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 …

Sayed Kashua at Other Israel Film Festival

Following a screening of Season Four of his comedy show Arab Labour, Sayed Kashua talks about his reasons for leaving Israel, in a panel moderated by Lucy Aharish with Mira Awad, Menashe Noy and Sammy Smooha. Nashua gets into a  bit of a heated debate with Smooha as to whether things have improved or not for Arabs …

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 …