I just sat on a Piccadilly line train and spotted the Qur'an, some Hebrew orthodox literature and gossip-heavy The London Lite all being read in the same carriage by different ethnicities!!!
Monday 30 March 2009
Saturday 28 March 2009
Million's Poets - Spoken word brings social change
It is the Middle East's answer to Pop Idol. Now in its third season, the weekly, live, three-hour programme makes celebrities out of its contestants and reaches an audience of some 17 million across the Arab world. The show features text message voting and a glitzy presentation, and people queue up outside the 2,000 seat Al Raha Beach Theatre in Abu Dhabi to be part of the audience.
The show may have all the hallmarks of a shiny, western talent show but it is very much of the Middle East. Entitled Millions' Poets, contestants recite their own poetry, composed in a traditional Bedouin style called Nabati which dates back to the fourth century. The live audience in the theatre is segregated, with men and women seated in different sections, yet women poets compete alongside men on stage.
"When we designed this show we had in mind the grandness of Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the suspense of Pop Idol, " says Nashwa Al Ruwaini, Millions' Poets producer and head of the show's production company, Pyramedia. "The idea was to create a new format that would appeal to this part of the world without offending this part of the world."
The Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (Adach) commissioned and pays for the show as part of a bigger initiative by the biggest Emirate to raise the cultural bar in the Gulf. Millions' Poets costs 70m dihrams (£14m) to produce per season, including the 27m dihrams in prize money.
"It started here in Abu Dhabi but even I was surprised to learn that there are Nabati poets in many countries like Libya, Nigeria, Morocco, Egypt and Algeria as well as the Gulf. We found out Bedouins are everywhere!" says Ruwaini.
The Millions' Poets phenomenon has spurred the launch of a dedicated satellite channel for re-runs, a website that gets millions of hits, a magazine and, soon, a specially-designed iPod preloaded with Millions' Poets' poetry.
But perhaps the most surprising result of the show is the fact that in the current season a Saudi poetess called Ayda al-Jahani, who is completely veiled, is in contention for the top prize. "We have had poetesses before but not as strong as this woman," says Ruwani. "Saudi is quite conservative but people are sending their votes. It was unheard of to mention a woman's name, much less have her on stage, getting votes! This show has helped create social change."
by Kate Bulkley, The Guardian
Avé Maria
Hatred empties me
Unto the tulips of May
My brothers are gone
Strawn across these blood warm fields
A sweet wound
I pace, insatiably accompanying my Iberian soil
Find my daughter, ripped from 700-year breasts
Hie with me and time
To where she would cry
Pining grief keeps feeding me filthy meat and wine
I remember
I dearly wished to stay, in the arms of my drunken Mother
Once so splendid
Whose smile sleeps now
Confusion paints sex upon her body
I kiss her away and taste her deep down...
(Priests in confession weep out!)
Through each town omens sweep round
This land will never suffer love again
Until my beautiful motley Maria is refound
Mother, I was truly mistaken
Palaces of lust became us
By Roman Gods you were rudely awakened
Shaken
Rue this fist full of memories
Us and the Jewish escaping... the raping
Elation grips ex-mountain dwellers
Bedlam growls with the weather
Leather belt beatings, ancient words are burning in their screams
Maria turns to me and dreams
"Kiss me once more, kiss me"
As my heretic soul is soaking in flames
We got to choose between death and baptism; they were both just the same
ZK
[featured in the ITV1 documentary 'Muslim Jesus' (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw_URVvWh5w)]
Monday 23 March 2009
Son of poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes kills himself
Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has hanged himself at the age of 47. The former fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had carved out a successful scientific career in one of the remotest parts of the western world, but ultimately he could not escape the legacy of being the offspring of one of the most famous and tragic literary relationships of the 20th century.
Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children. She had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother's death, in 1969, their father's then partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura in the process.
Plath's relationship with the future poet laureate has been the subject of numerous literary and personal memoirs and biographies, and even a film, as well as long-running attacks on her husband's reputation and behaviour by some feminists. She addressed one of her last poems, Nick and the Candlestick, to her baby son: "O love, how did you get here? O embryo … In you, ruby/ The pain you wake to is not yours … You are the one." Although Nicholas Hughes's father maintained an anguished public silence about the tragedy, poems written at the time, published in the last year of his life, also spoke of his relationship with his son.
In a statement issued late on Sunday evening, Frieda Hughes reported: "It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16 March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.
"His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence for the next project or plan."
A report in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner today by its columnist Dermot Cole understandably celebrates Hughes's academic and personal qualities rather than his literary associations. Noting that his initial scientific training had been at Oxford, Cole says he earned a doctorate at the University of Alaska in 1991: "He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie … He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena river, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current."
That interest may seem to pop psychologists an altogether more positive inherited legacy, of Ted Hughes's passionate interest in fishing, and indeed his father made several visits to Alaska before his death in 1998. Nicholas's particular academic specialism was in the behaviour of fish in currents. A 2004 paper explored why larger fish swim upstream in the turbulence of midstream rather than in the quieter waters near the banks: "Large fish swim further from the bank to avoid wave drag, the resistance associated with the generation of surface waves when swimming close to the surface," he wrote.
