RANDA JARRAR

I watched Bergman’s Persona last night. I’d started reading this Sontag essay about it, then decided to see it first.

While I was watching it, I noticed that I was squinting and sitting the way I squint and sit when I’m reading a book. Because of its imagery and monologous nature, I felt like I was reading a book.

It’s a film about two women: one, an actor who has refused to speak, the other, her nurse. It was really sexy, despite the fact that there was no overt erotica between them.

It’s mostly focused on doubles, but it’s also a film about voyeurism, and in addressing our need to possess what we “study,” what we watch, it turns voyeurism on its head. In one scene, the mute woman rises from the bottom of the frame and takes a photograph of us. In another, the nurse tells her about two peeping toms who’d spied on her and another woman while they were sunbathing. The women end up “raping” the peeping toms. It’s as though someone put voyeurism itself in front of a mirror.

In one of my favorite scenes, the nurse tells the mute woman they could be each other. But you couldn’t fit, she tells the actress, “your spirit is too big: it would stick out all over the place.”

The following is a call for submissions from a dear friend, Hayan Charara:

I am compiling an anthology of contemporary Arab-American poetry that a major university press has expressed interest in publishing. The anthology is intended to be a comprehensive collection of Arab-American poetry.

To be considered for inclusion in the anthology, contributors and contributions must meet two criteria: (1) Contributors must be of Arab descent, and (2) original poems must be written in English, i.e., no translations.

“Arab-American” themes or subject matter are welcomed but not required. Previously published material is preferred.

While I have many poetry collections written by Arab-American poets, I do not have all of them. Please consider sending books (photocopies or printed manuscripts are welcomed) so that I have a complete and up-to-date sampling of your work. Email submissions are accepted, but hard copies are preferred. Any books sent will be returned if requested (please include SASE with sufficient postage). Otherwise, submissions will not be returned–please do not send your only copy.

The press would like to see a manuscript of the anthology in the fall. To accommodate this, and to ensure a top-notch manuscript, deadline for submission is to September 15, 2005.

Inquires and/or email submissions should be sent to:

hayan.charara@sbcglobal.net

Hard copy submissions should be sent to:

Hayan Charara
Editor, Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry
4905 Avenue G
Austin, TX 78751

Remember to include a SASE for reply.

Finally, please pass this message on to anyone who may be interested or may be able to spread the word. Thanks.

You be the judge.

The Guild of Book Workers has put together a gorgeous installation whose theme is flight. It’s at the HRC right now, so if you’re in Austin, check it out. If not, you can go to the site and check out the works individually. Here are my favorites:

Mimi Shapiro
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
The Poet’s Dream: I loved the idea of a dream being a machine for flight, the way a book can be sometimes.

Melissa Jay Craig
Chicago, Illinois
Night Flight (to Bright Lights): I thought this was perty, kind of remided me of being a teenager. I was into Iridescence and flight, especially from my second story window on the weekend.

Mary Howe
Stonington, Maine
ABZ Bees: I liked this concept (“Maine beekeepers overthrow a 2002 decision by the US Postal Service to end live bee shipments”), as well as the organization. I loved the workmanship on the individual bees.

Sarah M. Smith
Salem, Massachusetts
Awful Disclosures (Letterpress Broadside): This was my favorite, totally hilarious: “Absurd trial of a moth caught in flight, written by the artist in the style of 18th & 19th century dying speeches”. I love the jumpy font switches, the dying speeches model, and the silliness of the situation, as well as the prose. Very cool.

From The New Criterion:

If it were true that the balkanization of literature was justified by the supposition that only people who belonged to a certain category of people could truly understand, write about, interpret, and sympathize with the experiences of people in that same category, so that, for example, only women could write about women for women, and only blacks about blacks for blacks (the very careers of many academics now depending upon such a supposition), how was it possible that a Church of England vicar had been able, actually without much difficulty, to persuade a feminist publishing house that he wrote as a woman, and as a Muslim woman of Indian subcontinental origin at that? Was he not in fact telling us, as presumably a good Christian should, that mankind is essentially one, and that if we make a sufficient effort we too can enter into the worlds of others who are in many ways different from ourselves?

You must read this.

Fucking finally.

