Essays and Features

ESSAYS & FEATURES IN THE CURRENT AL JADID, VOL. 23, NO. 77, 2019

Lebanon’s Tide of Change: Revolutionaries vs. Predators

By Elie Chalala

The Lebanese and Iraqi uprisings, and recently those in Algeria and Sudan, have shaken up the gloom and doom discourse following the first wave of the Arab Spring in 2011. Following the Iranian-Russian-Assadist “victory” over the Syrian revolution, Hezbollah pundits and pseudo-leftists declared it fruitless to replace more than half a century of Syrian tyranny with a democratic system. Those same pundits have recently demonized the second wave of Arab protests in Lebanon and Iraq, portraying them as the outcome of imperialist conspiracies and predicting for them the same fate of the first wave in Syria. Unlike previous conflicts in Lebanon that divided the country along confessional lines, the current revolution includes all sects, both Christian and Muslim – a remarkable historical change. While sectarianism is deep-rooted in Lebanon, and in fact enshrined in the confessional apportionment of state power, the current uprising has united ordinary Lebanese against the corruption of the powerful.

Essays and Features

ESSAYS & FEATURES IN FORTHCOMING AL JADID, VOL. 23, NO. 77, 2019

Muayyad al-Rawi, Iraqi Poet And Renaissance Man Whose Work Painted a Portrait of the 1960s

By Al Jadid Staff

Muayyad al-Rawi, the poet and intellectual, pushed the free verse movement of Arabic poetry into a new dawn during the 1960s. To many, Muayyad was a literary theorist and spiritual guide for this generation of Iraqis. “If we want to draw a portrait of the 1960s, al-Rawi was one of its most important members; and however short the memory of subsequent literary generations, that era remains a milestone in the history of radical rebellions in Iraqi culture,” said Iraqi author Fatima al-Mohsen.

Essays and Features

The Happy Smock: Huguette Caland’s Structured Art and Influence on Artists

Al Jadid Staff

ESSAYS & FEATURES IN FORTHCOMING AL JADID, VOL. 23, NO. 77, 2019

Despite Decades-Old Controversies, Iraqi Poet Badr Shaker al-Sayyab Still Relevant!

By

Al Jadid Staff

The Arab cultural scene never tires of Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s legacy, refusing to let it rest even 55 years after his death. The recent publications of Jasim al-Muttair’s “The Swinging Moods of Badr Shakir al-Sayyab,” as well as several columns on the poet by Iraqi writer Yassin al-Dulaymi and Lebanese columnist Mohammad al-Houjeiri, have again brought the poet’s life into the public eye. Sayyab did not shy away from politics in his work. “He was the kind of person who thought that a literary person and an educated person and a poet had a duty to get involved in the politics of his country and his nation and to point his finger and to be on the side of the poor and the struggling sectors of society. Governments were not, still are not, accepting of people who are not accepting of their line,” said his son, Ghailan al-Sayyab, in an interview with The National.

ESSAYS & FEATURES IN FORTHCOMING AL JADID, VOL. 23, NO. 77, 2019

Lebanese Jewry: Once Part of the Country’s Confessional Map, Now Vanished

By Al Jadid Staff

With roots going back to the 7th and 15th centuries, many Jews who fled the Spanish Inquisition settled in Lebanon. By the early 1700s, more Jews who had earlier fled to North Africa and the Middle East followed and settled in Lebanon’s Shouf Mountains, according to British Historian Kristen Schultz. But in recent years, this small Jewish community has been decreasing even further, numbering less than a hundred. Once boasting a population as high as 14,000 in 1958, the number of Lebanese Jews has shrunk in the wake of conflict: the short-lived civil war of 1958, the 15-year 1975 war, as well as the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The fascination in the dwindling numbers within this community has especially enraptured news media.

Essays and Features

Wanous' Perspective on Theater: A Balance Between Nationalist Tradition and Universalism

Fatme Sharafeddine Hassan

Emile Habibi, The Pessoptimist Who Went Global

Omar Zane

Emile Habibi died in early May, 1996 in his home in Nazareth. In addition to being a great Palestinian writer he was an exceptional character as well. His presence, his tongue and his written words added a certain lightness to the otherwise unbearably sad Palestinian and blighted Arab experience of the last seven decades. He witnessed events unfold, and for many years recorded the stories of an area which had acquired a much bigger foot print than its geographic size.

For a Friend Sorely Missed

Moayyad al-Rawi (1939-2015)

By

Elie Chalala

This brief column can only begin to do justice to Iraqi poet and critic Moayyad al-Rawi. A longer tribute will appear in Al Jadid’s next issue later this year (Vol. 23, No. 77, 2019).

Moayyad, who died in 2015, fled the Iraqi dictatorship in 1970 for Lebanon, making it his first stop in a life in exile; it is there I met him. Imprisonment and repression following the 1963 Baathist coup forced him to leave Baghdad and Kirkuk, which he loved, and which figured prominently in his writings.

Uninterrupted Fugue: Uprootedness in Kamal Boullata’s Work

By Gérard Xuriguera

Contemporary artists adhering to Constructivism were not solely content with respecting the orthodoxy of its ethic. From Malevitch to Mondrian through the Bauhaus and up to this day, the structural unfolding of this art of simplification and of exactitude has at times been refined, at other times made more complex; all along, it continued to explore different venues that retraced the founding precepts without relinquishing its rigor.

Ali al-Shawk in the Eyes of One Acquaintance

By

Mahmoud Saeed

Ali al-Shawk’s death leaves an empty space that no one can fill. He was prolific, thoughtful, articulate, and of high manners. Personally, I thought of him as one of the most cultured intellectuals I have met inside or outside of Iraq. His cultural depth owed to the greatness and diversity of his reading, which included his fluent command of English, from which he translated several books.

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