Hughes gave up his professorship two years ago to concentrate on pottery, although the paper said he continued his research with his partner, Christine Hunter, also a biologist.
Cole wrote: "A few times I called to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened. He deserved his privacy. By and large, people in Fairbanks respected that, which is a good comment on our part of the world. In Alaska he had the freedom and the opportunity to live on his own terms and be recognised for his own accomplishments. Here he was not a literary figure forever defined by the lives of his parents."
In Plath's poems, he was her saviour
The shock and sadness of the news of Nicholas Hughes's death is almost unbearable. In his mother's poetry, he was saviour and life force - at his birth, she wrote, "this great bluish, glistening boy shot out onto the bed in a wave of tidal water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily", and he was for her the baby in the barn, "the one solid the spaces lean on". She loved her children, but not even loving them could save her, or, it now seems, him. Her son tried to survive her, escaping to Alaska, pursuing the wild fish through the icy rivers, but in the end he swam back up stream to the terrible birth and death place. Plath was heroic, in her struggles to create light and art from darkness, and so, I must and need to feel, was he. Margaret Drabble
Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children. She had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother's death, in 1969, their father's then partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura in the process.
Plath's relationship with the future poet laureate has been the subject of numerous literary and personal memoirs and biographies, and even a film, as well as long-running attacks on her husband's reputation and behaviour by some feminists. She addressed one of her last poems, Nick and the Candlestick, to her baby son: "O love, how did you get here? O embryo … In you, ruby/ The pain you wake to is not yours … You are the one." Although Nicholas Hughes's father maintained an anguished public silence about the tragedy, poems written at the time, published in the last year of his life, also spoke of his relationship with his son.
In a statement issued late on Sunday evening, Frieda Hughes reported: "It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16 March 2009 at his home in Alaska. He had been battling depression for some time.
"His lifelong fascination with fish and fishing was a strong and shared bond with our father (many of whose poems were about the natural world). He was a loving brother, a loyal friend to those who knew him and despite the vagaries that life threw at him, he maintained an almost childlike innocence for the next project or plan."
A report in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner today by its columnist Dermot Cole understandably celebrates Hughes's academic and personal qualities rather than his literary associations. Noting that his initial scientific training had been at Oxford, Cole says he earned a doctorate at the University of Alaska in 1991: "He made lasting friendships in Fairbanks with those who shared his inventive interests in such varied pursuits as stream ecology, pottery, woodworking, boating, bicycling, gardening and cooking the perfect pecan pie … He spent countless summer hours in his research of grayling and salmon in the Chena river, exhibiting all the patience and wonder that defines a great fisherman. One of his innovations was rigging underwater cameras to get a three-dimensional view of the fish feeding in the passing current."
That interest may seem to pop psychologists an altogether more positive inherited legacy, of Ted Hughes's passionate interest in fishing, and indeed his father made several visits to Alaska before his death in 1998. Nicholas's particular academic specialism was in the behaviour of fish in currents. A 2004 paper explored why larger fish swim upstream in the turbulence of midstream rather than in the quieter waters near the banks: "Large fish swim further from the bank to avoid wave drag, the resistance associated with the generation of surface waves when swimming close to the surface," he wrote.
Hughes gave up his professorship two years ago to concentrate on pottery, although the paper said he continued his research with his partner, Christine Hunter, also a biologist.
Cole wrote: "A few times I called to let him know I would like to write about his life and his family connections whenever a news story about his parents appeared, but he did not think it was a good idea, so it never happened. He deserved his privacy. By and large, people in Fairbanks respected that, which is a good comment on our part of the world. In Alaska he had the freedom and the opportunity to live on his own terms and be recognised for his own accomplishments. Here he was not a literary figure forever defined by the lives of his parents."
In Plath's poems, he was her saviour
The shock and sadness of the news of Nicholas Hughes's death is almost unbearable. In his mother's poetry, he was saviour and life force - at his birth, she wrote, "this great bluish, glistening boy shot out onto the bed in a wave of tidal water that drenched all four of us to the skin, howling lustily", and he was for her the baby in the barn, "the one solid the spaces lean on". She loved her children, but not even loving them could save her, or, it now seems, him. Her son tried to survive her, escaping to Alaska, pursuing the wild fish through the icy rivers, but in the end he swam back up stream to the terrible birth and death place. Plath was heroic, in her struggles to create light and art from darkness, and so, I must and need to feel, was he. Margaret Drabble
Umayyah the Enchantress
Your Ammu and I
Alive in grubby fantasies she'll let you see
Concluded that the term 'love' wasn't ripe enough for the agony
So we mused synonymically
During trickles between gasps
Until we drained the concentration
And were rendering our evolving walls sky blue
Months later
You began
When a tall tot loaned 'Allah is Great' to your priceless ear
With four low-tide eyelids soaked right through
Aptly anchoring at the behest of a familiar white moon
I sought to study a virgin's story from atom one
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Now clouds behind the ducks insist that your name prevails over that four-lettered bore
Again you creak your jaw open like Grandpa and snore
Ssh... awaken and twist a twirl
Led us wed while the pretty lady's bathing and keep it from the world
Locate that pink hijab and some tasbih pearls
In closing, you and your curls
Were the hallucinogenic provision for when a boy met a girl
ZK
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