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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 »Culture V
![[From the blog, golamabinawas.blogspot.com/]](/content_images/3/sm_11-الصورة-من-أعمال-غلام-أبي-نواس-220x300.jpg "[From the blog, golamabinawas.blogspot.com/]")
This is our fifth weekly edition of Jadaliyya's Culture. Previous weeks can be found here, here, here and here. This week's offerings include: The conclusion of Sinan Antoon's translation of "Mirrors of Absence" by Syrian dissident poet, Faraj Ahmad Bayraqdar. Khaled Mattawa translates, Keep Reading »
Rajab Buhwaysh, "No Illness But This Place"
![[El-Agheila Concentration Camp. Image ّfrom chezchiara.com]](/content_images/3/sm_El_Agheila_Concentration_Camp.jpg "[El-Agheila Concentration Camp. Image ّfrom chezchiara.com]")
This long poem is from the concentration camp of El-Agheila in Libya, is one the most criminal chapters in the history of colonial Africa. The Italian colonization of Libya began in 1911, but in the east it was successfully resisted by the Sanussiyya movement for more than two decades. When the Fascists rose to power in Rome in 1922, colonization efforts intensified in order to pave the way for settlement programs—and the resistance intensified in kind under the leadership of Umar al-Mukhtar. By 1929, the Italians began removing the native population so as to deprive the resistance of material support. By the end, they had deported two thirds of the population of ...
Keep Reading »The Long and Invisible Road
Route 181: Fragments of a Journey in Palestine-Israel. Directed by Michel Khleifi & Eyal Sivan. Belgium/France/Germany/UK, 2003 Today Palestinians commemorate the nakba, or day of catastrophe. At the same time, the state of Israel seeks to criminalize this expression of an autonomous Palestinian national consciousness, which threatens to fragment and disrupt Israel’s historical self-narrative. This year, the nakba finds itself in the shadow cast by the Israeli Knesset law, approved on 23 March 2011, which denies state funding to any organization that “undermines the foundations of the state and contradicts its values.” The new law, referred to in popular discourse ...
Keep Reading »Arab Spring or Arabian Summer?
![[Image from unknown archive]](/content_images/3/sm_this.jpg "[Image from unknown archive]")
After over a decade-long search, the Obama administration is gloating over the murder of the Western world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden, making him the third Reagan-supported criminal (after Saddam Hussein and Augusto Pinochet) to die since the turn of this century. As the United States celebrates the death of its staunchest enemy and steals the world media’s attention from the bloody protests in Syria and Yemen, the ‘Arab Spring’ perseveres into its fourth month.
Keep Reading »The Bawwab's Daughter
![[Children in Cairo: Image from author]](/content_images/3/sm_11.CairoChildrenPhoto.jpg "[Children in Cairo: Image from author]")
I was staying with friends in Maadi, a noisy, dusty suburb south of Cairo. One of the most striking features of this neighborhood — actually its own city — is that many of the expats who live there persevere in the spurious claim that it is quieter and greener than the neighborhoods of the city center. In any case, there is no dispute about this: Maadi is far away from the city center and, unlike Cairo, no one would travel hundreds of miles just to visit it. Despite my strong objections to the place, I was enjoying myself with my friends, sleeping late, staying up late on their terrace, smoking cigarettes and talking about how our lives were changing as we entered ...
Keep Reading »Quoth the Grandmother -- قالت الجدة
![[Hamdy El-Gazzar. Image from Iowa Writers Workshop]](/content_images/3/sm_hamdy.jpg "[Hamdy El-Gazzar. Image from Iowa Writers Workshop]")
[This piece is from Hamdy El-Gazzar's current writing project entitled, Our Revolution: Stories To Fit in the Palm of Your Hand] The lady is old. Elderly, timeworn. Nearly 92. Long years old. One of the wonders of the world… Look — do you see her small, round dark-brown pita loaf of a face? Can you see how wrinkled it is? The creases are deep, the lines run north and south, east and west. Notice what tens of thousands of nights and days have done to those lines? The cruel scalpel of time carves into every part of this face. It cuts at the brow, cheeks, and nose. It scratches at the ears and neck, around the mouth and around her little eyes. Grandma’s ancient. ...
