What We Are Reading Today: Democratic Equality by James Lindley Wilson
It mounts a bold and persuasive defense of democracy as a way of making collective decisions
Updated 17 August 2019
Arab News
Democracy establishes relationships of political equality, ones in which citizens equally share authority over what they do together and respect one another as equals.
But in today’s divided public square, democracy is challenged by political thinkers who disagree about how democratic institutions should be organized, and by antidemocratic politicians who exploit uncertainties about what democracy requires and why it matters.
Democratic Equality mounts a bold and persuasive defense of democracy as a way of making collective decisions, showing how equality of authority is essential to relating equally as citizens, says a review on the Princeton University Press website.
James Lindley Wilson explains why the US Senate and Electoral College are urgently in need of reform, why proportional representation is not a universal requirement of democracy, how to identify racial vote dilution and gerrymandering in electoral districting, how to respond to threats to democracy posed by wealth inequality, and how judicial review could be more compatible with the democratic ideal.
“Gaslighting” is suddenly in everyone’s vocabulary. It’s written about, talked about, tweeted about, even sung about (in “Gaslighting” by The Chicks).
It’s become shorthand for being manipulated by someone who insists that up is down, hot is cold, dark is light — someone who isn’t just lying about such things, but trying to drive you crazy.
The term has its origins in a 1944 film in which a husband does exactly that to his wife, his crazy-making efforts symbolized by the rise and fall of the gaslights in their home.
In this timely and provocative book, Kate Abramson examines gaslighting from a philosophical perspective, investigating it as a distinctive moral phenomenon.
What We Are Reading Today ‘Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors’ by Alison Light
Updated 28 March 2024
Jasmine Bager
Alison Light, author of many acclaimed books about feminism and history, takes us on a journey to trace her own ancestors in “Common People: In Pursuit of My Ancestors.”
Many of us might be curious about our ancestors — who were they, what stories did they have to tell, what were they like? Exploring one’s lineage could uncover less than glamorous backstories or prove to be a frustrating endeavor with inconsistencies and dead ends.
Light, however, finds a way to chart the course of the lives of everyday people. She goes through the stories of servants, sailors, farm workers, combing through archives to revive their stories and allow these people to live once more — if only in her pages.
In her 2009 book, “Mrs Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury,” she was transfixed by the life of Virginia Woolf, a popular yet deeply depressed author in her own right, who relied on live-in domestic help during her life to help with the most intimate and mundane of daily tasks. In this book, Light uses the same approach but turns the focus to her own life and history. She tries to understand her own ancestors and — by extension — all of ours, too. Her attempt at understanding the lives of those who once existed helps us to understand our own lives. Family history is a kind of public history and one that we share.
The book has maps, detailed family trees and Light’s personal photographs to augment her painstaking research and ability to zap life into those long gone.
“I began this book because I realized I had no idea where my family came from,” she says in the preface. Although she knew where she grew up and her personal history — as well as fragments of her parents’ lives, which they shared, and some stories about her grandparents — she did not know the bigger picture.
Her mother’s mother was an orphan and her father’s side was littered with blank spaces. She concluded that many of her relatives had no roots, as far as she could tell, and so the book became a quest to dive deeper into what it is possible to find out about people we never met but whose bloodline we share.
Since genealogy has become something of a trend in recent years, finding out your genetic background has become a simple process — spit into a tube and have it analyzed. But what are the stories that go behind and beyond the science?
Light’s book tries to find out, and you, the reader, can join her on that journey.
Lebanese art expert Myrna Ayad says she wanted to ‘focus on the person,’ not their work
Updated 28 March 2024
Rawaa Talass
DUBAI: Lebanese author and art expert Myrna Ayad recently released “Alcove,” a book of 30 essays exploring the lives of celebrated and forgotten modern artists from the Arab world. Ayad based her essays on intimate interviews with the artists’ relatives, students, and close friends.
“I was not after describing their work,” Ayad, who lives in Dubai, tells Arab News. “My aim was to focus on the person — what moved them, what affected them, how they lived, how they survived and why they persevered.”
The artists hailed from the Gulf, the Levant and North Africa, and were working between the 1950s and 1980s — a time when the MENA art scene was far smaller than it is today.
“Despite geography, they all knew each other and were friends,” says Ayad. “They exhibited alongside each other and deliberated together. In those days, there were key cultural capitals like Baghdad, Beirut and Cairo, so they would all gather there. They were likeminded people.” What also united them was a sense of struggle — be it political, personal or professional. “It was not easy at all being an artist in those days,” says Ayad.
They were also documenters of their time — depicting contemporary historical and political events.
“They addressed topics full-on,” says Ayad. “They had enough liberty and confidence to do that, which is why you find a lot of answers in modern Arab art.”
The term “alcove” derives from the Arabic word “al-qubba”, meaning a vault or a chamber. And the interviews Ayad conducted for the book unleashed a vault of memories for her interviewees. “All of the conversations were emotional,” she recalls. “I was on Zoom calls watching grown men cry.”
Here are five noteworthy artists featured in “Alcove.”
