All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

Database Highlight | The Nanking Massacre Archival Project

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On December 13, 1937 the Japanese Imperial Army invaded Nanking and the ensuing six weeks became known to history as the Nanking Massacre. This web site provides access to first hand accounts and photographs from Westerners who remained in Nanking after the Japanese invasion. These resources do not provide a comprehensive understanding of what occurred in Nanjing during 1937-1938, but the observations made by these men and women provide an important historical lens to complement additional research. The materials found in this collection are housed in the Yale University Divinity School Library’s Special Collections.


More information & databases: The Nanking Massacre Archival Project’s website

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Poet Lena Khalaf Tuffaha on Her Relationship Status with English: ‘It’s Complicated’

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, translator and poet, author of the 2017 collection Water & Salt, talked about her poetry, translating from Arabic, and her community of poets:

You write, in “Copybooks”: “But best of all, they taught us poetry. / They tucked gleaming verses into our hearts, / and let them sleep for years.” Who are the poets you first remember reading and building on, your relationship to their words, what they gave to you (and what you wanted to in turn give by writing your own poems)? Are there poems you still have memorized from childhood? 

Photo courtesy of Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: It’s difficult to limit it to just one. My childhood was steeped in poetry. Memorizing and discussing poems was a central and prominent part of education. And it wasn’t limited to school—poems swirled all around us. They were sung on radio stations (some of the Fairouz and Um Kolthom standards lived rich lives as poems before they became songs). People around me quoted poems as part of daily conversation. In elementary school, one of my favorite games involved tossing lines of memorized poems back and forth, you say one that ends in a word with the final letter aleph, for example, and I respond with a line that begins with that same letter, and so on. Like most Arab children of my generations and those before, I memorized lines of the great desert poets Antara, Umru’ul Qais. I’m always writing و لقد ذكرت و الرماح نواهل مني on the edges of notebook pages. Desert Ode Doodlings…

My grandfather, Husni Fariz, was the poet laureate of Jordan. I used to relish the chance to sit at his desk and “write poems,” terrible poems in Arabic, ones that tried desperately to rhyme. Several of his poems are still tucked away in memory.

Because poetry was in the air all around me, reading it closely for myself, outside of school and study, was a separate pleasure. The intimacy of the poem on the page was an experience I discovered in high school. I read Mahmoud Darwish, beyond the poems that were popularized and sung (Identity Card, for example) and fell in love with his vocabulary and his cadence. From his poems I learned about compression and time travel, about echo—how a sound pattern can thread through a poem and deepen meaning and resonance.

I also moved a lot as a child, in and out of Arab and American school systems, so my relationship with various literary traditions was interrupted or enriched, depending on your perspective. I was introduced to very few English-language poems by women in middle school and high school. My sense of English-language poetry was that, unlike Arabic, which was peopled by the lines of Al-Khansaa’ and Fadwa Touqan and Nazek al Malaika, English-language poetry was the stately business of old white men. Some of whose work I loved: Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, and this one Ted Hughes poem that I love-hated, that haunted me in 10th grade: “Griefs for Dead Soldiers.” Then there was Naomi Shihab Nye—her work was well-spring and mirror and open fields. I still don’t have the words for what it means to read her poetry. In college, in Seattle, I found—or was found by—the work of Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, H.D., among others. Their work changed my life—how I read, how I write.

I have been reading a book by Dunya Mikhail in which she writes:  “Where do you want to go? America?” one of them said. “But don’t forget, poetry only exists in the margins over there.” For that friend, nothing could be worse than marginalizing poetry! What does it take for you to maintain a life of poetry and poetic community in the US? 

LKT: The good news is that you can make a life of poetry if you want to. It takes work, but anything worthwhile does, I suppose. At my reading in Dubai last year a young poet asked: Do you think we are living in a golden age of Arab American poetry? I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but there is certainly a more visible community of poets that I’m privileged to belong to who are creating, lavishing readers with exceptional work. And this is true beyond the Arab American community of poets, of course.

I’m still learning how to use social media as much as possible without getting overwhelmed to stay in touch with and aware of poetry that feeds me and also that challenges me. I’ve learned that finding actual physical spaces where poetry is read aloud, where poets can be together to work and to celebrate the work is vital for me.

