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Kaleem Hawa

Kaleem Hawa has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Artforum, among others.



Articles Available Online


Hating it Lush: On Tel Aviv

Essay

May 2023

Kaleem Hawa

Essay

May 2023

I   They made the desert bloom, tall sparkling towers and clean Bauhaus lines, and apple-ring acacias, and teal blue shuttle buses, and stock...

Poetry

Issue No. 28

Three poems from issue 28

Sarah Barnsley

Valzhyna Mort

Kaleem Hawa

Poetry

Issue No. 28

Valzhyna Mort, ‘Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison’   Sarah Barnsley, ‘Virginia Woolf Has Fallen Over’   Kaleem Hawa,...

WHISKY WITH MOTHER as the electric blue fades into the small hours and now, a long way from home, my hands are covered in excrement I didn’t know my own smell, the layer of smell that forms on the body as the hours without water go by My tongue gets distracted by eating grass Sucking on an animal’s hard udders, sucking on the fur, the teeth all dolled up, or imagining the death of your parents It’s all the same From the moment he entered my head, this saltwater hell Zealous hammering on my veins The trouble with my brain is I can’t hold it back, it rolls on and on through the spiky undergrowth like a bulldozer Where am I I don’t recognise these big houses I’ve never rounded this bend in the road Degenerate desire Damaging desire Demented desire I don’t know how to get back My mother will be blind drunk, sprawled on the sloping grass, her feet carved up by the blades The clouds are tree trunks at this time of night My hangover’s fierce and I collapse any old how to masturbate, my hair electrified, my skin hot, my eyelids stiff My hand works away then falls still as an insect, so that nothing is enough Me and him in a convertible Me and him on a muddy road Bodies shouldn’t have breasts after a certain age; when my breasts turn to thick heavy flesh I’ll have them removed Women should stop opening their sex, too I look for a word to replace the word I look for a word that shows my devotion The word that marks the spot, the distance, the exact centre of my delirium We should be like tiny snakes till the end, and be buried that way, in long holes like gutters I get up feeling anxious, my head thick with blood I walk round the house and open the windows The wind sweeps over the insect corpses trapped in the mosquito net He keeps jars back there full of rusty water and all kinds

Contributor

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa

Contributor

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and...

after Mahmoud Darwish    Why is a boy an exclamation,  and why are his dead a period?,  why do his sinews tighten when he sees  a Palestinian body? Does his vision narrow  because of their flight,  or because their world is raining with salt?  Why is a boy with a gun different  from a boy with a jail cell?,  if the tools of rupture are our arms for  repurposing the body, and the arms of  the state are our means of repurposing the male,  are we finally useful and breathing and nervous…?  Does the white mean Night’s arrival?,  or does night signal the white’s escape?,  and when that white city boy becomes  a White City man,  does the hate in his heart subside?,  or does it become an ellipses,  a Bauhaus history of stories started  and left unfinished 
You Arrive at A White Checkpoint and Emerge Unscathed

Prize Entry

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa


READ NEXT

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

Interview

September 2013

Interview with Max Neumann

TR. Andrea Scrima

Joachim Sartorius

Interview

September 2013

‘It’s as though you’d like to speak, but have no language.’ These are the words chosen by German painter...

feature

Issue No. 10

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 10

This tenth editorial will be our last. Back in February 2011, on launching the magazine, we grandiosely stated that we...

 

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