Rihana finally spoke. Not that she didn’t want to, but being deaf, she insisted on making me hear her voice when she uttered the question. I still do not understand why it was so important to her to articulate it.

She asked to meet me and I went out to see her the moment she came. I could hear some music coming out from her iPod and she was dancing in the middle of the road. Yes she is deaf.

She then stopped and said: “Who is the whore?”, and she danced away into the street past the restaurant, the car workshop and three black clad ladies who eyed her in contempt.

I crossed my legs so tight and sipped at my tea. Reem, who was recently divorced said: “I do not understand all these women. They could kill for a husband, and all that it boils down to is 7 minutes of in and out. End of story.” She remarried 7 months later.

“I swear I heard a voice coming from it”, said Leila. She was not walking properly yet, and feeling a bit soar. What did it say? I asked. It was reading a sort of a poem, at least it had that tone. I could not figure out what language it was, although something was so certain in me that it was in French. What was it? I don’t know. She closed her eyes, and I figured it was pain, but then she started humming a poem recital tone like that we all had in childhood, standing infront of the chalk board, swinging on our feet and stopping to catch a breath between two long sentences. Her fiance came to pick her up, because she never went on the streets alone, it was immodest. She stood upright, swallowed her pain and walked away. Half way she screamed at him for trying to hold her hand.

“He left me”, Amani wept. I was in earnest, struggling to listen to her while my head kept wandering off to a pinpointed mountain top. I came back for one second to ask her why he left her. She wept louder. She finally said: “He had a dream, he told me. He was standing on the sidewalk and this bus stopped at a sign. He was going to get on the bus, but 10 men walked past him and caught the door first. When the bus drove off to the next corner, he told me, it stopped and started taking off something like a yellow jacket and there was no bus anymore, it was me. He broke off with me and went to buy a new car!” She was 19 years old.

Rihana wrote to me. She read: “My self is like a big old mansion. Sometimes I like to grab a chair and place it across from the doorway. In those many rooms up behind, I could picture old women wailing, their agonised voices echoing in my soul, their laughters turning into bewitched shrieks, their whispers like burning venom. The pain is metallic cold. I could picture lost children running through halls and knocking down candles, a girl craving for love locked in her room, her fingers wandering away in fantasy over her skin, curtains breathing in the winds from wide-open windows, and a silver darkness. As I sit on my chair exposed to the night stars, I long for things that I can’t have, and it grows dead lonely.”

She put me to sleep and we lay there on a green bed. Through my closed lids I saw her close on her trembling bosom, and fight for sweet sleep that doesn’t come. “I hate my father..” she said finally. I did not open my eyes, but my legs grew stiff, as if I would prance off in a second, to avoid a devastatinng wave of anger. She hugged herself and the pillow and said again: “I hate my father, but he did not hurt my sister.” Jana said no more.

Is there God? Her voice was like a horrid scortching sigh in hollow lead cylinder. She hugged her legs, smoked a cigarette, patted her flat stomach and reflected on a crime she never committed. I sacrificed my baby, I gave away my marriage he used to hit me. Their idea of support was to ask whether I had become a Lesbian. I would have just for spite. Women are soft on women, I reckon, softer than this world. I cut my hair to look ugly, said Maryam. She closed her face down on mine in a scary stare and touched the remaining inch of cropped hair. Do you see? Do you see? I am tired of suffering, If I go back it is only to shame. I think sometimes I should go and marry that man in the bank. He offered me money, a house and a maid. Hell, that is prostitution under a contract! Would you like me to do that? Would you like me to do that? She screamed like a nightmare.

In the hospital, I remembered Leila. I could hear the voice talked about. There were two, three, million of them in a chorus. They recited a poem, and it was in Arabic. Oh Mother Mary! Virgin Mary, full of grace, the Lord is wih thee, blessed thou art among women, the voices said. The prayer turned to a sunflower field and the flowers were singing. Their petals clutched, fastened with paper glue. They looked like giant moist eyelashes that were burdened down with infection. At the border of the field was an old sewing factory from another time, a medieval time. Sorceresses were sewing at big machines. What were they making?

I held my hands out looking at a pamphlet that fell from the sky. The paper was black, the writing was black, a black trickle gently leaked onto my fingers. There was a strike. I looked around and the street was flooded with distorted figures, all blackened with soot. They were not human beings, yet they were. On their bodies were maps. The maps stopped at dead ends. Their voices loud but feminine. I tried to read the pamphlet. It turned to a video screen in my hand and it seemed to play a movie. The woman in the movie was moaning, and there was man standing near her. He did not touch her, as if he did not see her, but she went on moaning. At times she would smile and say: I am being raped. On the corner of the screen there was an advertising for her music album. They deceived me, she said and continued to moan, now in pleasure, I am being raped, she went on. A website address appeared at the bottom of the screen, saying: Buy the music album for 20 per cent discount and you will get the movie for free. The streets continued to flood with strikers, as if they filled the whole world. The whore! screamed the victims, their dead-end maps glowing in the gory sun.