Has translation (the act of, and the close reading it entails) affected how you write, how you see words, your own and others?

LKT: Absolutely. All my reading happens in the liminal space between the languages that claim me. I am bilingual—I can’t really tell which I learned first, Arabic or English, and I’ve studied French since middle school. Maybe that’s why translation seems like such a comfortable space, openly engaging with layers and histories of meaning.

How did you come in particular to translating I Am a Guest on This Earth? And do you continue to be interested in translating poetry?

LKT: I first read a few of Faiza’s poems online, and I was struck by her voice and the work she was doing to embody the experiences of war and survival from a woman’s perspective, from inside of a woman’s experience. I wanted to translate the poems because I don’t think that voice is available to English language readers very often. We get to hear about women as casualties of war in the Arab world, we get to hear about Arab women, not often from them.

Have you considered translation lately? What would make you want to return, what do you think it can/could potentially bring to your own work? 

LKT: YES. I’m also considering translation and mulling over ideas. Translation is braided into my writing and my world view. I don’t even think of it in that term anymore—literary travel, literary citizenship are phrases that come to mind.

Photo courtesy of the author.

In “Dhayaa’,” from Water & Salt, I was enchanted by the interplay of the soundscapes of dhayaa’ and loss. (It’s also interesting to see dhayaa’ rendered in Latin letters instead of ضياع.) You have, for instance, “In English loss sounds to me like one shuddering blow to the heart,/ all sorrow and absence hemmed in,/ falling into a neatly rounded hole,/ such tidy finality[.”

I was interested in the way the poem takes its position right away, with the opening line, “In my language,” and contrasts it with English. Is this something you feel in the context of this poem, or more generally, that Arabic is a language that belongs to you, while English is a language at some distance?

LKT: Thank you. So much of what interests me and what I think was happening in “Dhayaa’” is about the relationship between sound and meaning, the path into language through sound. My relationship status with English continues to be: It’s complicated. The distance doesn’t come from me, I think. I’ve been a diligent student and good citizen for a long-time. But English is the language of power and colonizers and it’s impossible to pretend that isn’t present while writing. And maybe, too, there’s the complication of how English has become the language of my poems, through time and distance and the various impacts of power (State, Academic, etc) on my life.

Again in, “My English Teacher Told Me,” there is a contrast between English & Arabic that (interestingly!) takes place entirely in English, yet manages to evoke a sort of precise-schoolmarm English on the one hand, and a more gently unfolding, older, more meandering Arabic (although also by using English words). How do you navigate the rhythms and grammars of Arabic and English as you write? Do you ever write in Arabic, as a part of your process?

LKT: I like to say I try to write in Arabic. But there are the facts of one’s life—a university education in English, time spent among the books and lives of English-speaking worlds. It would be wonderful to pretend one doesn’t take place at the expense of another. This is why I majored in Comparative Literature as an undergraduate—I wanted a way to be among all the texts and traditions that held sway for me, not to choose a singular perspective, not to look out onto human experience through only one window. Some of the emotional weights assigned to Arabic and to English in “My English Teacher” likely have to do with power, with belonging, with welcome and rejection, too.

There is a wonderful delicateness to the names in “Mountain, Stone,” contrasted by a namelessness, and a stone. The poem begins with Shaymaa’ al-Sabbagh: “Do not name your daughters Shaymaa,/ courage will march them/ into the bullet-path of dictators.”

Did the poem come out of a particular name?

LKT: I hear Arabic names for both meaning and sound. I cannot simply hear Raneem and not be conscious that it means “the laughter of angels.” Because the name introduces Raneem but also immediately tells a story of her parents’ hopes and dreams, of their imagination and associations. The name brings the world of Raneem along with it, as it locates her. And I am interested in how our stories are erased, how our histories are palimpsests, often narrated in news reports (English, Arabic, whatever other languages) without our names. I also approached this poem as a parent, one who labored over the privilege and responsibility of naming her daughters. I wanted to re/name these Arab children, write them back into life, and also to eulogize them and us—our people, our language, our cities. The name that began this poem was Shaymaa’, the young Alexandrine poet who was shot to death at a peaceful protest marking the 4th anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. Proud woman—that was the name her parents gave her. And it is such a profoundly Arabic name, it seems to rise from the desert itself, it can hardly be pronounced in anything but the classical, it demands that you say that hamza at the end, doesn’t it? Imagine her parents, whose Shaymaa’ walked with garland of roses, and was then taken from them. Each of the names in the poem correspond to people, children, who have died in Egypt, Syria, Palestine.

