Marseille was by no means the ultimate destination in Rifa’a al-Tahtawi’s book Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Paris (“The Extraction of Gold from the Review of Paris”) but rather a station of transit to the French capital. Like the other waystations, it is a place of harbingers, presaging the moments and encounters that he will explicate later […]
Our Little Palestine: Excerpts from the Diary of a Siege
Abdallah al-Khatib was born and raised in the Yarmouk camp that houses Palestinian refugees since the Nakba. His friend Hassan Hassan was actively involved in the peaceful uprising that swept Syria in 2011. An aspiring filmmaker, he also assiduously documented the uprising in and outside the confines of the Yarmouk camp. On the day he […]
Mental Health in Lebanon: Socially Buried, Individually Sought
Given the unprecedented amount of crises that continue to unfold in Lebanon over the last two years, it is not surprising that the subject of mental health has been gaining long overdue traction. The events of the 17 October uprising exposed many to the trauma of a violent police state[1]; the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing […]
Bone Insurrection
The Dream I Didn’t Dream, Part 1 In my dream, I was taking inventory of the bones in my body, only to find one missing. I must have miscounted, I thought at first. So I counted them all over again only to find, this time round, two missing. A smile drew across my face, certain […]
Seafront Reclamations, Rubble, and Waste: A Metabolic Reading of Lebanese Urbanization
Since the outbreak of the waste crisis in the wider Beirut area in 2015, the Lebanese government has resorted to the supposedly temporary solution of storing municipal waste in the coastal landfills of Borj Hammoud, Jdeideh, and Costa Brava. Far from being new or temporary, this solution is in fact merely a repetition of decisions […]
Qalaq—Notes from the Making of a Film
Prologue Rasha Salti Completed in 2018, artist and filmmaker Ghassan Halwani’s film Erased,___ Ascent of the Invisible is heartfelt journey into existential questions, manifest in images, sensations, signs, metaphors, and allegories, on what it means to continue to live with the absence of a person who was kidnapped, to cohabit with the archive of the Committee […]