حكواتيّة

Stories from the Levant

[metamorphesque]

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë

[biladal-sham]

Beirut, Lebanon - 2007 - Chaldean Christian children celebrate Christmas in a Christian neighborhood of Beirut. 

Photograph by Ziyah Gafić

[juniper-girl]

The Dove’s Lost Necklace طوق الحمامة المفقود (Nacer Khemir, 1991)

[museumticket]

Cities are smells: Accra is the smell of iodine and spices. Haifa is the smell of pine and wrinkled sheets. Moscow is the smell of vodka on ice. Cairo is the smell of mango and ginger. Beirut is the smell of the sun, sea, smoke, and lemons. Paris is the smell of fresh bread, cheese, and derivations of enchantment. Damascus is the smell of jasmine and dried fruit. Tunis is the smell of night musk and salt. Rabat is the smell of henna, incense and honey. A city that cannot be known by its smell is unreliable. Exiles have a shared smell: the smell of longing for something else; a smell that remembers another smell. A painting, nostalgic that guides you, like a worn tourist map, to the smell of the original place. A smell is a memory and a setting sun. Sunset, here, is beauty rebuking the stranger. But to love the sunset is not, as they say, one of the attributes of exile.

—Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

[her-moth]

Mahmoud Darwish, Absent Present, trans. Mohammad Shaheen, 2010

[wedarkacademia]

“I used to invent love when necessary. When I walked alone on the riverbank. Or whenever the level of salt would rise in my body, I would invent the river.”

― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

[shashiatnight]

Radio Romance by Mashrou' Leila

[shashiatnight]

[oneinchbarrier]

[haykhighland]

By Najwan Darwish, Palestinian Poet

[hakawatiyya]

« To quote the tomb of leftist Jewish Egyptian activist Shehata Haroun, the father of Magda Haroun, the current president of the few remnants of the Jewish community who remain in Cairo: ‘Every human being has multiple identities, I am a human being, I am Egyptian when Egyptians are oppressed, I am Black when Blacks are oppressed, I am Jewish when Jews are oppressed, and I am Palestinian when Palestinians are oppressed.’ »

— Massoud Hayoun, When We Were Arabs: A Jewish Family’s Forgotten History

[hakawatiyya]

« يا ريت بترضي، يا ريت

حبيبة قلبي تكوني

بعمّرلك بعيوني بيت

حيطانو ريف جفوني

من البدر العالي عالجبال

بحيّكلك من نورو شال

طال النجمه الما بتنطاال

بعلّقها بصدرك قونه»

« I wish you would agree

To become the love of my life

I would build you a home with my eyes,

Its walls with my eyelids

From the full moon atop the mountains,

I would weave you a scarf from its light

The star that cannot be reached has appeared

I would take it and hang it on your chest »

— Rabih El Khawli, Ya Reit

[eternallybeirut]

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?

[nasser-art]

“as far as your dream goes the earth will get bigger.”

_ Mahmoud Darwish

[hakawatiyya]

Letter to Nefertiti // by Sana Tannoury Karam

[eternallybeirut]

Source

[eternallybeirut]

“إلى من لم ت/ييأس: الحبّ مقاومة”

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

October 17 (thawra) graffiti from the streets of Beirut

[eternallybeirut]

Tomorrow We will See