American University in Cairo (AUC) Tahrir CultureFest 2024 focused on Cairo, connecting the AUC community with the downtown neighborhood community. April 17 -22, 2024
AUC Press partnered with AUC Tahrir CultureFest, where esteemed authors shared their insights and success stories. They explored a range of topics that contribute to the preservation of Cairo’s heritage in urban and rural areas, from architectural to preservation efforts.
Thank you AUC Press for inviting me to speak at CultureFest 2024. Absolutely an incredible hour with a distinguished and an enthusiastic audience.
The Corning Museum of Glass, “dedicated in exploring a single material: glass”, permanent exhibit , 35 Centuries of Glass Galleries –Beads from West Africashows the most comprehensive and celebrated glass collection in the world. The Museum welcomes more than 300,000 visitors annually from around the world and is the largest museum in the world dedicated to the art, history, and science of glass. Galleries explore Near Eastern, Asian, European, and American glass and glassmaking from antiquity through present day, which now includes the Masaga Glassmakers of Bida, Nupeland, Niger State, Nigeria at the gallery of African glass.
photo credit (above and below): Corning Museum of Glass
This is significant as it not only highlights the long tradition of glass making (primary furnace) and glass recycling (secondary furnace) in Nupeland but also highlights the indigenous glass technology in Nigeria and parts of West Africa. I have dedicated ten years to recording, documenting and researching glass produced and recycled by Masaga Glassmakers of Bida under the auspices of His Royal Highness, Alhaji (Dr.) Yahaya Abubakar CFR, ETSU NUPE thus, this exhibit is a momentous event for me, personally, and for the Masaga Glassmakers of Bida. (See: Art of Glassmaking – Masaga Glassmakers of Bida). The glassmakers take their rightful place in the Corning Museum of Glass -Beads from West Africa with their contribution to the history of glass in Africa.
The African gallery also includes glass production from Ghana, Mali and other West African countries:
Thank you to Katherine Larson, Ph.D., Curator of Ancient Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass for this recognition as it will perpetuate future research in archaeology, anthropology and cultural studies around glass in the region and glass technology of indigenous peoples.
US VETOS ANOTHER UN RESOLUTION FOR CEASEFIRE IN GAZA CONDEMNING 2MILLION WOMEN, CHILDREN, MEN, THE ELDERLY, THE SICK AND INJURED TO DEATH FROM EITHER STARVATION OR MURDER BY BOMBS COURTESY OF THE US TAXPAYER.
January/February is the season of the orange in Egypt, and if one is very lucky to find the bitter orange, larang/narang, it is from the trees in Fayoum. Every year, I receive a pungent bounty of bitter oranges from the farm, Bayt Hewison, Fayoum. And every year, I prepare marmalade to savour and share.
I’ve made marmalade during revolutions, “when in a jam, make marmalade”; I’ve made marmalade, “when all was right in my world”; but this year when looking at the bitter oranges on my kitchen counter, nothing was right in the world. Could I make marmalade? Since October, I stopped writing about heritage. The atrocities in Palestine caused such grief that I thought, “if world powers do not stand against slaughter and genocide of humans then why does cultural heritage matter?” But subsequently and because of the perseverance of Palestinians who record and document their own extermination, if there is to be any justice, resistance does matter!
This is the story of the Palestinian Jaffa Orange.
Before Zionism… in Palestine, the city of Jaffa was a crossroads for economic trade and agricultural international export in Palestine and was a vibrant port for the export of Shamouti orange, the orange of Jaffa, a species developed by Palestinian Arab farmers during the Ottoman era, early 19thcentury. The people of Palestine no matter their religion, cultivated the sweet orange around the ancient city of Jaffa, from which the Jaffa orange was named. At the beginning of the century, natives of the city worked together in cultivating orange groves, “Arab orange groves employed Jews and vice versa. During these years, an intricate network of economic, social and cultural relationships was developed between Arab – Muslim or Christian and Jewish communities from the city.”- (Jaffa Oranges, Pride and Propaganda,CJPME).
The Jaffa orange is known for its sweetness, few seeds, and thick skin, a characteristic unrivaled for export, “During the early 20th century and until 1939, oranges were the largest Palestinian export, surpassing even cotton. In 1939, a total of 30 000 hectares were cultivated and 15 million crates were exported. “ (Jaffa Oranges, Pride and Propaganda, CIPME).
When Zionism stole Palestine… Nakba
The Palestinians in Jaffa were forced to flee in 1948 when the city of Jaffa was besieged and bombarded by the Zionists. Tens of thousands of Palestinians escaped the city and the orange groves that had belonged to the Palestinians were stolen and declared the property of Israel. The Palestinian farmers were told the orange orchards were considered “abandoned assets.”
The Jaffa Orange became the symbol of the Palestinian’s land and a symbol of national identity in literature and art. Palestinian novelist, Ghassan Kanafani, used oranges to symbolise loss in his 1958 short story about the Nakba, called The Land of Sad Oranges.
