On their rafts plowing waters and waves, the escapees embark. Throughout their sea adventure, they forge their exterior. The deeper they penetrate it, the more it widens; the more they traverse it, the more it unfolds. At sea, they withdraw to themselves, beginning their lives on sweeping flowing land on which they live their seclusion. The sea grants them seclusion that allows them to navigate and conquer it by moving steadily on its surface. They cannot forego seclusion, for such act would lead them to the abyss; neither can they remain within it, because seclusion intensifies as the sea widens.... more

A year has passed since the kidnapping of Razan Zeytouneh, Samira al Khalil, Wael Hamadeh and Nazem Hamadi From this office. Till this day, the scarf of Razan remains untouched and in the wait. Till this day, the identity of the perpetrators remains an open secret.  

In at least one place where tomorrow feels lost, music still fills the gashed present with a kind of home-made mercy. The place is Yarmouk Palestinian Refugee Camp outside Damascus, the present is a siege of over 450 days, and the music—unlike water and electricity–keeps flowing unstoppably from Ayham Ahmad’s battered upright piano.   Much more than a mere soundtrack, this music is the hero of the short, bittersweet documentary “I Am Blue”, which pays homage to Ayham’s insistence on composing in the midst of devastation, and the camp’s collective struggle to endure. Indeed, rather than surrendering to despair, the composer and... more

I've had a recurring dream since I fled the Yarmouk Refugee Camp and came to Beirut. The dream takes me back to besieged Yarmouk, where death and destruction have found a way to settle in all its details. I am not sure whether it is a dream or a nightmare. But I live in this open-ended waiting with images of that place and the difficulty of abandoning it. Maybe the sound of my friend Ayham's piano changed the nightmare into dream and the place into a legend. Here, there is no geography, a place between two times, the first is... more