March 2008 |
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Murmur in a Giraffe’s Ear
Writer, producer and director Nigol Bezjian was born in Aleppo, graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York and UCLA Film and Television. He has directed several films, including Hour of the Grey Hourse, Chickpeas, Muron.
A long time ago the Syrian Baathist government nationalized cultural institutions, swiftly placing the iron noose around their necks. I must have been 14 years old when I woke up one morning to found the Cinema Orient (Cinema Al-Sharq) moniker covered with a white canvas that read, in red Arabic letters, Cinema al-Kindi. I’d never heard of al-Kindi before and the Arabic script could’ve translated to The Kennedy Cinema or al-Kanady (meaning Canadian) Cinema. What a paradox, I remember thinking...
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Nadi al-Sinama in Damascus, or when Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social Order
Rasha Salti interviews Omar Amiralay, veteran Syrian filmmaker and founding member of the Damascus Ciné-club.
His upright –almost stiff– countenance notwithstanding, Omar Amiralay recounts, barely repressing a bittersweet inflexion, the story of Nadi al-Sinama, or the Damascus Ciné-club that ended abruptly with gorvernment intervention. With echoes of an underground intrigue, the ciné-club conspired to screen the vanguard and marvelous and stubbornly challenged government. Version originale en français disponible en pdf, cliquer sur le lien ci-dessus (titre)
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The Story of Constantine's Ciné-Club, a Cinema to Claim their Own
Daikha Dridi interviews Chafia Djemame, founder of the Women’s Ciné-club in Constantine, Algeria.
While barely in her thirties, when Chafia Djemame founded the Women’s Ciné-club with friends from Algerian universities, they were surrounded by young women so young they affectionately referred to her and group of friends as middle-aged. From Jijel, an eastern port city, Chafia recounts the adventure of the ciné-club in the 1980s, in the heart of Constantine, one of the most conservative cities of the country. Version originale en français disponible en pdf, cliquer sur le lien ci-dessus (titre)
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The Unrelenting Battle of a Censor Against Censorship
Daikha Dridi interviews Mustafa Darwish, judge by profession and occasional film critic, a veteran founder of ciné-clubs in Cairo, who once held the position of censor.
Until this day, Mustafa Darwish remains a critic and judge of cinema. In the 1960s, off and on, he was the very atypical director of the censorship unit at the Ministry of Culture, as well as the unhappy founder of several ciné-clubs in Cairo. He revisits for us a nearly 50 years long experience, that can be summarized in a race against obstacles…
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A Damascene Mosaic: On Nostalgic Longing and Monumentalism in Ghada Samman’s "The Impossible Novel"
by Shareah Taleghani
Ghada Samman's collection of prose poems, Letters of Longing for Jasmine (1996), opens with the following passage:
Everyone who masterfully conceals their emotions explodes like a deluge if they are exposed. Here I am revealing and writing about the projection of my heart.
Whenever I write about Damascus, my paper is transformed into white sails, the pen in my hand becomes a spike of wheat, and my fingers a rainbow.
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A Personal Dialogue in Samarkand
by Mahmoud Darwish, Translation by Shareah Taleghani
When the heart has been broken, it cries out: Samarkand
She is the partridge….
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Can you not weep tomorrow?
Perhaps I can
But does this dew descend
Whenever the road to Damascus finds me
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A Pound of ‘Awwamat (1) and Some Syrup
by Suhail Shadoud. Translated by Marlin Dick.
Four in the morning, in the East Village. A band’s playing in the loft of the restaurant. A girl’s playing with the band. I know her. It’s a Brazilian song, and my head could ignite a thousand fires. The fire of the playing fingers whose smell I pick up on my skin; the fire of the days in Salhiyeh, in Damascus. And the song of Wafed Haidar. The fire of the kindling wood that is my life, now turning to ashes in front of me. The flame of longing... nostalgic people call it ghurbeh (2).… And «Khalil Gibran... didn't fall short, no; he might have even overdone it.» That’s what Hussein Abdel-Sater screamed in my face.
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“Our Eyes Travel to You Everyday” - The place of Jerusalem in the works of Fairouz and the Rahbani Brothers
by Christopher Stone
Jerusalem represents so much to so many. For Arabs and Palestinians it has become, particularly since Israel occupied roughly half of it in 1948 and then all of it in 1967, a symbol for loss: the loss of land and home, the loss of sovereignty, the loss of hope for a unified Arab world, the loss of honor. It will surprise no one that many Arab poets, famous and unknown alike, have written both about this loss and expressed hope of recovery. Many of these poems have taken the form of popular song. It would be difficult to find an Arab singer who has not sung for Palestine.
