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 …

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 …

Hisham Bustani’s The Perception of Meaning

Hisham Bustani’s The Perception of Meaning is an eclectic collection of texts, ranging from one sentence flash fiction to poetic passages to retellings of fairytales and longer works, including "History will not be made on this couch". Throughout, the original Arabic is mirrored on the opposing page by the translation into English by Thoraya El-Rayyes. As …

Alif and Jerusalem In My Heart: A Review Round Up

Alif's debut album Aynama-Rtama (Wherever It Falls) and Jerusalem In My Heart's second album, Lau Mat, Lau Lau Lau Lau (If He Dies, If If If If If) have been received positive, not to say glowing, reviews. Here's a round up. On Lau Mat, Lau Lau Lau Lau: Beginning with 'Al Affaq, Lau Mat, Lau …

Poetry and Freedom: A Conversation with Adonis

Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said Esber, better known by the name Adonis, will present a poetry reading at DePauw University on September 30, and the next day will take part in a question-and-answer session with the title "Poetry and Freedom: A Conversation with Adonis." The session will be led by Joseph Heithaus poet and professor of English at DePauw. I …

When Arab Women Artists “Revisit The Harem”

Where does tongue-in-cheek parody end and self-exoticization begin? At what point does the Arab woman artist, stepping into the so-often imagined space of "The Harem" risk pandering to an audience that seems to have a never-ending appetite for orientalist remediations? Lebanese photographer Rania Matar's wonderful and insightful A Girl in Her Room series (capturing teenage girls in …

Souad Massi’s New Album El Mutakallimun

Algerian singer Suad Massi is releasing a new album, El Mutakallimun (translated as The Masters of the World) which reinterprets ten classic songs from around the Arab world, from "Sa'imtou", the Muallaqa of the 6th century poet Zuhayr Ibn Abi Salma, to poetry by Abu Kassem El Shabbi whose poem "The Will to Life" was made internationally famous by the Arab Spring.  El …

Adonis: The Difference between a Poem and a Painting

The Daily Star interviews Syrian poet Adonis on the eve of the opening of “A,” an exhibition of his visual art in Paris. The exhibition runs until May 10, 2015 at the Galerie Azzedine Alaïa. Adonis' visual works incorporate poetry directly - as his "experiments with visual art began by taking verses by such great Arab poets as Bashar …

Elmaz Abinader and Tony Khalife at the Levantine Cultural Center

On the 28th of March, the  Levantine Cultural Center is hosting an evening of poetry and music with two Lebanese American artists: poet Elmaz Abinader & musician Tony Khalife. Abider will be reading from her new collection of poetry, This House, My Bones (2014). Abinader describes the collection as a "meditation" on history where "the body and the earth exchange their …

Prince of Poets: The Sixth Season Begins

The sixth season of the Arabic poetry competition Prince of Poets began on Wednesday night. It has been eight years since the start of this competition, which is screened every two years over the course of ten weeks. The poets competing this year are: Usama Ghawji, from Jordan Abdallah Abu Bakr, from Jordan Hassan Abdeh Tamili, …

Bahrani Poet Abdulrahman Rafee Passes Away

Bahrani poet Abdulrahman Rafee' has recently passed away at the age of 79.A poet of vernacular dialect, he commented on the state of Bahrani society and the wider Arab world. As one of the commentators on the video below states, like Ahmad Matar, Abdulrahman Rafee's black humour made many "cry with laughter." On the state …

Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here in Dearborn

From March 6 to July 12, the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here exhibition will be on display at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn. The Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Collection, founded by San Francisco bookseller Beau Beausoleil in the weeks after the bombing, includes broadsides, artist books, prints and an anthology of essays and poetry. Exhibits have been …

Teaching Arabic Differently

According to the Arab Organization for Education, Culture and Science the Arabic language is "in dire need of support and revival through fundamental shifts in the way it is taught," Ghinwa Obeid writes in The Daily Star. “The Arabic language... doesn’t have the enough means to have a wide presence,” Zuhaida Darwich Jabbour, secretary-general of …

Rim Banna at MELA Festival

Palestinian singer Rim Banna is performing in MELA Festival in Oslo, the 17th of August. Banna first achieved prominence on the international stage in 2003, joining Norwegian jazz singer Kari Bremnes on the antiwar album "Lullabies from the Axis of Evil." Since then, Banna has become known for her updating of traditional Palestinian songs, lullabies …

A Cloud Reflecting Life

What do you see in the smoke rising from an explosion? As Israeli airstrikes explode over Gaza, Palestinian photographer Belal Khaled turns death into art, seeing symbols of resistance in the clouds of smoke. Similar to how children and day dreamers might interpret shapes in the sky, Khaled turns the Gaza airstrikes into something wistful and …

Two Poems on a Journey

These two poems, one by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish and the other by the Iraqi poet Saadi Youssef, seemed to me like two halves of the same journey...or two modes of thinking about exile and rootlessness and nostalgia and homesickness, themes which appear again and again in the works of both poets, examined from …

The Aroma of Coffee

From Mahmoud Darwich's Memory For Forgetfulness, a prose poem set during one day, August 6, "Hiroshima Day" during the siege of Beirut in 1982. I no longer wonder when the steely howling of the sea will stop. I live on the eighth floor of a building that might tempt any sniper, to say nothing of …

Arab Women Writers (in English)

An old, updated list of works of fiction (and some non-fiction) in English by Arab (sometimes identified by others, sometimes self-identified) women writers. Useful books: Abdelrazek, Amal Talaat. Contemporary Arab American Women Writers: Hyphenated Identities and Border Crossings. Cambria Press. Print. Amireh, Amal, och Lisa Suhair Majaj. Going global: the transnational reception of Third World …

Mutanabi Readings

I recently re-discovered this beautiful video with a reading which inspired me to go on a search for Mutanabi sites and readings. The video is from one of his most famous poems and ends on perhaps the most famous line of Mutanabi (915 – 965): الخَيْلُ وَاللّيْلُ وَالبَيْداءُ تَعرِفُني وَالسّيفُ وَالرّمحُ والقرْطاسُ وَالقَلَمُ The desert …

Two Matar Poems

يقظة Awakening صباح هذا اليوم This morning أيقظني منبه الساعة The alarm clock woke me up و قال لي : يا ابن العرب And told me: oh son of Arabs قد حان وقت النوم ! It is time to sleep! انحناء السنبلة The Stalk Bows أنا من تراب وماء I am made from dust and …