Taken together, and watched in the order they were made, the films reveal the cyclical nature of history, which seems to repeat itself even as it moves forward. Democracies swell into empires, empires are toppled by revolutions, fathers abandon their sons and sons find their fathers. Movies end. Life goes on.

That’s seriously one of the most beautiful paragraph I’ve read in a movie review. What film is it talking about? Ahem.

Read the rest of the review.

I took my kid to Bookpeople Saturday, and he disappeared promptly after we entered the store. I stayed calm and picked up a few titles to peruse in the rocking chair in the kid’s section (my usual post at Bookpeople). These titles included the new Bee Lavender book, Wendy’s book, I’m Not The New Me, a Patricia Highsmith bio in which there’s a photo of her topless (purrrrr…will try to find the photo and post it one day), and a copy of Bitch magazine. Then I went hunting for the cub.

I found him 3 minutes later sitting in a chair and listening to a reading. The authors were a husband and wife team, a writer and illustrator of children’s books about Native American kids and their horses. The husband was drawing a picture of a horse. It looked like a deranged dinosaur. But my son nodded, and whispered, “it looks so cool!” helistened to the author read from her book, and closed his eyes to imagine the scenes.

After the reading, I flipped through my books and my kid flipped through his comics. A few minutes later, he looked up and said, “Why don’t you write a book about us?” “You mean a children’s book about you?” “NO, like, a diary about us?” “Because one day, you’ll be grown up and it’ll make you mad that I wrote about you.” “No way! I want you to write about me. It would be cool. Write about the stuff we do together.”

These days I have been alternatively disheartened and charged up about writing. My friend Alaa, who lives in Cairo, read my novel and loved it. He wrote a post about it in Arabic, which made me cry. While I was writing my book, I was suffering from the “inauthenticity” issue that a lot of Arab Americans go through (“I’m not a real Arab. Who am I writing for?” etc.) Over time, I slowly stopped worrying about people who slung the inauthenticity rock. Most of those people were just voices in my head, anyway.

Still, it’s reassuring to know an Egyptian friend in Cairo liked, and related to, my novel. A real relief.

These things are related somehow, I promise: my kid and the authenticity and the writing and all that. Because I’ve always felt so in between, in all senses of the word, but especially when I start a novel, which I am doing now. I struggle between writing something completelly fictional, and something completely autobiographical. With the first one, I found a good balance. I guess I am having a hard time trusting myself to find that balance again. But I’ve always struggled with the fact that I write things that are semi-autobiographical, or that could be perceived as such, because then it may give others the excuse to pull the rug from under me and expose me as a fraud, because, since I write things that I draw from my real life experiences, I am not a real writer. Or because I am American, I am not Arab. Or because I am Arab, I am not American. Or because I am a single mom, I am not interested in success. This is all simply not true. I am learning to see what is, and repeat it to myself, daily. Lately I have been dreaming that I am riding a bicycle. In my waking life, I am also searching for a good balance.

I’m over at Moorish Girl today and every Friday, so stop by and say hi.

I thought this was a story from the ONION, but apparently it’s for real:

Swedish-based home furnishings giant IKEA has been strongly slammed by a Scandinavian leader for being “sexist” in its self-assembly manuals. The company has been told by Norway’s Prime Minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik, to stop using so many images of men in its instruction leaflets. He reportedly rejected the company’s argument that it did not want to offend Muslims by depicting women building beds, sofas and bookcases. “This isn’t good enough,” he told a local paper. “It’s important to promote attitudes for sexual equality, not least in Muslim nations.”

The store’s colorful and detailed catalogue is printed in over 20 languages and circulates in over 30 countries, including Kuwait, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Malaysia. …

Assembling an IKEA piece can be just as great a challenge for men as for women, the Norwegian leader had said. “I myself have great problems with screwing together such furniture.”

Dude.

We had an IKEA when I was growing up in Kuwait. On the nights we were broke, my dad would drive us out to it in our smoking Olds — it really was smoking, I think part of it was perpetually on fire– and deposit my brother and me at the “ball pit.” Then, he and my mother would proceed to stare longingly at furnishings while my brother and I licked plastic and dove to the bottom of the pit, for hours.

No word on whether my parents discussed who would screw together the furniture. You know, worded differently, that sentence could have turned out really, really nasty.