Alienation: A New Chapbook by Mahmoud Almunirawi

Click the image to access the PDF

Sometimes I think about praying

Maybe in congregation with other Muslims

Afterwards, I would call my mum and tell her:

People liked my voice when I recited the Qur’an

This happens again and again

But I haven’t done it a single time since I left home

I did not even call and ask her how she is…

Mahmoud Almunirawi defines this PDF as an album of overexposed images of architecture and poems “written during my 5 years in Sweden. Together,” he writes, “they form an abstract biography of life events.” тнє ѕυℓтαη’ѕ ѕєαℓ, which posted some of these poems in the original Arabic, was not involved in editing the English text, which was translated from Arabic by Slimen Zougari.

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Mina Nagy: A Portrait of the Artist as an Agoraphobe

Istanbul by Ayhan Ton. Source: instagram.com/ayhanton

There is no escaping the fact. Since 2011, I haven’t been in downtown Cairo except twice, heavily sedated and only for as long as it took to run my unavoidable errand. With the help of medication, my condition had improved enough for me to go there frequently when the protests started in January that year, instead of being confined to Heliopolis as usual. After I was shot with a pellet gun and had to run away from hospital on the first day of protests, for a few weeks I returned to the hotspots of the revolution, but tear gas, shooting and all kinds of attacks often forced me (along with everyone else) to run for my life. This fucked it all up again, in time. Protest hotspots became indistinguishable from vast, crowded spaces too far from home. And, succumbing to my terror of both, I confined myself to Heliopolis.

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Ahmed Almunirawi’s Tunisian Portraits

It can happen that I am observed without knowing it, and again I cannot speak of this experience, since I have determined to be guided by the consciousness of my feelings. But very often (too often, to my taste) I have been photographed and knew it. Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice…

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Mahmoud Almunirawi: A Psychological Epidemic

By Mahmoud Al Manyarawi

I think I must be crazy, or have a short circuit in my brain; it feels like I can’t think in a right way, a way that guarantees any other destination in this life.

Taking decisions – any decisions – is a serious crisis in my life, so it feels like I’m paddling. I’ve tried, at least I think I’ve tried to edit my position, to lie down on my comfortable side, but where can one find a side in dimensionlessness? Failure echoes in the present and makes me tap deeper into my fragility. A psychological epidemic destroys my imaginary pictures of my self.

What can one do more than go on trying to live, though, since living is an involuntary daily activity that routinely robs us of our will to choose.

So I wake up every day carrying this box of contradictions about and trying as much as I possibly can to organize the mess. But I fail. A daily failure that reminds me of the greater failure of our existence. So I sleep on it, only to ironically try again when I wake up as if I didn’t yesterday.

I know I don’t have anything new to say, but repeating what can be repeated is the only way to emphasize nothing.

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