I have long wanted to write an essay “Do My Lovers Have to Understand Umm Kalthoum?”
So this is a start.
Or perhaps: Fuck the Patriarchy and Other Lovers.
The names (and the years) have been changed to protect the innocent.
I started writing about the evocative power of songs because ironically, since the pandemic began, I haven’t been able to listen to lyrics, only instrumentals. And that gave these songs from my past a greater resonance.
I have known foreignness most of my life. My parents knew a rootedness I've never experienced. And Sawwah is a song addressed to them and others like them, wondering so far, with their roots so exposed, so vulnerable. In a strange land. In exile of sorts, exile of the heart.
We used to send cassette tapes from London to my grandparents in Cairo because international phone calls in 1970s were so expensive.
And this Halim song evokes so much of that longing and what I call exile of the heart.
Ansak evokes my anarchist rebelliously unmonogamous heart
This one captures the misery of my teen years in Saudi Arabia. After I wrote this, I sat for a long time with memory and sadness.
I was tempted to find happier memories but what’s the point in censoring memory? It would be propaganda of sorts.
So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia:Iran, that so many white women didn’t pay enough attention to theocracy that white supremacy was building at home theguardian.com/us-news/2024/m…
It was being built by white men who look like their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, not the scary brown men with beards, right?
The same arrogance and naiveté that made so many white Americans think Trump would never become president is same arrogance & naiveté that made so many think "it would never happen here” whether it was destruction of abortion rights:anti-divorce laws feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-ha…
Two months into its genocide in Gaza, the more Israel displays its savagery against Palestinians, the more obvious its moral and philosophical defeat.
Militarily, Israel is armed to the teeth and propped up by the U.S., the world’s most powerful country.
And Israel is losing
The unconscionable vote against ceasefire at the UN yesterday by U.S. & abstention by the UK are reminders that while some western political powers might still be propping up Israel’s crimes,around the world more & more people vehemently oppose the genocide.
Israel is losing
Israel’s crimes are repeatedly being equated w/some of worst genocidal crimes: from ethnic cleansing and genocide in Srebrenica to the cultural genocide of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
It has come at a staggeringly high Palestinian death toll—at least 20,000.
When the NYT is reporting it like this, something is changing
"People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups."
"It is not just the scale of the strikes...Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say."
Some of you will remember that at in Sept. 2012, I was arrested in NYC for spray painting over an Islamophobic and racist pro-Israel ad.
Notice the language of the ad and how it continues to echo today. 📷 Kristy Leibowitz
Anytime you see the words “civilized” and “savage” being used, understand that the purpose is dehumanization.
I refused to allow that dehumanization to exist without challenge on the walls of the subway that I and millions of New Yorkers use.
We who oppose Israel are not savages and there are more options than Israel/Jihad. And if it makes me a savage to oppose that option, if it makes me a savage to support Palestinian freedom from apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, then I am a proud savage.
The wife of the Illinois landlord who stabbed to death Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6yo Muslim Palestinian-American boy, told investigators the man "listens to conservative talk radio on a regular basis" and became obsessed with the war between Hamas & Israel nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s…
The landlord also the boy's mother, Hanaan Shahin, a dozen times while she was trying to protect her son and call for help.
The man was screaming "you Muslims have to die" when he barged into the ground-floor apartment the mother and son shared in suburban Plainfield.
A friend of the family said the landlord--71-year-old Joseph Czuba--shouted: "You are killing our kids in Israel. You Palestinians don’t deserve to live."