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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Omar Hamdi, “Sticks and Stones”

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 …

Exhibition: Retracing A Disappearing Landscape

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 …

Curfew Palestinian Dance Performance at Rich Mix

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 …

Lebanon Now: Uppsala Short Film Festival

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 …

Sahar Assaf on Theatre in Lebanon Today

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 …

Mahragan Music

Listening to Cairokee's Keif (Fix) recently, I was reminded to look up another crowdfunded project from a couple of years ago -- this one on Mahragan music and dance.    The project was first put up on the site back in 2014, the idea being to make a documentary on the Mahragan movement, focusing on the …

Speaking in Tongues, Night Terrors in Arabic

"Night Terror," the first story in the short story collection Double Dutch by Laura Trunkey begins with the following passage: "He was speaking Arabic in his sleep. Her son -- who could barely manage three words in a row in English -- had an incredible fluency in a language she recognised only from television news clips." …

Gaza Surf Club

Gaza Surf Club is a documentary film directed by Philip Gnadt and Mickey Yamine about surfers in Gaza. The film focuses mostly on three people: the main protagonist, Ibrahim, a 23-year-old man who wants to go to Hawaii to train and learn, Sabah, a 15-year-old girl who once loved to swim but has had to …

Arab Films Entered for Oscars

There are films from 92 countries entered for the Foreign Film category of the Oscars. Among these are eight films from Arabic-speaking countries. Several of the films deal in various ways with the impact of the conflict in Syria. There is the documentary from Syria, “Little Gandhi,” which follows the life and death of Syrian …

Hisham Bustani’s The Crossing

Hisham Bustani's short story "The Crossing"  has been translated into English by Maia Tabet and appears in the current issue of Newfound.  The short story was originally published in Arabic in Bustani's The Monotonous Chaos of Existence (2010). In Newfound, it appears in both Arabic and English, as in Bustani's previous work, The Perception of Meaning, …

On the Use of English in Arab(ic) Music

Ahdaf Soueif once said that “the use of English by Arab authors is expanding at a faster rate than the use of French." I haven't seen any empirical evidence for this, but it seems likely -- or if not exactly faster than French, than at least at an equal rate. Watching 47soul’s recent release “Raf Etair” …