Keep Reading »Two Films for the Syrian Unraveling
A Flood in Baath Country. Directed by Omar Amiralay. 2003. Tea on the Axis of Evil. Directed by Jean Marie Offenbacher. 2009. As detentions of Syrian activists escalate and reports surface of nearly 500 dead, it is worth recalling that during the throes of Tahrir Square three months ago, all seemed quiet in Syria. Newspapers pronounced Syria “stable” and the risk of large-scale protest “unlikely,” and Bashar al-Assad used a rare interview with the Wall Street Journal to lecture his beleaguered counterparts on the practice of enlightened dictatorship. That same week marked the passing of Omar Amiralay, a titan of the Syrian documentary tradition since the outset ...
Keep Reading »Art for Change at the Square for Change in Yemen
[This post was sent to Jadaliyya by Woman from Yemen.] Walking through the old city in Sana'a there is no doubt that art is alive and is a part of our culture. Architectural beauty is not only appreciated but expected as well. The Revolution has revealed many hidden talents. "We have talent, but the Revolution gave us the opportunity to express them" said Khallad al-Faqih, member of al-Fajr Youth Coalition. Artists have used these talents to promote principles of the Revolution and provide inspiration and entertainment for protesters. Many artists viewed Yemen as a "grave for talent" because society does not necessarily encourage artistic ...
Keep Reading »Culture III
![[Painting by George Bahgory. Image from artspacegallerydubai.blogspot.com]](/content_images/3/sm_Bahgoury1.jpg "[Painting by George Bahgory. Image from artspacegallerydubai.blogspot.com]")
This is our third weekly edition of Jadaliyya's Culture. Previous weeks can be found here and here. This week's harvest includes: Boat Rocking in the Art Islands: Politics, Plots, and Dismissals in Sharjah's Tenth Biennial by Hanan Toukan Al-Shabbi's "The Will to Life" by Gaelle Raphael Al-Maqaleh's Betrayal: Translation and Commentary by Stephen Day All culture posts can be found in the culture section here. We look forward to your comments and contributions. Please read and forward our Call for Posts, or contact us at culture@jadaliyya.com The Culture Editors
Keep Reading »Al-Shabbi's "The Will to Life"
![[Al-Shabbi's Face Carved in Stone in Touzer, Tunisia. Image from Unknown Archive]](/content_images/3/sm_Shabbi.jpg "[Al-Shabbi's Face Carved in Stone in Touzer, Tunisia. Image from Unknown Archive]")
Abu Al-Qasim Al-Shabbi The Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909-1934) is well known and appreciated throughout the Arab world. His words are committed to memory and reproduced in textbooks. With the recent Arab uprisings, his poems, and more particularly “The Will to Life” and “To the Tyrants of the World,” have witnessed a revival, yet with a whole new tone. It seems that the Arab spring has infused "The Will to Life" with a newly found hope, a new urgency, and new life. Its opening lines have been chanted, recited, and written on signs and walls in Arab cities. Al-Shabbi was born in Al-Shabbiyya, Tunisia. He received a traditional Islamic education, ...
Keep Reading »مزمور
![[ لوحة بلا عنوان، أحمد السوداني. المصدر غير معروف]](/content_images/3/sm_Ali5.jpg "[ لوحة بلا عنوان، أحمد السوداني. المصدر غير معروف]")
مزمور ”إلى شهداء سوريا" لا يذهب الشهداءُ إلى الجنّة فأبوابها مغلقة منذ قرون والتجّار الذين اشتروا أنهارها ينظرون من الشرفات العالية إلى الطوابير الطويلة وحشود المشرّدين في الخارج
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 ...
Keep Reading »Faraj Bayraqdar, Excerpts from "Mirrors of Absence" II
This is the second part of selected excerpts from Faraj Bayraqdar's "Mirrors of Absence," written in Saydnaya Prison, Syria, between 1997-2000. The first part was published last week. Mirrors of Absence 40 It is neither bias nor bragging there is no graveyard in this world or the next bigger than this one: what I call my country 41 What happens when they open the gates? What happens when they shut them? as if a heavy glass sky is ripped from ...
Keep Reading »Between Massacre and Genocide: On Eric Friedler's "Aghét: Nation Murder"
The equation of German documentary filmmaker Eric Friedler’s Aghét: Nation Murder (2010) is of two parts: aghét and genocide. The film’s voice-over proclaims that aghét (whose literal meaning is catastrophe) is the word Armenians use for what was visited on their ancestors during and immediately after World War I. In interviews and in post-screening Q & A sessions, Friedler has repeated the same assertion. But I doubt that I am alone in asking: Is it really so? Are these two terms—catastrophe ...
