Select Books

Poetic Injustice:Writings on Resistance and Palestine

Remi Kanazi

Reviewed by Sami Kishawi

Remi Kanazi’s Poetic Injustice drives to the core of human struggle. His gritty and brazen style pierces the thick curtain of prejudice, intolerance, and blatant hypocrisy draping the Middle East and exposes the daily realities of a Palestinian people hardened by the humiliation and abuse legitimized through the world’s silence.

Kanazi’s articulate style of writing redefines prose; this, balanced with his uncanny ability to conjure up the most powerful images of life thousands of miles away, shows that he really masters the art of storytelling within the form of this seventy-six page book. Poetic Injustice does justice for the human cause.

 

Each poem in the collection deals with a familiar theme, an honest rendition of the ultimate human experience: war, displacement, racism, facing life’s impending difficulties. Each line forces readers to revisit any preconceived notions of the oppressed. Each word redefines the concept of mutual understanding. Each message contained within this work of textual art hits hard. Make sure you’re sitting in a reinforced chair before cracking the cover.

 

Remi cleverly designed this book as a manifesto for the morally conscious, those individuals who demand change for the better, the adults and the children who strive for social responsibility, equality, and self-preservation for all. Poetic Injustice is an authentic account of the wrongs that we as conscious brothers and sisters visit on one another, wrongs we can no longer ignore.  

As Remi writes, “sometimes a hand in the face is as powerful as a pistol”. It is a common message delivered in a unique and eye-opening way. Put Poetic Injustice at the front of your reading list and make a difference in the world.

 

Published: 2011, www.PoeticInjustice.net

Reviewer Sami Kishawi is an activist & blogger of Sixteen Minutes to Palestine <http://smpalestine.com/>

 

 

Zeitoun

Dave Eggers

Reviewed by BN Aziz

I first saw this book in the airport before I was about to depart New York for Damascus. The name "Zeitoun", olive, is a popular word in Arabic, and the a common Arab family name. Still I did not realize the importance of the story until a year later when I actually took it in hand to read.  

Dave Eggers is now a widely known because of his authorship of this book, and the earlier biography/novel “What is the What”, which I am currently reading.

It seems that Eggers has introduced a most effective, convincing way to tell the dramatic story of his subjects. Extensive recording of a man’s life story, then lightly fictionalized. "Zeitoun" is the account of an American family over a two year period. It is a simple family, as unremarkable as so many millions in the landscape of American history. Abdulrahman Zeitoun has a wife Kathy and four children, the oldest of which is a boy from her first marriage. Together this ordinary couple run a family house construction and repair business. Their days are full —driving children to school, supervising workers, meeting deadlines, bar-B-Q’s in the yard, visiting extended family.

Then hurricane Katrina emerges and heads into their neighborhood in New Orleans. Kathy departs for higher ground in another city with the children;  Zeitoun remains in New Orleans to board up houses of neighbors and secure his own properties.

He is an un-heroic fellow who finds he is needed by neighbors, abandoned animals, and three other men in the neighborhood who also remained through the storm. When Zeitoun goes missing after a week, his wife begins to worry. So does his brother Ahmed in Spain.

Zeitoon and his fellow survivors are incommunicado, have been picked up by federal authorizes. For looting.

The tension created by these two locations—Zeitoun in the flood and then in prison, and his family in a distant cit, frantic about his welfare-- is moderated by flashbacks of Zeitoun and Kathy’s early lives in the US, and his youth in Syria, his brothers and his father at sea, his own wanderings around the world, ending up, almost by chance in New Orleans. Compared to his earlier life, the domestic scene they inhabit in the US is rather uneventful.

