Category: Articles
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Traps and Shadows in Noor Naga’s Egypt Novel
Translated from the Arabic by Rana Asfour We find ourselves in Cairo in a post-2016 world, when a bald American girl arrives in what she feels is her homeland and the origin of her roots. Reading between the lines, we gather that she’s left America, fleeing from a sadness that…
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Taming the Immigrant: Musings of a Writer in Exile
I see no impurity or weakness in fear, unlike courage which I have often found to be synonymous with male folly. In fact, if anything, fear keeps you alert, vigilant, in a state of internal meditation even, one that enables you to gradually build up your psychological defenses. I refer…
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Música en Egipto en la última década: entre huir y asestar con las autoridades
Comencé mi carrera en el periodismo hace 17 años. En una serie de incidentes no planeados, terminé cubriendo actividades musicales y la escena de la música contemporánea como mi enfoque principal. [Se prohíbe expresamente la reproducción total o parcial, por cualquier medio, del contenido de esta web sin autorización expresa…
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All attention to the art
I don’t know when this architecture tradition started, but I believe most of us are familiar with it. You enter a giant building, and at the entrance, you come across a glass box displaying the building’s scale model/maquette. You are inside the building, yet you are observing a miniature rendition…
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I Love Wasta and Hate Standing in Line, but I am Poor
We encounter no scenes of people lining up in Renaissance paintings, neither is there evidence of the existence of lines among the Romans or the Greek. In the workers’ city by the pyramids, detailed records have been found regarding workers’ wages, their diet, food and beer rations, yet lo and…
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Music in Egypt in the Last Decade: Hit and Run with the Authorities
I started my career in journalism seventeen years ago. In a series of unplanned incidents, I ended up covering musical activities and the contemporary music scene as my main focus. In a pre-2011 world, there were quite a few regulations and limitations controlling music production in Egypt and three adjacent,…
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Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison
During the 1921 obscenity trial involving James Joyce’s Ulysses, a dispute broke out between the prosecuting attorney and the defense team in the New York courthouse. The assistant district attorney angrily announced he was going to read an extract from the novel out loud to establish before the court that…
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RE:WRITING THE FUTURE: THE TANTA MUSEUM OF WHITE HISTORY
A ravishing tale about a time when political and social world orders have been turned on their heads. It gives us great pleasure to present this proposal for a flagship museum commemorating the history of white people as part of an initiative to recognise and celebrate the ethnic and cultural…
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A tour in the wild, without leaving your couch
Published first time at Mdamasr: When I am anxious, or heavy, or feeling — like Mahmoud Darwish — that nothing pleases me, I usually put on a documentary about the lives of lions in central Africa, or wild horses in Mongolia, and I let it play in the background as…
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The Arab Spring Isn’t a Historical Event. It’s Our Life
I lived my first 25 years under one president: the one and only Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian president’s portrait hung in schools, in the street, and at police stations. Every year on his birthday, we sang songs about him, and TV shows praised his greatness, his genius. But he was…