Arwa Ibrahim

Breaking Poems

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:44:00 +0000

In her third book of poetry, award-winning Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad explores the resilience of women’s bodies across borders in a fluid set of poems entitled Breaking Poems. Hammad embraces life at the border, refusing to translate her identity to fit a bounded-identity construct of what it means to be Palestinian or American. She uses a diasporic language, blending anglicized Palestinian Arabic with English. She fuses cultures, dropping names of inspirational figures like Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

Exploring the theme that wars are fought on women’s bodies, Hammad writes, “in gaza still flesh is ashed/wa smoked wa denied/a women’s chest caves in/smoke escapes legs.” (Wa means "and" in Arabic). In fact, the violence in Gaza is a constant topic in her poetry, summoning us to act and react as she evokes images of exploded bodies, rubble in place of homes, and empty stomachs. She connects the experiences of women in New Orleans to Gaza, capturing the resilience of women’s bodies as they encounter multiple forms of violence.

Breaking poems is also about breaking with old identity constructs. Hammad undergoes a personal transformation as she finds it impossible to fit into fixed and bounded notions of identity. Instead, she embraces border identities that are contradictory, fluid, and multi-sited. She refers to herself as “translinear me” and allows herself to exist simultaneously across time and space as a young girl in Deheisha to a woman in Beirut to a refugee in Brooklyn. “We lived there once my parents sisters and me,” she writes about Beirut. “I left my skin there still boiling.” Beginning to find home in change, Hammad writes:

sometimes I leave my body wa I leave my country wa my religion sometimes leaving is my religion.

Hammad also offers up the poem as the space for home, writing, “Poem is my body my language my country.” By exploring transnational and border identities, Hammad joins the ranks of women like Gloria Anzaldúa, Uma Narayan, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ella Shohat, and Nadine Naber.

Hammad’s poetry is never conventional; she plucks words that evoke the sensations of sight, smell, and touch. She induces feeling and meaning by convincing the reader that her words describe their memories. Nuanced and complex, breaking poems explores a new space in twenty-first century poetry.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, March 29th 2009

Things I’ve Been Silent About

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:47:00 +0000

By Azar Nafisi

Random House

Things I’ve Been Silent About is the second memoir for bestselling author Azar Nafisi. Offering a larger lens into her life than Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi tells her life’s story and the story of her country of Iran. Interspersed throughout her memories are references to poems and novels that had a profound impact on her, as well as memories of revolts and protests preceding and following the Iranian revolution.

A captivating theme in Nafisi’s memoir is the interwoven relationship between myth and reality. When the realities of Nafisi’s life are illogical, irrational, and uncontrollable, she retreats to the world of fiction. As a child, she finds comfort and escape from her severely depressed mother in the stories she creates. She constantly has her head in a book, obsessed with ancient tales and, eventually, modern literature. Fiction is the reliable fixture that offers a comforting presence in her life. Her mother’s mythical versions of reality—which she tyrannically imposes upon her family—make Nafisi’s quest for truth more urgent. Her quest expands as a result of the seemingly nonsensical nature of post-Revolution Iran, which saw the promise of equality replaced by the rise of authoritarianism and the depletion of women’s rights.

Nafisi’s memoirs hold true to the saying that the personal is political. She tells the history of the Iranian Revolution through her story. These profound insights are weakened by the battle she continuously wages with her mother’s ghost. The magnitude of resentment and unresolved issues towards her mother that she writes about threaten to make an otherwise powerful story into an unreadable epic of self-pity.

The memoir is also weakened by Nafisi’s profuse obsession with proving her critics wrong—the same literary critics that found Reading Lolita in Tehran to be an orientalist work relying on Western stereotypes to portray Iran. She goes to great haste to strengthen her father’s political stances; she too often repeats his love of Iran, critique of the Shah’s regime, and desire for revolution. Yet she never acknowledges that her family’s economic and political privileges situate them in a less vulnerable position than many other Iranians. Instead, she portrays herself as the victim and the martyr at many points in her life.

