Subjects Archives: Literature

To Rom, and Parichehr Today I met Iranians who don’t hate Arabs. They smiled and said “hey, selam,” even knowing I was Arab. They didn’t have green eyes, yet they seemed to bear up pretty well without them, and they don’t fault Arabs, not all of us, at least, for Nahavand, and the bloody flare-up […]

  A talk delivered at the conference “The Left in Palestine/The Palestinian Left,” School of Oriental and African Studies, London, 28 February 2010 This talk is dedicated to the memory of my late friend and comrade, the Arab Marxist Jabra Nicola (1912-74). The terms “Right” and “Left” as used in Israel are misleading: they do […]

  Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008.  x + 493 pp.  $45.00 U.S. (cl).  ISBN 978- 0691124988. Michael Sonenscher begins, “This is a book about the sans-culottes and the part that they played in the French Revolution” (p. 1).  Actually, there are no revolutionary sans-culottes […]

Johannesburg, 11 March 2010 (IRIN) — Most food crop cultivation in Africa is rain-fed, but climate change is affecting vital rainfall patterns and pushing up temperatures, diminishing yields that could halve in some countries by 2020.  This warning has been widely quoted since it first appeared in a synthesis report for policy-makers in 2007 by […]

  The white man called you Bhagat Singh that day, The black man calls you Naxalite today. But everyone will call you the morning star tomorrow. — Excerpt from the Telugu poem ‘Final Journey: First Victory’ by Sri Sri 1 It has been a long and tortuous route.  Forty-three years ago, a group of Maoist […]

  In a deserted place in Iran there is a stone tower, not very high, without any door or windows.  In its only room (whose floor is dirt and whose shape is a circle) are a wooden table and a bench.  In this circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing, in letters […]

Introduction by Geoffrey Gunn It is probably a cliché to observe that tropical rain forests host the greatest known concentrations of bio-diversity on the planet.  Together, the three great global equatorial biozones are central Africa, the Amazon basin, and the Indonesian archipelago, including southern Sumatra Island, and the even more remote tin-rich offshore island of […]

  For Gabriel Péri and d’Estiennes d’Orves, as well as Guy Moquet and Gilbert Dru The one who believed in heaven The one who didn’t Both loved a beauty Imprisoned by soldiers Which climbed the ladder? Which stood guard below? The one who believed in heaven? The one who didn’t? What matters the name of […]

  Kids Love Peace Outdoors ICY and SOT are artists in Tabriz, Iran.  More videos by ICY and SOT may be viewed at <vimeo.com/icyandsot>. | | Print  

  The office workers did not know, plodding through 1963 and Marshall Square station in Johannesburg, that you would dart down the street between them, thinking the police would never fire into the crowd. Sargeant Kleingeld did not know, as you escaped his fumbling hands and the pistol on his hip, that he would one […]

World-renowned political organizer and one of Africa’s most celebrated poets, Dennis Brutus, died early on December 26 in Cape Town, in his sleep, aged 85. Even in his last days, Brutus was fully engaged, advocating social protest against those responsible for climate change, and promoting reparations to black South Africans from corporations that benefited from […]

The nuclear dispute between Iran and the United States is heating up. Iran made its proposal on December 12, having been in negotiation with the US and other powers since October 1.  Iran proposed exchanging 400 kilograms of its 3.5 percent enriched uranium for an equivalent amount of 20 percent enriched uranium to be used […]

Allow me to make a few points about the current international negotiations which are likely to make a huge impact on the future of the planet.  At the heart of the issue is the trade off that has to be made between those who want to continue on a path of exploitation and the protesters […]

“The more a ruling class is able to assimilate the foremost minds of the ruled class, the more stable and dangerous becomes its rule.” — Karl Marx A few days back, I received a ‘Dear friends’ email from Mr. Najam Sethi, ex editor-in-chief of Daily Times, Pakistan, announcing that he, together with several of his […]

  Dina A. Amin.  Alfred Farag and Egyptian Theater: The Poetics of Disguise, With Four Short Plays and a Monologue.  Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xxx + 321 pp. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3163-7. This urgently needed book is an investigation of Egyptian theatre through the works of the preeminent Egyptian playwright Alfred Farag (1929-2005), during […]

(for Hafiz) The stillest fall of all is the fall from grace.  No louder than a feather falling in a forest, and yet we fall.  There are many ways to kill a man.  Gun and knife will work well but to make a man irrelevant will also do, and what better way to ignore an […]

  Rauda Morcos has every right to hate the press.  On July 2003, the Israeli newspaper Yedeot Ahronot interviewed Morcos about her poetry but also announced to the world that she was a lesbian. Following the public outing, Rauda Morcos’ car windows were smashed, the tires punctured, and she received countless threatening phone calls and […]

  “Would it not be better to administer euthanasia?” Enrique Lacoste Prince is a Cuban cartoonist based in Havana. Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi [at] gmail.com). | | Print

  I don’t want to serve. . . .  I think that in fighting in the cinema, through our movies, for a freer, more authentic expression, with weapons that can include joie de vivre and comedy, we are waging the same war as those who fight on the barricades. — Dušan Makavejev (1971) Infamous Yugoslavian […]

  Come one, come all Down to the hall We’re gonna make noise We’re gonna bust balls We’re gonna disrupt We’re gonna jump in the fray I got a list of all the things that we’re supposed to say We’re gonna get real rowdy Have a barrel of fun But we’re the USA, so by […]