I do not appreciate lousy advertising and marketing gimmicks especially when women are shuffled along, even more so when it is about the unquestioned cliches that incriminate those who fall victims of discrimination far more than those who discriminate.

I was caught by surprise when sitting down for an interview with one of the exhibitors at the Media and Marketing Show a flock of five women in white clothes and blond wigs lined just infront of us and in a coquettish unbefitting manner one of them said: “Please join us to the seminar we are hosting.”

My American guest, an online marketing expert said: “Is that a personal invitation for me? I will attend as long as you are going to be there.”

We laughed, and the women left in a flock as they had appeared.

I finished my interview and went up to their booth. The ladies were so obliging they let me take a picture of them. I asked: “So what is with the white and blond hair?”

The girl with the coquettish voice said in the same unflattering way she spoke before: “White, blond, clean.” She elongated the last word and bent her head to the side and smiled seducingly.

She pointed to he boss at the corner of the booth, I thought I should walk up to him.

The guy seemed he hadn’t gone beyond the first class in color theory at some graphic design course. He explained about the business which seemed close to offering product placements in a GPS directory. I could barely understand the relation between white/clean and his business objectives. He said white seemed the most suitable color to brand his service! Fine, what about the women?!

I longed to talk to Laura Boushnak that instant. Her recent “I read, I write” photography project was just fresh on my mind. Having seen it the night before at Portfolio Gallery in Dubai, the work focused on Egyptian women who were struggling to give shapes and forms for their ideas, by learning how  to read and write. The photos showed the women, a few teenagers, but mostly women in their thirties and even older ladies, writing down with the little they knew of the alphabet about their dreams, their fears and the shame they felt because they were ignorant. Her photos were simple, unmanipulated and true. One woman wrote: Who am I? and she wrote down her name. That was all she could write.

*http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=157362383651&ref=mf

(Laura Boushnak)

Γεια! Λοιπόν ας ξεκινίσουμε…

Μπορείται να δείτε video που έχω φτιάξει με θέμα… τα γλυκά και όμορφα αγόρια. Είναι φωτογραφίες των πιο sexy και ωραίων νέων -για μένα τουλάχιστον Lol-. Είμαι απολύτως σίγουρη πως ο καθένας θα συνφωνεί για κάποια πρώσωπα αλλά θα διαφωνεί για άλλα. Lol -δύσκολο να αρέσουν όλοι σε ολους.- Ok.

Si chiama Daniele Romeo il giovanissimo consigliere comunale (pidiellino) di Reggio Calabria autore di un “colpo” davvero significativo: in diretta Sky, ha chiesto al presidente del Consiglio Silvio Berlusconi (nell’ambito della necessità di trattare con l’Udc, cosa che si è fatta peraltro più complicata per via del pressing piddino sui centristi, anche sui nomi dei candidati a Governatore nelle singole Regioni in cui si vorrà tentare di chiudere alleanze Udc-Pdl) se il nome di Giuseppe Scopelliti come candidato alla presidenza della Giunta regionale fosse “uno” dei nomi, o proprio quello giusto.

La risposta del premier è stata di una granitica e forse insperata solidità: il sindaco reggino e coordinatore calabrese del Popolo della libertà sarà il candidato del Pdl alla carica di Presidente, per il voto del 21 e 22 marzo.

La cosa a nostro avviso è importante. Crediamo poco ai tatticismi: e la partita 2010-2014 (no!, non sono gli anni del settennato dei fondi comunitari, anche se in parte rilevante coincidono, ma quelli della prossima legislatura regionale…) sarà decisiva per la Calabria. Troppo, affinché un “particolare” rilevantissimo come il nome dei singoli candidati all’incarico presidenziale possa essere lasciato nell’incertezza fino, magari, a poche settimane dal ricorso alle urne.

Ma il frangente, questa sorta di ufficializzazione della candidatura Scopelliti, è fondamentale per almeno altri due motivi più “politici”.