But how can you be sure people are imagine-saying Shaymaa’ correctly? Is it ever a consideration that the Anglophone-only reader gets the rhythm or sound of a poem…. wrong? If they are hearing Shaymaa’ al-Sabbagh’s name as “Shae-ma”? Zeina Hashem Beck, I believe, has a short pronunciation guide at the front of Louder than Hearts, although I don’t know if that changes the reader’s experience. 

LKT: Here I don’t mean that all readers need to pronounce Shaymaa’ as I hear it. I’m more focused on how the sound I know of her name drives or is in conversation with its meaning for me, is as much a source of the poem as the ideas and images. I also don’t think of myself as writing exclusively or even primarily for Anglophone-only readers. The world is rich with multiple Englishes. English is the language of so many non-Anglos who have been colonized into absorbing it. I could go on here—this is what I explored in the critical thesis I wrote for my MFA, a notion I call “expanded English.”

I loved the unexpected end of “Instructions for Making Arabic Coffee,” the twist at the end into fortune-telling and the enormous potential for loss, opened and then left. I suppose in the beginning I thought it was going to be something like Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl,” but this advice is gentle, until opening up into fortune-telling…. Hm, not sure there’s a question in there.

LKT: Ma3lesh, I’ll take the compliment, too. The ending surprised me when I wrote it, which is poetry’s ultimate gift. I didn’t know where I was going when I began, just meandering in the voice of that Arab auntie with all her instructions, and trying to decipher the significance of those instructions. Coffee is served every day, but also with such ceremony, to mark beginnings and endings of many magnitudes, so maybe the poem had to chase after another realm.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, writer, and translator. She is the winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Chapbook Prize for Arab in Newsland, and the author of Water & Salt, a book of poems from Red Hen Press published in April 2017. ​You can follow her @LKTuffaha

Journalists, diplomats kicked out of Ahed Tamimi’s trial

Despite Ahed Tamimi’s request for her trial to be open to the public, military judge rules that it will take place behind closed doors.

By Oren Ziv

Ahed Tamimi during the first hearing of her trial at the Ofer prison military court. February 13, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Ahed Tamimi during the first hearing of her trial at the Ofer prison military court. February 13, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Dozens of diplomats, journalists, photographers, and supporters arrived at the Ofer Military prison Tuesday morning for the opening hearing in the trial of Ahed Tamimi, the 17 year old from Nabi Saleh. The judge, however, ruled that the trial would take place behind closed doors to protect Ahed’s interests, ordering everyone in the courtroom, except for Ahed’s family members to leave.

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Tamimi was arrested on December 19 when the army raided her home in the middle of the night, following the publication of a video showing her attempting to push armed Israeli soldiers off of her family’s porch. She has been imprisoned since then. A military court denied bail to Ahed and her mother, Nariman, who was also arrested, ruling that they would remain in prison until the end of their trials.

Nariman was arrested the day after Ahed and is charged with incitement for livestreaming the video, which later went viral.

Ahed Tamimi faces 12 different charges in her indictment, regarding five different incidents. The charges related to the video are assault of a soldier, disrupting the work of a soldier, and incitement. That video was filmed shortly after soldiers shot Mohammed Tamimi, Ahed’s 15-year-old cousin, in the head with a rubber-coated bullet, severely wounding him; part of his skull was removed, and he was in a coma for several days.

Mohammed Tamimi, 15, was shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet by the Israeli army shortly before the video of Ahed and Nur was filmed. (Activestills/Oren Ziv)

Mohammed Tamimi, 15, was shot in the head with a rubber-coated bullet by the Israeli army shortly before the video of Ahed and Nur was filmed. (Activestills/Oren Ziv)

The trials of minors are typically held behind closed doors to protect the minors. According to Attorney Gaby Lasky, who is representing Ahed, the best defense would be to open the trial to public scrutiny. Lasky intends to appeal the decision, arguing that it is Ahed’s right to decide whether the trial will take place behind closed doors or will be open to the public. Ahed was said to be planning to read a public statement at the hearing, which was made impossible by the judge’s decision.

