IN ENGLISH

AFRICA // SHAHD FADLALMOULA

It must be heartbreaking,
To see your mother
Give up her youth
To make enough
Just to feed everyone
But her children.

***

My mother is
The only woman I know
Who has been raped
Beaten
Lynched
Robbed
Malnourished
And
Terrorized
And is still standing.

So forgive her,
if she is
Hunchbacked now,
Sore on the Eyes
With a Raspy voice
She is trying, her best.

AN INTERLUDE CALLED MENTE // MAJID AL TURKI & EMAN ALEGHFELI

 
 
 

–Overture–

Where it all begins
above the crud
and the unstable grounds.

–I–

It’s hidden,
but the pressure
is well noticed.
bits of filth
are on your legs.

–II–

Something seems different..
you probably wouldn’t know,
but you feel weaker,
bent a little.
your legs are stained.

–III–

It’s gloomier and darker now;
too late to change anything.
You’re trapped under the
force of your will.
you’ve lost sight of
your feet.

–IV–

All seems withered and
the air tastes a bit stale.
giving up seems like
all you can do now;
you close your eyes
waiting for what may
come. Your knees have
clamped, and you feel crushed.

–V–

No breathing is left;
all light has been consumed.
It’s cold and damp
and your skin is crawling.
people simply step over
and around the place
you stay in. Sight is barely
possible anymore;
you kneel in submission,
a victim to the world.

Is it time to buy time?

–VI–

Rest assured, there is no need
for further misfortunes.
now, you've been suffering
for a life time. 
kneel down,
plead and dispute.

Live on.

***
text // majid al turki
art // eman aleghfeli

 

 

DECOLONIZE YOUR MIND #1

 
 

A plot for a movie that has never been made.

One early morning, a yellow taxi pulls up by the famous ‘Souq al-Madina’ in Aleppo, where an elegantly dressed Zayneb Hallaq emerges from. Standing in front of a jewelery shop, she eats some of her kibbeh with pomegranate syrup while sipping the black tea she brought with her, before she hops into the taxi that will take her home. Upon arriving at the door of her apartment’s building, she sees a man who is ringing her apartment’s bell in hopes for any of the building’s tenants to buzz him in. After conversing with him she discovers that he is her new neighbor-tenant Ali al-Falaji.

Zayneb is very passionate about voicing people’s opinions and mustering the truth and displaying it to the public in her writing. Consequently she becomes heavily affiliated with Hamdi the Hidden, a very controversial writer in an underground newspaper in Aleppo. Through the movie’s build up, Zayneb finds out that Ali, her new neighbor, is also a writer, a very good one too, who wrote a book about a young Syrian soldier titled ‘Nine Lives five years’, but has not published anything else since then. The two new friends confide in each other what they both want to achieve while they live in Aleppo. To Ali, it was to publish another book, where Zayneb explains in turn that her purpose in Aleppo is to save up money in order to support her brother, Ayman, once he gets out of the Army.

With the progress of time, Zayneb and Ali’s relationship develops and the days bring them closer and closer. Until one day, Ali could hear a stern deep voice coming from Zayneb’s apartment that could not be her voice. Intrigued and driven by suspicion, he nears her apartment in an attempt to catch something that would make sense to him. He starts hearing Zayneb’s voice which sounds faint and feeble, as if pleading in despair for mercy. Ali could no longer uphold the confusion and anger that are eating his heart while hearing the voices in a discourse that he could not comprehend, and decides to intervene and bursts into the apartment.

Still caught in the haste of an adrenaline rush, Ali rushes through the entrance to be confronted with Zayneb and a big man in the living room. Standing there, his sole presence in the silent room demands an urgent explanation from Zayneb at once. Zayneb quickly and nervously introduces the two men to each other, Ali as merely the next door neighbor, and the big man as Hussain Al Hallaq, her husband. She carries on the introduction by saying that she has been wedded to Hussain since she was 13 years of age, in her hometown, a small village not very far from Aleppo. Ali, pale as a sheet of paper, bleakly explains his thoughtless action of barging in by saying that the noise coming from the apartment worried him, and excuses himself.

Zayneb mumbles something quickly to Hussain, and rushes after Ali to catch him by the door. In high hopes to justify herself, she explains that her marriage to Hussain was arranged and she had fled to start a new life in Aleppo, leaving her husband, family and the life she hated all behind. She quietly cries that he only came today to take her back because her brother Ayman is returning from the army.

At that moment, and in the surge of all the mixed feelings expressed in that little corridor by the door, the police raid Zeyanb’s apartment, pushing the door wide open, they recognize and arrest Zayneb for her disputable political activities in the Oppositional Underground movement with Hamdi the Hidden. And it is in that moment in particular that Ali realizes that he has fallen in love with her.

------
TEXT & ART:
MOSHTARI HILAL

 

TAWSEET AL SHARQ #3: مُلهَم

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In this project of Tawseet Al Sharq, I will bring to light Middle Eastern cultures, traditions, beauty and issues by examining and discussing Middle Eastern art and artists. Since this project started on Tumblr before coming to Jaffat El Aqlam, this piece is therefore dedicated to Wed, the mind behind it all, who I have had the pleasure of following and seeing her art flourish through social media platforms.

