STORIES, STORIES

The Fairytale of Third Cinema by Kathryn Narciso a. Little Brown Americans We are nothing but them. When the ruling giant came to town, we didn’t break loose, and just sucked up the flavors of the new, almost forgetting the old. The nation’s elite was guilty of kissing the mestizos and language was shared tongue-to-tongue, skin-to-skin, until little brown Americans were born to this nation and grew up becoming second-class citizens of their own homeland. It was like allowing a thief inside your home: fed him when he’s hungry, gave him drink when he’s thirsty, warmed him up when he’s cold. Flesh and blood for spit. The cycle repeats itself, again and again: you offer your flesh for flesh, blood for blood, but you only get spit and still say Thank You. b. The Unholy Communion When Hollywood was preached outside its birthplace, the rest of the world took its chalice and drank from it. Not one has come clean after the communion. It’s a religion without confession. The converts were s...

Stories That (Probably) Need Telling by Nessreen I’m not gonna lie. I was reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck , a collection of short stories about the experiences and thoughts of Nigerian women from different backgrounds, when I decided to finally, actually in-real-life-and-not-just-imagining-it , write the book I had been putting off for years now. There’s nothing more inspiring than reading a brilliant storyteller, but now I know that inspiration is one thing, and actually putting in the work is another (why do I know this only now ?). Obvi it wasn’t going to be easy, and I knew that off the bat. I have mediocre writing skills (I generally speak better than I write, I promise you), horrible writing habits, a glaring lack of writing accomplishments, and an inflated sense of grandeur, which all meant that tackling this mountain that is writing a book is exactly the kind of thing I would go for. And so here we are. In 2013, I left Saudi Arab...

Making (Radio?) Waves by Nessreen It’s Sunday, the sun is shining painfully bright through my window and falls right on my bed, where I have thrown my laundry. I’m sorting through my clothes thousands of miles away from Jeddah, here in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia, and I’m laughing into a freshly laundered shirt.  Listening to The Low Priority Que (The LPQ).  “And where the hell was Ghost this whole time?” Hakeem says, outraged, in the middle of a discussion about -SPOILER- Jon Snow’s demise on Game of Thrones. “Sam gets in a minor scuffle and mashallah Ghost is there to save him, but while his master was getting shanked by his own people, where was this Ghost direwolf?”  “He was probably up there on the wall, heard Jon Snow was in trouble, looked around and thought, Uff meshwar ,” says Tamim .  Well, never mind that I bungled the transcription of that sound clip (you can listen to it yourself and point out where I made mistakes right here ), and never min...

He Who is Neither Nor by Nessreen One time at lunch, a friend, who I presumed to have received some sort of bad news just then, sighed and said, “God is good." I was all “What do you mean God is good ?” because I’m always ready for a nice old argument about religion, and he was all “Just that. God is  good.”  He didn’t explain further, but we all know why we say God is good  to punctuate tragedies big or small – to remind ourselves that God only gives us things that we can handle, that He puts us in difficult situations so that we may be stronger and wiser and that our faith in Him may be harder to shake. We say it as a salve to our wounded souls when beset with misfortunes.  But what if (and the chances are very, very high, given the nature of God’s all-knowing existence versus our tiny, tiny excuse-for-a-speck ones), what if we were looking at it all wrong?  Saying God is good  is just the same as saying God is bad . After all, thi...

RANTINGS OF AN ARAB MALE by Hakeem Jomah Unpopular opinion time!  I believe that man is a product of his environment.  I ALSO believe that, given certain catalyzing factors, man can regress or progress despite his environment.  The Arab male is molded to believe from day one that he truly is a king in his own right; with that comes the mandatory responsibility to provide for and nurture a family financially and emotionally, and play a part on the disciplinarian front.  And right off the bat, that's gargantuan pressure. They're ALSO bred and molded to believe in a mandatory self-entitled pride and unearned respect from his family, and it's up to the Arab male to figure out on his own how he goes about doing that. But he's so used to being spoonfed everything that he skips the "how to earn it" part, and jumps right into the "expecting to be respected" part. I'm an Arab male, I've lived this. A lot of people have th...

I have been roped into a beautiful opportunity to share my voice with the world. Not my real sound-making voice – more like my thoughts through (hopefully) size 12 Time New Roman font. ( It's Arial. - Ed ) But my words are meaningless without context of who I am and what I do. So allow me to begin with a brief explanation.  I may belong to one of the few genders the human race has to offer, but my heart strings strum with the natural beauty that surrounds me. Food has, and always will be a comforting companion of mine. I am a jack-of-all-trades and an expert of none, but I am quite learn-ed in the ways of business, visual arts, how to operate useless gizmos and delivering awkward jokes. Like the one about women's rights in Saudi Arabia, that one's a knee-slapper! I identify with the Arab community as well as with Virginian "culture". Although truth be told, I am generally considered a weirdo here and there and everywhere else in between and beyond.  ...