Essays and Features

Andrée Chedid’s 'Wounded Beirut'

By

Mona Takieddine Amyuni

I have coined the phrase “Wounded Beirut” as an expression of the state of my bleeding heart and my city’s as I lived and suffered the war that decimated my country between1975-1990. I witnessed the agony of my city being reduced to ruins, and yet, refusing to die. Indeed, “Wounded Beirut” summarizes in my imagination all that we did, witnessed, and resisted throughout those long, tragic war years. Writing about my city has certainly been part of the healing process and a tribute to Beirut.

Black Winds

In many languages
men devastate the land

tear it up with gun-fire
Smash it with terror
bury it under the dead

In the spiral of ages
In the black winds of hatred
love is too light.

Gibran’s ‘The Prophet’ Outside the Canon of American Literature

D. H. Melhem

If "The Prophet" is accepted on its own terms as a poetic work, regardless of its distinction from prevailing modes, one is struck by its direct engagement with common life…. It is time to accept Gibran not as a foreigner who wrote books in English, but as an American, with his difference and with his gifts. Let "The Prophet" and Kahlil Gibran enter the canon of American literature. The book and its author have been standing outside its rusty gates long enough.

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Essays and Features

‘The Jewish Quarter:’

Second Title

Ramadan Drama Revisits 40’s Egyptian-Jewish Relations

By

Elie Chalala

Section

Essays and Features

Nawal Al Saadawi Speaks on Intellectuals, Politics, and Sexuality

By

Elie Chalala

Nawal el-Saadawi remains one of the most famous Arab feminists. She is also considered a radical and uncompromising activist. Her radicalism spans a wide range of gender issues, and perhaps most irritating to Arab governments has been her insistence on the interconnectedness of sexuality and politics, a perspective which leads her to conclude that they need not be separated.

Nawal el-Saadawi remains one of the most famous Arab feminists. By the same token, many consider her one of the most radical and uncompromising activists. Her radicalism spans a wide range of issues, including women’s sexuality, the circumcisions of young girls, and, perhaps most irritating to Arab governments, her insistence on the interconnectedness of sexuality and politics, a perspective which leads her to conclude that they need not be separated.

Sabah: The Curtain Descends Upon a Great Lebanese Singer & Cultural Icon

Sami Asmar

Sabah loved the spotlight and proved a prolific worker, despite, or possibly because, of surviving many adversities, which starting at a young age with the murder of her mother for alleged infidelity at the hands of her older brother. She also apparently loved to get married, holding a record of nine husbands from different backgrounds, including politicians and her co-stars, such as the famous heart throb, actor Rushdi Abaza. Along the way, she had two children.

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Essays and Features

Assia Djebar (1936-2015)

Second Title

Home in France; Heart in Algeria

By

Elie Chalala

Assia Djebar has been a problematic for some Arab intellectuals, both when she became an "immortal" or a life-long member of the prestigious French Academy, and when her name was frequently mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender. Her recent death on February 6 proved no exception. As her body lay in one of Paris’ hospitals, the same questions arose: Why were her works not translated enough into Arabic, while her novels were translated into scores of other languages? A valid question.

Section

Essays and Features

Novelist Salwa Bakr Dares to Say it Aloud

By

Elie Chalala

Salw Bakr was asked to explain the large quantity of novel publications in the Arab world. Once again, Bakr pointed at political repression as a clue, especially when repressive regimes, under which most Arab intellectuals live, curtail freedom of expression. She indeed found the large number of published Arab novels amazing, for half of the Arab world remains illiterate, something that hits home, since Egypt constitutes half of that population. According to statistics, the average Arab reader reads no more than a quarter of a page annually.

Revolution’s successes and failures; the taboos broken, how political Islam’s “holiness” mask dropped; the intelligentsia’s flight to the past to avoid analyzing the present.

Radwa Ashour (1946-2014)

A Literary, Cultural and Political Activist Icon, Echoing in Egypt's Valley

By

Nada Ramadan Elnahla

The valley was flooding with apparitions . . . Silence, followed by a crescendo. A sound that will echo in the valley years later. ("Apparitions")… Radwa Ashour—novelist, educator, human rights activist, politically committed intellectual figure, and critic—opened her 1998 autobiographical novel "Apparitions" (or“Specters”) with this powerful scene. Seventeen years later, on November 30, 2014, Ashour would join those apparitions, her gentle soul forever filling our valley with her inspiration, resistance and writings.

The valley was flooding with apparitions . . . Silence, followed by a crescendo. A sound that will echo in the valley years later. ("Apparitions")

Radwa Ashour—novelist, educator, human rights activist, politically committed intellectual figure, and critic—opened her 1998 autobiographical novel "Apparitions" (or“Specters”) with this powerful scene. Seventeen years later, on November 30, 2014, Ashour would join those apparitions, her gentle soul forever filling our valley with her inspiration, resistance and writings.

Syrian Regime “Dresses” up Image with Choreographed “Demonstrations"

Elie Chalala

A Syrian author, Ala Shayeb al-Din writes and comments on the shocking and detestable attitudes that humans display when presented with tragic and horrific circumstances. One occasion for such commentary occurred following the massacre in Jdeidet Al Fadel on the 21st of April 2013, where more than 483 people were burned alive or knifed to death over a four-day period. This terrifying massacre became even more appalling when a group of Assad loyalists celebrated the event by organizing “festivals” to cheer the “courageous” Republican Guards and the Shabiha (pro-Assad thugs) on their victory over “the terrorists,” when in actuality they had committed unspeakable cruelties against civilians.

Essays and Features

Hanna Batatu (1926-2000)

A Scholar with Passion for Knowledge, Disdain for Spotlight

By

Elie Chalala

Hanna Batatu, 74, a leading authority on the contemporary Arab world best known for his writings on Iraq and Syria, died June 24, 2000, at his brother’s home in Connecticut after a brief battle with cancer. He passed away just a few days before American University of Beirut was going to honor him as one of its Millennium Scholars.

I met Hanna Batatu in the mid-1980s, when I was a graduate student at U.C.L.A., where he lectured on Iraq. I and other colleagues interested in the politics and history of the Middle East met with him publicly and privately. Once while giving him a ride to the Los Angeles International Airport, he gave me his home telephone number, for he frequently worked at home when he did not have teaching commitments in Georgetown University. Sometime later I called him and asked if he would agree to be interviewed about the Kurdish question on a radio program hosted by a friend of mine.

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