Abdullah Al-Shaikh (1936 – 2019)
The Iraq-born Saudi artist was an introvert who devoted his life to painting folkloric scenes, local landscapes and abstract compositions. “It was so fascinating for me that this man — who grew up in a relatively conservative environment — belonged to a family who didn’t object to art-making,” says Ayad. “He never did it for fame or fortune, he was just so committed.” Al-Shaikh held his first solo show in Alkhobar in 1981, when he was in his forties.
Jumana El-Husseini (1932 – 2018)
Hailing from Palestinian aristocracy, El-Husseini was exiled from her native land in 1948 and eventually settled in Lebanon. “Like other Palestinians, (her family) were dealt a catastrophic blow. They lost their home and Jumana never got over it,” says Ayad. “She channeled that pain into painting.” Many of El-Husseini’s artworks are landscapes of Jerusalem, where she was born. In Lebanon, she married, raised a family of three sons and received double degrees in political science and child psychology. But her heart was still in Palestine.
Nuha Al-Radi (1941 – 2004)
The Iraqi artist worked with a number of mediums, such as ceramics, painting and found objects. The daughter of an ambassador, Al-Radi lived a cosmopolitan life, residing in India, Lebanon and the UK. She was also a noted diarist, who wrote about daily life under the first Gulf War. In the politically turbulent early 2000s, she created “junk art,” making figurative wooden sculptures decorated with feathers and ornaments “in response to Western sanctions against Iraq,” according to her biography.
Mona Saudi (1945 – 2022)
The Jordanian artist, famed for her abstract marble sculptures, led a remarkable life, marked by rebellion and creativity. When she was just 17, she took a taxi from Jordan to Beirut to pursue her artistic career. “She grew up in a conservative environment. Her father forbade her from going to university,” says Ayad.
In Beirut, she mingled with artists and poets, and, in 1964, staged an exhibition in a café. The funds she made financed her studies in Paris. Saudi was also an activist who designed posters for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
Asim Abu Shakra (1961 – 1990)
In his short life, the Palestinian artist used the cactus as a symbolic motif, representing resilience and toughness, in his emotionally-charged paintings.
“He was studying in Tel Aviv, Israel,” says Ayad. “Can you imagine what that did to him psychologically? He felt he had been uprooted and put in a box. He’s separated and alone.”
Abu Shakra died of cancer aged 29. “When the cactus became darker and darker in his paintings, that was when he was sicker and sicker,” Ayad says.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Class’ by Stephanie Land
Updated 27 March 2024
Jasmine Bager
Stephanie Land, the author of the bestselling memoir “Maid: hard work, low pay and a mother’s will to survive,” which was turned into a wildly-popular and critically-acclaimed Netflix limited series in 2021, does not want you to feel sorry for her.
Land published her second, and equally sobering, memoir in late 2023, titled, “Class: a memoir of motherhood, hunger, and higher education” which charts her way out of poverty.
Land, who sometimes climbed actual mountains to help raise her daughter as a single mother, continued with the storytelling style that we became familiar with in “Maid.” Abandoned by her daughter’s father, Jamie, and her own father and, separately, her mother, Land tries to write her way to success.
In this continuation of the story, Land brings us along as she is schooled on all things school-related. She puts herself through college in her mid-30s — at least a decade older than many of her classmates. She also provides insights into her daughter’s journey in the school system.
Always worrying that she would be on the verge of homelessness “again,” Land talks candidly about the shame that went into lifting herself and her daughter from poverty, while wrestling with the idea of who truly deserves to thrive in America.
She writes: “Nothing made me question my life choices more than knowing that my hours spent cleaning other people’s toilets to put myself through college weren’t enough — and that my hours spent earning a degree didn’t matter.”
As she attempts to navigate the crushing loneliness that stems from being a motivated adult with a severe lack of resources, she perceives existence as just her and her daughter against the world.
While she fully acknowledges her white privilege, she, like many mothers living under the poverty line, constantly worry about managing reality with expectations. Land tries to study hard to secure her dream of earning a higher degree. This is while she is also raising a healthy and well-adjusted daughter, Emilia, who had already lived in over 15 homes before she turned 10. Providing stability and safety has been Land’s top priority, but one that seemed so out of reach.
Armed with a meticulous daybook planner and a steady demeanor, she learned to do mental math constantly to calculate expenses. But throughout this, Land kept a pretty solid work ethic and an almost obsessive reassurance that it would all be worth it in the end. It just had to.
Although those reading “Class” now know that Land somehow pulled her way out of the pangs of poverty and into a bracket that many would envy her for, her goal for this book seems to serve a dual purpose. Firstly, she wanted to take back her narrative and find space in the broader world. And secondly, she sought to advocate for other young, single mothers who did not get a semi-happily-ever-after story that they were able to write themselves.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Thoreau’s Axe; Distraction and Discipline in American Culture’
Updated 27 March 2024
Arab News
Author: Caleb Smith
Today, we’re driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it—most of which emanate from our beeping and blinking digital devices.
This may seem like a decidedly 21st-century problem, but, as Caleb Smith shows in this elegantly written, meditative work, distraction was also a serious concern in American culture two centuries ago.
Smith explains that 19th-century worries over attention developed in response to what were seen as the damaging mental effects of new technologies and economic systems.