Yumna Kassab: Taxi

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.

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Karim Zidan: Gabriel

The angel Jibreel from “The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existence”,
Egypt/Syria, c.1375-1425. Source: mimirstudios.tumblr.com

The angel came down to earth bearing a message of peace. He swept over the pyramids of Giza and landed in the heart of Cairo. People gathered around to witness the heavenly being, capturing the moment through the camera lenses on their phones. The world watched this miracle unfold — taking in the angel’s magnificent wings, which arched off his back in a graceful curve. His skin glistened in the sun like fine copper while his hair fell below his shoulders in flowing locks like unkempt wool. And when he spoke, the people listened, for his voice was like the song of a nightingale bearing the promise of a brighter future. The angel spoke of love and peace, of fear and hatred, of humanity and the eternal light. His words reached the ear of the president, who feared his own stardom would be diminished. He ordered his intelligence agencies to act, and so they did. The angel made the evening news — they called him a criminal, an anarchist, a troublemaker, an outcast. They said he fled from Heaven under a cloud of shame, with the goal of chaos and war. They censored his speeches and erased his online presence. And still the angel stood in the heart of Cairo and called for freedom while the people listened with open hearts. In his growing fear, the president deployed the army, which surrounded the angel and took aim at his chest. The angel smiled for he knew the battle had been won. He removed a single daffodil from his pocket and planted it in the cement beneath his feet. He then spread his resplendent wings and took off, ascending the heavens, his purpose achieved.

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Robert Neuwirth: Show v. Tell

Yüksel Arslan, Arture, 212, D Effects 56 (Islamic Arts). Source: sibelbugdayci.wordpress.com

capitalism is an extremely contagious virus

communicable by primitive accumulation.

Its chief symptom is the belief that every problem –

including infection with the virus itself – is

curable by the profit motive.

—The Book of Derivatives®

the future is

the exploitation of the

net present value

of the past

—The Book of Derivatives®

This legal notice filled the latest issue of The Loiterdale Loss-Leader, a free, limited-circulation South Florida newspaper, in its entirety:

Know ye all men by these presents, that the following brief has been filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida —

Reply brief

Motion to dismiss

Cross motion

Order to Show Cause

Request for summary judgment

plus

*Four (4) Special Notes of Historical Interest*

Guillermo Telles, aka Guillermo Tell, aka Bill Tell, aka Wild Billy Tell (hereinafter TELL), a naturalized citizen of the United States born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and currently living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, representing himself pro se, does aver and assert:

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Omar Sakr: On Belonging to a Country that Cannot Keep its Children

Hassan Ammar (AFP), Beirut, 19 October, 2019. Source: off-guardian.org

after & for Ghassan Hage

The day is forecast as catastrophic. Heat

strangles the sky. It bulges, a rotten purple.

Earlier, an old Greek and a friend unexpected

slipped into my sleeping throat to see

why I bulged, rotting within: a history

believed in, threatens to become faith

in a future―didn’t anyone tell you

never to eat a seed? Oh it grows, it grows.

You must lose this weight to be at ease.

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Stacy Hardy: The Empty Plot

The empty lot gapes, yawns and quivers. It exhales dust and sucks the blue out of the sky. It draws her to it, an emptiness that calls out, that whispers and jeers. A wide mouth, that says, come, that dares her. She has no business with the empty plot. It is a nothing place, a no place, not a place but a gaping, an emptiness that is yet to be filled, something still to come.

It has no address at present, nothing that sets it apart in the neighbourhood. There are so many. Empty stretches of land cleared for some future construction never to come, suspended in the eternal yawning present of oblivion. Plots that have stood so long that they have become part of the landscape, vast parks where rubbish accumulates, some partially developed, deep holes sunk in the earth, now filled with murky water that collects debris, the pokes of steel foundations casting dancing shadows on the surface like the spines of poisonous fish; ruinous scaffold of catastrophic geometries that shade rows of empty buildings, concrete structures looming like theme park wreckage, dark and sullen, windows dust coated, shattered in places, doors padlocked against squatters that never come. The streets that hem them, nearly deserted, monuments to some moment of false hope, a future that dims with each day, grows wary, listless, the air dirty with stalled development.

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