Shahd Alshammari's Blog, page 14
March 15, 2016
Poetry Slam 2016
GUST’s English Department held its first Poetry Slam event- and it was a huge success. I was invited to be one of the Judges, alongside Nada Faris, an established writer, poet, and a friend of mine. The event was very well organized and there was great effort behind it, a colleague of mine, someone who has supported me endlessly, Ms. Ann Newman, was the head organizer of the event. She managed to put together a great team of slam poets, supporting their creativity and providing a venue for expressing poetry, ideas, and mainly, expressing voices that are sometimes muted.
My main concern was that although these poets were excited and very brave, they still struggled to speak up. I have read somewhere, I don’t recall which critic said this, but I think it was a Feminist critic (might be Cixous or Irigary) who insisted that we should listen to women speak. When women speak, they tremble. Why? Because society has silenced them for too long. I understand all of this all too well. As an undergraduate student, I always lost marks on participation grades. I was too shy, too intimdated by the entire classroom, and hated attention. Sometimes, I had so much to say, but couldn’t build up the courage to voice my opinion. Years later, I was able to slowly get over this fear. I can’t say I am an all-star speaker, but I can say, that at least it’s no longer terrifying to speak!
I loved the initiative, and I hope we can establish more forums, more venues to speak up, and as we go along, develop a stronger female voice, a collective voice that both speaks and listens to the other.
Music and Soul
I was invited to Abdulrahman Mohammed’s concert, and as I have always been a fan, I was very excited to see him live. He was spectacular. I am reminded by everything that his music takes me back to. I remember how his words used to make us cry. I remember how the poetics of it all barely captured the intensity of reality. He draws his inspiration and his lyrics from Old Arabic poetry, and he has included Qais’s (the poet) love for Laila. Qais, otherwise known as “Majnoon Laila.” In love, will anything other than madness suffice? I doubt it :) Abdulrahman, like Qais, pours his soul into art. He left all of us completely awe-struck that night, and we left the stage reminiscing and wrapped in a blanket of passion, pain, and possibility.
March 13, 2016
Flight B6
As the flight landed, I sighed. Finally. It left me drained, and I rubbed my eyes, hoping for some miraculous recovery. I looked to my right, at the person sitting near the window. You loved the window seat, while I detested it.
Two minutes later, my phone came back to life, and the first person looking for me was you.
“Finally. Hope you had a safe flight,” you said.
“Tiring. But safe. How are you?”
“Hi,” you reminded me.
“Hi.” Barely two syllables but I knew. I recognized in yor voice that I was still, very much, always landing home.
March 8, 2016
Women’s Day
International Women’s Day. A day that we celebrate, a day that is still yet to receive significant exposure. Today we think about how far we’ve come, about what still needs to be done to achieve gender equality, parity, and how we can further this agenda of women’s rights. I won’t go into the sociopolitical issues at hand, because this blog remains a personal one, but I do want to bring up a few ideas that crossed my mind.
Around me, there are beautiful, brave, strong women to celebrate. There are fighters, there are mothers, daughters, students, friends, colleagues- you name it. Each one is fighting a battle of her own. And perhaps it’s important to mention that Feminism is NOT a hatred of men, it is not us against them. At a gender parity forum today, a couple of academics and myself raised the fact that women can be hostile – they can wage wars among themselves. There is a division even between women, according to religion, social class, sect, economic position, etc.
In class the other day, I asked my students to work in pairs. I trusted that they would choose their partners efficiently, and that there would be no issues. By the time I looked up from my book, I asked if everyone had a partner. Everyone nodded and voiced “Yes.” Except for one girl. One girl who remains invisible to the rest. I’ll call her Britney, for anonymity’s sake. Britney has a mental disability, as well as a physical one. She is slightly slower than the rest, but works very hard to keep up. In fact, she tends to be the only one who reads the text before class. And yet, Britney is isolated, not spoken to. My students are adults, and yet I was suddenly reminded of how mean kids tend to be. Being picked last for the soccer team, or not being picked at all. I was reminded of how I have felt left behind way too many times in school. The utter humiliation she felt while she raised her hand to say “Me. I don’t have a partner” came crushing onto me. Some girls, unfortunately, giggled in the background. I don’t understand it and will not attempt to unravel this behavior. My reaction was: “Great. Then I’ll be your partner, Britney.” She beamed with pride. One student laughed and complained that that wasn’t “fair.” I simply shrugged it off.
What’s not fair is the way our society insists on divisions, separations. On sexism AND ableism. What’s not fair is how we want to empower women, but continue to disempower those who are at a disadvantage in one way or another. So my pledge for today, my gender parity pledge is to continue to support those that need a helping hand. I believe it is a cycle. I was supported by wonderful and kind academics when I was an undergraduate, and today, I aim to do the same, to pay it forward.
So happy women’s day, but also – here’s to doing better.
February 27, 2016
And there’s a flame that burns for you, even on the colde...
And there’s a flame that burns for you, even on the coldest nights.
February 23, 2016
Utopia
I think I know what it feels like to be kicked out of heaven. The fall from grace. The break. The punishment that feels like centuries. No wonder there is an obsession with heaven- a place we can never touch again.
My thoughts are mine. And yet when we touched the sky, I told you about every thought I ever had. You called our Utopia Cloud Number Nine. I wonder if you know that’s what you said, or whether I made it up inside my head.
February 18, 2016
And I wasn’t looking for you. I wasn’t looking for a life...
And I wasn’t looking for you. I wasn’t looking for a life-altering person. I wasn’t looking for that type of pain that crushes your bones, and I wasn’t looking for the rush that overtook me when you first laid eyes on me. I knew it was fate, or destiny, or whatever it is you may call it. And you made me believe in all the above, when I was very comfortable not believing. But you said, “play me like a guitar.” And slowly, my frozen fingers came back to life.
Sometimes we are pushed out of our comfort zone, and that is essentially terrifying. I didn’t want to leave my bed. I didn’t want to look at you, and I avoided you, but like the sun, you caught up with me. And just like it happens in the movies, it happened. Except this is a movie I am not sure I signed up to watch.
And maybe this is the end. This is the last chapter, and there might be no epilogue, but you should know, I am forever changed, and I will walk around with your name in my veins, knowing fully well that the death of that is impossible: blood never dies, even cells are always regenerating. The storm can take you away, but your cells in me will stay housed, safely, securely, away from the storm.
Hikma event recap
I recently managed to read this article published in Kuwait Times, and it is very good coverage of the Hikma event (October 2015). I am grateful to Athoob for her creativity and succinct coverage. The talk itself should be available on YouTube soon.
Here is the link: http://news.kuwaittimes.net/pdf/2015/oct/05/p04.pdf
February 17, 2016
Haruki Murakami is one of the greatest novelists and alwa...
Haruki Murakami is one of the greatest novelists and always manages to capture the complexity of human emotion. One of my all-time favorite lines of his is “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” And here is yet another one of his beautifully crafted passages:
“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun.
And another one:
“But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.” Murakami.
