Miroslav Tichý. Source: lempertz.com
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My hunger for love exceeds me
Which has been a continuous annoyance
.
Although possibly a passe
But I do love both women
And the people who imagined God differently
It is a strange game
Egypt’s iconic rapist face/look: actor Hamdi El Wazir in the film “Hilali’s Fist” (1991). Source: YouTube
In the presence of the rope, standing on the platform, and in reply to the traditional question, he told the executioners and men of law that his last request was to be washed, so as not to meet his Lord unclean. They’d dragged him from his cell to the place where he would die, and the shit had run out of him uncontrollably, like water. Piss flowing as though a tap had been spun open. By the time they reached the execution chamber his red trousers were soaked through and stained with diarrhoea. The stench filled the heavy air of the room.
The governor, the judge and the prison doctor met the request with silence. Taking him to bathe meant the time it would take to walk him to the prison bathhouse, then the time it would take to wash, and then there was the return journey, and all that, of course, would constitute a waste of time: of government time, and that of the senior officials who there to ensure that the judgement was properly executed.
Sebastião Salgado, Blue Mosque (Sultanahmet), Istanbul, Turkey, 1999. Source: artsy.net
WE THE MORTALS
Away from what you leave behind
a five year old Amine in Guatemala
a tormented gaze in Ras Beirut
or bulging eyes missing the ceiling
eyelashes napping for eternity
your destiny awaits you.
Grief for the ones who cared
decomposition for your filaments
calcium your only index.
Youssef Rakha, Eagle Shadow, 2021
I was not born on the mountaintops. but from the first the sea was my destination. wrestling the ghosts which pursue me was my singular work. exemplary. no, sadly. no, I was not born upon the mountaintops. and my childhood was without gardens. When I let my ghosts drift away to distant lands. I found night at my bedroom window. and I did not stop. until I grew tired of watching the stars. the day I lost my innocence in a whirlpool of light. and hated the sight of my city by day. I had to do something with myself. took time as my enemy before I knew what it was. and became used to sitting on the riverbank. watching the water as it ran on its way. caring nothing for associations of place. I learned to walk in streets that remained nameless. at least to me.
“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?
Murat Palta, “Crime and Punishment” as an Ottoman miniature. Source: behance.net
Every morning when I wake up, I sit cross-legged, light a cigarette and plan something new
– küçük İskender, Semih Gümüş interview
He was the enfant terrible of Turkish poetry. Gay man and performer who studied medicine and psychology before earning his entire living from poetry. Author of 24 books of poetry, küçük İskender was the voice of Istanbul’s underground and underbelly, Beyoğlu: voice of the junkies, trannies, the suicidal and the broken-hearted. He was a film enthusiast, who wanted his film library to be turned into a foundation. A fan of Kurt Cobain, Kafka and Mayakovsky, Iskender would sit in his smoky basement in Beyoğlu, beer in hand, and hold forth with histories of film, hair-raising stories of literally fatal love affairs and the darker side of Istanbul.
Born Derman İskender Över in 1964, he went by the name “küçük İskender” which means ‘Little Alexander”, a nod at the poet Iskender Pala, who in his mind would be “Alexander the Great”.
He was, without doubt, Turkey’s most prolific and inventive poet of the post-80s scene. He was the scene.
Yüksel Arslan, Arture 385, Men XXVI (detail). Source: artfacts.net
Let him who is without copyright file the first suit.
–THE BOOK OF DERIVATIVES®
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Youssef Rakha. A stock photo of a woman in niqab is made up of versions of Aliaa Magda Elmahdy’s iconic picture, her act of protest of 2011.
Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.
– Plato, BC 427–347
Always I have and will
Scatter god and gold to the four winds.
When we meet, I delight in what the Book forbids.
And flee what is allowed.
– Abu Nuwas, AD 756–813
The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression.
– Sigmund Freud, 1937
The revolution is for the sake of life, not death.
― Herbert Marcuse, 1977
Eros is an issue of boundaries.
– Anne Carson, 1986
“Hi, I’m writing a piece on Arab porn and would love to get your input…”
“Why would I be relevant to Arab porn?”
“Porn meaning explicit web content, or sexual self expression in general.”
“I see. Well, okay. I’d like to read what you’re writing but I don’t want to contribute. Not because I’m against the idea. I just don’t feel like revealing anything at this point, or I don’t have anything to reveal. I don’t want to explain myself or my sexuality or whatever.”
Alex Webb, Gonaives, Haiti, US invasion, 1994. Source: magnumphotos.com
Joy of my days, come
watch me run
I’ve bought white shoes
and see-through eagle’s wings
I am the clarinet’s mouth
and you the ransomed player
Kneel and guzzle me, set
the sea’s taste in my throat
and make my breast a wave
upon whose mane the sun
sows jewels
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…
“Freud sees the collision between psychoanalysis and our penal institutions: ‘It is not psychology that deserves to be laughed at, but the procedure of judicial inquiry.’ Reik, in a moment of apocalyptic optimism, declares that ‘The enormous importance attached by criminal justice to the deed as such derives from a cultural phase which is approaching its end.’ A social order based on the reality principle, a social order which draws the distinction between the wish and the deed, between the criminal and the righteous, is still the kingdom of darkness. It is only as long as a distinction is made between real and imaginary murders that real murders are worth committing: as long as the universal guilt is denied, there is a need to resort to individual crime, as a form of confession, and as a request for punishment. The strength of sin is the law.”
— from Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown
(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.
