Amir Tag Elsir’s The Grub Hunter

January 15, 2020 by Tasnim

Amir Tag Elsir’s The Grub Hunter is a novel about who gets to write novels, and the impact of surveillance on literature. In its opening lines, the protagonist tells us “I’ll write a novel. Yes, I will. This is a really strange idea for a retired police agent like me” (1). This is the story of a former secret service agent, Abdallah Harfash, also known as Farfash, who, has retired after an accident in which his leg is amputated.  He […]

Categories: Literature, Notes • Tags: Amir Tag Elsir, Sudan

Sarha Collective’s Adaptation of Land Without Jasmine

April 6, 2019 by Tasnim

Land Without Jasmine is an adaptation of Wajdi al Ahdal‘s novel, which tells the story of a young woman who disappears from her university in Sana’a, Yemen. The play was put on by the new collective Sarha and billed as “the first ever Yemeni theatre production to be staged in the UK.”  Sarha describe their adaptation as “a dark fairytale which transports audiences to a murky underworld of lust, obsession and violence where nothing and no one are what they […]

Categories: Theatre • Tags: Sarha, Yemen

The Other Americans

March 24, 2019 by Tasnim

Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, out next week, begins as a murder mystery and grows into a larger story about fear, anger and resentment, about the meaning of love and the finding of home, exploring the grey zones of human behaviour and the schisms in society that allow us to mark people as other. The narrative opens with music composer Nora Guerraoui learning of her father Driss’s death and returning to her Moroccan immigrant family in California. The sudden death […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Anglophone-Arab, Arab-American, Laila Lalami, migration, Morocco

Capernaum

February 26, 2019 by Tasnim

  I recently went to see Capernaum at Picturehouse Central. When we left, my friend commented, “that was heavy.” And it was, heavy in a way that felt difficult to process immediately, beyond that familiar discomfort of watching a film like this as entertainment, as people around us ate popcorn and checked their phones. During the opening scenes we see children running through narrow alleyways playing with pretend guns, an echo of many other similar opening scenes, including Nabil Ayouch’s Horses of […]

Categories: Art, Film

Words, Words, Words

February 19, 2019 by Tasnim

  Words Words Words a MARSM organised event featuring Palestinian artists billed as a celebration of “the power of words and meaning,” took place this Friday at Richmix. The performers were two spoken word artists, Farah Chamma and Dana Dajani, and musician Jowan Safadi, making his UK debut. Rafeef Ziadah, herself a spoken-word artist, was going to host but unfortunately could not make it. Farah Chamma, accompanied by Maruan Betawi on the oud and Phelan Burgoyne on drums, took us through poems on […]

Categories: Art, Music, Performance Art, Poetry • Tags: Dana Dajani, Farrah Chamma, Jowan Safadi, Spoken Word

On Memory: An Evening with Palestinian Writers at the Arab British Centre

October 30, 2018 by Tasnim

On October 29th, the Arab British Centre hosted Selma Dabbagh, Jehan Bseiso, Farah Chamma and Ahmed Masoud, who came together to talk about what memory means to them as Palestinian writers. Behind the headlines and milestones and tweets, there are people and stories and morning rituals. There are memories and details so resilient they pass from one generation to another, they cross borders and traverse checkpoints to be captured in poems and plays, novels, art pieces and a whole tableau of […]

Categories: Art, Literature, Poetry • Tags: Ahmed Masoud, Farah Chamma, Jehan Bseiso, Palestine, Selma Dabbagh

Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys

September 24, 2018 by Tasnim

The Watermelon Boys is the debut novel of Iraqi-Welsh journalist Ruqaya Izzidien. Set between 1915 and 1920, the novel tells a first world war story with a difference: in this novel, the main protagonists, Ahmad and Carwyn, are Iraqi and Welsh. The novel focuses most on the story of Ahmad and his family, though it spirals out to include a large cast of characters including a number of Ahmad’s friends and colleagues as well as his Jewish neighbour Dawood and […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Review, Ruqaya Izzedin, The Watermelon Boys

SAFAR Film Festival

September 15, 2018 by Tasnim

The fourth edition of SAFAR is taking place at the ICA and the Institut Francais, running from 13-18 September. The festival, curated by Joseph Fahim, included films from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Palestine, the genres ranging from adaptations, “creative documentaries,” shorts and features. The full program can be found here.  I attended the second day of the festival at the ICA, where the films featured were Stories of Passers Through by Koutaiba Al Janabi, and Poisonous Roses by Ahmed Fawzi […]