“The court understands that this trial interests many people outside of the courtroom, that people know that her [Ahed’s] rights are being violated and that this trial is entirely unnecessary,” Lasky said following the judge’s decision. “The way to keep the story out of view of the public is to close the doors.”

“All of the proceedings until now were open to the public,” Lasky added. “Closed door proceedings are supposed to protect the minor, not the court. So when the parents and the girl herself want and think it’s important to have the proceedings open to the public, the decision to close the doors is not intended to protect Ahed but to protect the court from public scrutiny.”

Basssem Tamimi, Ahed’s father, said following the hearing that the decision to conduct proceedings behind closed doors was an attempt to mask that “there is no justice under occupation.” He added that the decision to close the hearing to the public was not intended to protect Ahed but the court.

“Protect Ahed from whom? From their soldiers? Our enemies are not the audience or the media,” Bassem said. “We don’t trust this court and we don’t trust this system. We are afraid that something will happen to Ahed and her mother.” Bassem said his sister died in military prison, which is why he fears for Ahed’s safety and wants the hearings made public.

Gaby Lasky, Ahed Tamimi's attorney, and Bassem Tamimi, Ahed's father, outside of the Ofer military prison. February 13, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

Gaby Lasky, Ahed Tamimi’s attorney, and Bassem Tamimi, Ahed’s father, outside of the Ofer military prison. February 13, 2018. (Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)

The Israeli military court system’s treatment of minors has been widely criticized by international human rights organizations. In 2013, UNICEF published a report describing the poor treatment of Palestinian children held in Israeli military detention as “widespread, systematic, and institutionalized.” In 2015, despite concerns raised by the international community, the army suspended a pilot program meant to decrease the number of Palestinian children arrested in nighttime raids, like the one in which Ahed was arrested.

Tuesday’s proceedings were short. The military prosecutor read the charges against Ahed, but Lasky declined to respond, saying that she had not received the investigation materials, and would not respond to the charges until she had. The next hearing will take place in March.

“Today we made preliminary claims against the legitimacy of the occupation and this court,” Lasky said. She called the Ahed’s indictment “inflated and out of proportion, in some parts reflecting severe discrimination.”

Since her arrest, Ahed Tamimi has become an international symbol of Palestinian resistance to the occupation. Prominent actors, authors, and musicians signed a letter, published Monday by Dream Defenders, a Florida-based racial justice organization, calling for Ahed’s release. The signatories include Daniel Glover, Rosario Dawson, Cornel West, Angela Davis, and others.

Pentagon Fires War Court Official Who Was Attempting to Negotiate End to Guantánamo Death-Penalty Trial

The sudden firing by U.S. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis (left) of the Pentagon official who oversaw military commission trials at Guantánamo Bay has raised concerns of political interference in the already tumultuous legal proceedings in the death-penalty trials of the five men charged with plotting the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The New York Times reports that Mattis fired Harvey Rishikof (right), who served as the Convening Authority of the Guantánamo tribunals, as Rishikof was engaged in plea negotiations that would potentially have spared the Guantánamo defendants the death penalty in exchange for pleading guilty to the September 11 attacks. The Pentagon provided no explanation for the February 5 firing, and David Nevin—who represents accused attack-mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed—told The Times that “[t]he firing fairly raises the question” of whether the Pentagon was attempting to unlawfully influence the convening authority. The Office of the Convening Authority is responsible for approving cases for trial, plea agreements, reviewing convictions and sentences, and providing resources to defense teams. Military law prohibits even the appearance of “unlawful command influence” over the handling of a case. Nevin said the defense has “an obligation to try to learn everything we can” about possible improper influence, and he has asked prosecutors to turn over information relating to Rishikof’s firing. At the same time Rishikof was dismissed, the Pentagon’s acting general counsel, William S. Castle discharged Rishikof’s legal advisor Gary Brown, also without explanation. Brown and Rishikof’s firings have focused renewed attention on the dysfunctional military tribunals at Guantánamo. The death-penalty trial of Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, accused of planning the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, was thrown into chaos in October 2017 when his entire civilian defense team resigned amid allegations that military officials had violated attorney-client privilege by eavesdropping on legal meetings at the Cuban facility. Rishikof intervened in that case after the judge, Air Force Colonel Vance Spath, held the chief defense counsel for the Military Commissions Defense Organization, Marine Brig. Gen. John Baker, in contempt for allowing the resignations. Spath has directed that proceedings in the U.S.S. Cole case continue without expert death-penalty counsel, even though the only remaining member of Nashiri’s defense team, Lieutenant Alaric Piette, graduated law school in 2012, does not meet the American Bar Association standards for death-penalty defense, and has never tried any murder case. During a January 2018 pretrial hearing in the case, Spath criticized Piette for seeking a continuance in the case until expert death-penalty counsel could be appointed, telling Piette to “engage in self help” by attending special training to become “more comfortable handling capital matters.” On February 5, Piette, who stayed on the case out of concern for his client’s rights, told The New York Times: “I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing, but I don’t think I really had a choice.” Piette “doesn’t come close to being qualified” to handle the case, according to Ellen Yaroshefsky, a professor of legal ethics at Hofstra University. “So a death penalty case is basically going forward without a lawyer. If that is what we think passes as a court system, we’re in big trouble,” she said. 

