What We Are Reading Today: Seashells of Southern Florida
Updated 19 November 2021
Arab News
Edited by Paula M. Mikkelsen & Rudiger Bieler
Located where the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea converge, the Florida Keys are distinctive for their rich and varied marine fauna. The Keys are home to nearly sixty taxonomic families of bivalves such as clams and mussels — roughly half the world’s bivalve family diversity. The first in a series of three volumes on the molluscan fauna of the Keys and adjacent regions, Seashells of Southern Florida: Bivalves provides a comprehensive treatment of these bivalves, and also serves as a comparative anatomical guide to bivalve diversity worldwide.
Paula Mikkelsen and Rüdiger Bieler cover more than three hundred species of bivalves, including clams, scallops, oysters, mussels, shipworms, jewel boxes, tellins, and many lesser-known groups. For each family they select an exemplar species and illustrate its shell and anatomical features in detail. They describe habitat and other relevant information, and accompany each species account with high-resolution shell photographs of other family members.
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.
‘The Jinn Daughter’: A hauntingly inimitable debut by Rania Hanna
Updated 27 March 2024
MANAL SHAKIR
CHICAGO: Set to be published in April 2024, “The Jinn Daughter” is a hauntingly inimitable debut by US Syrian writer Rania Hanna that weaves fantasy with Middle Eastern mythology and folklore in a story that centers around a mother’s struggle to save her daughter. Nadine is a Hakawati Jinn, someone who collects seeds of dead souls and documents their lives before they pass on. One morning she finds herself in the middle of a disaster when the seeds of the dead stop falling. With no souls able to pass, they will remain on Earth and turn into ghouls. But when Death comes to her with a proposal, Nadine’s task becomes clearer and more dangerous. She must outmaneuver death and use her magic to save her daughter Layala and the world as she knows it.
Nadine and Layala live on the outskirts of town and society. Jinns are not welcome among humans. Most were imprisoned or killed during the Jinn Wars, but Nadine is the town’s Hakawati Jinn and therefore she must stay. But her life has never been easy, especially with her only daughter being half-jinn and half-human. Her husband is no longer living with them, and her 14-year-old daughter Layala asks incessant questions about Nadine’s life, duties, and whether or not Layala is destined to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Managing human deaths, a teenage daughter, and angry townsfolk already weighs Nadine down, but when Kamuna, the guardian of the underworld, visits her and asks for Layala to take her place, Nadine knows her troubles have only just begun.
With the use of her own physical strength, the magic she possesses, and her quick wit, Nadine must do everything in her power to keep her daughter safe. And while Layala has always listened to her mother, when things begin to change, Layala questions what she’s been told as truths begin to unravel.
Bridging life and death with intimate relationships, grief, loss, hope, and love, Hanna’s novel develops ominously from its first sentence. Her characters’ lives are riddled with obstacles as they serve as the viceregents of opposing worlds, attempting to live some semblance of the lives they have inherited. And as a mother is pushed to the brink of the world for her daughter, the heart of the story is about love and sacrifice.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Insiders’ Game’ by Elizabeth N. Saunders
Updated 26 March 2024
Arab News
One of the most widely held views of democratic leaders is that they are cautious about using military force because voters can hold them accountable, ultimately making democracies more peaceful.
“The Insiders’ Game” sheds light on this enduring puzzle, arguing that the primary constraints on decisions about war and peace come from elites, not the public.
Elizabeth Saunders focuses on three groups of elites — presidential advisers, legislators, and military officials — to show how the dynamics of this insiders’ game are key to understanding the use of force in American foreign policy.