Tag Archives: by Malak AlSayyad

Sara ElHassan, Revolution and the in-between.

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Illustration of Sara ElHassan by Jordan Andrew Carter

If you follow Sara ElHassan on twitter be prepared for some sharp social and political commentary, complete with a little bit of sarcasm and zero tolerance for bullshit. Meeting Sara in person was actually not very different. She speaks with the rhythm of a spoken-word poet; Spelling out hard-hitting truths and filling every syllable with passion, she articulates her hopes for her country with insistence, and expresses her desire for the freedom of her people with urgency—a people that have risen once again in a revolution against years of oppression and dictatorship.

While I could easily imagine her as the loud protester at the front of the march, her determined rallying cry rippling through the crowds, the contributions Sara has made to the current revolt have actually come through the power of her writing—and from thousands of miles away, too.

As a freelance writer, blogger, poet and editor, she has always written about Sudanese social and political issues, publishing her work on her own blog, but also for publications with a wider reach like CNN and OkayAfrica. One of her more recent pieces on the art fueling the Sudanese revolution, a series of uprisings that have persisted since last December, reflects her commitment to strengthening the role of art as a catalyst for social change. She has held her belief in art as a revolutionary tool since moving back to Sudan after college and recognizing just how much passion and talent is waiting to be unleashed in her home country.

In 2012, together with several of her friends and collaborators, Sara started a monthly event series and literary club called Nas with Notepads in Khartoum that brought together aspiring writers and poets to engage in writing workshops, collaborative work and performance. The events were usually private and would be publicized through a mailing list. But after gaining a lot of traction and attracting 4000 participants, Nas with Notepads held their first public event as part of 100 Thousand Poets for Change. The event was a great success, but as soon as the first Arabic poem was read, the authorities shut it down. Eventually they had to stop holding events all together. 

Sara knew the power of literary art in influencing and educating. But until the current political movement began, putting into motion a wave of talent and energy in art that spread quickly and drove people to take to the streets, she had never understood that visual and graphic art could fuel change in her country to the same degree as writing. She hopes that by sharing this art on her social media, by writing about it and publicizing it, she can help fuel the revolution and reach people in a way that her alone words can’t and in the long run, she hopes to help create the environment for Sudanese artists to have the support they need.

I first met Sara when my student association invited her to give a talk at Wellesley based on a professor’s recommendation. Her talk was focused on gender, media and art of the Sudan Uprisings and it was completely different from any lecture or talk I had attended at the college in the past. Not only were we hearing from a highly sympathetic young person about a powerful political movement that had just ousted a long-standing dictator, but her perspective turned out to be very unique. Sara was born in the US, but lived in Sudan for many stretches of her life and since 2017 has been based in Arizona.

As a Sudanese-American she feels she is always in between—not Sudanese enough for the Sudanese, not American enough for the Americans. And it is from this vantage point that Sara writes about the issues of her country. “I am fortunate enough to have an outsiders perspective and be more critical but at the same time I have a very deep understanding of Sudanese culture. So my analysis is not lacking context.”, she explains. Though her in-betweenness comes with a set of challenges, she is grateful for the role she is able to play in amplifying people’s voices and putting the international spotlight on Sudan. She does it not only to fight stereotypes about Sudan, Africa and post-colonial countries in general, but also because an international eye on a local issue is a method of protecting those vulnerable to the brutality of dictators.

Sara ElHassan feels passionately about her people’s freedom and the important role that art and advocacy can play in making change. Her dream is for Sudan to have a civilian government that cares about its people and gives them the chances and opportunities they deserve in life.

‘Ida’ Film Review: A long take on Polish memory

Movie Review: "Ida"


Still from the film PC: Opus film

“Ida”, Paweł Pawlikowski’s brutally simple yet deeply powerful film is as much a deep-dive into collective Polish memory as it is about the conflicting emotions of a novitiate nun’s journey through her own past. The film swept up two Oscars at the 2015 Academy Awards (Best Foreign Language film & Best Cinematography), but was less well received at home. In a country that has recently passed a controversial law against forms of holocaust guilt attribution, it is no surprise that a film with a strong message about Polish complicity in Nazi atrocities has caused some backlash. One might try to link this to the rise of right-wing populism in the country, but in fact the controversy over this film was not limited to one side of the political spectrum. By means of a compelling narrative presented through stunning cinematography, the director confronts his native Poland with a dark and uncomfortable side of its history. One that carries an important message for the present day.

“Ida” tells the story of Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), who at the start of the film is days away from taking her vows. Her mother superior at the convent, where she has spent her entire life since being orphaned as a child, sends her away to meet her only living relative, her aunt Wanda (Agata Kulesza). At their first encounter, this woman who was once known as ‘Red Wanda’, a reference to her time as a staunch communist state prosecutor, reveals Anna’s true family history to her. The young novitiate’s real name is Ida and she comes from a Jewish family that was murdered during the holocaust. In this pivotal scene, Wanda offers only an insensitively brash explanation and walks around the house smoking a cigarette as the viewer is left staring at Ida, who is composed, yet in shock at the revelation. Her wide, expressive eyes and young features exert a strong emotional pull on the viewer in this moment and throughout the entire film. This young non-professional actress has eyes that can tell a whole story. I can’t help but see in them the looks of Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc.