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Cannons of the Past
by Najeeb Nusair. Translated by Christa Salamandra and Suhail Shadoud
However much we moan and groan, however much we lament, reminisce, mull over, write, dig up, represent, glorify, venerate—even if we use the entire vocabulary of literature and science to conjure it up, the past will not return. Even if we cry, kick the ground with our feet like temperamental children, beg people, societies and nations, even if we consult scholars, historians, doctors, and feminists…
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Constructing Musical Authenticity: History, Cultural Memory, Emotion:al-Matla‘
by Jonathan Shannon
With my research proposal in one hand and oud in the other, I felt that I was prepared for fieldwork in Syria. What I was not prepared for was a common response to my stated research interests in Arab music: Is there even such a thing as “Arab music”? While many Syrians expressed surprise at my choice of Syria as a research site—American researchers are few and far between there—some also expressed doubts about my intentions to study “Arab music.” Is the music Arab, or is it Turkish, Persian, or Byzantine, or is it a mixture of all of these? What is “Arab” about Arab music? Because many of the genres commonly performed in the “classical” repertoire have their roots in pan-Ottoman and Persian musical practices, calling them “Arab” is problematic, and many of my interlocutors, musicians and otherwise, pointed this out to me.
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Damascus, What Are You Doing to Me?
by Nizar Qabbani, Translated by Shareah Taleghani
My voice rings out, this time, from Damascus
It rings out from the house of my mother and father
In Sham. The geography of my body changes.
The cells of my blood become green.
My alphabet is green.
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Ismail Yasin in the Coloring Book
by Walter Armbrust
It is no secret that black and white Egyptian films are powerful objects of nostalgia. No secret either that the films are remembered by their actors above all else. My nomination for the most popular Egyptian actor of all time would be the comedian Isma'il Yasin. He was born in 1912 in Port Suez, and began his artistic life singing munulugat ("monologues") in cafes. Monologues were aria-like pieces—expressions of a single person's thoughts, though in tremendously varied forms. Yasin's monologues were comic and often topical. Like many Egyptian film actors, he performed in live theatre throughout his life, and even had his own theatrical troupe, named after himself. But as an object of nostalgia he is inevitably remembered for his recorded performance in films.
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Nostalgia Commodified: Old Damascus
By Christa Salamandra
Before the 1990s, elite Damascenes rarely ventured into the Old City, a place then associated with the backwardness of an embarrassing past. Most wealthy, “old notable” families moved from their Old City neighborhoods decades ago; their children and grandchildren are returning to them now, not to live as their ancestors had, nor to shop like the peasants and tourists, but to spend leisure hours in restaurants, cafés, nightclubs and art galleries. Linked to a process of economic liberalization, the transformation of the Old City into a leisure site is profoundly reshaping social, cultural and economic life in historic Damascus.
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Nostalgia for Colonialism
by As‘ad AbuKhalil, Translated by Marlin Dick
Tis the season for Arab liberals to walk in the path of their guides, namely the conservatives in the west whom they emulate. You can follow the upcoming influences on Arab liberals by following the current and earlier paths of rightist discourse in the west. Arab liberals fumble around for the traces and vestiges of these right-wingers in order to follow them and take their path. However, the western product always arrives a bit disfigured in our countries, where things end up more brazen, monstrous and vulgar. In our lands, liberalism becomes conservatism, conservatism becomes fascism, and the left becomes tired old liberalism, allied with the al-Hariri family. Only the Phalange [Kata’ib] and the Lebanese Forces has retained the western product as is. They snatched up western fascism and preserved it intact.
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Nostalgia in contemporary Moroccan poetry
By Deborah Kapchan
Modernity is often associated with industrialism, technology and the loss of pastoral ways of life. Nostalgia is the sentiment that modernity yields—a structure of feeling characterized by a mourning for the authentic. Serematakis tells us that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostalghia, a composite word that corresponds to “a desire or longing with burning pain to journey” (1994: 4). But nostalgia is not just any journey, but a journey to the past, a journey home. Indeed, in ancient Latin it literally meant a return home, and in European history the word connoted a medical condition of homesickness, exemplified by an “acute longing for familiar surroundings” (OED). Loss is integral to the affective state of nostalgia.
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