From my appartment

A collage: Plate of frike and chicken, lettuce from Syria, olive oil from Palestine, Apple OS X, Nadira Sururi poem called "Rejection" in Opening the Gates, Mandela at Havana with Castro--"How far we slaves have come," Pathfinder Press, Dome of the Rock, Mada'in Saleh postcards, l'Officiel des Spectacles


First The Mavi Marmara, then The Rachel Corrie; soon another. Why it is becoming another way to make the Pilgrimage, just like in Chaucer's time, when the Wife of Bath made several pilgrimages all the way to Palestine! The difference this time is that when one arrives off the coast of Jaffa and Akka, pirates occupying the land board your ship and deport you to Jordan or, if you are from an imperialist country, on a plane back to Ireland or America. I sit back in my apartment, glad that I can at least eat Palestinian food... things like my Shammoute ("Jaffa") oranges coming to my from Tripoli, Lebanon, and Frike (فريكة), one of the special foods of Palestine. And the box is from Palestine! I washed the frike, soaked it in a little water, and then, after melting some margarine and a little olive oil in a sauce pan, I added a fair amount of chicken broth and cooked it until it was soft. Had a special sweet taste.

In the quicktime movie,attached below, is an experiment with doing a blog with Quicktime Broadcaster. Remember, with Quicktime broadcaster and a Mac, you have to use the internal microphone and set things to mono, as the Mac does not record in stereo, except with applications like Garage Band. I'm reading this: ...from Nadira Sururi's, "Female Contractions"--a poem which forms the Chapter heading for other Arab Women writers on "Rejection" in Margot Badran and Miryam Cooke's Anthology:

She did not know
Nor her family knew
But the bridegroom Was a Ghoul
They sang and sang...
‘He’ll feed you
Fatten you
And on your wedding day
Will eat you...’

They sang and sang
She wept and wept
And then sang
‘I don’t want. I don’t want.
I’m no fool
He’s a ghoul
Wed? To a ghostly host? Am I?
Fed? His bridal-roast? Am I?
She wept and wept alnight
‘He was alright except

At night he was a goat’
They sang...Alweddingnight
She wept and sang and wept and sang
Alweddingnight
At dawn he slept
At last she crept. Away
She went. Away. Unwed.
They sang, resang...
Unwed...She left...Away...
They sang...

... in the book I reviewed in 1975 for an English Language Jordanian newspaper, Female Contractions, by Nadira Sururi, RSS Press, Jordan 1975; this one poem of her poems and illustrations is published in Opening the Gates an Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing, edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2004, p. 123.