Together, Wanda and Ida go on a journey into their past and across Poland to retrieve the remains of their murdered family members and reach some form of reconciliation with their unspoken history. They start to unravel bits and pieces of their own identity and, in doing so, pull at the threads of Polish memory regarding the historical fate of its Jewish population.

In one scene, the son of Wanda’s former neighbor bends down crying while he sits inside the hole in the ground out of which he has just dug up the skull of her son. He was the one who had delivered Ida as a child to the convent and murdered her mother, her father and her older cousin, Wanda’s son. Until this scene, the viewer is never invited to view Wanda as a Jewish victim herself; here we see her in pain for the first time, although we are not given enough of a moment to fully register that pain.

Indeed, the film never lets the viewer engage directly with the scenes or even the history they refer to. There is no soundtrack and very little diegetic sound to guide our emotions, but there are narrative elements in every corner of every shot. Quite literally in fact, for most of the film the characters are confined to the margins of the frame, depriving viewers of the satisfaction of taking in a full action or even a full person at once. The camera is tilted upwards and rarely ever moves. Most shots are long takes that last a little too long, yet don’t wait for an action to be fully completed. The space above weighs down heavily on every scene, almost pushing the characters out of the frame to center on an absence of people, a dead space.

A plot twist towards the end of the film, after Wanda suddenly commits suicide, changes the pace of the film completely. The narrative jumps awkwardly as Ida returns to her aunt’s home and explores every aspect of Wanda’s sinful and adulterous life at once. She wears her late aunt’s dresses, forces herself to smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol; she suddenly reunites with a musician who had taken an interest in her and sleeps with him. The narrative jumps seem jarring and removed from the raw feeling of the rest of the film. This sequence is short and the events it recounts confusing. They culminate in Ida’s return to the convent after her lover fails to give a satisfactory answer to her repeated question: “And then what?”

The film ends by breaking all of its own rules: An audible soundtrack accompanies Ida home as she walks towards us, center-frame. Her glance looks past us, in a final, shaky long take we lose our grip on all the threads of Polish memory this film has pulled up and we abandon, just as Ida does her lover, all the questions left unresolved. Despite this unexpected ending and the narrative jumps leading up to it, Pawlikowski suceeds at confronting the viewer with the complex internal struggle of the film’s main character and the dark points in Polish history that many might wish to forget. He manages to provoke thoughts and questions, but not to resolve them.
That is the viewer’s task.

Ida (2013)
Director Paweł Pawlikowski
Writers Paweł Pawlikowski (screenplay), Rebecca Lenkiewicz (screenplay)
Stars Agata Kulesza, Agata Trzebuchowska, Dawid Ogrodnik
Rating PG-13
Running Time 1h 22m
Genre Drama

War Criminal’s Accomplice

Letter to the Editor

To the Editor:

It seems the case of Shamima Begum has exposed several British political double standards. Patrick Galey’s “UK’s racist two-tier citizenship” (Feb 21, 2019), highlights the racist double standard being applied in this case, but I think there are other layers to this debate.

Although recent headlines suggest otherwise, Shamima, who left home at 15 to join ISIS, is
neither the first nor the last returnee. Hundreds of other European ISIS fighters and “those
affiliated with them” – their families – have returned to their home countries. Shamima is
getting much more media attention due to her pleas for return which went viral on social
media and the home secretary’s decision to strip her of her UK citizenship. Shamima does
not have a second citizenship, nor does she have the ability to guarantee one. Thus the
government’s decision effectively renders her stateless, an action that is illegal under
British law and international law.

Had she been allowed to return, Shamima would not have been the first European “ISIS
wife” or even ISIS fighter to face the consequences of her decisions in her own country.
Hundreds of returnees have been processed by their respective countries and have
received verdicts ranging from life sentences to participation in rehabilitation and de-
radicalization programs. As your writer points out, the homes secretary’s assertion that she
can be stripped of her citizenship because her mother is a Bangladeshi immigrant is, on its
face, hypocritical and racist.

But Shamima’s case also exposes a far different facet of British hypocrisy, one exemplified
by a British citizen who does in fact hold another passport. This is a woman who is married
to a brutal war criminal, the one responsible for the largest number of civilian deaths Syria
has ever witnessed. She has defended her husband, consulted with him on strategy and
publicly expressed her allegiance to him repeatedly. So the conversation around ISIS wives
and terrorist accomplicity begs the following question: Where is the challenge to Asma Al-
Assad’s British citizenship in this debate? Where is the call to hold this European citizen
accountable to the crimes against humanity, the terrorism, she has helped defend? The
first lady of Syria and the accomplice of a mass murderer surely deserves as much debate
as a pregnant teenager who ran away from home at 15 to join a terrorist organization.

Etching in the new Seasons of Migration

Feature Report

Sudan’s most influential printmaker, Mohammed Omar Khalil, collaborates with the Beirut-based experimental publishing house ‘Dongola’ to bring a classic postcolonial Afro-Arab novel to life.

