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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,...

            Zut, zut, zut, zut             – Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu   Sostène Zanzibar was not feeling himself that day; someone else was A journalist from an English paper Name of Phyllidia Or possibly Petronella Something along those lines The interview had gone remarkably well Such probing questions Very stimulating, very in-depth There was no denying that Sienna – or possibly Serena – was thoroughly a young woman Hang on, cross that out Was a thorough young woman Very thorough indeed   In a bid to impress her host, she had taken up gesticulation with all the fervour of a new convert It was a joy to behold Her impeccably-manicured hands would suddenly flutter away from the warmth of her lap, describing graceful ellipses as if trying to conjure up words that could not possibly exist Ever In any language Even French   When the ink ran out of her biro, Zanzibar produced a pencil from his inside pocket with a little flourish ‘Men,’ he said, ‘alwez ave two penceuls’ He almost winked, but thought better of it ‘Women,’ she said a little later, sitting on his face, wearing nothing but her high-heeled boots, ‘always have two pairs of lips’ She almost added Try these on for size, big boy, but thought better of it too   Allegra – or possibly Anushka – had struggled to fully comprehend the answers to some (if not most) of her questions The fact that the former usually bore little (if any) relation to the latter did not help Neither did Zanzibar’s scattergun delivery nor his baffling habit of peppering his sentences with arcane references to Heidegger and Blanchot Whenever he switched to pigeon English, he sounded like Jacques Derrida dubbed by Inspector Clouseau, which proved an even greater source of confusion Of course, now that she was grinding her crotch against his salient features, that his nose kept popping in and out of her prize orifices, Zanzibar’s discourse was largely inaudible anyway This was as it should be She wanted to move beyond surface meaning, to experience his words at

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

September 2016

Sitting, scrawling, playing

Emily Gosling

Art

September 2016

Amidst the drills and concrete, white walls and big names of London’s Cork Street stands a new gallery, Nahmad Projects,...

fiction

January 2014

Vertical Motion

Can Xue

TR. Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping

fiction

January 2014

We are little critters who live in the black earth beneath the desert. The people on Mother Earth can’t...

poetry

June 2011

Malcolm Starke Died Today

Kit Buchan

poetry

June 2011

Malcolm Starke died today who rang us most nights so late that it could only be him. He’d been...

 

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