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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,...

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE PONDERS LOVE   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, snow white and super blue: On the footpaths, we are told, radiators grapple with hydrants and at the marble quarry puss licks her belly until the shag is fluffed Get well cards addressed to third parties The cable car’s driving crank whirrs Here dwells Friedrich Nietzsche On ukulele, recording his propaedeutics in song Huzza, a subcutaneous Alpine ditty Dissimilarity as a religious doctrine The root chord: E minor Robert Walser says Friedrich Nietzsche was not Huh? What? What was I not? You were not loved Hence your resentment The vengeful perfidy of one unloved Meanwhile, new arrivals tuck in to hearty snacks Sausage Berries Poire Williams and Gentian Friedrich Nietzsche and the mild master of remorse converse on stacking chairs Are they onions? Are those contacts – or blows with the fan? Is it a hand-forged bark spud, swathed in camellia oil? We don’t know They speak quietly The mountains’ endless murmur Friedrich Nietzsche ponders love Robert Walser smiles in silence     THE ARBITER’S SICK   Honey protocols, hear how they mock I’m still asleep, they’re fighting already My assistants are whacking each other with hangers and brushes Oh boy, the arbiter’s sick today I see how they batter their limbs, whose workforce is mine, in order, thus squandered, to own themselves at long last Or so the assistants think How wrong they are! Whizz bang, the ankle joint, the nose bone Cat’s tongue, mop and deerfoot OMG Who’ll sew this for me? Who’ll stitch it up? Who’ll fetch and bring back, who’ll support, who’ll transcribe? What do mops and moping have to do with each other? Check it for me! Enough of the fisticuffs! When do we go to print? Assistants, get to work! The theme is: The arbiter’s sick today Let’s go! Mixed dactyls, skipping rhythms, inner universe of middle rhyme Bear me forth and write it all down Realise me in places where I cannot set foot And, while conciliation soon prevails, it’s still lying there, the cuddly toy of my tattooed assistant, who always was my favourite Ah! I’ll never sack a single one     TRANSLATION   Honey protocols, hear how they mock, you translated yourself – didn’t you? – into everything You translated your chemisettes, your crumbs, right on into The Great Glory, where they vanished instead

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

fiction

January 2014

Son of Man

Yi Mun-yol

TR. Brother Anthony of Taizé

fiction

January 2014

Rain falling onto thick layers of accumulated dust had left the windows of the criminal investigations office so mottled...

feature

July 2011

Herat

Sam Duerden

feature

July 2011

At Kabul airport, a man I mistook for a foreigner.   A security guard, red-haired with blue eyes and...

fiction

January 2015

Judge Sa’b

Uday Prakash

TR. Jason Grunebaum

fiction

January 2015

Nine years ago, after thirteen years of living in the Rohini neighbourhood of north Delhi, I moved, and came...

 

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