In Tim Burton’s 2012 film Dark Shadows, adapted from a Goth sitcom aired on American TV between the 60’s and 70’s, Johnny Depp plays the role of Barnabas Collins, long undead and inadvertently awoken from a centuries-long slumber by construction workers. In a classic trope of the time travel genre, Barnabas, not a time traveler […]
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Ghost (ش.ب.ح)
Notes Towards an Alliance with the Revenant To write is to work for the dead, to create the conditions needed for the ghost to return. In order to do so, the writer must let go of the desire to tell a story. The dead don’t tell stories. They return to disrupt narratives that insist on […]
The Third Place: In the Shadows of Anxiety and Recovery
A few years ago, I was approached to compose music for a film. It was a film written in Arabic; the plot was set in an Arabic-speaking country, centered around a local, historical anecdote, and all of the actors’ dialogue was also in Arabic. The rough cut included selections of temporary musical segments that were […]
Waiting for the Moths
Celebrating the memory of Ghassan Kanafani in 2018, Palestinian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah addressed the late author and activist in a facebook post:“Do you know what the fate is, of the story that we do not write, of our unwritten story? Allow me Ghassan, to ask you from the heart, because I can scream and turn […]
The Imam and the Giraffe
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 […]