What makes the book special for me is Eggers’ presentation of the life of the man Abdulrahman Zeitoun, both his heroism in the storm, his determined prayer and belief in himself, his day to day offhand description of his treatment like a caged animal. First we experience Zeitoun and Kathy’s Islam as a very ordinary matter woven humbly into their common American days; then we experience the devastating Katrina hurricane as a calamity; and finally we are confronted by the behavior of federal enforcement authorities during the storm. I read many criticisms of the blunders of authorities, the racism behind the inaction, the incompetency, the priority given to ‘security’, the corruption pervading reconstruction of the city. I watched Spike Lee’s critical film of the affair in “When the Levies Broke”.

Only in this book, in the almost understated words of Zeitoun, do I feel the outrage of the whole affair, especially the caging of American and denial of their rights by the faceless, cold men and women who our government trains in the name of to ‘protecting this land’.  But neither author Eggers nor Zeitoun use such harsh words. They just give us the facts.

One congratulates Eggers on his writing and his respect for people that allows them to entrust  their story to him. For me, an anthropologist, Eggers illustrates the best in social and political documentary.

 "Zeitoun" was published in 2009 by McSweenys.com

 

 

Harley Loco

Rayya Elias

Reviewed by BN Aziz

“Write or be written” was a principle of the Italian Writers Association that I appropriated to RAWI, the Arab Writers network when I was its director. The more personal stories our Arab people –particularly Arab Americans-- write, the sooner we will find our political voice and offer others universal links essential to advancing the common good and even help articulate the humanity of our homelands.   

I am always delighted to learn about a newly published writer, and I extend this welcome to Rayya Elias. Even though title of this memoir Harley Loco confused me, I was not put off by the author’s promotional labels of lesbian, acid, punk music. Along with these presumed enticements was added a middle east identity—Syria, in this case.

But this is neither a book about Syria nor about being Syrian, although we are enticed by the promo “…fled Syria with her family…”. Two colorless chapters from Elias’ memory of her childhood in Harley Loco may have suggested the book was current, thereby securing a publisher’s interest. But is this sufficient to sustain public interest?

The bulk of the book seem to record the author’s wild living in New York facilitated by drugs and experimental music, peppered with many celebrity names I should but cannot recognize. Regardless, I find nothing enlightening in the memoir; neither is Harley Loco good literature nor is it a new window into 1970’s New York. Does one have to be a punk follower to appreciate Elias’ escapades? Or are we so desperate for anything labeled Syria today that the most fatuous confessional will suffice?

Sorry Ms. Elias, this is one book I cannot celebrate. That your story is published by Penguin may make it easy to find. So perhaps readers can decide its merit for themselves.

Brick Lane

Monica Ali

Reviewed by

The boundaries of inventiveness are continually being challenged and breached in literature. How glorious. The latest such outbreak is in the writing of Monica Ali. Brick Lane, Ali’s first novel, is a complex and satisfying piece of writing. Only recently, 5 years after its publication, I sat down to read this young woman’s work. What a thrill.

I knew that since the appearance of Brick Lane, Ali achieved wide recognition. But this book still astonished me; it is more than the work of a good storyteller. It is a multi-layered story with a new kind of heroine, a British immigrant, a woman, a Muslim. (Ali’s characters in this novel are only excelled by those of Hanif Kuraishi.)

Brick Lane invites us to taste immigrant experience in full splendor. This novel blends fantasy, family conflict, letters from a sister in Bangladesh, and the ever so slow maturity of our heroine Nazneen. Nazneen had an inauspicious birth in the homeland, and was taught to ‘endure’… everything (at times infuriating for the reader.)  When swept into a marriage that lands her in London, she clings to that philosophy. Nazneen tolerates a failed husband Chanu who, although clumsy and pompous, clutches a commendable philosophy. While this does not bring him success in England, he speaks some truths.

Following the downturn of Chanu’s fortune and the emerging independence of Nazneen, we meet a host of believable, refreshing characters in the London council estate where Nazneen resides. Each one, whether a forlorn family doctor and his wild wife, neighborhood women who range from the naïve to the cunning to the dreamy, her own truculent daughter, her hapless lover, fills in the British immigrant landscape.

