Welcome to Kaifan

Kaifan welcomes students to the start of a new semester!!

I know why the free bird cries*

Marital relationships are complex. Marriage is seen as a mean to bring two people together (or 2 or 3 or 4 for that matter). But that is only done by trapping the 2, 3, 4, individuals in a contract from which escape is almost impossible without injury. One decides to break free, and in that decision, whether intentionally or not, hurts the other caged bird. Wouldn’t it just be much better if the cage was never built?**

Often in my classes we debate issues of reason and passion. Plato is a dominant and domineering voice there. My classrooms, as all classrooms are, are a reflection of my positions in life, a reflection of how I see life. So we debate the validity of reason over passion. And we debate the insensitivity of promoting reason over passion. And then I come to my own personal life and find myself, in contradiction to what I preach in class, unable to find a position that supports passion as not necessarily less than reason, nor stick to reason that I, very often, find quite … unreasonable. So I choose the grey area. I choose to be unreasonably passionate and passionately reasonable. And in the process, I confuse. ***

* Remodelled from Maya Angelou

** Inspired by a very dear friend whose cage collapsed on her and is now forced to fly away from that cage. Freedom she values. But freedom she doesn’t want. And what do you do as a friend? Support her in her new-found freedom? Or help her get back to the comfort of the cage?

*** Not inspired by my attempt to start translating Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Let’s see how that goes.

Elections 2009

I’m now ‘once, twice, three times a [voter]‘ to misquote Lionel Richie
With my jinsiya in hand, I headed to make my choices.

I still feel elated when I finally make those ticks. The fact that I did it three times in four years makes it all the more joyous, despite the rather nagging, critical voice that makes me wonder about the usefulness of a vote that can easily be thrown away within a year with this constant change in Parliament.

No … Today, there is no chance for negativity. This is a good day.

I didn’t even hesitate when I looked at the time (8 am) and decided to get on with it now. I didn’t even have to drag myself out of bed. I got up, put on my very comfortable beige pants, and my very summery white shirt – minding the heat – and headed to the center. I found my hall, went in, placed my ticks – with a heart that seems to have been beating faster, then headed home to share the experience with mother, father and brother over the breakfast table.

This is a good day.

My ‘jinsiya’ now has three stamps: a green hexagon, a black star, and a red oval, indicative of our flag of course.

This is a very good day.

*Dear visitor: please do not burst my bubble. I am happy. It might be a temporary sense of happiness that will fade away soon. But I am now happy. So spare me any negativity you might be unfortunate enough to have. Just celebrate the day with me.

Elections

يتشرف عبدالله النيباري بدعوتكم لافتتاح مقره الانتخابي بمشاركةصالح الملا و شروق مظفر.الاحد3/5 س8.ض عبدالله\السالم ق٤.ش سيدعلي سيدسليمان

Blackberry Doubts!

“Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certaintly”
Father Flynn

Meryl Streep in Doubt

I think I have fallen in love with Meryl Streep yet again, for the third time in about 3 years. She struck me while watching her on stage for Mother Courage in 2006. She struck me again in 2008 when I watched Mama Mia. And here she goes again baffling me in Doubt. This woman is just amazing. To think of the spectrum of roles she played, and played to an excellence, in only these three movies …

So I’m in love with Meryl Streep. Do you blame me?

And I’m also in love with my Blackberry. These toys are such an amazing and deadly waste of time. And I have no doubt about that whatsoever. This certainty is actually a bond as powerful and sustaining as doubt.

