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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,...

1 I see your picture for the first time two summers ago, sometime in early July I am scrolling through Facebook, my forearms hurting from spending too much time at the computer, when I chance upon a picture of you with your arm around a girl I recognise from my time at art school I am taken by your face, the top half of which is covered by a pair of sunglasses, the bottom with a thick moustache You are wearing a full sleeve T-shirt, and a pair of headphones hang casually around your notably broad neck I can’t be sure given the fuzzy background, but it looks like you are standing in the middle of a busy marketplace ‘OMG full lowwww!’ someone comments beneath the picture ‘Full loweeeee1 is right!’ you reply Based on the delight on the girl’s face as she looks up at you, delirious from your attention, I assume a romantic bond I am jealous of her happiness, of her ability to hold you and look at you the way she does, in a way that I imagine I will never be able to I remember first encountering your photograph while sitting in my bedroom in my old family house in West Delhi, by the window overlooking the large sports complex with the cricket field and newly built swimming pool But this cannot be right Your photograph was uploaded on 2 July, 2016, well after my parents and I had relocated to their current house in North Delhi, in late 2013 I remember the first time I saw a series of pornographic magazines was in that old house, on a summer’s day in August 1995 Perhaps this is why my memory plays tricks on me, for I have since returned to your picture with the same furtive image-lust That day in ’95 I skipped school, pretending to be sick so that I could re-watch three video cassettes I had found in the TV cupboard some months earlier, none of which were explicit per se, but all of which contained a few

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

November 2012

Film: Difficulties in Impression Management

Patrick Goddard

Art

November 2012

Difficulties in Impression Management, 2012 Running time 13’09”

fiction

April 2013

Fairy Tale Ending

Stacy Patton

fiction

April 2013

Rodeo Cowboy You meet him at a rodeo dance on the Fourth of July. You are 17. He is 20;...

feature

Issue No. 6

The White Review No. 6 Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 6

By the looks of it, not much has changed for The White Review. This new edition, like its predecessors,...

 

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