Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Suja Sawafta
-
An Unlasting Home
In her debut novel, An Unlasting Home, Mai Al-Nakib exposes the challenges that often come with state formation and national identity. The title, borrowed from Irish writer James Joyce’s novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, speaks to the impermanence of home “under the eaves of men’s…
-
Hocine Tandjaoui’s Clamor offers a poetic memoir of the Algerian Revolution
For the Algerian-born Parisian poet, Hocine Tandjaoui, the memory of the Algerian War of Independence, and the personal biography that shapes it, is best relayed through poetry. His genre-bending book, Clamor, uses the medium of poetry and the trigger of sound—specifically the discordant cacophony of war—to place readers in the…
-
George Abraham’s Birthright is a lexicon of resistance and return
George Abraham’s lyrical and poignant debut poetry collection, Birthright, was published at the height of global chaos in the midst of the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic. Since then, it has stood out to many readers as an urgent and necessary lexicon in the wake of continued assaults on the…
-
Jordan’s official Oscar entry Farha grants the Palestinian Diaspora permission to narrate
On 1 December, Netflix began streaming Farha (2021) worldwide, despite immense pressure directed at the platform to prevent its debut. The film is director Darin J. Sallam’s first full-length feature and chronicles the coming-of-age story of its heroine, Farha, a 14-year-old Palestinian teenager who possesses a voracious appetite for books…
-
Orientalism, Ukraine and the social disease of selective solidarity
A couple of weeks ago, I stood in front of my most diverse group of students and the largest class I have had since I began teaching in 2020. It was my first face-to-face cultural content seminar since the start of the pandemic, and I hesitated for a second, knowing…
-
The comeback of rapper-poet Omar Offendum
For lovers of music which fuses together the sounds of Arab America with the legendary voices of Arabic music, Omar Offendum is old-school or, better still, a pioneer. As he often notes, the Syrian-American rapper was “born in the KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia], raised in the USA, and constantly…
-
A Woman is No Man
As voices continue to emerge within the tradition of Anglo-Arab fictions, one constant within these narratives is the conversation surrounding the negotiation of identities between one’s traditional culture vis-à-vis a Western one. Etaf Rum’s debut novel “A Woman is No Man” diverges from traditional representations of identity struggle by providing…