Susan Meiselas, Satori on stage, 2015. From “Mary’s Girls”. Source: magnumphotos.com
The driver announced that Hainault was the last station. The car was empty save for him and a foreign-looking bloke sitting at the other end. It had taken him ages to make it that far all the way from East Putney. Transport is a bitch on Sundays — engineering works, limited service, delays, replacement buses. He was quite late, at least half an hour. He stood up with the bag hanging from his shoulders, and waited by the doors until the train stopped.
He had never been in Hainault before and it sounded exotic to him. He got his mobile phone out and shot a picture of the station sign. He walked towards the exit and realised the other guy was still sitting inside the carriage. Perhaps he hadn’t understood the driver’s message; he himself had found it pretty hard to figure out: bad speakers plus accented English. Henry walked towards the train and knocked on the window.
“It’s the last station,” he said.
Liza Zhakova, from “fuckmehard”. Source: lensculture.com
From this red block of pure substance we look toward sea, separated from it by tiny flakes of white paint. Some finger has stuck itself in the same pot to draw wave tops, a line quivering but unbroken. Doctors speak of low iron levels in the blood and say things, “a nice broth is what you need” “a good cut of meat”, while the strength of the soul goes unmentioned. Yet here we rest, Soul and I, knowing better. I talk to you as if I’m old and you’re innocent, and I keep a shell in my hand. We sit in the shell of the boathouse, and my body remains a shell for you, and nothing passes through my mind except that I want to write lines clean and new. The wave top looks like a dishcloth wrung out, and the speed I move is not the speed of the water.
Bill Evans by David Redfern, 1965 (Getty Images). Source: londonjazznews.com
Perhaps it is a matter of starting with black leader, if it can be done against the pecuniary concerns of printers and the aesthetic concerns of editors. Would it work? For here I face a problem of a different order. I am not trying to capture an image of happiness anyway. And yet the black might help with something else. Who knows. What I will try to do is after all pretty much the same thing that Sandor Krasna attempts in Sans Soleil. To write about things that might seem random to the reader/viewer—strange, wanton connections and trajectories that nevertheless relate to personal history. Krasna, the fictional cameraman in Marker’s film, hides behind images to reflect on memory, his memories. I am going to hide behind a jazz album.
I am not writing about Paris Concert Edition One in order to trace an arbitrary history. Why Bill Evans’ album, then? I could blame the fact that Paris is a marked city for any Argentine writer, a city embedded in an aspirational aura; something akin to joining a club (cue Cortázar, Saer, Borges at times). I could blame my previous life as a musician, my years studying jazz: years of longing for a vanishing point, a way to get out from Rosario, the provincial town were I was born. Days of longing for something global—I thought I’d make a claim to something global through music. Or I could blame the fact that I later lived briefly in Paris, I managed to tick that box before I was expelled by my own restlessness, but not before I managed to take enough notes—enough for several books, several clichés. But I am not writing about Edition One simply because I need to start somewhere, either. I could have started anywhere.
Roger Ballen, from “Shadow Chamber”. Source: lannassignment2.wordpress.com
Literary Magazine Interviewer: First question. Do you see yourself as a “promising young writer”?
Promising Young Writer: That depends. Do you mean “promising” or “young”? You can easily apply both to me, or dismiss them. It’s a matter of perspective.
LMI: Let’s see, then. How old are you and what have you written that’s promising?
PYW: Well, I’m 28. So far I’ve written two books of poetry and one of short stories. I don’t like to evaluate my own work. It depresses me. And you can’t be objective about it. But it’s easy to say that I like only two poems in my first book, the rest belonging to the realm of lame beginnings. Maybe I will have a view of my two later books after some time. I guess it takes time to see your own writings as external objects so you can evaluate them as you evaluate other things. Actually, I admire and hate my own work with equal force, and that applies to everything related to myself. I also finished my first novel, the first part of a trilogy. I’m in the process of publishing it now.
From the story “Aka Ana” by Antoine D’Agata, 2007. Source: magnumphotos.com
(1)
A little girl walking through the woods on her way to her best friend’s house finds a small piece of paper. It is shiny and colorful, ripped from a magazine no doubt, with ragged edges and folded into halves – twice. I still don’t know what makes the little girl take that loose piece of paper into her hands. It is litter, really. But it will never be far from her for the next decade. From that day, she keeps it. Folded as she found it. She gently places it between the pages of The Little Prince or A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, perhaps Watership Down. Now and again she takes it out and unfolds it. Over the years, the piece of paper becomes worn and soft, as satin silk or lambskin chamois. Whitened, thin and frayed at the folds until it is too delicate to even open. But the girl keeps it. It has become her confidante.
As an Arab you’re probably expecting me to lay into Nymphomaniac. It’s a film that must seem, if not offensive to my cultural sensibility, then irritatingly irrelevant to the poverty, underdevelopment, and upheaval that surround my life.
In most cases dropping the word “white” in the same paragraph as “Islam’s respect for women” is all it would take to slam Lars von Trier in this context. It would be a politically correct slur, too. I could even draw on Edward Said’s hallowed legacy to point out that the only time non-Europeans appear in over four hours of action, they’re portrayed as dumb sex tools. Not only self-indulgent and obscene but also Orientalist, etc..
But the truth is I actively delighted in Nymphomaniac, and I didn’t have to stop being an Arab for that to happen. To be accurate I should say I would’ve welcomed a von Trier film anyway, but this one showed up when it was needed—and it duly exploded on arrival.
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