Mohammed Omar Khalil in his Long Island studio. (PC: M. AlSayyad)

Set in a “small village at the bend of the Nile” and filled with tales of sexual conquest, passionate murders and challenges to coloniality, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North quickly grabbed worldwide attention. It was translated into English only three years after its publication, but in Sudan, Salih’s home country, it did not make it past the censors. Despite critical acclaim, the novel was banned for thirty years due to its explicit sexual imagery. This, however, did not hinder the Arab Literary Academy from recognizing it in 2001 as “the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.”

Fifty years after its publication, in a small town south of Tangier, Morocco,  Season of Migration to the North was to become the topic of discussion between two people who would give it new life.  

“I met Sarah in Asilah and explained to her that I want to publish a book on Tayeb Salih’s novel.” recounts Mohammed Omar Khalil, the master Sudanese printmaker currently living in New York. “She responded by saying ‘No. We’ll publish it,’ and told me about her new publishing house in Lebanon. It was called Dongola.” He smiles. “I liked this name, Dongola, because it’s the name of an ancient village in Sudan. So I said yes. And here we are.”

Dongola Limited Editions is an independent experimental publishing house founded by Sarah Chalabi. It specializes in limited edition artists’ books and focuses on creating collaborations across the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. These books are not about art, rather they are art.  

Season of Migration to the North flips the post-colonial narrative of the time on its head. Instead of the white European man going south to ‘liberate’ the Africans from themselves, the African man was now writing his own narrative, and he was doing so while headed north. Equipped with certain remnants of colonialism—an elite education and fluency in the occupier’s language—the main character, Mostafa Said, engages the minds of London academics and conquers the hearts and bodies of the white women who fall prey to his charm. He plays the part that is expected of him with malicious accuracy, turning his room into a “harem,” dim with incense and burnt sandalwood; a trap for the orientalist woman-victim of the week. The book has been widely regarded as a reversal, the antithesis even, of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Mostafa Said is a product of the post-colonial crisis of identity. He is powerful and yet powerless, a victim and a perpetrator—“he loved a woman that treated him like dirt.” And eventually, he lost his grasp on life. “He never left England,” Mohammed Omar Khalil explains. “He carried it with him on his back, even when he went back to Sudan.”

Khalil was born in 1936 in Bourri near Khartoum, Sudan. He immigrated to the United States in the 60s and made a home for himself in New York City. He is regarded as one of the most important contemporary Middle Eastern painters, and as a pioneer printmaker. He has influenced more than two generations of artists as a teach and mentor. His work has been featured in the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, the British Museum and the Jordanian National Museum, among others.

I visited Khalil in his Long Island studio, a vast warehouse-like space where the only place to walk is amongst piles of dusty books, CDs and large canvas paintings leaning against each other in seemingly endless rows. The ceiling is high and large windows covered in white curtains let in the sunshine, which illuminates every corner of the studio. He makes us a pot of cardamom coffee before settling into his favorite chair. His workstation is cluttered with books, etching knives, snippets of magazines and ink rollers, organized in a manner only clear to the artist himself.

Switching between English and Arabic, he recounts his own tales of migration and art. He tells me the story of the first time he took an art class in Italy, where the nude model was, in fact, naked; after the semester, she told him that he had scared her initially, “because you come from Africa.” Shifting in his chair, he explains how he wrote his letter of resignation to the faculty of Arts at the University of Khartoum after becoming fed up with administrative corruption. When he told his colleagues, they laughed. The next day, he left the country, not to return for another 27 years. Mohammed Omar Khalil distances himself from Mostafa Said, the novel’s main character, a womanizer who murders his sadistic wife with a knife during a passionate sexual encounter. “I’m not like that. […] He was horrible with women.” Khalil grimaces. But despite everything, he adds, “We all have a little bit of Mostafa Said in us…” As he chronicles his own journeys from Sudan to the US and Europe, I picture Khalil as the unnamed narrator of the novel, a voice of reason and balance, both disgusted by Mostafa Said and in admiration of him.

. . .

Season of Migration to the North is Dongola’s most recent project and will be published in a limited edition of 30 copies. Each will include an original Dongola publication of the Arabic novel designed by the acclaimed Iranian graphic designer Reza Abedini and a used English copy acquired from online retailers. Finally, each artists’ book will include a series of ten original etchings, printed, signed and numbered by Khalil himself. The project has already caught the attention of l’Institut du monde arabe, which will host a live book signing in Paris in March of this year.

Tayeb Salih’s novel was published ten years after Sudan’s independence from British rule and is widely recognized as one of the most powerful works of post-colonial Afro-Arab literature. Censored in Sudan, it was finally serialized in the Lebanese journal Hiwar in 1966. Now, more than fifty years later, it has found its way back to a publishing house in Beirut, at a time when its themes seem ever more relevant to the world we live in. Today, Beirut is going through its own identity crisis and Lebanon has witnessed season upon season of emigration and immigration. And the book? Well, the book has been touched by the magic of Mohammed Omar Khalil, joining the ranks of artists’ books that reinterpret the very notion of what it means to read a book.