1)   Se mai la gente di Calabria non l’avesse capito, è assolutamente assodato che (anche) il Pdl calabrese non conta assolutamente nulla: come sempre, come in quasi tutti i partiti, per le scelte-clou si decide tutto a Roma. E – cari Traversa e Abramo, Pirilli e Gentile, Sarra e Bevilacqua, Morelli e Dima… – Berlusconi ha deciso che il candidato sarà Scopelliti: punto. Decisione verticistica, non certo partecipata, fuori da ogni concertazione e adottata, al più!, col sondaggista di fiducia accanto.

2)   L’Udc è davvero a un bivio… Infatti, intervistato proprio da questo blogger, il presidente nazionale udiccino Rocco Buttiglione ha ribadito in questi giorni due concetti assai cari a Cesa&Casini: intanto, col Pd – o col Pdl – non ci sarà nessun accordo “nazionale” ma si ragionerà esclusivamente “regione per regione”. In seconda battuta, in nessuna regione e comunque in Calabria <non pensi il Pdl – ha ammonito l’ex ministro – di presentarsi a un tavolo di trattative con l’Udc con un “pacchetto” preconfezionato e un candidato già stabilito>. ….Fatto! E’ proprio quel che Berlusconi ha certificato: il dialogo coi centristi, in Calabria, almeno sul nome del candidato non ci sarà mai perché il candidato “è” Peppe Scopelliti, come sancito dal premier “in solitaria”.

Potrebbero essere i prodromi di un’alleanza calabrese Pd-Udc, per certi versi sensazionale!, a una manciata di mesi dall’accordo (<strategico, non tattico, e valido pure per le Regionali 2010> si disse all’epoca) per le Amministrative 2009.

Группа Тату отдельно:)

и немного весёленького

Photography never makes sense. I become indifferent to the world. Let them not see what I see. What does it matter?

Some secrets are best not told, they are only lived by those who bear them.

Women on the roads, men in coffee shops, cows and monkeys on the street, deer and elephants in the forest. What difference does it make to take a photo? It will only entice the momentary obligation of showing amazement. I do not need that hypocrisy, neither do all those women and men and animals.

Margin: drifting away from the original text.

I remember thinking on my three-hour drive up the uneven forest road about my ideals those linked to my fascination with photography. I remember having two particular images in my mind, one of them the Pulitzer-winning shot of a starving Sudanese toddler stalked by a vulture by Kevin Carter, the South African photographer.

Many would argue the power of the image, how photographers can carry the mission of revealing the truth. Well, Carter committed suicide, and photos cannot transmit the smell. This must say something about the image, and the extent to which the eye is capable of interpreting everything that needs to be interpreted, and the consequences of depriving the reality from its actual context once it is framed – also probably a fault with the capability of the human face of drawing a clear line between an expression of sadness, for example, and an involuntary reaction to the light of the sun. But that is just an example, which can also be rendered in the “chaotic” placement of the nature-made, something almost always confused with neglect versus the human-made orderliness which is simplistically made synonymous with the human virtue of progress. Well, a photograph, cannot reverse this easily, although driving on the road, the human-made small tea plantations seemed dreadful on one side, while naturally grown plants seemed peaceful and friendly on the other.

What am I talking about? Reduction.

Images are not like words. They are clear, evident, and undeceiving. Words are much more complicated. But images lack the word, just as a word lacks the image representation. There is always something missing, and with that is a whole chapter of data unavailable to be processed by the mind to reach the accurate conclusion. The result, misjudging, stereotypical images, and vast opportunity for manipulation. I will call it the “synopsis” effect.

El técnico del Inter de Milán, que ejerció de espía, fue el único que se quedó en su asiento incluso en el descanso

El último fichaje del Barça, el ucraniano Dmytro Chygrynskiy, tuvo ayer en el Camp Nou un compañero de fila muy especial. El defensa central procedente del Shakhtar Donetsk se sentó, codo con codo, junto al entrenador del Inter de Milán, José Mourinho.

Ambos vieron el encuentro del conjunto de Pep Guardiola desde el palco del estadio blaugrana. Dima, además, tuvo a su izquierda a su hermano, que ha sido uno de los hombres importantes en la negociación por el fichaje del defensa. Aunque vive habitualmente en Tailandia, lleva varios meses al lado de su hermano, seis años menor, para estar a su lado en un momento importante de su vida, en el que cambia Donetsk por Barcelona. Con Chygrynskiy, Mouriunho tuvo pocas palabras. De hecho, las justas. Aunque el técnico portugués deberá enfrentarse al conjunto blaugrana en la fase de grupos de la Champions League, el nuevo central del Barça no debe preocuparle en absoluto. Por lo menos esta temporada. Dima no será uno de sus rivales en el terreno de juego. Ya jugó la máxima competición continental con al camiseta del Shakhtar Donetsk, después de que el propio presidente ucraniano, Rinat Akhmetov, le pidiera que hiciera un último esfuerzo antes de dejarlo marchar, previo pago de 25 millones de euros, al Camp Nou. Pese a ello, sus 22 años le permitirán crecer durante varias temporadas como blaugrana jugando la Champions.

