RR

April 2020

View of Tripoli. Photo by Nur Turkmani I write this the night before Ramadan, from my home in Tripoli. A night where families in Tripoli would have otherwise gathered at mosques to pray, gone to supermarkets to stack up on dates and almonds, visited neighbors and discussed what desserts they would prepare for the first iftar. Instead, people are desperate and angry. I see it right in front of me — in my mother’s face, as she tries to create some semblance of Ramadan by turning on old white plastic lamps. In my brother’s scrunched up face and tired eyes,

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Gabriella remembers watching President Michel Aoun’s first speech after October 17, the first day of the 2019 protests in Lebanon, and being stunned by the absurdity of his discourse. Since then, her pop art illustrations have parodied Lebanon's ruling elite - from the melting away of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri to the bankrupt Banque du Liban. With the world coming to a pause, Gabriella yearns to return to the streets, especially when she watches the news.

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Introduction In 1967, Palestinian photographers and filmmakers Salafa Jadallah, Mustapha Abu Ali, and Hani Jawhariyah came together in Amman to create the Photography Section in the Fatah Information Office and a year later started a film collective known as the Palestine Film Unit.((Rona Sela, “Seized in Beirut: The Plundered Archives of the Palestinian Cinema Institution and Cultural Arts Section,” Anthropology of the Middle East 12, no. 1 (Summer 2017): 89.)) After the Black September civil war that resulted in the expulsion of the PLO by the King Hussein regime, the Film Unit followed the PLO to Beirut.((Nadia Yaqub, Palestinian Cinema in

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"New Country" by Melissa Chimera Death has nothing to do with going away Rumi     This rainy Honolulu morning after a stormflooded our stream nearby and rainhammered the trees into the mud,the wind taking it all, or so it seems,I think of you, my friend, what you saidof night birds and turbulence, finally,of home: I want to run across the Green Line((The Green line refers to the geographical dividing line between east and west Beirut during the fifteen civil war.))until only the air they breathe divides them.And then of Gilbert, how you lovedthose floating islands of poems,the current that flows

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