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There is a concept coined by the Lebanese writer Walid Sadek which denotes a present endlessly postponed by the lack of pasts and futures. He calls it “the protracted now.” Since discovering it in his "The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War" (Motto Books & Taipei Biennial, 2016), I have been carrying it around with me, like an overweight suitcase that I would rather check in at the nearest counter than have with me as the plane flies over fictional borders that harm non-fictional people. During the flight, it is checked in and, in those few hours, past and

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Wonderland IV by Beatriz Morales Last year, my original plan: to come to America,But lack of money for passage stopped me         until early autumn.On the Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon,I boarded the President Lincoln.I ate sea wind and tasted waves for more than twenty days,But luckily, arrived unharmed.I thought a few days and I’d be on the dock,Little did I know of the suffering in the wood house.The barbarians’ harsh treatment really difficult to accept,Thinking of my family finances, a double stream of tears.Yet, I hope to enter San Francisco soon,Avoid living in

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I put down Laura Johanna Braverman’s poetry collection, Salt Water, and lay in bed thinking, “Is it possible for something to be contrived and honest at the same time?”   This book touched me greatly. I cried many cathartic tears with her as I lived, through her words, an experience of immigration that is familiar to me, and will be familiar to so many others. Braverman writes, “I realise/ in the strange, simple way an insight/ that should have been obvious/ all along suddenly ripens/ and drops from the tree:/ I am the fruit of exile”, and I nod, having realised the

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ريما رنتيسي ترجمته من الإنكليزيّة زينة الحلبي عبرت الزّمن لكون هون - الصّورة لزينة الحلبي جلست في رواق شقتي في الطابق الخامس حيث كان بإمكاني التقاط الانترنت من جيراني في الطابق الثالث. كانوا قد أعطوني كلمة السرّ لأنهم اعتبروني من العائلة، خصوصاً وأنني في سنتي الثالثة في بيروت، كنت لا أزال غير قادرة على إتمام أي معاملة رسمية، كتأمين خط هاتف مثلاً. أرسلتُ لكاثرين التي كانت في شيكاغو آنذاك، رسالة نصية عاجلة أقول فيها إنني غير قادرة على التحدّث معها عبر سكايب لأنني في الرواق، وإنّ صدى صوتي قد يتسلّل إلى عتبة جارتي المجنونة ويجتاز المزار الذي نصبَتْه لجميع القدّيسين،

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"Tell Me Again" by Heather Asaad Dreamers, before they lived a life of shadows,a short life but long years of chasing fear,before they found a room, sunblinds on windows,an L-shaped desk, a home they know is here, were children young as – most commonly – three,with fringes, hairslides, hair too soft to hold them,two hundred words in their vocabularyand shapes of sentences in which to mould them: sentence shapes like cradles for dolls to dream in,like railway tracks and bridges, tunnels, sidings,paradigms for journeys, returns and crossings, first languages, half-formed, dropped at a borderDreamers crossed and were

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    The first film by an Arab woman to be selected and screened at the Cannes film festival in 1974, Saat El Tahrir Dakkat (The Hour of Liberation Has Arrived) by Heiny Srour, chronicles the anti-colonial struggle of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (al-Jabhah al-Sha'abiyah li-Tahrir 'Uman wa-al-Khalij al-'Arabi, PFLOAG). Srour's documentary closed the last edition of the Lebanese Film Festival and was recently screened in New York as part of a series focusing on the theme of decolonization in cinema.   The film's opening sequence sets the stage by pitting the voices of a guerrilla

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Photo by Nour Annan In the absence of state-monitored public transportation, van #4 operates as a privately-owned informal “public transit” in Beirut. The van’s route begins all the way from the Lebanese University’s campus in Hadath to Hamra, carrying over 50,000 passengers a day.    I am picked up in Chiyah, next to the wall with bullet ears. This route has it all: burnt tires, an abandoned building calling out the names of dead dogs, wildflowers caught in gust. We are an unlicensed and unregistered van carrying one city. The door won’t slide and hajji has her toes stretched into air. It’s

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In its 10th edition, the biennial Ayam Beirut Al Cinema’iya took place from March 29 to April 6, 2019. The film festival has showcased, fostered, and defended Arab films made and conceived independently, however vague a definition that might be, for the past twenty years. Middle Eastern cinema has historically struggled on two fronts: the domestic one, in the fight against censorship; and the far more insidious international one. In the artistic flight from poor or inexistent funding and distribution circuits that favor commercial cinema (from either Egypt or the US), Arab filmmakers in many cases have had to rely

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