Mouriunho fue el único que no se movió del palco durante el tiempo de descanso. El entrenador ‘nerazzurro’ se quedó en su asiento, sin apenas moverse, durante el tiempo en el que el resto bajó a la zona VIP del palco para degustar un refresco o algo de comer. Tampoco quiso perderse el encuentro otro de los entrenadores con los que el Barça se las verá esta temporada. El técnico del Valencia, Unay Emery, también estuvo en la grada del Camp Nou presenciando el partido que protagonizaron el club blaugrana y el Sporting de Gijón.

Post Script:

When I looked at my notebook, I realised that I had skipped Face 7 and jumped directly to Face 8. Yet, Face 7 still exists and I would like to call it the Face of Good.

Note:

The Face of Good is like other faces, a phase. It never prevails, but is always there. Similar to love, hatred, sadness, purity, beauty, and simplicity. The Kingdom of Nine does not have the Hollywood type of good guys against bad guys. True that in some of the artwork of the colonial era, many of the good characters were depicted white and the evil black, but that is just the colonial art.

In the Kingdom of Nine the power of destruction is worshipped equally with the power of creation, for there is no life without death, and even the good dies, only to be resurrected, only to continue to survive in the joy of the people.

And in the Kingdom of Nine people are feasting for the coming 10 days.

The story, they say is that of a good ruler who was killed by a villain. The good ruler had made their land so rich and prosperous, and those who remain true to him, await his visit every year with festivities. They only want to prove that what he has given to their land has lived on.

The face of sadness is mine. In the Kingdom of Nine people are beyond sadness.

I am on a local bus on an 11 hour trip (initially I thought it was only going to be 6 hours). All of the bus’ passengers are commoners, the type who might need to work a whole lifetime to save money for a dowry.

The roads are very very bad, and I am sitting on the back seat, having to jump up and down countless times to avoid crashing on my seat whenever the bus crossed over a ditch.

We stopped at a bus station for a one-hour break. It rained for 10 minutes. The bus station was crammed with old and young. A century old couple slept in the dry corner of the crowded passage. Passers by never looked, while the old woman sat in a retreat watching over her husband who was sleeping in an embryo position covered with a bright green and his toes showing out.

At the other gate of the station was a shelter. People slept underneath while it continued to rain. At the far end crouched 3 children.

I could not take a photograph, the light was too dim and they were far away separated from me by darkness and showering rain.

What have their lives been like? I wondered. I believe suffering has no time for sadness, but I can be as sad as fancied.

17 August:

I am in my third hotel, sleepless since yesterday. I spent my night traveling on that local bus. It rained all night and it was pretty cold. I took the back seat because that was the usually the one left spar, never reserved, and I was too late to book a ticket.

Never experienced such bad roads and the driver  kept flying over bumps and road ditches up a 3500 metres mountain and down again.

Margin: I reached the city at dawn, cold and wet. I had the best cup of coffee at a small shop on a street that was just as if waking up from a long night sleep. The nearby candy shop was just opening, and I stood with the driver of the cab on the sidewalk. He told me that he was a regular gambler and that he lost a lot of money betting on horses.

Continue:

My hotel is a village hotel, on the outskirts of the green city. The hotel has no facilities (the word makes me giggle). I could use a hot bath. The man at the reception said I should let them know whenever I needed the hot water. I did, and I stepped into the bath and the hot water to run out of the tap. After waiting for 5 minutes with nothing happening, I dressed again, called the reception again and went to bed.

Just as I was dozing off, the door banged. I opened the door and a man was carrying a bucket of hot water!

That made sense at once. He placed the bucket in the bathroom. I remembered how we used to take baths as children in Lebanon during the civil war, when there was scarcely any electricity or water. Never forgot the technique!

A nice satisfactory bath with just half a bucket of steaming hot water! To think how much water we waste in the luxury of our homes back in a desert city that has nothing of the sort!

Still can’t figure out how to turn off the ceiling fan, as the weather is cold. It is still raining outside.

We want to change the world. We think we can. We shall always try. I studied journalism because I thought it would make me change the world, but when I saw her face I realised that there is no need.

She does not need to be changed. Hut after hut, people on roads going about their lives just like their ancestors did, shielded from hatred.

Where do you think conflicts are born? Places where people are ignorant and poor or places where they get to watch more TV?