(Charlie Savage, Fired Official Was Exploring Resolution to 9/11 Case Precluding Death Penalty, New York Times, February 10, 2018; Carol Rosenberg, Secretary of Defense fires Guantánamo war court overseer, Miami Herald, February 5, 2018; Dave Philipps, Many Say He’s the Least Qualified Lawyer Ever to Lead a Guantánamo Case. He Agrees., New York Times, February 5, 2018; Carol Rosenberg, Military judge to lone USS Cole lawyer: ‘Engage in self-help’ to learn capital defense, Miami Herald, January 23, 2018.) See U.S. Military and Representation.

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Israel to boycott Paris film festival over ‘Foxtrot’ screening

Nathan Schmidt / Bethlehem

Israel’s embassy in France have announced that they will not be attending the Israeli Film Festival which be showing the film Foxtrot opening night.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry accused the Israel Film Festival organisers of not heading the Ministry’s advice and a ‘more suitable’ film for the event ‘which will include an audience of Jewish donors’.

‘Foxtrot’, directed by Samuel Moaz, depicts the cover up of the death of Palestinian teenagers by the Israeli army.

In an interview with left-wing paper Haaretz on Monday, festival director Helene Schoumann defended the decision to play the film, stating, ‘I really love the movie. I don’t see anything against Israel whatever … So I won’t cancel it. Of course not.’

In an interview with Variety Magazine, Moaz defended his film, saying ‘every humanistic society should strive to be better, to improve itself. And the basic and necessary condition for improvement is the ability to accept self-criticism.’

Moaz’s previous work includes ‘Lebanon’, a 2006 film depicting the 1982 Lebanon War. The film critical of the war and the damning effects of conscription. It Leone d’Oro at the Venice Film Festival.

Last year, ‘Foxtrot’ was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2017 Venice Film Festival and was nominated to the short list for the 90th Academy Awards.

Israel’s cultural minister, Miri Regev, has targeted the film in several statements and interviews in which she claims ‘Foxtrot’ was “boosting BDS and Israel’s enemies” and showed “Israeli army soldiers in a deceptive manner as murderers and harms the good name of the Israel Defence Forces.’

 

BDS organisations have widely mocked the boycott.

‘Boycott the Israeli film festival in Paris? Israel’s doing it,’ said EuroPalestine, a European based organisation supporting BDS.

Regev said she would take steps to prevent the Israeli governmet from supporting the Paris festival.

‘Foxtrot’ and Samuel Moaz’s former works have been accused of fitting into the category of ‘Shooting and Crying’, an Israeli fictional canon in which the depravity of occupation and Israeli’s military endeavours are criticised morally yet fail to address systematic issues or drum up meaningful change.

Donald Trump’s personal attorney says he paid $130,000 to Stormy Daniels

Michael Cohen confirms payment as adult film star who allegedly had relationship with Trump vows to ‘tell her story’

Donald Trump’s personal attorney Michael Cohen said that he paid $130,000 to an adult film actor who allegedly had a sexual relationship with Trump in 2006.

Cohen said in a statement to the New York Times that he was not reimbursed by the Trump Organization or the Trump campaign for the payment to Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

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