course of the last week, there has been much discussion of the Bin Laden videos released by the Pentagon, footage seized during the Navy Seal raid in Abbottabad. The most damning video captured during the course of the raid — or, thus we have been assured by media pundits — is that of a seated and stooped Bin Laden, cloaked in an aging blanket, his right hand clutching a remote control as he views images of himself on satellite television. To take the mainstream media and ...
Keep Reading »A Conversation with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme on "The Zone"
![[From The Zone (2011) by Basel Abbas and Ruanna Abou-Rahme]](/content_images/3/sm_thezone.jpg "[From The Zone (2011) by Basel Abbas and Ruanna Abou-Rahme]")
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work collaboratively from their base in Ramallah, Palestine. They have performed together with Ramallah Underground and recently founded the sound and video performance collective Tashweesh. Recent exhibitions and projects include New Sound (NY LYD) Images Festival, 2011 (Copenhagen); the 6th Liverpool Biennale (Future Movement); 23es Instants Video CCF, 2010 (Marseille); Home Works V, Ashkal Alwan, 2010 (Beirut); the 3rd Jerusalem Show, Al Mammal Foundation, 2009 (Jerusalem); The Delfina Foundation, 2009 (London) and the 53rd Venice ...
Keep Reading »The United Transport Company - Jerusalem
— Translated from the Arabic by Chris Stone. The United Transport Company stands alone on a square kilometer of land in the heart of Jerusalem. It is bound on the west by Street Number 1, which falls on the line that divided the city into East and West Jerusalem in 1948. To the east are The Garden Tomb and the Schmidt Girls School. To its south is the Jerusalem Hotel and to the north lies Damascus Gate, which leads to the old city. Here one usually finds large and small white buses with ...
Keep Reading »Culture IX
Before the Arab Summer sets in, four more Spring sowings: — Amira Hanafi translates "Dawn," another piece from Hamdy El-Gazzar's revolution/ary series, "Palm-Sized Stories." — Chris Stone translates Adania Shibli's short fiction, "The United Transport Company - Jerusalem." — Anny Gaul reviews Jocelynn Saab's film, Dunia. — Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim speaks in about revolution, literature, and the imagination. (Arabic here.) For ...
Keep Reading »التخييل هو فعل صناعة الخيال : حوار مع صنع الله إبراهيم
في الشهر السابق زارت " جدلية " بيت الروائي المصري صنع الله أبراهيم لتتحدث معه عن الثورة ، الأدب و أمكانيات التخييل. كما يفعل دائما أكرمنا المؤلف بتقديم رؤية شاملة ليس للإبداع و السياسة فحسب بل لحياة البشر أيضا. الترجمة باللغة الأنجليزية هنا و باللغة الأسبانية هنا سؤال: هل كانت أحداث يناير وفبراير ثورة أم تغيير نظام فقط أو إسقاط عائلة أو شئ آخر ؟ أجابة: لا طبعا لم تكن ثورة ، لا تستطيع أن تقول إنها ثورة لأن الثورة من المفترض أن يكون لها برنامج وهدف هو تغيير كامل للوضع وإحلال ...
Keep Reading »Algeria's Impact on French Philosophy: Between Poststructuralist Theory and Colonial Practice
Pal Ahuluwalia. Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots. New York: Routledge, 2010. Jane Goodman and Paul A. Silverstein (eds). Bourdieu in Algeria: Colonial Politics, Ethnographic Practices, Theoretical Developments. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009. Christopher Wise. Derrida, Africa and the Middle East. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. In the past few years, there appears to have been a falling out between Middle Eastern studies and post-structuralist theory. Edward Said’s ...
Keep Reading »Nizar Qabbani's "Poetry Buses"
Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998) was a Syrian poet, essayist, diplomat, and publisher and one of the most popular poets in the Arab world in the last few decades of the 20th century. He was born and raised in Damascus in a middle-class merchant traditional family. At the age of 15, Qabbani’s sister committed suicide because she was unwilling to marry a man she did not love. It is believed that this tragic event incited Qabbani to write poetry that expresses women’s desire and exposes their social condition. In ...
