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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Two Ways into Bara, by Zahreddine: Speaker of the Baran Tribe

(1)

Go to the street, ask for anything, it will be given to you.

BARA will have seized the monarchies and set their palaces ablaze.

There is a fellow population suffering.

To have lived it, later generations will assume it caused great conflict of the heart.

But, take my trials, they are too good for me.

Remember, the videos passed around.

I am guilty.

There is nothing left to say.

White sheets compound the pavement.

Chemicals in the territory.

The revolution is a farce.

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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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Antonio Denti: Notes on War in Times of Peace

Generations

I’d rather fight a war tomorrow than think my son might have to do it one day.

This sentence, which I know to be true, does not belong to me. It does not emanate from me. It inhabits me because I am part of this living planet. It originates in the deepest strata of life, in the mechanisms that regulate the way life is handed down from being to being, from generation to generation, across time. It does not make me any more courageous than the moderately frightened – or more heroic than the moderately selfish – man that I am.

: Maidan Shar, Afghanistan. November 2001. The Frontline: Kabul had been liberated and the Taliban had fled. The frontline had shifted some 60 km south of the capital. It was very quiet, apart from sporadic gunfire. In truth, no one knew what lay beyond. No one knew where the Taliban had gone. Time would tell they they were still there.

: Kabul, Afghanistan. November 2001. The Price of a Battle: Two Taliban fighters await their fate in prison, having been captured defending Kabul when their positions were overrun by victorious Northern Alliance soldiers.

: Kabul, Afghanistan. November 2001. Children play in the liberated city.

: Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. US Marine: When it became clear that to stay in Iraq was going to be much harder than it had been to get there.

: Near Hilla, Iraq. May 2003. A History of Violence: Shortly after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, mass graves from the Saddam era started to surface in various parts of the country. The Mahawil mass grave near the ancient city of Babylon contained the bodies of over 3,000 Shias killed during the 1991 uprising, which followed the first Gulf War. It was the largest one found.

: Eastern Iraq. May 2003. The Search: A US marine searches a local man at an improvised check-point. But what would have been useful to find – the history, the fear, the hatred, the faith, the desire for revenge or victory – none of it could be found in this way. Yet only those things really mattered, only things that cannot be kept in a man’s pocket or hidden in his socks would shape the years to come.

: Baghdad, Iraq. April 2003. Out of place: A US marine guards a tiger that had belonged to the Saddam Hussein’s eldest son, Uday. Two very deadly creatures, the largest predator and a human soldier, both somehow out of place.

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Youssef Rakha: Who the Fuck Is Charlie

miraj-nama_of_shah_rukh_1-1490ba5a0977120034b

From the Miraj Nama of Shah Rukh, 15th century, showing the Prophet Muhammad astride his Buraq. Source: studyblue.com

The mere idea of contributing to the Charlie Hebdo colloquy is a problem. It’s a problem because, whether as a public tragedy or a defense of creative freedom, the incident was blown out of all proportion. It’s a problem because it’s been a moralistic free-for-all: to express solidarity is to omit context, to forego the meaning of your relation to the “slain” object of consensus, to become a hashtag. It’s a problem above all because it turns a small-scale crime of little significance outside France into a cultural trope.

Charlie Hebdo is not about the senseless (or else the political) killing of one party by another. It’s about a Platonic evil called Islam encroaching on the peaceful, beneficent world order created and maintained by the post-Christian west. Defending the latter against the former, commentators not only presume what will sooner or later reduce to the racial superiority of the victim. They also misrepresent the perpetrator as an alien force independent of that order.

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Always a Place for the Still Frame: David Degner on Practice, Vision, and the Future of Photojournalism

David Degner is a Cairo-based freelance photographer represented by Getty Reportage and the co-editor of the Egyptian photo story magazine, Panorama by Mada Masr

: CAIRO EGYPT – May 10: A few thousand supporters of Abdel Fattah El-Sisi attend a rally for the candidate at the Cairo International Convention and Exhibition Center CAIRO, EGYPT on May 10. Sisi’s Presidential Campaign.

