RANDA JARRAR

In this month’s Harper’s, Robyn Creswell, a comp lit doctoral candidate at NYU, reviews six Mahmoud Darwish poetry collections in translation.  I really appreciated the review’s depth, analysis, and comprehensive understanding of Arabic poetry in general and Palestinian politics and poetry in particular.  It’s really worth a read.  One of my favorite parts of the review:

In [Memory for Forgetfullness], Darwish imagines that he is visited by an old friend, a PLO representative assassinated in Paris… Darwish asks him what life is like in the afterlife. “It’s just like here,” the ghost shrugs. The weather is hot and humid, just like August in Beirut.  In the afterlife they watch television all day too, mostly the news, trying to keep up to date on the progress of the siege. …A peculiarly Palestinian humor is at work in this scene, in which the afterlife, rather than providing the houris and comforts of paradise, turns out to be just another case of airport ennui.”

It was -5 degrees last night.  I bought a mini palm tree from Staples an hour ago, and wondered what I must have looked like heaving its artificial green leafiness through the white snow, an unchanging grey sky as my backdrop.  I was not cut out for this weather.  But then again, is any human being?  I keep thinking about how beautiful Spring and Summer will be.  I try not to dwell on the sad current events.  I look forward to the future, even though I know the pretty seasons don’t last.  They provide the weary with a much needed snow-cease-fire.  Cease-snow?

Ari Folman, the director of the animated film, Waltz with Bashir, which I just can not wait to see, is interviewed in the NYT Sunday Magazine.  It’s a great piece; here’s an excerpt:
Israelis are divided, definitely, but I think you hear too much of the louder voices that always justify any kind of act of aggression. But there is a very big crowd of people who are fed up with war. I can’t understand the word “war” anyhow.

What can’t you understand?
I can’t understand people killing each other for a piece of land. Can you understand that?

Israel’s founding generation didn’t seem to harbor ambivalence about war.
They were survival wars. They were about the existence of the country, and they were influenced tremendously by the Holocaust. But the Lebanon War had nothing to do with survival.

It was a military exception?
It was not an exception. It was a turning point in the relationship between the Israeli leadership and the people, who realized for the first time that war can be declared just for political reasons.

Read the rest here, and read about the film here.

I got a flying mermaid figure from Bali for my birthday.  She’s super special and I have a feeling she will be a sort of muse for my new project.  You can get a glimpse of the kind of work I’ve been doing since I finished A Map of Home when the Oxford American‘s February issue comes out.  I’ll update you again about it, but just wanted to mention it now in case y’all need to renew your subscriptions!

Palestinian life is not worth much to the world.  Neither is African life, or Iraqi life.  Funny, since all three have a wealth of natural resources in common.  There’s a link here, and until we wake up and call our government out on its blindness to and participation in genocide, the blood is on our hands.

As I write this, 30 people, many of them kids, were just killed in an Israeli strike on a UN school.  The weapons used were paid for by your tax dollars.

What is happening in Gaza today is a huge and incomparable tragedy.  There are no two sides to it.  There is Israel and its complete refusal to acknowledge the Palestinians as humans with rights.  We as American citizens fund several nations, including Israel and Egypt, that treat the people living on their soil worse than dogs.  That is the sad truth.  Hamas, which was originally created by Israel, is stupid to send fart-weak missiles into Israel.  But Israel is even stupider to think that massacring innocent civilians will make its own borders safe or its future strong.

I’m not sure what blogging does for the 800,000 children living in Gaza right now, but I do know that they need our help.  Send donations, big or small, to