The man in the car said the district suffered a conflict five years ago. Two or three people were killed, he said. It might not be about the media, parties in conflicts are organised. Their leaders create the little wars.

She is not shielded from hatred afterall. Religion divides them. Now it is calm, he said, and it was.

Additional margin: I am sitting on a hedge at the bus station in a faraway village. It feels great to call it a village, not a town, not a city, because only then it can be entitled to being described as beautiful.

People from “this place” hate to sit at a hedge like me facing a muddy street overflowing with green and bathing in a gentle rain, the one we call in Arabic Dima.

The night before I travelled I met a man. He said he hated the Kingdom of Nine because it had no facilities. Facilities to him include air conditioner, some creatively designed water tap, elevator music, and most of all internet. Internet is scare here and I do not wish to look for it.

Dmytro Chygrynskiy verá cumplido su sueño de jugar en el Barça y confía en no defraudar a su gran valedor, Pep Guardiola.

Tras varias semanas de tiras y aflojas, Pep Guardiola verá por fin cumplido su deseo de tener a sus órdenes al internacional ucraniano Dmytro Chygrynskiy. Tras asegurarse el Shakhtar Donetsk su presencia en la Europa League ayer frente al Sivasspor turco, el férreo y acaudalado Rinat Akhmetov, presidente del club ucraniano, aceptará la oferta blaugrana de 25 millones de euros y Chygrynskiy firmará por las cinco próximas temporadas. El jugador percibirá 1,2 millones netos la próxima campaña, cifra que irá en aumento hasta los dos millones que cobrará en la campaña 2013-14.

Las negociaciones han sido tan largas como arduas, pero finalmente llegarán a buen puerto por la insistencia de Guardiola y los deseos de Laporta de complacer a un técnico que hizo historia en su primera temporada al frente del primer equipo. La historia viene de largo, concretamente del pasado año, cuando el Barça quedó encuadrado junto al Shakhtar en la fase de grupos de la Champions League.

Y Pep quedó prendado de las virtudes del joven internacional ucraniano (Iziaslav, 7 de noviembre de 1986). Tan sólo le bastaron 69 minutos en la ida en el Olimpiyskiy de Donetsk (fue suplido por Seleznov) y el partido completo en la vuelta en el Camp Nou para entender que Chygrynskiy es el central idóneo para reforzar la zaga blaugrana. Dotado de un físico prodigioso (1,90 metros y 81 kilogramos de peso), ‘Chygryk’, ‘Chygryno’ o ‘Dima’ destaca por su notable técnica y su capacidad para sacar el balón jugado desde atrás.

Además, las continuas lesiones de Rafa Márquez terminaron por convencer a Guardiola de la necesidad de fichar un central. Y éste tenía que ser Dmytro Chygrynskiy. El técnico blaugrana descartó otras alternativas y dijo ‘no’ a todos los nombres que le presentó Txiki Begiristain.

Una vez acabada la temporada, el Barça se lanzó a por el central ucraniano, pero se topó con un muro llamado Akhmetov, que fue rechazando una tras otra las ofertas barcelonistas.

Hasta Laporta viajó a Donetsk junto a Txiki… pero no hubo entente. El Shakhtar pedía 30 millones de euros y no admitía facilidades de pagos. El Barça empezó ofreciendo 20 millones, subió su propuesta a 17 millones fijos más ocho variables en función de diversos objetivos y acabó ofertando una cesión por tres millones con una opción de compra por 22.

Tras la enésima negativa del club ‘hirnyky’ (‘minero’), el Barça renunció a su fichaje… pero el de Santpedor volvió a insistir y al final se saldrá con la suya. Ni el hecho de que no podrá jugar la Champions con el Barça ha frenado a Pep. Las negociaciones podrían quedar hoy satisfactoriamente cerradas por 25 millones de euros en una serie de plazos todavía pendientes de concretar.

En cuanto al jugador, Chygrynskiy es consciente del enorme esfuerzo que hará el Barça y por ello accederá a una rebaja salarial. El internacional ucraniano es el segundo mejor pagado en el pudiente Shakhtar (sólo por detrás del croata Darijo Srna), donde percibe tres millones de euros sumando todos los conceptos. Sin embargo, el central ha accedido a firmar por cinco temporadas, a razón de 1,2 millones de euros la primera de ellas, cifra que irá aumentando hasta llegar a dos millones en la última, la 2013-14.

Chygrynskiy, que reiteró semanas atrás su deseo de jugar en el Barça, no ha dudado en sacrificarse para hacer realidad su gran sueño. Dejará un club en el que es el ídolo de la afición y cobrará menos… pero será blaugrana.