Article by Lisa Accadia, AMES Australia
We recently sat down to interview Bushra, a Syrian who arrived in Australia toward the end of 2016. Bushra spoke generously to us about her life, culture, and faith. What we discovered was a warm-hearted woman whose love for life and good humour was not foreign. We hope that her approach to life and...
- By Greta Medawar and Carissa Gilham
In May 2017, Shaam Group presented the inaugural Shaam Syrian Film Festival in Melbourne and Sydney with the objective of providing a platform for Syrian cinema to be screened in Australia. Sponsors of the festival included Melbourne travel agency, CedarJet Travel, and popular Sydney based Knafeh Bakery that specialises in Jerusalem street food....
by Leslie Hemphill
“You are welcome”, or “You are family” were words we heard so often in Syria when we travelled with daughter-in-law Ghada on three visits to stay with her parents and family in Damascus.
Ghada was one of six children raised in a little house - really a two-storey apartment. It was possible to climb out a window onto...
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...
… any attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences exposes not only the misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but also the way in which understanding is complicit with the power to produce such things as the “Orient” or the “West”.’
- Edward W. Said (Orientalism, p. 348, 1995 Penguin edition)
The following article appeared in...
Not to be Ignored
Below is a transcript of an interview conducted at the end of 2010, when there was no thought of conflict in Syria, and the issues of the day for educated young women related to their ‘liberation’. The questions chosen were a response to the times since Ms Ayaan Hirsi Ali had recently visited Australia, where she...