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Letter to Nefertiti // by Sana Tannoury Karam

"I am jealous of my senses. The air is the colour of gardenias, your smell on my shoulders like laughter and triumphal arches. I am jealous of the peaceful daggers lying sheathed before you on the table, waiting for a sign from you to kill me. I am jealous of the vase, which has no need of its yellow roses because you give it the full benefit of your deep red lips, hungry for my hunger. I am jealous of the painting staring greedily at you: look longer at me, so I too can have my fill of lakes and cherry orchards. I am envious of the foliage on the rug, straining upwards to see an anklet descending on it from above, and of the anklet when it rests on your knee, making the marble in the room as hot as my fantasies. I am envious of the bookshop that is out of sorts because it doesn't carry an erotic book in praise of two small ivory hills, bared before it to a frenzy of guitars, then hidden by a wave of sighing silk. I am envious of my fingers catching the dialogue of darkness and light as it overflows from your hands, the movement of a spoon in your teacup, the salts stirred up in a body that yearns for a storm to spark the fire of song: gather me up, all of you, and hold me close so I can envy my memories of you in the future. I envy my tongue, which calls your name with as much care as someone carrying four crystal glasses in one hand. I taste the letters of your name one by one, like lyrical fruits. I do not add water to them, so as to preserve the taste of peaches and the thirst of my senses. I envy my imagination embracing you, silencing you, kissing you, caressing you, holding you tight and letting you go, bringing you near and pushing you away, lifting you up and putting you down, making you submit and submitting to you, and doing all the things I never do."

- Mahmoud Darwish, from I Am Jealous of Everything Around You.

« What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extraordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist. Aeroplanes achieve existence only when they are hijacked. The one and only destiny of motor-cars is to drive into plane trees. Fifty-two weekends a year, fifty-two casualty lists: so many dead and all the better for the news media if the figures keep on going up! Behind the event there has to be a scandal, a fissure, a danger, as if life reveals itself only by way of the spectacular, as if what speaks, what is significant, is always abnormal: natural cataclysms or historical upheavals, social unrest, political scandals. »

Georges Perec, “Approaches to What?” In L’Infra-ordinaire

“I undressed and left my clothes on the sand. I was not at ease with my body, not even in the darkness of night. It had been unloved, perhaps forever. Untouched by a lover for a long time. I didn’t know what to do with it when it was not in conversation with a piano. Or how to respond to the way Tomas gazed at the green jewel pierced through my belly button.”

— Deborah Levy, August Blue

Beirut and I, we make love like war

Tomorrow We will See

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

My Women are Tabla & Qanoun by Nur Turkmani

Beirut’s stony Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral of Saint Elias.

It was initially built towards the end of the 18th century and reconstructed in 1849.

Style: Byzantine, baroque, Islamic

The only remaining Mameluke building in Beirut, Zawiyat Ibn Arraq.

Once a complete private madrasa, only the zawiya (prayer corner) remains of it.

Today, someone seemed to have made it their own prayer corner and unrolled a prayer rug inside.

Date: 1517- used till Ottoman times

Beautiful to see what we treat as “monuments” being reused as such. Do we glorify what is historical only because we know it’s historical? Do we love these stones only because we know they’re hundreds of years old? What’s so intrinsically beautiful about what’s historical?

Can we even call them monuments? Is it history? Is it present?

“إلى من لم ت/ييأس: الحبّ مقاومة”

“To he/she whom did not despair: love is resistance”

October 17 (thawra) graffiti from the streets of Beirut