Hijab and the Market
The lead photo from my new article, Cultural Programming, in Tuesday’s Souciant. Taken in Torino, mid-May.
Feature photograph for Joe Lockard’s Common Protests. Shot in London on March 26th, at the anti-cuts protest.
Archived entries for Arab
Immigrant Songs
The high point of our year in Milan was discovering its longstanding hip-hop scene. Not just any artists, but the brilliantly-named MCs Marracash and Karkadan. Routinely employing cheeky oriental signifiers, both musicians attack typically racist fantasies of predatory Arab outsiders.
Charlie Bertsch wrote an in-depth piece on Karkadan in Zeek on Tuesday, reflecting on the singer’s significance as a multilingual Tunisian immigrant, playing the role of the ‘Post-European.’ Check out the videos. They do a great job of embellishing the complexity of the MC’s music.
Irrespective of how many times I’ve commissioned articles on Arab musicians, in context, it still feels precedent-setting to run these pieces. Part of that has to do with the poor state of music criticism, in general, in Jewish publications. And part of it has to do with identity politics.
The ideological link, for me, is the original experience of otherness that Jews once had in Europe. The situation of Arab Europeans is unbelievably close. Because of the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, it’s something we tend to forget, precisely when it needs remembering.
Levantine Continuum
You don’t see Arab grocery stores around here like we did in Milan. However, the number of Middle Eastern restaurants and fast food places in this part of Berlin would be enough to make any Italian conservative’s head spin. In Boxhagenerplatz, the square in which we’re temporary ensconced, there are no less than four falafel places, and one doner shop.
The difference, between Friedrichshain and Piazzale Loreto, is an absence of Arabs. The pedestrians are largely European, speaking any number of languages. Though I have heard a higher incidence of Israeli-accented Hebrew, the emphasis is on German and English. One has to go next door, to Kreuzberg, to approximate the oriental vibe of our former home.
Being able to discover a Levantine continuum, this far into eastern Europe, and live within it, definitely has its advantages.
Wild in the Streets
For the last fortnight, I’ve run into this truck on my morning dog walks. Pixel and Raster always stare up at the collection of animals quietly, looking a little perplexed. The driver, a fifty something Arab-looking guy, smiles.
Yesterday, Pixel broke form, and barked repeatedly at the big white tiger. I was unsure as to whether it was because he was the closest to the sidewalk, or because it looked familiar, but didn’t smell particularly alive.
Got My Eye On You
I used to think that London was the capital of European street art. Living in Milan has made me reconsider that assumption. The intensity of the tagging and political postering here is overwhelming.
This detournement, using an anti-military flyer, is located inside a small municipal park a few blocks away from our apartment, on Padova street, in the middle of an Arab-Latino immigrant ‘hood.
Click on the photo for more detail.
The New Anti-Semitism
What do we make of right-wing incitement against Islam in America, and Arab Americans like Rashid Khalidi? Because it is primarily directed at Jews, despite the fact that most find themselves drawn to Obama, how are we to effectively interpret it, and work to minimize it’s potential consequences? Surely there is serious damage being done here.
Such forms of agitation are designed to erect the most vulgar of barriers between peoples, in this case, two American communities, both of whom share roots in the Middle East and bear unique personal witness to that region’s troubles. In the same way that US foreign policy has made it even more difficult to reconcile Jews and Arabs in the Levant, we must recognize that these kinds of practices also tend to inscribe similar kinds of divisions in the Diasporas we share.
Indeed, it is hard to not see in the kind of language used to classify Obama as a Muslim, and Khalidi a terrorist, a perverse desire to bring the war back to the West, and make sure that the same stresses that characterize life in the Middle East also make themselves felt in America as well. It seems that wherever we go, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is inescapable.
-From an article in progress
Jerusalem Nursing Home
There’s a story I never finish. Every year, I write a new draft, and somehow lose it. It’s about visiting my senile grandmother in a nursing home in east Jerusalem in April 1977. Not just any nursing home, but a converted Jordanian army barracks, replete with falling plaster and broken pipes. The works.
At least half the patients are elderly Arab men in wheelchairs. Everyone is speaking a different language, including my Palestinian Jewish grandmother, who, for the first time ever, addresses me in fluent German, while her roommate, a giant Armenian woman, insists over and over again, in French, that she is Napoleon.
Imagine being transported thirty-one years back in time, in London, at an installation by two Chinese artists, at the new Saatchi Gallery on Kings Road. The photograph above says it. all.
American Oriental
The main supermarket in 29 Palms, California, home to the largest Marines base in the U.S.
Back from Iraq, the troops bring home a taste for middle eastern food, American-style.
The new desert couture: three keffiyehs, next to a U.S. flag in a surplus store down the street.
(De)Programming the Middle East
If you live in the US and need to follow events in the Middle East closely, Mosaic is absolutely indispensable. A thirty-minute long aggregation of regional television news programming broadcast on Link TV, the show is the brainchild of award-winning producer Jamal Dajani.
A Jerusalem native, and a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I spoke to Dajani about his work on Mosaic for the March issue of Zeek. What transpires is a fascinating conversation about the state of Middle Eastern media today, and its increasing importance for Americans.
If you enjoy this piece, check out Covering the Coverage, and Left of the Middle East. Short excerpts from my book, they cover much of the same topical ground as my conversation with Dajani, but focus on US and otherwise progressive Western news media instead.