Nostalgia in Anglophone Arab Literature

My book is out! I set up this blog way back in 2012 as a way to store my notes and various thoughts as I was researching, wanting to be able to write informally and quickly and to have my posts tagged in an easily accessible way. The posts dwindled as I focused on the …

Sea Music

This compilation has been lurking in my drafts folder from back when sea shanties had their moment on Tiktok. A few examples of sea music from various parts of the region, from Egypt, the Levant, and Khaleeji pearl diving songs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJPRMRzyZMs&ab_channel=MamdouhElkady Endak Bahriya عندك بحرية starts at 12:50 (the confusion over the word Rayyes is …

The Symbolism of Arabs in Space

A. Naji Bakhti's Between Beirut and the Moon (2020) is an episodic, wryly comic novel about growing up in Beirut in the aftermath of the civil war, with tensions still simmering. The protagonist, Adam, has ambitions of being an astronaut as a child, and when his friends and his parents mock this ambition it becomes …

Radical Imagining: Afro, Indigenous, & Palestinian Futurisms

I was sad to miss the live broadcasting of this event, but happy to find that it is now available online, transcript and all. The panel explores speculative fiction and Afrofuturism as a source of inspiration for Indigenous, and Palestinian speculative fiction and ranges across a number of other topics. Here is a snippet of …

Documentary “Muhi – Generally Temporary”

"For the past seven years Muhi, a brave and spirited Palestinian boy has been living in an Israeli hospital, unable to return to his home in Gaza. Caught between two worlds and two peoples, Muhi is raised in paradoxical circumstances that transcend identity, religion and the conflict that divides his world. His time at the …

Amir Tag Elsir’s The Grub Hunter

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 …

Tariq Jordan’s “Ali and Dahlia” and the House of Mirrors

To be hungry for representation means that you will seek to see yourself reflected anywhere, so you will enter (of your own accord) into what you know will be a house of mirrors, where distorted reflections will stare back at you, follow you, pretend to be you, make money in saying they really are you. …

Sarha Collective’s Adaptation of Land Without Jasmine

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 …

The Other Americans

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 …

Capernaum

  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 …

Words, Words, Words

  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 …

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

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 …

Ruqaya Izzidien’s The Watermelon Boys

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 …

SAFAR Film Festival

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 …

Arab Science Fiction at Worldcon 76

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 …

Leila Aboulela’s Short Story Collection Elsewhere, Home

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 …

Palestinian Historians, Historians of Palestine

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 …

The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows

  "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 …

MFest 2018

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 …

Banipal Book Club discusses Frankenstein in Baghdad

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 …

Sarab by the Palestinian Circus School

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 …