الوداع في مثلث صغير

Pink by Youssef Rakha
Pink by Youssef Rakha
Vintage Map of Cairo. Source: 123rf.com
Mario Giacomelli, Presa di coscienza sula natura Angelini, 1970. Source: sageparis.com
Massachusetts Pictorial Map, 1946. Source: mapsandart.com
Ian Ingramو Castle of the Tooth Fairy, 2017. Source: artsy.net
Book cover courtesy of the translator
Bruno Barbey, Tangiers, 1995. Source: magnumphotos.com
Hieronymus Bosch, The Seven Deadly Sins And The Last Four Things, 1500-1525. Source: Wikipedia
“A sea breeze bearing the sound of a car as it passes down the Corniche: enough to make you feel you knew these roads once, before the wars, before the city changed and became what it came to be.”
Rabie Jaber
The plane still pitching forward like a bullet as my head rattles and jars to words I once composed on another journey: “Let the days go by, just set your heart on the nearest table and wait.” It’s not the landing that scares me so much as this wild careen across the tarmac, as though the danger’s only real to me when it submits to gravity.
Years since I’ve returned to Cairo this way.
“Not a drop of rain fell tonight. To go away with no goodbyes: I’ve no regrets.”
In the passport queue I remember when these lines had come to me: in transit between Egypt and England, a university student, miserable most of the time, my life like a dream, transient and insubstantial against the solid reality of airports. Not poems I had expended any great time on, and maybe I’d never have thought of them again had they not rattled back into my head on the runway. Mind you, though: when they were published, several people had told me they were the strongest thing I’d written. It was only by (almost) pure chance that they had been published at all, and in Beirut, from where I’m returning.
No response to my greeting from the customs officer at his window and I’m hunched over the conveyor belt, waiting in agony for my bags. An agonising need to piss. This was one of the most exhausting trips I’ve ever taken, but it had certainly had its uses.
Has mother sent a man to wait for me among the drivers with their signs?
Mohamed Nassef, Cairo, March 2019. Courtesy of the artist.
The way the world looks through my broken phone camera:
Antoine d’Agata says, “Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it’s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.”
I’m interested in imposing my doubts about photographic truth. These photos are small fictions that draw on and use reality. They are documents in the equivocal sense of artefacts that can evoke responses.
Sohrab Hura (schizophrenic mother with her dog), India, 2008. Source: newyorker.com
Nan Goldin, Guido on the Dock, Venice. Source: christies.com
This is the text of a paper given at the the Humanities Institute of the University of California at Santa Cruz on 22 May 2019
The Aljamiado Manuscript, a Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir) manuscript from 16th-century Arévalo written in Castilian using the Arabic alphabet. Source: ballandalus.wordpress.com
The story which I’m about to tell you today is the history —or, rather, la historia, which in the Spanish language means both story and history— of how Miguel de Cervantes’ novel El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, or, in English, The Valorous and Witty Knight-Errant Don Quixote of the Mancha, was translated into Arabic.
Two weeks ago, after I finished writing this first paragraph in my study room in Mexico City, I began reading it out loud to myself to test how it may sound to you. However, back then in Mexico City, as I reached the written word “Quixote,” how it is written in English —Q U I X O T E— my reading was interrupted by the silence of the following question: How am I to pronounce to you, in English, the name of our world-famous caballero? Am I going to pronounce it, here in Santa Cruz, as دون كيهوتِ, as some of my north-American friends do —with an “h” sound in the middle— or the Anglicized دون كْويكْسوتِ, the way many English-language speakers in Britain, to my surprise, still do?[1]
I’d rather think about a young woman with child and a young man in love with her even though he’s not the father of her child, the two of them are the only ones in the world, and he, the young man, is thinking that the young woman makes him so happy that even though he isn’t the father of the child she’s carrying he has to help her, they have to find a place where she can give birth, the young man thinks, and then the two of them, the man and the woman, go off to find a place somewhere and someone who can help, but as they’re walking it starts to rip and tear inside the young woman’s body and then they’re at a farm, they go up and knock on the door but no one opens up, so either there’s no one home or else no one wants to open the door for them, but the house is dark so probably there’s no one there, so they go into the hay barn, there are some cows in the stalls, some sheep walking around in the main part of the barn, and it’s probably the heat that the animals are giving off that makes it less cold in the barn than it is outside, so the girl lies down in the straw and there she gives birth to a baby and she says that an angel has told her she would give birth to a baby boy so it must be a boy, she says, and she says that the angel told her not to be scared because God was with her and the young man sees that a light is coming from the child, an incomprehensibly beautiful light, and then the young woman takes her breast and she gives it to the baby and the boy falls silent, and he sucks, he sucks, the young man thinks, and everything about it is unbelievable because there’s such a strange light shining from the baby lying there at the young woman’s breast, then she looks up at the young man and she smiles at him and the young man thinks that this, this light, no, he can’t understand it, because this light from the child in the darkness
— from The Other Name: Septology I-II by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls
Beirut taxi by The Monocle. Source: cdn.shopify.com
When my father was younger, he said he would learn English. It is the language of the world, it is the future here.
He took us out of our school and enrolled us in another. Arabic, English, a little French, and this would let us be citizens of the world.
How was he to learn English as an adult man? There were no courses in the village, he could not read at a level to enter university. His one choice was to read over our shoulders and for us to teach him the words. He put a satellite dish on the roof and we only ever watched English shows night and day. He had the TV turned to children’s shows because they spoke slowly and he could understand.
Portrait of Eman Assaad courtesy of the subject
Sebastián Gordín, Poets don’t write books, 2016. Source: galleryrosenfeld.com
James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1 (Whistler’s Mother), 1871. Source: Wikipedia