Keep Reading »From Gun to Pen: The Palestinian Revolution Lives
This Is My Picture When I Was Dead. Directed by Mahmoud Al-Massad. Netherlands/Jordan, 2010. ‘If you don’t know Ma’moun Mreish, you don’t know the history of the Palestinian Revolution.’ This line is key to the mixture of personal and national history presented by director Mahmoud Al-Massad in This Is My Picture When I Was Dead. It begins with the shooting of father and son, Ma’moun and Bashir Mreish, in Athens in 1983, one of many Mossad assassinations of senior PLO cadres. The film then hints, and ...
Keep Reading »Culture IV
This is our fourth weekly edition of Jadaliyya's Culture. Previous weeks can be found here, here and here. This week, with Hamdy El-Gazzar's قالت الجدة ("Quoth the Grandmother," trans. by Alex Ortiz), we initiate Hakadha narwi al-thawra, a new series of fiction from the revolutionary Arab world. In future weeks, we will be bringing more Arabic fiction (and translation) in this vein. Also this week: Excerpts from “Mirrors of Absence," by dissident Syrian poet Faraj ...
Keep Reading »Faraj Bayraqdar, Excerpts from "Mirrors of Absence"
Faraj Ahmad Bayrakdar was born in Homs, Syria, in 1951. He studied Arabic at the University of Damascus. He was arrested by Syrian Military Intelligence in 1987 on suspicion of membership of the Party for Communist Action. He was held incommunicado for almost seven years and was tortured. In 1993 he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. Bayrakdar was released in November 2000 following an amnesty without obligation to renounce his political activities. He left to Sweden and has been living there ...
Keep Reading »"The Language of Almonds," A Short Film/Tribute to Hussein Al-Barghout by Salim Abu Jabal
Hussein Al-Barghoti (1954-2002) was born in Kobar, near Ramallah, Palestine. He earned a B.A in English literature from Birzeit University in 1983 and a Ph.D in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in 1992. He taught at Birzeit from 1994 to 1997 and at Al-Quds until 2000. Al-Barghouti was multitalented and wrote poetry, fiction, lyrics, scripts, plays and literary criticism. He published sixteen books and tens of studies and articles. He was one of the founders of the Palestinian ...
Keep Reading »حنين إلى الضوء
حنين إلى الضوء سنان أنطون “إلى أحرار سوريا” ضع أذنك اليمنى أو اليسرى على الأرض وانصت . . . هل تسمع الأقمار وهي تختنق بالتراب؟ الأشجار تشهق تمدّ جذورها لتقبّل جباه الموتى الجدد الأغصان ترتعش وليس لدى الريح ما تقوله الآن الليل في حداد لكن شفاهاً أخرى ستستيقظ غداً لتردّد ذات الكلمات وتقبّل الشمس
Keep Reading »Boat Rocking in the Art Islands: Politics, Plots and Dismissals in Sharjah's Tenth Biennial
On April 6th, Jack Persekian, director of the Sharjah Art Foundation and Art Director of the Sharjah Biennial was summarily dismissed by Sharjah ruler Sheikh Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qasimi. The Foundation is the umbrella organization that oversees the reputed Biennial. The reason, according to the Foundation’s statement, was the “public outcry” in response to a work exhibited in the Biennial. Although initially left unidentified, within days it became clear that the main work at the centre of ...
Keep Reading »Al-Maqaleh's Betrayal: Translation and Commentary
The Betrayal My faith in poetry is betrayed, as blood, gushing from the heart of the square, now masks the face of words My eyes can no longer make out the shape of things, the tone of things Blood, blood, and more blood It shrouds my soul, my tongue it envelopes the horizon and stains people’s bread, falling on plates, coffee cups, and the eyes of children. * * * What dark shadow casts its corpse across our homeland, in this ...
Keep Reading »Aesthetic Uprisings
Signs of the Times: The Popular Literature of Tahrir: Protest Signs, Graffiti & Street Art. Curated by Rayya El Zein and Alex Ortiz. Special Issue of Shahadat, April 2011. Full issue available here. In the heady days that followed the January 25 demonstrations in Egypt, the air seemed to crackle with images from the myriad protests and demonstrations and strikes and uprisings all across the country. For those of us following events from outside, it became part of the daily routine: together ...
Keep Reading »Special Bodies, Speculative Personhood: Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi
He was very sincere. We are like soulless bodies since he left. –Basma Bouazizi, sister If Brad Manning, 22, is the Collateral Murder and Garani massacre whistleblower then, without doubt, he’s a national hero. –Wikileaks He may be a mutilated trunk dismembered all about, the spirit removed all around and separated from the limbs, yet he lives and breathes the vital air. –Lucretius, De Rerum Natura Bradley Manning and Mohamed Bouazizi’s names have become known because they ...
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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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