Operation Protective Edge
by Paul Wessels. The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, Philip Weiss (Eds) Nation Books, 2011 On Thursday 24 July 2014 I held a readathon of the abridged version of the “Goldstone Report”, at Rhodes University. I sold it as a Mandela Week event to get […]
Portrait of the Artist as a Daughter
by Ed Pavlić. “Where material is absent, dialectics is groundless.” – James Snead, “On Repetition in Black Culture” “For me to go find my father,” writes Harmony Holiday, “has meant to fall in love or infatuation with black artists who are a lot like him. This search morphs from being about one man, to being about […]
Licking Dirty Hands
by David Shook. In the tradition of German poet Heimrad Bäcker, who turned quotations from the Holocaust into poetry, French poet Frank Smith has re-appropriated the official Combatant Status Review Tribunal transcripts from Guantanamo Bay, released to The Associated Press by order of a US judge in 2006. Like Bäcker, Smith seeks to emotionalise the de-emotionalised […]
Undoing the Spell
by Ben Verghese. Many of the dominant narratives of the partition focus on events in 1947 – easy-to-caricature leaders, the two-nation theory and the birth of Pakistan. How then do we find ways to duly speak of one land mass being forcibly carved up; of the multiple peoples displaced; of the umpteen lives lost, and uncountable, […]
The Undeveloped Intellectual in Zombie-land
by Ibrahim Farghali. This is Rakha’s second novel after his début, The Book of the Sultan’s Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars, in which he addressed the identity crisis created in Egyptian society by Wahhabism, which was imported into the country by Egyptians who went to work in Saudi Arabia in the […]