Back to school

In Kaifan there is a new scattering of lawn chairs, I’ve detected at least 10, like those you see in the picture. Not bad. And a shaded seating arrangement that includes a table in the center is actually very useful for campus. I think they would serve their purpose rather well when I take my classes outside.
However, these chairs each cose KD520, from AlKhurafi Group. A rather huge sum I think. On another frontier, a departmental activity that lasts 2 days, including fashion shows and art galleries and music, with all the expenses you can imagine (costumes, music, lights, plaques, certificates, awards, etc.) was begrudged the KD 1500 requested by the department, and only received the KD 1000 after alot of haggling. The activity cost us at least KD 1600, and I am not counting the money that students put in themselves, or the money donated from other teachers.
It makes you wonder about KU’s priorities. It also makes you wonder who decides where our money goes.
520 KD is alot for these chairs, right? Or am I mistaken?

Love Without Sex?!

Gustav Klimt - Danaë

Sex Without Love by Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health–just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

I love how Olds calls our feelings of love for our lover “lov[ing] the priest instead of God.” We have a tendency, needy humans as we are, of “mistaking the lover for [our] own pleasure.” The sex is good, so we think it’s the giver that is good. We’re human beings. Physical bodies. And in our aspiration to be trans-physical (is that even a real term?), in our need to be more than just pure body, in our endless desire and wishes to be more than what we are, we refuse to accept the simple, earthly, natural pleasure we find during the act of physical sex and insist on making it ‘more meaningful’ and more transcendental, so we insist that it is not just the body that we love, but the person (soul/body/mind) that comes with the body. Why can we enjoy a dish prepared by someone without guiltily thinking that we have to love that someone, yet we don’t do the same when it comes to sex?

But my own question goes in the opposite direction to that of Olds. How do they do it, the one who love without making love? Platonic love. Isn’t that what we call it? But isn’t it just partial love? Impaired love? Even flawed love? Isn’t it just preparation for real love? And if sex is such a necessary component of love (proven simply by the act of physically consummating a marriage as the ultimate goal of love), then why claim love to be more prophetic, more noble, more worthy of humanity? And why claim that love can exist without sex?

Happy Birthday

Georgia O'Keeffe: Music Pink and Blue

Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement.

Here they are, returning, arriving over and again, because the unconscious is impregnable. They have wandered around in circles, confined to the narrow room in which they’ve been given a deadly brainwashing. … As soon as they begin to speak, at the same time as they’re taught their name, they can be taught that their territory is black: because you are Africa, you are black. Your continent is dark. Dark is dangerous. You can’t see anything in the dark, you’re afraid. Don’t move, you might fall. Most of all, don’t go into the forest. And so we have internalized this horror of the dark.

By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display – the ailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be the nasty companion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time.

To write. An act which will not only “realize” the decensored relation of woman to her sexuality, to her womanly being, giving her access to her native strength; it will give her back her goods, her pleasures, her organs, her immense bodily territories which have been kept under seal: it will tear her away from the superegoized structure in which she has always occupied the place reserved for the guilty.

It is by writing, from and toward women, and by taking up the challenge of speech which has been governed by the phallus, that women will confirm women in a place other than that which is reserved in and by the symbolic, that is, in a place other than silence.

*Excerpted from “The Laugh of the Medusa” by Hélène Cixous, and gifted to Disturbed Stranger, a woman who always writes her body.

There Was Once

Margaret Atwood

“There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.”

“Forest? Forest is passé, I mean, I’ve had it with all this wilderness stuff. It’s not a right image of our society, today. Let’s have some urban for a change.”

“There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the suburbs.”

“That’s better. But I have to seriously query this word poor.”

“But she was poor!”

“Poor is relative. She lived in a house, didn’t she?”

“Yes.”

“Then socio-economically speaking, she was not poor.”

“But none of the money was hers! The whole point of the story is that the wicked stepmother makes her wear old clothes and sleep in the fireplace-”

“Aha! They had a fireplace! With poor, let me tell you, there’s no fireplace. Come down to the park, come to the subway stations after dark, come down to where they sleep in cardboard boxes, and I’ll show you poor!”

“There was once a middle-class girl, as beautiful as she was good-”

“Stop right there. I think we can cut the beautiful, don’t you? Women these days have to deal with too many intimidating physical role models as it is, what with those bimbos in the ads. Can’t you make her, well, more average?”

