Dear Dr Adnan al-Bursh,
Your hands have lived with me for months. After Israel tortured you to death, I searched for them in every photo or video they showed of you. I glimpsed one photo of you that your children and wife were looking at on their phone as they grieve. Your arms greet the camera and they are outstretched. Your hands offer the camera an even larger smile than your mouth.
I find your hands amidst a tangle of doctors’ wrung-out bodies in a photo taken in the staff room at al-Shifa Hospital at some point in the early weeks of Israel’s onslaught following October 7. Most of the other hands are preoccupied: your colleagues are manipulating their phones, one is laughing and grasping the back of his neck, one is vaping, one is caught at a moment of his fingers’ gesticulations. But your hands are still. Each forms a soft ball: one rests on a mattress, the other props up your head. Exhaustion seems about to pull you into sleep.
From a letter to Dr Adnan al-Bursh. We will be posting letters of rage & grief, to those who can no longer receive them, throughout the day. Please join with your own.
arablit.org/dear-dr-adna...
30.04.2025 07:59 — 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 1
Dear Unknown: A Painting of Gaza
Dear unknown,
You posted a picture to twitter, and I saved it to my phone, and in the time since then, I’ve spent hours looking at it, hours painting it, and now, I can’t find on the internet any trace it ever existed. Your picture is elegant and sparse. It is divided into three partitions of the visual space: in the bottom third is a table covered by wrinkled white cloth, upon which sit a cup on a saucer holding coffee and another coffee cup holding white flowers, bursting from a shock of green; in the middle third is a low wall split by three long vertical cracks; and in the upper third, moving toward the viewer through the empty space where windows once were is a catastrophic scene: crumbling, bombed out structures, rebar scraping the sky. All of it catches a specific tonal quality of light I associate with sunrise (but it could be sunset), a certain vibrancy generating on its objects shades of gray, muted purple, orange and warm pink. It is almos
The GRIEF issue is out today. Don't miss the many resonant letters at arablit.org/grief & join us in writing your own.
Also, if anyone knows who took this photo, we'll pass it on to Matthew.
"May what we mourn propel us toward collective liberation." - Abdelrahman ElGendy
30.04.2025 07:48 — 👍 13 🔁 10 💬 1 📌 1
Just finished the excellent ‘Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age’ by @raphcormack.bsky.social - a highly readable account of fakirism, spiritualism and occultism in the 20th century, approached through the lives of two key figures: Tahra Bey and Dr Dahesh.
21.04.2025 07:11 — 👍 8 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0
Happy US Publication date to HOLY MEN OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC AGE. It's been a slog but it's finally here! @wwnorton.bsky.social wwnorton.com/books/978039...
11.03.2025 10:33 — 👍 9 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0
Happy US Publication date to HOLY MEN OF THE ELECTROMAGNETIC AGE. It's been a slog but it's finally here! @wwnorton.bsky.social wwnorton.com/books/978039...
11.03.2025 10:33 — 👍 9 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0