However, the dynamic relationships between myth and reality—and the personal and political—are the redeeming factors that ultimately make Things I’ve Been Silent About an enlightening and moving memoir.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, March 25th 2009

Creating a World Without Poverty

admin — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 17:38:00 +0000

By Muhammad Yunus

Public Affairs

He’s known as the “Banker to the Poor.” He pioneered the concept of microcredit: providing modest loans to poor entrepreneurs to allow them to move out of poverty. And for these efforts, most know him as the winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. In Creating a World Without Poverty, Muhammad Yunus tells the story of why he founded the microcredit organization Grameen Bank, and how it has evolved over time to adapt to the changing needs of Bangladesh’s poor citizens. Yet unlike his first book Banker to the Poor, Yunus directly situates Grameen Bank and the concept of microcredit in the field of social business—a “new kind of business” in pursuit of social goals with limited personal gain. No, social business is not the PR dream that multi-national corporations hide behind, according to Yunus. Social business, he feels, is the solution to the global poverty crisis.

Well, is it? The answer lies in Yunus’ analysis of our current global economic crisis. He points to free market economics for failing to address growing social problems. Yet don’t expect him to look solely to government, nonprofits, or multilateral organizations for the solution. Governments can be corrupt, inefficient, and are prone to power politics, according to Yunus. Nonprofits rely on a stream of limited and unreliable donations. Multilateral organizations such as The World Bank are bureaucratic and self-serving. Instead, Yunus believes wholeheartedly in social business. The pursuit of profit should be coupled with the intent to increase social good. Moreover, the poor should have some ownership of microcredit organizations—like Grameen—who loan to them. In this way, Yunus believes that social business can operate in the capitalist system, just so long as it’s regulated, reformed, and fair.

Yunus’ analysis, which captures the severity of the current conditions and holds corporations accountable, is well-founded. However, his solution is contradictory. While he argues that it is conflicting for businesses to pursue profit maximization and social benefits, he admits that his model of social business encourages the pursuit of profit in order to repay investors and expand social efforts. Moreover, he encourages corporations like Danone to start offshoot social businesses—like Grameen Danone—without acknowledging the contradiction in creating a social business while maintaining a vast profit maximizing corporation.

Other potential pitfalls arise. How can social business succeed and eventually overpower the profit maximizing business model, simply through the belief that people want to do good? Even with a global environmental and economic crisis before us, the systems of power will continue to benefit from exploitative and destructive profit maximization practices. They will not reform on their own, regardless of whether their CEOs believe in the inherent need to create positive change or not. Let’s not forget the words of Fredrick Douglass that “power concedes nothing without a demand.” The type of change Yunus writes of—substantive positive change—cannot arise in a global economic system that is fundamentally flawed. It will not come from a relatively small number of wealthy entrepreneurs and corporations who seek to serve the poor, but from the majority the world’s ordinary people that rise up to demand a real change—accepting nothing less. While Creating a World Without Poverty is an informative introduction into alternative theories of poverty reduction, Yunus fails to prove his claim that the social business model is the solution to poverty.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, March 13th 2009

I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody

admin — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 13:18:00 +0000

By Sinan Antoon

City Lights Books

Sinan Antoon’s novel I’jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody brilliantly portrays the complex impacts of political repression on humanity. It takes the form of a fictionalized compilation of interpreted handwritten prose of an Iraqi college student as he is held and tortured in a prison during the reign of the Ba’th regime in the 1980s. In the introduction of the novel, the reader is told that the Ministry of the Interior in Baghdad came across a handwritten “un-dotted” manuscript that an individual has "clarified" by dotting and inserting diacritics. Antoon points out that half of the twenty-eight letters in the Arabic alphabet are pairs or triplets with the same skeleton. They indicate different sounds by the varying number and location of “dots” above or below the letter. The word “I’jaam,” found in the title, literally means the “dotting” of Arabic script, but has come to signify something that produces a “clarifying” effect. And, thus, Antoon sets up the prose as "found text" written by a prisoner that government personnel have interpreted and made available to the public.