Perhaps in an attempt at political reality Ali has Nazneen stumble into an organizing meeting of local Muslims. One the surface they represent hope... and danger. This may be Monica Ali’s attempt to acknowledge real threats faced by disillusioned British Muslims. The eventual collapse of the group may be the author’s way of ridiculing immigrant Muslim leadership. Or it may serve to send our heroine elsewhere.

The heartwarming letters to Nazneen from her sister Hasina in Bangladesh may be another message from the author. Hasina’s compassion tells us that humanity survives there, even though it may be missing from the lives of Bangladeshi in the UK. If Hasina can overcome what has befallen her at home, surely there is redemption for Nazeem.

          Our Muslim author also skillfully weaves the reality of migrated Islam. The people of Brick Lane are not pious Muslims (not at this point in the story), but their prayers and practices are ever present, in fragments, in a vague memory of home, in terms of habit, constantly interrupted by unimportant daily preoccupations. All religion-related episodes in the story tell us that everything in this arena of their lives is unsettled and unreliable. Nevertheless, our heroine can and does finde meaning.

Jihad for Love

Parvez Sharma

Reviewed by

If any single story could cover the range of human feeling about homosexuality, it is surely the film “Jihad for Love”.

Love for mother, ambiguities about heterosexual marriage, coming out, or not coming out, seeking and finding emotional support, delight in the feminine, solidarity, fear, determination, defiance, risk, learning about one’s true self, divine love, arguments with orthodoxy. We witness all this and more following the lives of some 12 men and women in “Jihad for Love”. We also learn about love within Islam from Muslims themselves.

Few subjects elicit such emotions and reactions as single-sex love. Director Parvez Sharma seems to have found and shared them all in the exploration of Muslims’ homosexual relations in his remarkable film. Same sex love among Muslims is not a new subject; there have been books and reports before. But most have focused on the ill treatment of gays and lesbians in the Arab world. Jihad for Love includes some of the barriers people encounter. Yet it goes far beyond that.

This beautifully woven portrayal of young Muslims by director Sharma is a story of two kinds of love. Yes, sometimes a Muslim (like any other homosexual) must live in secret and flee their society. Sometimes they live in danger and anxiety. But the main message of “Jihad for Love’ lies elsewhere. 

What almost all the subjects of Sharma’s film share besides love for one of the same sex is their love of God-- Allah. All are Muslims who seek to affirm their social identity within the context of Islam, without  banishment and without themselves abandoning their faith. This is clearly Sharma’s main message of the film, a message one hopes audiences will remember-- remember above the dangers and difficulties. Because Sharma’s message explores Islam with new eyes.

As Sharma himself believes, Islam and Allah are great enough—they embody a capacity—to accept their children who are lesbian and gay. Almost all the women and men he interviews are believing Muslims, and each seeks the acceptance of God’s love as much as they seek social acceptance. Perhaps they seek the love of Allah more.

To me this is the most inspiring and valuable aspect of the film-- a portrayal of individual men and women whose love in a worldly partner cannot be disassociated from their love of God. Through their portrayals, we are reminded of the sufi interpretations of the Qur’an and teachings of Prophet Muhammed.

As Parvez Sharma explains, this is a story of “people of faith who are taking back Islam”. He and many of the people he portrays believe they have a right to be Muslims, like others”. The struggle for this right is itself a ‘jihad’. “We are taking back the word ‘jihad’, a word associated by others with holy war. We are taking the concept of the greater jihad as the ‘inner struggle”.

In this argument, Sharma and his film represent a major step in the struggle of a people to overcome both inner and outer injustice. Speaking for oneself is a major argument in this director’s work. Too often, he argues, others are in control of who we are. “We cannot allow our lives to be mediated anymore; we have to pick up the cameras and we have to tell our own stories. We are presenting the voices of Islam, without being mediated by the West.”

In this Sharma is a real leader and a fine example of what can be achieved. He has chosen a vulnerable subject to make this point, but perhaps this forcefully illustrates the great courage involved. He therefore represents a major success and a worthy beacon for other Muslims.

