Marie Colvin: The Real 'Rose in the Desert'

Iconic, Storied Reporter Faithfully Depicted the Human Cost of War, Forthcoming in Al Jadid

As a war reporter, Marie Colvin chased death to expose the reality of war and violence to civilians. She was well-known for her ‘outrageous’ bravery, diving headfirst into killing zones and dangerous situations at the risk of her own life – a streak of daring that, while a common expectation for those in the field, Colvin pushed to the extremes. In the seven years since her death in February 2012 – when the home she was staying in came under mortar attack by Assad forces – several books and films have come forth to honor and give a portrait of her life. Colvin passed away at the age of 56, with the final moments leading to her death a culmination of all she had fought against in her career.

Cultural Briefings

Killing of Famed Iraqi Author of ‘The Jewish Baths’ and ‘The Aging of Baghdad’ Sparks Growing Outrage

By Al Jadid Staff
The assassination of a leading Iraqi novelist and poet in the middle of a street in the holy Shiite city of Karbala on February 2 has sparked outrage inside and outside Iraq, raising speculation that he was the latest victim in the targeted killings of prominent figures that started last summer.
 
Alaa Mashzoub was fatally shot 13 times by two assailants on motorcycles outside his home in the neighborhood of Bab Al Khan. According to Amar Al Massodi, head of Karbala’s Literature Group, a branch of the Iraqi Literature Association of which Mashzoub had been a member, the writer was returning home from a weekly meeting when he was ambushed. On February 3, intellectuals and artists from Karbala staged a sit-in in protest. News media throughout the world continue to report and comment on the writer’s death.
Cultural Briefings

Native Daughter--Now Columbia University Dean--Returns to Lebanon to Design Beirut’s Museum of Arts

By Al Jadid Staff

Lebanese-born architect Amale Andraos and her company, WORKac, have been selected to design the future Beirut Museum of Art. The art museum, whose project had previously been awarded to Paris-based Lebanese architect Hala Wardé in a 2016 competition, will now be built under Andraos, featuring an open-view walkway that transforms the museum’s interior rooms into an “indoor-outdoor” space. The site, owned by Université Saint-Joseph, had marked the Green Line separating Muslim areas from Christian ones during the Lebanese civil war. The design is intended to “break down the barriers of the museum and allow members of the community open views and access,” in the words of Ali Oriaku from The Architect’s Newspaper. Oriaku emphasizes that the ‘“open museum” idea is especially significant when considering the building’s location on a site known for its history of religious segregation and conflict.”

Cultural Briefings

Tunisian Grave Digger Gives Drowned Refugees in Death, the Dignity They Failed to Receive in Life

By Naomi Pham

On a donated plot of land on the outskirts of Zarzis, a cemetery marked by a sign labeled “Cemetery for Unknown” in six languages has become the resting place for hundreds of unidentified bodies. One Tunisian man has devoted himself to giving migrants who died at sea dignity in death. At 52, Chamseddine Marzoug, a former fisherman-turned-gravedigger, has built over 400 graves in the span of a dozen years for migrants who perished at sea in an effort to reach Europe. Coming from Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, as well as Tunisia, these migrants often washed ashore with no family to claim their bodies. “They didn’t have any families to care for them,” he was quoted last September in a Washington Post article by Sudarsan Raghavan, continuing, “So I decided to become their family.”

Cultural Briefings

Imperialism First!: European Leftists Abandon Anti-Fascist Legacy to Embrace Putin and Assad

By Al Jadid Staff

Both the European and Western Left, as well as their Arab counterparts, have received their share of criticism regarding their policies on the Syrian war. While some intellectual debates among the different factions of the Left indicate differences in policy outlooks, a majority of these groups remain united in their embrace of Syria’s Assad and his Russian enabler, Vladimir Putin. Hussam Itani’s essay “Imperialism First!: European Leftists Abandon Anti-Fascist Legacy to Embrace Putin and Assad,” which appears in the forthcoming issue of Al Jadid, centers on how the European Left abandoned the struggle against fascism, and instead turned its energies to fighting U.S. imperialism.

 

Essays and Features

Rima Assaf: How One Broadcaster Liberated Her Emotions with the Written Word

By 
Rima Assaf

While preparing my report on the Holocaust of Aleppo, I felt the customary format of broadcast news did not allow me to express my feelings. Thus, I have resorted to these written words in order to release my unbearable pain after watching a father breaking and clawing at stones with his bare hands in search of his children, entombed under mountains of rubbles.