Antoon’s introduction is remarkable in its ability to blur fact and fiction and encourage the reader to become conscious of the politics of memory, story and interpretation. The reader wonders throughout: What meanings have disappeared or changed because of the “dotting” of the script and the political motivations of the interpreter? Which of these prisoner’s memories are true, and which are hallucinations of an under-fed and tortured captive? Most importantly, Antoon propels the reader to question their own need to distinguish between fact and fiction. He illustrates that life under a repressive political regime often means the inability to differentiate between reality, fiction, time and space.

Antoon writes with an illustrious and brash poetic style that moves the reader in profound ways. We not only understand, but feel the fear, frustration and helplessness that come to claim every inch of an oppressed person’s existence. “To live here means to piss away three quarters of your life waiting,” he writes, “Waiting for things that rarely come…waiting so long that you drown in time, because time itself is a fugitive citizen, trembling with fear and stumbling on the sidewalk, only to be pissed and spat upon by a merciless History.” It is not difficult to read passages like this, which were written in the context of the Ba’th regime, and apply them to the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. The passing of time has only increased the relevancy of this text to current political crises.

The real brilliance of this novel comes from Antoon’s ability to illustrate the tense relationship between culture, history and oppression with subtlety and potency. The narrator struggles to keep his passion for poetry and literature alive as the government attempts to regulate which forms of expression are acceptable and which are not. His obsession with the banned Iraqi poets al-Jawarihi and Muzaffar al-Nawwab illustrates oppressive regimes’ ability to deaden the humanity of the people. Ba’th party slogans and sayings of Saddam Hussein are interwoven with personal experiences and demonstrate the discrepancy between the rhetoric of the regime and the reality of life in Iraq. Ultimately, Antoon’s poetic expression of this dichotomy is his greatest strength as he powerfully unearths the deadening impact of oppression.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, June 8th 2007

Zaatar Days, Henna Nights: Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations across the Middle East

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:14:00 +0000

By Maliha Masood

Seal Press

Pakistani-American Maliha Masood needed a change in her life. She resigns from her lackluster job, cashes in her savings and books a one-way ticket to Paris. While in Europe, her strong desire for adventure and self-discovery propels her to hop on a flight to Cairo, Egypt, but the journey does not stop there. In Zaatar Days, Henna Nights, Masood recounts the literal and metephorical journey she takes across the Middle East, living in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. She describes, with harrowing detail, her experiences riding Cairo's bustling subway system, floating in Jordan's Dead Sea, roaming around Damascus' old city, strolling down Beirut's posh commercial streets, praying in Aleppo's Great Mosque and laying in the sand of Turkey's Patara beach. Yet Masood is certainly not your average tourist. Instead of isolating herself in luxurious hotels while solely visiting popular sites, she forces herself to become immersed in the varying cultures by renting apartments in average neighborhoods in which she must communicate in order to survive.

Masood always finds room to write about the specifics. The reader cannot help but feel as if they are walking and sitting alongside her, smelling the various spices in the souq (Middle Eastern marketplace) and feeling the anxiety that comes when one cannot rely on language to haul themselves out of a sticky situation. While the details are important, Masood's profound insights are the jewels of this text. She struggles with the privilege of being a tourist, especially when she opens her eyes to the widespread poverty that often surrounds her. She elaborates on insider versus outsider tensions, religious versus cultural practices, language as a social bond and a barrier, Western ideas about the Middle East and vice-versa, among other things.

Ultimately, this text is a personal and spiritual quest in an attempt to transcend duality. As a Pakistani-American, Masood writes that “[duality] seems to be the thesis of my life,” and she often divides her identity into her Eastern and Western selves. However, her travels open her up to the possibility that we are all more alike than we assume, that perhaps we share common desires and hopes. The readers of Zaatar Days, Henna Nights will certainly come away with more than a tourists gaze of the Middle East. They will understand its vast variations, complexities, and subtleties in a way that only a person with both insider and outsider status (like Masood) is fortunate and brave enough to experience.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, April 13th 2007