Scheherazade: Tell Me A Story

Yousry Nasrallah, Director, Egypt

Reviewed by BN Aziz

Is this story about women in Arab society? Or about corruption?

Yousry Nasrallah’s 2009 film “Scheherazade: Tell Me A Story” is billed as a tale about women in Cairo.  I disagree.

True, women’s lives define the narrative of “Scheherazade". But I wonder if the main message of this film lies elsewhere. The misreading of the story is important because, given prevailing images of women in Arab society, I fear that viewers in the West will walk away talking about abuse Arab women encounter at the hands of men rather than the deeper social message.

First of all, let me say that this “Scheherazade” is a powerful work and should be seen. Writer Wahid Hamed is to be congratulated along with director Nasrallah. It is a moving and brilliantly performed production, with first class acting. Shown in Egypt to wide acclaim, the film has also won several major international awards, another testimony to its excellence. Even so, New York audiences only had an opportunity to see “Scheherazade” this August, two years after its release, at the Africa Diaspora Film Festival.

In a panel discussion with the audience after the film was screened in New York, questions focused exclusively on the relation of Arab women to Arab men and their Arab society. The cultural stereotypical imprint of gender inequality in Arab culture, so deeply embedded in the western mind, threatened to dominate the dialogue. My co-panelist Ginan Rauf rightly asks: “If this were set in another place, would we not be able to see the narrative as a ‘story’ of individual lives rather than a portrayal of a culture?” She asks that audiences try to see the individual people in this story. Rauf added to our understanding with details about Nasrallah’s past work, his early training as an economist, his career in journalism and his wider philosophy. Nasrallah, she points out, has emerged as a major world director, with his special imprint.

Fellow panelist Aydin Baltaci widened the issues further with his comments on artistic strategies used by the director to achieve the dramatic effect. For him the main drama was the compelling and tragic story of three sisters who fought over the affections of a simple but opportunistic young laborer running their deceased father’s shop. Baltaci drew parallels between this and other well known dramas focused on the dynamic of three sisters.

Most of us agreed that, as portrayed in the stories told to heroine Hebba, a Cairo talk show host in “Scheerazade”, in the course of her live interviews with three women, men are domineering, cruel and selfish. All the women are engaged in a constant battle for their rights. We find no redeeming male anywhere in the story.

The three cases, relived through dramatic flashbacks, revealed by the women, each telling her story on TV, are threaded together by interludes where we witness the relation of heroine TV host Hebba and her ambitious husband, a not very successful print journalist. It is in these episodes, that the real plot of the story unfolds. Here the corruption of Egypt’s media industry is exposed. Hebba has been attacking politicians head on in her interviews, but under pressure from her husband re the danger (to his career) of these confrontations, she agrees to abandon this theme out of affection for her young, seductive husband.

Hebba continues the live TV show, but now focuses her investigations on the lives of women. The three women she chooses are bold and frank. Invariably their histories all lead back to the issue of exploitation by men, and their stories either finger prominent men in the capital or the corrupted system of family values. Although Hebba feels she is simply revealing these women’s private lives and not dealing with politics, her angry husband shouts back the truth: “Everything is political”. Meanwhile his career prospects are sinking.

The summary: three women, each from a different background, and with different experiences, find their lives are circumscribed, at one level or other, by the ambitions of men, and the wider culture of corruption in which they must operate. The women are abused—although all fight back—but the men are perhaps abused even more by their deep and direct involvement within the corrupt system, currying favor with officials and bosses, asserting their prowess.  In the end Hebba too cannot escape its grip on her marriage. For me this film as essentially a story about corruption in the male dominated society, and how, it reaches, by one means or another into every home, and into every marriage and thereby to every woman.

The redeeming message could be “women fight back, whereas men do not”, this even though women pay heavy price for their resistance. Nawaal Saadawi could have written this film. So I ask, why is it that so much good fiction, or pseudo-fictional stories on gender are produced by men?

