Fall 2007
Krystel Abimeri
By Krystel Abimeri Fall 2007 | ArteZine Beirut, in many ways, is an “Urbs Incognita,” a city that has been presented only through clichés. The euphoric expressions—“mosaic of communities,” “crossroads of cultures,” “Switzerland of the Middle East”—have been used and abused. Despite all this romanticising, this weary city seems condemned to be destroyed after each reconstruction…
Mahmoud Darwish
By Mahmoud Darwish Fall 2007 | ArteZine When the heart has been broken, it cries out: Samarkand She is the partridge…. *** Can you not weep tomorrow? Perhaps I can But does this dew descend Whenever the road to Damascus finds me I gather this echo Just as the lovers gather the tears from the night…
Nizar Qabbani
By Nizar Qabbani Fall 2007 | ArteZine 1 My voice rings out, this time, from Damascus It rings out from the house of my mother and father In Sham. The geography of my body changes. The cells of my blood become green. My alphabet is green. In Sham. A new mouth emerges for my mouth A…
Suhail Shadud, Marlin Dick
By Suhail Shadoud and Marlin Dick Fall 2007 | ArteZine Story by Suhail Shadoud Translated by Marlin Dick Four in the morning, in the East Village. A band’s playing in the loft of the restaurant. A girl’s playing with the band. I know her. It’s a Brazilian song, and my head could ignite a thousand fires. The fire…
Flavia Codsi
By ArteEast Fall 2007 | Gallery ArteEast continues to bring you the best of the Beirut art scene with its fall 2007 Virtual Gallery exhibition featuring the work of painter Flavia Codsi. Codsi redefines realism and modernism by painting classic subjects in ways that shake up typical art historical chronologies and preconceived notions of contemporary Lebanese…
Christa Salamandra
By Christa Salamandra Fall 2007 | ArteZine Guest Editor: Christa Salamandra Nostalgia permeates literary and expressive culture in the Arab world. Exile, loss, defeat, rupture find expression in a variety of cultural forms, in song, prose and poetry, on the big and small screen, and in restaurants and cafés. Nostalgia reflects all the paradoxes and contradictions…
Deborah Kapchan
By Deborah Kapchan Fall 2007 | ArteZine Modernity is often associated with industrialism, technology and the loss of pastoral ways of life. Nostalgia is the sentiment that modernity yields—a structure of feeling characterized by a mourning for the authentic. Serematakis tells us that the word nostalgia comes from the Greek nostalghia, a composite word that corresponds…
By Christa Salamandra Fall 2007 | ArteZine Before the 1990s, elite Damascenes rarely ventured into the Old City, a place then associated with the backwardness of an embarrassing past. Most wealthy, “old notable” families moved from their Old City neighborhoods decades ago; their children and grandchildren are returning to them now, not to live as their…
Walter Armbrust
By Walter Armbrust Fall 2007 | ArteZine It is no secret that black and white Egyptian films are powerful objects of nostalgia. No secret either that the films are remembered by their actors above all else. My nomination for the most popular Egyptian actor of all time would be the comedian Isma’il Yasin. He was born…
Summer 2007
Richard Jeffrey Newman
By Richard Jeffrey Newman Summer 2007 | ArteZine It’s impossible not to make this personal. While I am sitting here at my computer, my wife is at her sister’s house on Long Island helping to take care of her father, whose life cancer will soon cut far too short. No one knows, or wants to predict,…