While preparing my report on the Holocaust of Aleppo, I felt the customary format of broadcast news did not allow me to express my feelings. Thus, I have resorted to these written words in order to release my unbearable pain after watching a father breaking and clawing at stones with his bare hands in search of his children, entombed under mountains of rubbles.

Through these words I repeat those of a wounded child in Al Sukari suburb hospital as she cried out: “Mother, help me! May God support and comfort you. My heart hurts me.”

Aleppo: A Catastrophe Defying Poets’ Powers of Description

By 
Amjad Nasser

When talking about what is happening in Syria, I face the inability of language to express reality. My vocabulary remains limited. My ability to describe reality, the basic forms of literature and writing, remains limited.  Nothing I have written or read could be elevated to the level of one moment of the reality experienced by Syrians in their disastrous country, or in their great Diaspora into which they were unmercifully pushed.

 

When talking about what is happening in Syria, I face the inability of language to express reality. My vocabulary remains limited. My ability to describe reality, the basic forms of literature and writing, remains limited.  Nothing I have written or read could be elevated to the level of one moment of the reality experienced by Syrians in their disastrous country, or in their great Diaspora into which they were unmercifully pushed.

Broken Dreams: Love, Corruption, and the Plight of Foreign Workers in Israel

By 
By Lynne Rogers
 
"...although a Palestine mystery, “Murder Under the Bridge” presents readers with a crime that exposes the harsh plight of illegal foreign female workers in Israel and the corruption that leads to their abuse."
 
Murder Under the Bridge, a Palestine Mystery
By Kate Jessica Raphael
She Writes Press, 2015
 
Kate Jessica Raphael describes her novel, “Murder Under the Bridge, a Palestine Mystery,” as “the product of my imagination and experience – the experience and imagination of a white, Jewish American who spent around eighteen months in Palestine, with brief forays into Israel.” Her cast of characters also crosses the green line in the pursuit of love, which results in grave consequences. The mystery opens with the discovery of t

The Syrian War Has Taken Us Prematurely to Hell!

By 
Father George Massouh

The crimes committed in Syria have surpassed what the human mind can imagine in terms of horrors and atrocities. Undoubtedly, in our cruel East, we have become accustomed to living with this reality, which plunges us down to the depths of hell. This horror lies in our acceptance of what occurs in our countries while we continue our daily lives as if nothing is happening, and justify the violence as a defense of central causes or as wars against terrorism.

 

The crimes committed in Syria have surpassed what the human mind can imagine in terms of horrors and atrocities. Undoubtedly, in our cruel East, we have become accustomed to living with this reality, which plunges us down to the depths of hell. This horror lies in our acceptance of what occurs in our countries while we continue our daily lives as if nothing is happening, and justify the violence as a defense of central causes or as wars against terrorism. As if some want to convince us that terrorism can be defeated by “counter” terrorism.

Women of the Revolutions: The New Faces of Arab Feminism

By 
Angele Ellis

“Nada’s Revolution” follows the tale of the 27-year Nada Ahmed, an Alexandrian woman looking to make decisions about marriage and career in the years after the revolutionary wave of the Arab Spring. In “Feminism Inshallah: A History of Arab Feminism,” Feriel Ben Mahmoud, the film’s director, traces the beginnings of feminism to male feminists such as the Egyptian Qasim Amin (1863-1908), whose nationalist aspirations for Egypt fueled his assertion that the Quran supported women’s rights—essential to throwing off the yoke of colonialism and joining the modern world.

 

Feminism Inshallah: A History of Arab Feminism
Directed by Feriel Ben Mahmoud
Women Make Movies, 2014

Nada’s Revolution
Directed by Claudia Lisboa
Women Make Movies, 2014

 

Sin, Redemption, and Visions of Female Illness in Modern Arab Literature

By 
By Bobby Gulshan

Hamdar’s examination of the female body in illness and suffering presents a compelling contribution to the body of literary criticism of Arabic Literature. She invokes strains of critical thought—like Foucault and the idea of discourse—using them to map the development of the image of the female body in recent Arabic literature. 

 
The Female Suffering Body, Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic Literature
By Abir Hamdar

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