The Story of My Experiments with Truth

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Reviewed by BN Aziz

Mahatma Gandhi’s name may be recalled during tributes to Martin Luther King Jr. today. Yet few are familiar with what spawned Gandhi’s leadership qualities and what were his early influences.

India continues to produce formidable leaders. Vedanta Shiva and Arundati Roy, both Indian women, lead global opposition to western domination. But why the obscurity of their noble ancestor, Mr. Gandhi?

Living in India in the 1970s, I was introduced to his remarkable autobiography. A few months ago, browsing in a London bookstore, I found a 1982 Penguin Books edition of the book and was reminded why I had been moved by these writings years earlier.

167 essays constitute this sequence of ‘experiments’: they cover Gandhi’s child marriage, his uneventful student days in England, his dependence on his brother, his strained marriage, nursing his ill son, discrimination in South Africa, his collaborations and friendships with Indian Muslims, Parsis, Christians and Hindus.

Gandhi’s humility and the many failures he experienced are hard to comprehend given his accomplishments. In his early years, he was aimless. He was unfamiliar and uninterested in Hindu doctrine. He experimented in fasting (which he forced on his family). Perhaps it was his condescending attitude to Kasturba and her hardships as his wife that explain his unpopularity in some circles.

The discipline stemming from Gandhi’s lifelong dietary experiments led to his struggle towards the principle of ahimsa, non-violence.

The essays were serialized in India between 1927 and 1929 in a Gujarati periodical, then translated for the weekly, Indian Opinion. Gandhi actually wrote a great deal. He published influential pamphlets regarding Indian rights; he co-founded a paper where he published his legal arguments on civil liberties and his emerging social theories. This set of writings are truly a record of social ‘experiments’, and as such it has few parallels.

Given the state of the world today, with neo-colonialism re-established across the world, where peaceful co-existence seems so elusive, this is a good time to reread the early life of Gandhi.

The Butterfly Mosque

G Willow Wilson

Reviewed by BN Aziz

With a title like Butterfly Mosque, I thought, this book promises something special. It was Sally, a young member of our RadioTahrir team who introduced me to the name of its American author, Willow Wilson. Recently Wilson reappeared with the publication of yet another book, a fantasy adventure novel Alif, The Unseen. I decided to revisit her 2003 memoir.

Butterfly Mosque is not the only autobiography of a young woman’s foray into the Arab world. Nor is it a unique record of religious conversion to Islam. (e.g. Yvonne Ridley who documented her experience a decade ago after her captivity by Afghan rebels.) What makes Butterfly Mosque exceptional is its intimacy. Because Wilson’s entry into Islam and Egyptian culture is woven into her love of Omar, a young man she meets early on and eventually marries.  The story is told in terms of culture rather than politics or religion.

The ‘butterfly’ of the title implies gradual metamorphosis and indeed this is a story of someone who emerge into maturity without any special preparation. We know from her account in the early chapters about her carefree almost naïve (typical American?) college years. She wasn’t even a religious skeptic, just a young woman who decides to take up a job offer in Egypt.

In my recent interview with her (to be broadcast in March, 2013) Wilson explains how quickly the book came together from an assembly of emails with her family and friends in the US during her early months in Cairo, and her exchanges with them about what was happening to her. Yet this is more than a collection of letters; there is a real writer’s hand at work here.  

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Tahrir Diwan

a poem.. a song..

"These Words", by Lisa S. Majaj
poem from the chapbook These Words

See poems and songs list

Flash

Algeria: Qur'an Recitation
Algerian Sahara , by Sufi brothers

See audio list

Book review

Yousry Nasrallah, Director, Egypt's
Scheherazade: Tell Me A Story
reviewed by BN Aziz.

See review list

Tahrir Team

Hanan alShaykh and Tahrir members

Read about Hanan alShaykh and Tahrir members in the team page.

See Tahrir Team

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