Keep Reading »Culture VIII
This week's basket has everything you need to start the week: Greek mythology, French philosophy, the politics of poetry, and a dispatch from Palestine: Algeria's Impact on French Philosophy: Between Poststructuralist Theory and Colonial Practice by Muriam Haleh Davis The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and the Burial of the Martyrs by Maria Kastrinou Nizar Qabbani's "Poetry Buses" by Gaelle Raphael Translating Palestine: Dispatches from the 2011 Palestine Festival of Literature by ...
Keep Reading »"V for Vendetta": The Other Face of Egypt's Youth Movement
“Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea […] and ideas are bulletproof.” - From the film V for Vendetta In the summer of 2010 the youth of Facebook, “shebab al-Facebook,” began a campaign of peaceful civil disobedience through the Arabic “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook Fan Page. The success of their “silent stands” throughout the country gave youth a media friendly face as a group that espouses peaceful non-violent forms of civil disobedience to confront ...
Keep Reading »"To the Master of the Banquet" by Sargon Boulus
"Ila Sayyid al-Walima" appeared in Sargon Boulus' posthumous collection `Azma Ukhra li-Kalb al-Qabila (Another Bone for the Tribe's Dog) (Baghdad and Beirut: Dar al-Jamal, 2008) To the Master of the Banquet If you are a master give us some bread a drop of medicine for the sick! You, who call yourself a master, give to those who walked in all these funeral processions bewildered in the dream of disaster for whom a cloud passing through the sky of slaughter or a child’s skull, ...
Keep Reading »Prose of a Growing Movement
Yassin Alsalman, The Diatribes of a Dying Tribe. Write or Wrong / Paranoid Arab Boy Publishing, 2011. www.iraqisthebomb.com It’s a good time for a lyric exposé from an Iraqi-Canadian aged 25. Not that there could be such a thing as a bad time for one. With the “Arab Spring” turning the volume up, so to speak, of voices from the Arab world, “Westerners” building new ideas about the “East” are looking for different speakers and new narratives. Increasingly, it’s becoming obvious that Arabs in ...
Keep Reading »An Excerpt from "Judgment Day" by Rasha al Ameer
In Rasha al Ameer's Judgment Day (first published in Beirut in 2002 by Dar Al-Jadeed) a reclusive and middle-aged Muslim cleric from a rural background tells the story of how he falls in love with an independent, educated and urban woman who invites him to work on a book about the great Arab poet Mutanabbi. The relationship opens the man's eyes to aspects of life he has never encountered and leads him to reconsider everything he has ever learned. In this section, set in the early stages of their ...
Keep Reading »Culture VI
With Culture VI we discover that May is another cruel month, breeding/Out of the dead land, mixing/Memory and desire, stirring/Dull roots with spring rain... And so it goes with three new offerings that might remind us that the end of spring is near: 1. An excerpt from Jonathan Wright's translation of Rasha al Ameer's novel, Judgment Day. 2. Palestinian Artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme discuss their current project, The Zone, with Eva Langret. 3. Rebecca Luna Stein ...
Keep Reading »Dressing Like a Terrorist
Like many others, I was dismayed to learn of the two imams wearing traditional Muslim garb who were forcibly removed from an airplane that was to carry them to a conference on Islamophobia. The passengers who were removed from a Delta/ASA flight in Memphis, Masudur Rahman and Mohamed Zaghloul, apparently frightened other passengers and upset one of the pilots, who refused to fly with them on board. Not everybody was dismayed, however. The Delta/ASA pilot and the frightened passengers have ...
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About Culture
Jadaliyya’s Culture page is an open space for creative, original and creative texts about culture(s). Jadaliyya understanding of culture encompasses the production and dissemination of meanings in all sites, contexts and in a variety of media and genres.
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