: Ahmed Karika, nicknamed Khashaba, gets ready for an evening as a micman. Ahmed’s younger brother imitates him and will follow him to the same party later in the evening.

: Naji Mansour Mother Jones

: Dahshur Egypt – November 09: An Egyptian family visiting the pyramids of Dahshur spend more time exploring the new holes that have appeared near them. On the edge of Dahshur Egypt new holes have been made by artifact thieves, digging beside the archeological sites of Sneferu’s Pyramids. These include Sneferu’s Red Pyramid, and Sneferu’s Bent Pyramid. Since the revolution the Egyptian security forces haven’t been guarding archeological sites as much as in the past. Making independent archeological exploration easier.

: Uprising in Bahrain, Essam El-Haddad, Chairman at AGD Arabian Group for Development is also is top foreign policy advisor for the Muslim Brotherhood party.

: Drag-racing horses, Mahala Egypt – March 06: Abanoub Sherif in Mahala, Egypt on March 06.

: Gaza City Gaza – November 22, 2014: On the first day past the ceasefire in Gaza City Gaza on November 22.

: When Chinese tourists come to Xinjiang the International Grand Bazaar of Xinjiang is the main attraction. It’s a large mall with decorative minarets. Uighurs are hired to dance, sell melons and trinkets to the tourists.

: MINYA EGYPT – May 26: A photo of Ahmed Abdelfatah, lays on the simple lunch of bread and spices that his mother ate, he was sentenced with the 683 in the governorate of MINYA, EGYPT on May 26.

: 4/23/10 -Cairo, Egypt, Muhammad Fati, 22, runs and drops from a ledge to a small walkway below. Inside Cairo the traceurs must negotiate permission with bowabs and dodge constant traffic so their best location is an abandoned government building on the outskirts. Every friday the group rides out to the last metro stop and takes microbuses to converge on the dusty abandoned complex in 15 Mayo. A growing group of youth are organizing into parkour groups in the suburbs of Cairo. Parkour migrated to Egypt without any direct contact but through movies such as District 13 and homemade YouTube videos from around the world. Egypt was the second middle eastern country to form a parkour group in 2008 and since then has grown to more than 50 members with practices 6 days of the week in 3 areas around Cairo, and even a satellite group in Alexandria. Inside Cairo they must negotiate permision with bowabs and dodge constant traffic so their best location is an abandoned government building in an industrial city on the last metro stop. Parkour is a physical discipline like a martial art with the non-violent goal of being able to run and jump through complex environments quickly.

: In Khartoum’s sister city of Omdurman a group of friends try to troubleshoot why the internet has been so slow lately. Cell phone based internet is surprisingly common and relatively cheap. Sometimes less than 20 cents a day. But it can be painfully slow and unreliable. Instagram Sudan.

: Cairo Egypt – January 23: Down a side alley of the industrial neighborhood of Bolaq stands a large collection of old doors and decorations. The owner has collected them from around Egypt and sells them to set designers, interior designers, in Egypt and abroad.

In an age when video journalism is increasinly paramount and printing is arguably no longer necessary, how do you feel the still image is still pertinent to documentary or news work?

Video journalism serves its purpose and is growing as it is easier to create and distribute, but photos haven’t lost their power in this new environment. A single strong image can be viewed and summarize a situation in seconds. In our fast paced world there will always be a place for the still frame.

Do you think documentary and art photography are important for the development of photo journalism? Is there enough of that going on in Egypt (with the Cairo Image Collective, for example) to create a photographic culture?

As a photojournalist I often steal style from art and commercial photography. We must be aware of their modern visual language in our work to stay relevant and interesting. But even though the internet has broken down barriers it can be impossible to find many documentary or art photo books in Cairo. While in the west you can pick up a thick fashion magazine at almost any store and get inspired by the commercial portraiture it takes conscious effort for photographers to suss out inspiration in Egypt.

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Imogen Lambert: They tweeted martyrdom with lattes

Tower of Babel

By Youssef Rakha

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined…

Night bites my shoulder. I turn to you, through a nylon window

To a state of limbo, there on a map

Under rivers of paper

We never drown, gazing on bridges

Night hugged my waist, like my mother, wailing

Where are our parents?

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