2023 - Rusted Radishes

Crosshairs

النبعة | Al-Naba'a, by Hussein Nassereddine The sniper is like a lone onlooker who inspects from the shadows. He enjoys the detachment from his subjects. Akin to a spectator witnessing a couple's squabble, he briefly perceives them as mirror images of his own petty disputes with his lover. We are all distant observers at times, casually watching with delight a stranger in a café or noting a neighbor's late arrival. The sniper's first pleasure is the pleasure that distance allows.Yet, the sniper's kinship with his target ends where his livelier role begins. With chilling precision, he selects

Essay

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النبعة | Al-Naba’a

Artwork

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Can the Palestinian Mourn?

Amidst the constellation of responses to the October events, I read Judith Butler's article "The Compass of Mourning." Charting mourning as a compass, Butler describes its transformative potential to release Palestinians and Israelis from recursive, cyclical, and unproductive violence. In the article, Butler engages in a dual act of condemnation and contextualization, not settling for what she posits as a singular narrative of blame. Butler insists on an ethics of accountability that transcends unidirectional fault-refusing, for instance, the assertion by Harvard's Students for Justice in Palestine that the moral onus of the October violence rests on the shoulders of Israel

Essay

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Tessellate | Synesthesia | In Dreams I am Always a Horse

Three Children Balancing on a Total Barrel | By Abdul Rahman Katanani Tessellate My father tells a story about the boy who drowned. Mud-licked dam: testament to time unfulfilled. My father tells a story about the moon unfulfilled. Going away and not coming back the same way twice. He has nothing to say about starving. Nothing about the dirt he drank, the bombs he heard. He is a collection of stories he'll never tell. In the moonlight, he looks like a vanishing horse. In the daylight: a dog. He has nothing to say about the question he wants to ask. The same one I'll ask of the future. About being

Poetry

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Motherland: On Bassem Breche’s Riverbed

Salma: It's unlike you to drop by. Thurayya: I'm not dropping by, I got divorced. I'm done with men. Salma and Thurayya are the lead characters in Bassem Breche's film Riverbed (2022), a portrait of a solitary woman and her daughter negotiating their fraught relationship in the absence of a father. In his feature debut, which premieres in Lebanon on October 4 to close the 28th European Film Festival, Breche returns to primordial bonds - to home, to the village, to nature - and to what remains after all has been said, after damage has been done. Masterfully rendered by Carol Abboud

Film Review

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فاطمة قنديل أو الأقفاص الفارغة إلا من الشاعرية والأذى

@import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Noto+Sans+Arabic:wght@300;400;500;700&family=Rubik:wght@300;400;500;700&display=swap'); يُنشر النص في تعاون أول مع «مدى مصر» --<>--<>--<>--<>--<>--<>-- في البدء كانت الوعود المؤجَّلة. تعثر فاطمة في بيتها القديم على علبة شوكولاتة فاخرة، ولكن لا شوكولاته في علبة الصفيح، بل كيس مهترئ وقصائد قديمة ورائحة تفتح على الراوية بابًا لسرد ذكريات الطفولة. التنافر المعرفي بين ما تعد به علبة الشوكولاتة من أناقة السكريات المستوردة، وما هي عليه في الواقع، أي صفيح صدئ، ألوانه باهتة، فيه أوراق وكلمات عن قسوة الحياة كما عرفتها فاطمة، سيؤطّر سردية «أقفاص فارغة» (الكتب خان، 2021) للشاعرة فاطمة قنديل. الطبقة الوسطى قفصًا تتناول قنديل في روايتها الأولى سيرة امرأة من أسرة مصرية متوسطة تسعى إلى تحقيق وعود فردية وجمعية

مراجعة

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Damnation: On Ali Cherri’s The Dam

We hang between. -Stanley Cavell, "Ending the Waiting Game" So ends an essay by Stanley Cavell on Samuel Beckett. But between what? We're "poised," Cavell writes earlier, between past and future, hope and despair, beast and angel, life and death, good and evil, heaven and hell. He calls this the "inescapable fact." In The Dam, Ali Cherri adds that we're suspended between earth and water, with only a layer of fixative holding us together.Cherri's film begins at one of the cataracts of the Nile in the shadow of Sudan's Merowe Dam, where "toiled a man whose living was made of mud." Within

Film Review

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these are the unmakings of me

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed | By Dahlia Baasher | 70x70 Oil painting on canvas using palette knives, 2021 these are the unmakings of me i pile my dead aside & start anew- grief is a chest swelling a pain in the lower abdomen a gathering storm a hollow feeling in the first hour of morning. -lord knows i've been mourning for far too long there is so much pain i cannot name- there is love with no abode, makidada and memories with no hope of return. i have grieved a nation more times in a lifetime than i can recount i cannot name a time when i was not

Poetry

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