Muneeza Shamsie: The quietness with which Hussein portrays turmoil and self-doubt adds to the power of his stories such as the tight, intricate and moving ‘Lady of the Lotus’. This multi-layered tale vividly recreates Karachi in the 1950s: its elegant parties, cultural evenings and soirees. Hussein interweaves brief jottings from the diaries of his gifted mother, Sabiha Ahmed Hussein, capturing her profound love for classical music and her singing lessons by famous maestros. The narrative is skilfully constructed through a series of vignettes in the first- and third-person, which weld past and present to great effect, to tell of creativity, self-expression, self-doubt and loss. A brief reference to her longing for rain — so rare in Karachi but so abundant in her native Malwa, India — imbues the story with a myriad of metaphors, including an intertextual engagement with the famous Malwa folk legend which gives Hussein’s story its name. Music as an innate expression of the human experience also runs through ‘The Hermitage’. Here, the loud joyful singing of a nun and the painful soaring voice of a monk, juxtaposed against the disciplined, traditional chanting of their colleagues at a monastery, release the abbott Siddhant’s suppressed memories. More here.
Category: reviews
Mara Ahmed’s unwavering lens
Am so very moved by and thankful for E.C. Salibian’s attentive, honest, and profound writing about my work. Published in the first issue ever of the Rochester Beacon (a group of veteran journalists and others with deep ties to the Rochester community providing local news coverage and analysis), the article quotes/mentions so many people I love and am grateful for. This gives me more pleasure than anything. Thank you Nilofar Saleem, Saleem Murtaza, Aitezaz Ahmed, Gibran Ahmed, Mimi Ahmed, Muhammad Shafiq, Cat Ashworth, Rajesh Barnabas, Mariko Yamada, Joyce Edwards, Surbhi Dewan, Donna K. Khorsheed, and Tonya Noel ♥
Read article here.
mass moca
#massmoca was predictably brilliant: #lizglynn #sollewitt #spencerfinch #dawndedeaux #lonnieholley #louisebourgeois #robertrauschenberg and #jamesturrell’s #hindsight (complete darkness) and #intothelight (where one is surrounded by, almost squeezed into, changing, throbbing, vibrant color – i could feel and smell the color on my skin, as palpable as a fine mist) – how i love art ?
A negative review can be a great compliment
So “A Thin Wall” is on IMDb but I hardly ever visit the page. Today I was surprised to find a review for the film, by someone called krasicki. The review made me laugh because it’s so obviously written by a white male. It’s not just the name. It’s the deep discomfort with a non-linear narrative and multiple elements that move back and forth and collage stories without the expected concrete structure that will hold ur hand and lead u to an unambiguous conclusion. It’s the need for traditional history, written mostly by (white) men, rather than a collection of oral histories gleaned from the experiences of women for the most part. The reviewer’s racial/cultural sympathies are obvious in how he criticizes the film for “demonizing” the partition (how does one celebrate the displacement of 20 million people and the killing of another million?) and “largely blaming” the British. Lol. The final condescending blow comes in his description of the film as “Indian Kitsch.” Such colonial pettiness. He’s only written one review on IMDb. I’m glad the film got to him so badly 🙂
Beatriz at Dinner
i saw Beatriz at Dinner for the second time last night (free on amazon) and i cannot believe that the film has not garnered more attention. it’s such a subtle but precise take down of capitalism. the film has been described as being about the 1% or about trumpism. it’s so much more. it’s about white privilege, it’s about class, it’s about immigration, but it’s mostly, overarchingly about capitalism and its centrality in western culture. reviewers have talked about “class polarization” but to me the unevenness or discomfort created by the coming together of different socio-economic classes, at a dinner party, is not so much about some kind of communication gap (if only we could all dialogue), rather it’s an exposé of the arrogance, vulgarity and violence of capitalism foregrounded against cultures from elsewhere, in this case a small town near acapulco whose mangroves provide a beautiful, calming visual contrast to the crass agenda of the dinner party. i also felt the weight of patriarchy throughout the film. the women in the film are much warmer, more human, yet they are happy to take a backseat and support their husbands in their big-boy, big-money capitalist ventures. the protagonist, beatriz, is played by salma hayek, who is unrecognizable in this film. a masseuse and healer from mexico, whose family was displaced by a big american hotel that failed, she has a strong connection to nature and people, and can feel others’ pain sharply – a skill that is obviously missing from the room (and perhaps from mainstream american society). hayek is absolutely stunning in this film – the first time that we get to fully experience her many gifts. she sings a lovely song, towards the end of the film which, for a minute, seems to break through the greedy business at hand and move the other guests, but they recover soon enough. the film’s end has been criticized but it made sense to me. it’s a way to return to the mangroves of another time and place, a way to circumvent displacement.
Conflicting dreams and realities: Amos Oz in Rochester
Amos Oz, Israel’s most beloved writer and intellectual, was here in Rochester a few weeks ago. He gave a lecture on “Zionism: Conflicting Dreams” at the University of Rochester which provoked many thoughts and emotions in me. I wrote about it. It was published by Mondoweiss today. More here.
the florida project
finally saw “the florida project” which manages to talk about important issues like poverty and housing, but is shot in lush colors and seen through the joyful eyes of kids over a high-spirited summer.
We Wanted a #Revolution: Black #Radical Women, 1965–85
spent the day at the #albrightknoxartgallery in #buffalo to see this:
Focusing on the #work of #black #women #artists, We Wanted a #Revolution: Black #Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the #political, #social, #cultural, and #aesthetic priorities of women of #color from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. It is the first #exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream #feminist #movement in order to reorient conversations around #race, #feminism, political #action, #art #production, and art #history in this significant historical period.
Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405
May 8th: Loved the first film screened at MAG as part of The Reel Mind Film Series 2018 – “Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405” is a documentary about Mindy Alper, who suffers from severe depression and anxiety, and her stunning artwork. And what a treat to walk by Sarah C. Rutherford’s beautiful mural celebrating outstanding Rochester women on our way to the auditorium 🙂
Toronto with my BFF
The day started with a visit to Amra’s niece and her brand new daughter, who is absolutely gorgeous mashallah. Had a lovely brunch at Figo Toronto (baked eggs and ricotta pancakes), then off to Kensington Market where we spent most of the day. Kensington is an amazing old Toronto neighborhood full of small Victorian houses built in the 1880s for Irish and Scottish laborers. Immigrants from all over the world have passed thru or continue to live here, from Eastern European Jews, to immigrants from the Caribbean, East Asia, Central America, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Iran, Vietnam, and Chile. Not only is Kensington Market famous for its vibrant diversity, mix of foods, and art scene but it’s also home to Trotskyites and radical politics. We walked around the neighborhood, visited old book stores and a silver jewelry shop, had some strawberry rhubarb pie at Wanda’s Pie in the Sky, and then sat around waiting for live music at Poetry Jazz Cafe. Although the decor is cool, their website was dramatically off (it said the cafe would open at 430pm when it actually opened at 7pm and the music started at 10). One would have thought that they’d be rather chill for being so badly organized, but we found the establishment to be aggressively money-grubbing. Music was ok, but at the end of the day, Miles Davis posters are not enough. Jazz comes with a certain history and culture. There’s nothing free-spirited or ground-breaking about shoving customers from place to place in order to squeeze in more people (a bouncer-type loud character from London was assigned that job), whilst collecting a cover charge and hard selling drinks. Oy vey. Had some vegetarian empanadas for dinner and then back to the hotel.
Go-Rilla Means War by Crystal Z Campbell
Today Damien-Adia Marassa and I went to the Visual Studies Workshop to see “an installation and screening of Go-Rilla Means War by artist and writer Crystal Z Campbell. Featuring 35mm footage salvaged from a now demolished black civil rights theater in Brooklyn, New York, Go-Rilla Means War is an experimental short that merges fact and fiction. The film is a relic of gentrification, and highlights the complex intersections of development, cultural preservation, and erasure in the form of an intricately woven parable and celluloid frames weathered by decades of urban neglect.” It’s on until tomorrow. Check it out.
Aarti Kohli on A Thin Wall
Beautiful commentary/thread about A Thin Wall by the brilliant Aarti Kohli whom i had the pleasure of meeting at the Oakland Asian Cultural Center where she moderated the post-screening discussion about #colonial #partitions, #borders and #nationalism. Aarti is the Executive Director of Advancing Justice – Asian Law Caucus.
The Problem with Secularism
Sophie Chamas: In Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, Saba Mahmood argues that by solidifying religious divisions and emphasizing differences, modern secularism itself has heightened tensions in countries like Egypt. The modern state and the secular political rationality that animates it, she argues, has paradoxically made religion a more, rather than less, significant part of the lives and subjectivities of those who belong to both minority and majority communities.
In Mahmood’s view, while political secularism extricates religion from politics and relegates it to the private sphere, it positions religion as an essential aspect of individual and collective identity, thereby emphasizing rather than de-emphasizing religion, increasing rather than decreasing its importance. As it promises to free the state from religion and religion from the state, secularism, by defining and limiting religion’s appropriate place in society as private, personal belief, restricts and polices the practice of religion. Secularism thus reserves itself the right to adjudicate on what constitutes an integral aspect of a “belief system” and is therefore entitled to protection under the state’s commitment to religious freedom and equality.
[…] Religious Difference in a Secular Age persuasively highlights the ways in which the modern secular state cultivates religious difference, reinscribes religious inequality, and prioritizes majoritarian values and sensibilities over those of its minorities while claiming to be a neutral arbiter between communities. The author acknowledges that secularism is not something that can be done away with, any more than modernity can be. Though Mahmood declines or fails to envision an alternative, she argues that depriving secularism of its “innocence and neutrality” can help craft a different future. More here.
Una mujer fantástica – my review
Una mujer fantástica – best film of the year. by far. with the alluring city of santiago as backdrop. such beautiful restraint, such poetry in Daniela Vega’s gorgeous performance. i felt the same thrill at experiencing an alternative (non-hollywood) aesthetic and narrative world as when i saw Moonlight. eloquent filmmaking. what filmmaking should be.
Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject
Samah Selim: The book is thus both an anthropology of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo in the mid-nineties and an elaborate philosophical critique of secular concepts of agency in a post-9/11 arena where “Islam” is increasingly manufactured by liberal western elites as the antithesis of “reason,” “enlightenment,” and human emancipation, and where “feminist politics runs the danger of being reduced to a rhetorical display of the placard of Islam’s abuses.” The ethnography is framed by a major political statement about the role of academic research in the world at large, and the meaning of resistance to regimes of oppression.
Saba Mahmood’s startling answer to the feminist dilemma raised by the mosque movement is to sever the idea of women’s agency from “resistance to relations of domination, and the concomitant naturalization of freedom as a social ideal,” or more broadly speaking, from “the goals of progressive politics.” (In other words, there is no inherent reason why women must resist their oppression, since agency can be fully articulated in an embodied ethical practice that transcends western liberal distinctions of public and private). She does this by proposing the practice of da’wa in women’s circles in Cairo as an example of “lifeworlds” that altogether escape the antinomies of liberal thought, including feminist ones. More here.