    When I first came across her work, I was fascinated by how little she uses to effectively show the meaning behind her work. By focusing on replicating a simplistic figure, Wed transforms her minimalistic character from a mere shape into an extension of expressions of thought. Her work places heavy-weighted issues and expressions of Arab youth so tenderly on paper and poignantly celebrates women within that society. After reaching out to her, we sat down and discussed some of her pieces and the following is what happened.

I admire your simplistic character and your approach in producing such works. The use of a pen and paper makes it more accessible to other Arab youth and breaks down the barrier between the audience and your work. So the message flows freely in between the two and is not restrained within the work itself. Can you tell me why you used a simplistic approach to portray such figures and powerful messages?

From the start, I try to keep the character as pure and simple as possible to convey a certain emotion or thought because the goal of my work is to inspire people which is why the character is, in fact, called Mulham, which is Arabic for the word ‘inspirational’. I started off with deciding on the shape, rather than on the approach, and began with a shape of demaghi, which means being or related to the brain. The whole figure symbolizes the brain with the oblong head and minimalistic body. Such a figure disassembles itself from the physical body and does not need one to be enabled or to express itself. To that end, Mulham became an expression of itself and a continuation of my thoughts.

What audience was responding to your work and how have the responses changed overtime?

The majority of the audience that respond to my art are usually Middle Easterners, and women whose opinions resonate with the thought expressed in my work, whether they agree with them or not. When I first started uploading works of Mulham, there wasn’t a lot of response as the subject of my work and ideas accompanying Mulham were still not established with the audience. But with time, they started understanding that Mulham is not just a quick sketch of lines on paper accompanied by thoughts but is much more alive with emotions and thoughts, which gave the character more depth after it was established. Also with such a figure, repetition becomes accessible to both the audience and I to get my message across effectively.

Now, I find it really interesting when two Mulhams are present in the same work where they create this interesting dynamic of how we share and use our ideas on both a societal and an individual level.  How do you interpret that in your work, such as Secret Harmony?

Secret Harmony shows an uninhibited attraction, where there is no logical reason to be attracted. The attraction is just a raw emotion of the basic level of connection and more importantly examines a connection that doesn’t have to be explained. The nodes orbiting Mulhams’ heads signify knowledge and by count are unequal showing a difference in the way of thinking yet there is still chemistry. The everlasting connection through the figure combining them into one shows the love, vision and continuity of such a connection. Mulham serves the purpose of capturing such an emotion and cherishing it without the inflection of gender, age or a certain individual due to his simplistic figure. And it is important to me to encapsulate an emotion solely as an expression of itself, to offer the audience a work that expresses a pure connection they have with another person whatever that connection may be.

 
 

Next lets go back and talk about the making of the figure itself, how do you change the character to address a certain topic?

I include a specific body part in some of my works, only to highlight an issue specific to that body part.  When I do want to specifically show a woman I add a tooq (crown) of flowers or beads to surround Mulham. The only time I distinguish a woman in my work is when the work itself is directed to women and pertaining to an issue concerning women and their rights. Other than that Mulham is genderless.

In Freedom of Opinion, the connection is different than other connections we have seen throughout your work. Instead of being connected organically as they have usually been through their bodies or their minds, they are connected in an out-of-body box signifying their opinions. How is the connection through the box important to this portrait?

This piece is dedicated to all those who have been detained, or faced hardships due to voicing their opinions because they were at the forefront of the revolution. These men and women endure the hardship of raising such opinions, yet it is in their imprisonment that the concepts they’re fighting for, further rose and came forth. So the same box that they are imprisoned in has become a vessel that contains their battle, and their ideas are paving the way for future generations. Their fight has not gone unnoticed and their ideas and achievements can never be imprisoned so this piece is in honor of them.

A LIBERAL ARTS GUIDE TO LOVE

One: The fact that you see her existing. With nonchalance that is almost insolent. She has a biochemistry that you seem to be more aware of than your own. She'd made you analytical but your notes still read like poems. 

Two: Where you're going and where she's going are parallel lines. You will not share a point in time or space where there will be coffee and a chance to worry about oral hygiene. 

Three: Neuronal bridges of you do not exist. She is her own logic, well studied. You can neither add to nor change her axonims. You are not, as you have so fervently prayed, dormant in her mind, waiting for a moment of unexpected plasticity. You long to be déjà vu; to inhabit her as she inhabits you.

Four: You're lost without coordinates. The possibilities suffocate you. You don't realize that those possibilities are merely hallucinations. Outside of you there is no evidence of possibility and she remains unsolved. The hunger persists. Your infatuation has taken up purring and greeting you in doorways. 

Five: You have erred on the side of caution. And caution caught you in her arms and now you carry her baby; existential crisis. Who would have predicted that words could go that far? That they could be digested so thoroughly, absorbed and believed. 

Six: There's no one to talk to and I'm forced to bury my confusion in metaphors and tell you this story preceded the birth of the universe. 

Seven: You continue, audaciously, to hope. 

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TEXT: DANA S