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 …

Insyriated

  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 …

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." …

Whatever Happened to Immaginari PostColoniali/Postcolonial Visions?

A few years ago, I first learned about this project on Italian colonial memory called "Immaginari PostColoniali - PostColonial Visions".The project sought to establish "a large shared archive of everyday images and objects, an unconventional convention, exhibitions, performances and workshops in schools" about Italy's colonial history. I had a personal interest in this project because …

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 …

Racism and Welfare Conference

The Rasism och Välfärd (Racism and Welfare) conference, organised by CEMFOR (Centrum för mångvetenskaplig forskning om rasism) at Uppsala University, took place between 11-12 October. The first keynote, by Philomena Essed, was entitled "Inclusive Beyond Race: Racism, Dehumanization and the Pursuit of Dignity." The main thread that Essed developed in her talk was thinking beyond …

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” …

Film: 8 Borders, 8 Days

  Amanda Bailly's film 8 Borders, 8 Days  follows a Syrian woman, Sham, and her two children as they travel from Lebanon to Germany. In the beginning, during the parts in Syria and Lebanon, animation is used effectively to describe the problems Sham is fleeing in trying to reach Europe, and why the notion of …

World Literature and the Vernacular

  While doing some research on writing in Egyptian 'ammiya recently,  I came across a satirical cartoon from the 20s featuring a peasant woman (or literally, bint-el-balad, daughter of the land),  and what might be called the Egyptian New Woman, described in the cartoon as al-fata al mustarjila sa'iqat al-automobile -- the "mannish" girl who drives …

Plays by Rama Haydar & Bashar Murkus

As part of the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, The Segal Center is showcasing play readings by nine dramatists, including the following two plays by Rama Haydar and Bashar Murkus.     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHDZgDHjctM   Desert of Light Written by Rama Haydar (Syria) Translated by Rama Haydar & Rebekah Maggor Directed by Rebekah Maggor …

Focus Young Arab Choreographers Opens May 25

Focus Young Arab Choreographers is a project is supported by the Italian culture ministry and eleven different dance festivals in Italy.  The aim is to promote cultural dialogue and exchange between Arab and Italian artists and choreographers. The programme opens May 25 and runs until September 23. Six young choreographers from the Arab world will …

“On Arab Geographies”: Film Screenings in Abu Dhabi, May 4-6

 ‘On Arab Geographies’  brings together screenings of eight critically-acclaimed contemporary Arab films from across the region, as well as Q&A sessions and panel discussions on filmmaking in the region. The program runs from May 4-6. See the full schedule here. It is curated by Rabih El Khoury, who described it as a "travelogue": “This program aims to be a travelogue …

Readings of Plays by Yusuf Idris, Issam Mahfouz and Sa’dallah Wannous

    On April 19th, The Segal Center put on evening readings of plays Arab "classic plays" by Yusuf Idris, Issam Mahfouz and Sa’dallah Wannous who are described as "some of the Arab world’s most renowned playwrights" though "relatively unknown to the Western world." As the advertising of the event goes on to say, "Their complex …

Sinan Antoon in Stockholm: Translation and Literature of/on Iraq

Crossposted on Arablit. On October 19th, Iraqi writer and literary translator Sinan Antoon visited Stockholm University for an afternoon lecture entitled “Living Here and There: Travel and Exile in Arabic Literature.” Antoon’s talk was attended by an interesting mix of Swedish Arabic-language teachers and students, and some Arab exiles and “in-betweeners,” those who are neither …