Categories: Film • Tags: Ahmed Fawzi Saleh, Egypt, Iraq, Koutaiba Al Janabi

Arab Science Fiction at Worldcon 76

August 19, 2018 by Tasnim

Worldcon 76 (the World Science Fiction Convention), is running from 15-20 August, and includes several panels on world SF, including one specifically on Arab literature with the somewhat wince-worthy title “1001 Years Later – What Happened to Arabian Fiction.” The youtube channel of Yatakhaylon (They Are Imagining), a group which seeks to promote Arab fantasy and sf, has recently posted some live-streamed events from the conference, including the Arab fiction panel. As advertised, the panel had three speakers: Novelist Shayma Alshareef, […]

Categories: Events • Tags: Arab science fiction, Science fiction, Shayma Alshareef, world literature, Yasser Bahjatt, Yatakhaylon

Leila Aboulela’s Short Story Collection Elsewhere, Home

July 7, 2018 by Tasnim

Leila Aboulela has been on a book tour recently with her short story collection  Elsewhere, Home which includes some of her earliest stories, like “Coloured Lights,” as well as stories written more recently such as “Circle Line.” Aboulela read from her new book at a book launch at the Migration Museum on July 4th. She was in conversation with Chibundu Onuzo, who asked her, among many other things, to talk about the secret is to her staying power: what does it […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Leila Aboulela, Scotland, Sudan

Palestinian Historians, Historians of Palestine

July 1, 2018 by Tasnim

A symposium entitled “Palestinian historians/historians of Palestine: writing under the Mandate and beyond” took place this Friday at King’s College, organized by Dr. Sarah Irving. The day was packed full of discussion on Palestinian historiography and papers focusing on Palestinian academics and historians, figures such as Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arif al-Arif,  Izzat Darwaza, Nicola Ziadeh, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Darwish Al-Miqdadi. As someone focused on Arab(ic) literature, much of this material was entirely new to me — for example, my familiarity with […]

Categories: Events • Tags: Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arif al-Arif, Darwish Al-Miqdadi, Izzat Darwaza, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Nicola Ziadeh, Palestine

The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows

May 25, 2018 by Tasnim

  “The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows,”  which took place over the past two days at John Cabot University in Rome, was advertised as  an examination of “the political economy of the Arab Image” which “reflects upon the materiality, ethics, and aesthetics of filming, distributing and archiving post-2011.”  The workshop more than lived up to this ambitious description, with discussions ranging from debates on privacy and the ethics of sharing violent images to how archives can be more […]

Categories: Documentary, Events, Poetry • Tags: Egypt, Morocco, Palestine, Syria

MFest 2018

April 30, 2018 by Tasnim

This weekend was MFest, “UK’s first festival of culture and ideas dedicated to Muslim communities,” which took place at the British Library between the 28th-29th April. The programme included several panels relevant to this blog. I was particularly interested by the panel “Spicing Up Sci-fi: The Dunes Strike Back” featuring Emirati writer Noura Al-Noman, author of the young adult scif-fi novel Ajwan, as well as Soren Lind, who has co-directed a number of sci-fi inspired works related to Palestine with filmmaker and […]

Categories: Art, Events, Literature • Tags: British Library, British-Arab, British-Muslim, MFest

Banipal Book Club discusses Frankenstein in Baghdad

April 26, 2018 by Tasnim

Yesterday The Banipal Book Club met at the Rosetta Stone Bookshop to discuss Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi. There was quite a crowd at the store, reflecting the book’s popularity both in the original Arabic and — perhaps even more — in translation. The unprecedented success of this particular book in translation did come up as a topic during the discussion. The translator, Jonathan Wright, suggested that it was in part due to the time Penguin had invested in promoting […]

Categories: Literature • Tags: Ahmed Saadawi, Banipal, Iraq, Jonathan Wright

Sarab by the Palestinian Circus School

April 15, 2018 by Tasnim

Yesterday I went to see Sarab by Palestinian Circus School, part of the CircusFest at Jackson Lane. The show is a piece of circus theatre that ”shares with us the plight of refugees worldwide. The seven Palestinian performers use Chinese pole, juggling and acrobatics to reflect on their own history and the repetition of it today for millions of people.” The set for the show was ever-changing, with the creative uses of boxes allowing the performers to reflect the theme […]

