Book Review by Lisa Accadia
Daughter of Damascus by Siham Tergeman
Published by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1994
Damascus in my mind’s eye… is an Arabic house with an open courtyard, in its center is a small pool from which 70 brass pipes pour out cool water. A beautiful woman sweeps the courtyard with water, holding...
By Brigid Keenan, Thames & Hudson
Review by Charles Newton, ESL teacher and artistÂ
My husband, a diplomat, was posted to Syria in 1993, and I went with him. Very soon, like Isabel, the wife of the famous British Consul Richard Burton, a hundred and twenty-odd years before me, I found myself in love with Damascus. (Long after she left Syria,...
My Country
- by Nizar Qabbani,
- translated by Norma Medawar
From the lisp of the
blackbird…
From the saddening
huskiness of the flute…
From the flickering sounds of
the folk songs
From the sighs of the
minaret…
From a cloud at sunset
woven by a chimney and by
the wound of the bricks of
the decorated and widespread
villages…
From the whispers of a star
settled in our east
From a story between
a rose and a...
I have no power
By Nizar Qabbani
translated by Norma Medawar
I have no power to change you
Or explain your ways…
Don’t believe a man can change a woman
and the claims of men fancying that
woman comes from one of their ribs are false…
Woman never emerges from a man’s rib….
It’s he who emerges from her pelvis
like a fish rising from a basin of water
he...
