Osama

“They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it. In North London, where councillors once voted to change the name of the area to Nirvana, it is not unusual to walk the streets and be suddenly confronted by sage words from the chalkfaced, blue-lipped, or eyebrowless. From across the street or from the other end of a tube carriage they will use their schizophrenic talent for seeing connections in the random (for discerning the whole world in a grain of sand, for deriving narrative from nothing) to riddle you, to rhyme you, to strip you down, to tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street—the great majority of modernday seers travel the Metropolitan Line) and why. But as a city we are not appreciative of these people. Our gut instinct is that they intend to embarrass us, that they’re out to shame us somehow as they lurch down the train aisle, bulbous-eyed and with carbuncled nose, preparing to ask us, inevitably, what we are looking at. What the fuck we are looking at. As a kind of preemptive defense mechanism, Londoners have learned not to look, never to look, to avoid eyes at all times so that the dreaded question “What you looking at?” and its pitiful, gutless, useless answer —“Nothing”—might be avoided.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“أحد فنون الكذب الحميدة . التي احترفتها من سنوات . المداراة .. مداراة الخوف ، مداراة الألم ، مداراة اليأس ، وأحياناً مداراة الشغف”
― أماني خليل, الوهج

“If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister. If religion is a tight band, a throbbing vein, and a needle, tradition is a far homelier concoction: poppy seeds ground into tea; a sweet cocoa drink laced with cocaine; the kind of thing your grandmother might have made.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“المسكين

ينشِبُ مِخلَبَهُ في ساقِ ذُعرِهَا المُتَعثِّر
يُحَاصِرَهَا كَفَخ
كمتاهَة
كجِدار
يغمسُ نابَهُ في نبضِها ويبكى

جائعٌ جدًا
وفي منتهى الحُزن”
― أسامة جاد, الجميلة سوف تأتي