Categories: Art, Performance Art, Theatre • Tags: Circus, Circus theatre, migrant rights, migration, Palestine, Palestinian Circus School, Refugee crisis, Refugees, Theatre

Omar Hamdi, “Sticks and Stones”

April 14, 2018 by Tasnim

Omar Hamdi’s comedy special “Sticks and Stones” was filmed tonight at the Rich Mix. This meant, among other things, that Hamdi’s grand entrance was recorded again at the end, along with several jokes the comedian had skipped over during the actual show, but the audience was still whooping and clapping and full of good will despite the cameras and the fiddling with continuity issues for the recording — and that is probably a sign that they had enjoyed their evening. […]

Categories: Art, Performance Art • Tags: Comedy, nabil abdul rashid, omar hamdi

Exhibition: Retracing A Disappearing Landscape

March 29, 2018 by Tasnim

Today I attended the opening of the exhibition “Retracing A Disappearing Landscape’,  held at the P21 Gallery in London, which runs from 29 March-15 May, 2018 and explores “people’s direct experience of and fascination with memory and personal history as well as the collective narratives that arise in connection with modern day Libya.”  Artists featured included Elham Ferjani, Mohammed Ben Khalifa, Jihan Kikhia, Reem Gibriel and Laila Sharif, among many others. The exhibition included works more directly related to preserving and reflecting on cultural […]

Categories: Art, Sculptor/Installation Art • Tags: 2011 revolutions, Cultural Memory, Elham Ferjani, Laila Sharif, Libya, Mohammed Ben Khalifa, oral history, oral narrative, Reem Gibriel

Curfew Palestinian Dance Performance at Rich Mix

March 27, 2018 by Tasnim

On Saturday the 24th at Rich Mix, two dabke groups, El Funoun and Hawiyya, one from Ramallah and one from London, joined forces to produce Curfew, mixing traditional dabke movemens with contemporary dance in a show revolving around the Palestinian experimence of the newscycle, the way the news is both flickering social media feeds and newspapers and radio and also a force that shapes daily life, from curfews to checkpoints to the lates twists in the many current Arab crises. […]

Categories: Art, Dance • Tags: Badke, Dabke, El Funoun, Hawiyya, London, News, Ramallah, Social Media

Insyriated

February 23, 2018 by Tasnim

  I went to see Philippe Van Leeuw’s much-acclaimed Insyriated recently, with that by now familiar conflicted feeling about the lines between entertainment and reality. After the most recent events in Ghouta — so difficult to watch, so easy to scroll past on social media timelines — that unease was all the more present as we walked into almost empty theatre to witness the trials of an imagined day in the life of an imaginary Syrian family trapped amidst bombs and […]

Categories: Film • Tags: Hiam Abbas, Insyriated, Syria

Lebanon Now: Uppsala Short Film Festival

October 29, 2017 by Tasnim

The Uppsala short film festival which ran from 23-29 October this week included a series called Lebanon Now, with four short films from Lebanon: Submarine, In White, Maki and Zorro, and Street of Death. Submarine imagines the garbage crisis continuing on into the future rendering Lebanon uninhabitable. As the program describes it: Under the imminent threat of Lebanon’s 2015 garbage crisis, Hala is the only one to refuse evacuation, clinging to whatever remains of home. Mounia Akl wrote Submarine during […]

Categories: Art, Film

Sahar Assaf on Theatre in Lebanon Today

October 24, 2017 by Tasnim

The Segal Centre’s recently held an event on contemporary theatre in Lebanon.  The centre has previously showcased readings of plays by Arab dramatists Rama Haydar and Bashar Murkus.  On the 17th of October, to celebrate a new exchange partnership with the Theatre Initiative at the American University of Beirut (AUB), the Segal Centre invited Sahar Assaf,  Assistant Professor of Theatre at AUB, to speak on theatre in Lebanon today. This was followed by a reading of some excerpts from No Demand No Supply, […]

Categories: Art, Theatre • Tags: AUB, Beirut, Lebanon, Sahar Assaf, sex trafficking, Syria