A tale of two foreign ministers. This week US Secretary of State Antony Blinken wrapped up a trip to West Africa. It’s the secretary’s fourth trip to the continent and part of a larger Biden effort to push back on China and Russia’s increasing engagement and influence in the region. Blinken traveled to Côte d’Ivoire, Cape Verde…, Nigeria, and Angola. Meanwhile, Germany’s foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock headed to Djibouti, Kenya, and South Sudan this week...
– Interruptrr Weekly, “Symbols”, January 26, 2024 by Elmira Bayrasli
The Secretary of State and his official entourage found the time to travel to Lagos (seat of government is Abuja, distance 720 km) to join Madame Nike and various Nigerian elites, who were then accompanied by dancers and drummers to view the art of Nigerian and African artists. (Okay so far?) Artists usually welcome publicity from any sector to promote their art but when art of another culture is used as exploitation for government policy to influence the region, a line is crossed! Nike’s art and all the Nigerian artists that she represents in her Lagos gallery are people whose art preserves and celebrates Nigerian culture, tradition and heritage. Nigeria often points to the evil of the colonist era (1882-1960) as a time of occupation, apartheid, and theft of their cultural and art objects. To this day, the finger is often pointed to British colonialism as a root of the problem with identity and social issues. Therefore, it is disturbing that Madame Nike, who upholds the Nigerian and African art to the highest standards, succumbed to the pressure or the pride to be used in promoting Biden/Blinken policy of colonialism, occupation, and genocide.
‘Justice cannot bring back the dead’: Payam Akhavan recalls Rwanda horrors. It was unfolding in plain sight, and the world watched on television, and did nothing.
Estimates vary but somewhere between 800,000 and one million people were killed in Rwanda in just 100 days back in 1994.
Most were Tutsis, massacred by Hutus, who were often their neighbours. And Payam Akhavan, human rights lawyer, McGill prof and this year’s Massey Lecturer, was stunned that there was no will to intervene.
“It was a Holocaust in the making, but not one concealed behind the walls of concentration camps,” he said. “It was unfolding in plain sight, and the world watched on television, and did nothing.”
“The problem isn’t that radical evil is unstoppable. The problem is that we usually don’t really care about hatred and violence unless it affects us directly,” Akhavan explains.
“Rwanda taught me that there is nothing inevitable about radical evil. Radical evil is a political construction. It’s a political choice. It is predictable and is therefore preventable.”
Quakers at Ramallah Friends School, Ramallah, West Bank sing
the message of ‘Christ’mas 2023.
“From Ramallah Friends School to the world, we share our version of the timeless “ Little Drummer Boy.” Our hearts come together in prayer for the safety of the children in Gaza. May our shared prayers echo for peace and justice, weaving a tapestry of hope that goes beyond borders, embracing the shared humanity we all hold dear.”- RFS
By Lesley Lababidi in memory of Um Salah who fled Palestine in 1948 and died in the massacre of Sabra and Shitila Refugee Camp in Beirut, Lebanon, 1982.
Undreams
An unfinished tapestry, pushed deep into the unlocked drawer, brought unshed tears to her eyes.
After her grandmother’s death, the unowned tapestry was now hers to keep or, perhaps, unkeep.
The granddaughter unjammed the drawer, unwrinkled the unvalued tapestry and tugged at it, slowly, to unravel an unloved memory...
Her grandmother had worn the hijab when she unfortuitously was forced to flee.
She was unbearably young, unable to unidentify herself from the only life she had ever known.
She had untangled, untamed dreams. But in her flight, unwontedly flushed with misery,
those ungratified desires were undreamt.
It was someone, unremembered, who pushed the cloth and needle into her hands.
“Here, stitch and stitch and don’t look up. Unthink what you thought, unclench strings of yesterday.”
Her un-shining needle pricked the un-colorful cloth.
Each day when an unfed child cried, she undecorated the embroidered cake she would never eat.
When the rain unrestrainedly covered the ground, she unstitched the coat she would never wear.
When a mother moaned, she unwrote the poem she would never read; unmeasured the music she would never sing.
When unutterable screams surged through the un-dawned day, she unclimbed the mountain she would never see.
The granddaughter cradled the unfinished tapestry in her arms. Her fingers unexpectedly pulled a thread, undoing one stitch and then another.
Unwinding undreams; for her grandmother’s true tapestry was sewn with love.
“Undreams” is for those who are imprisoned in exile, forced from their homes, separated from friends and family, banished from their country —the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Chibok girls, the Uyghurs and millions more…
This Is Your Life is an American series broadcast on radio from 1948 to 1952, and on television from 1952 to 1961. In the program, the host surprised guests and then took them through a retrospective of their lives in front of an audience,.-Wikipedia Palestinians oppressed, colonized, ethnic cleansed and slaughtered from 1948 to 2024, as the world powers (audience) watch and clap in complicity.
Nomad4Now 