“There was once a girl who was a little overweight and whose front teeth stuck out, who-”

“I don’t think it’s nice to make fun of people’s appearances. Plus, you’re encouraging anorexia.”

“I wasn’t making fun! I was just describing-”

“Skip the description. Description oppresses. But you can say what colour she was.

“What colour?”

“You know. Black, white, red, brown, yellow. Those are the choices. And I’m telling you right now, I’ve had enough of white. Dominant culture this, dominant culture that-”

“I don’t know what colour.”

“Well, it would probably be your colour, wouldn’t it?”

“But this isn’t about me! It’s about this girl-”

“Everything is about you.”

“Sounds to me like you don’t want to hear this story at all.”

“Oh well, go on. You could make her ethnic. That might help.”

“There was once a girl of indeterminate descent, as average-looking as she was good, who lived with her wicked-”

“Another thing. Good and wicked. Don’t you think you should transcend those puritanical judgmental moralistic epithets? I mean, so much of that is conditioning, isn’t it?”

“There was once a girl, as average-looking as she was well-adjusted, who lived with her stepmother, who was not a very open and loving person because she herself had been abused in childhood.”

“Better. But I am so tired of negative female images! And stepmothers-they always get it in the neck! Change it to stepfather, why don’t you? That would make more sense anyway, considering the bad behaviour you’re about to describe. And throw in some whips and chains. We all know what those twisted, repressed, middle-aged men are like-”

“Hey, just a minute! I’m a middle-aged-”

“Stuff it, Mister Nosy Parker. Nobody asked you to stick in your oar, or whatever you want to call that thing. This is between the two of us. Go on.”

“There was once a girl-”

“How old was she?”

“I don’t know. She was young.”

“This ends with a marriage, right?”

“Well, not to blow the plot, but-yes.”

“Then you can scratch the condescending paternalistic terminology. It’s woman, pal. Woman.”

“There was once-”

“What’s this was, once? Enough of the dead past. Tell me about now.”

“There-”

“So?”

“So, what?”

“So, why not here?”

Vacation … books … missing

When you’re feeling lonely ’cause your significant other is out of town, and you’re bored ’cause it’s a vacation and you’re trapped in town, nothing’s better than to catch up on postponed readings. And as Arabic books seem a distraction while I teach English literature (the mind switching between Arabic and English texts seems to malfunction sometimes), I’m hoping that this vacation would be a time for me to cover what this image displays. I already read Rabee3 Jaber’s ‘I3terafat,’ Mais Al-Othman’s ‘3aqeedat Raqs’ and ‘3ara’is Al-souf’ so have 6 remaining books to cover, not counting 3alam Al-Ma3rifa’s book which I’m finding it hard to get into (reading anything theoretical in Arabic is completely beyond me, especially when it’s a theory I focus on in my own research, so used to reading the English terms), and 7ayat Sharara’s ‘Itha Al-Ayam Aghsaqat’ which I’ve read a long time ago.

So an update on the covered material.
‘I3tirafat’ is an amazingly sad book. Very captivating and hard to put down. A story of a boy struggling with who he is. But it goes beyond the usual narratives about the search of one’s identity.
Mais Al-Othman is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers. I read her ‘Ashya’oha Al-Sagheera’ a while back and her simple and clear style quickly seduced me. Then I read ‘3akeedat Raqs’ which is just completely brilliant in its style, and much more advanced than her earlier short story collection. Of course I made the mistake of reading ‘3ara’is Al-Souf’ after ‘3aqeedat Raqs’ and quickly noted that, although ‘3ara’is’ is beautifully written and as captivating as all her stories, ‘3aqeedat’ sits on its own pedestal. It is just brilliant in style and story. Very captivating and enjoyable to read.

Now do you think that I have enough distractions to stop me from thinking of what I miss? Or will the pangs of missing my significant other drive me to the edge of depression like it usually does?