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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,...

There’s a scene in the documentary I Don’t Belong Anywhere, about the Belgian filmmaker’s Chantal Akerman’s life and work, where she discusses her only foray into commercial filmmaking, the William Hurt and Juliette Binoche vehicle, A Couch in New York She and Hurt butted heads (even in this short anecdote you can sense her quiet obstinacy, her absolute refusal to bow to Hurt’s celebrity); nobody saw it and those who did, didn’t like it; it was, by any metric, a failure Critics took issue with both the romantic and comedic aspects of the film – a problem for a romantic comedy Akerman handles it with trademark good humour There are no scores to settle here, no grievances to unload, although the viewer must understand, perhaps now more than ever, the intense private battles Akerman must have fought to survive as an artist Certainly, Akerman possessed the singular vision, marvellous self-sufficiency (she made her first film when she was eighteen; she made another in just one week), attention to detail, and strong will we idolise in male auteurs; traits, for example, more recently venerated in Quentin Tarantino The scene concludes with Akerman seated defiantly in a diner, refusing to be embarrassed or humiliated by the box-office takings of a film about an unlikely couple brought together by an apartment swap There’s a slight air of mischievousness about her, a mutinous part of her that finds it amusing that the film was made at all, that they actually allowed her to make it Well, what was her great failure? The truth is Akerman couldn’t, even if she tried, – and the punchline is she did try – make a dumb movie   My Mother Laughs isn’t a memoir — no sign of Jonas Mekas, no brief, holy appearance of Agnes Varda, hardly any reference to her film career It’s a further step in her complex self-representation project, which began in 1968 with the short

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

7 1/2 mile hike to Mohonk Lake via Duck Pond

Patricia Niven

JA Murrin

Art

November 2012

Notes on a Walk Never Taken by JA Murrin   As a writer I like to visit the places...

Art

Issue No. 11

Sarah Jones

Sarah Jones

Art

Issue No. 11

A series of photographs by the acclaimed British artist Sarah Jones is published in The White Review No. 11. 

poetry

February 2012

Sunday

Rachael Allen

poetry

February 2012

Supermarket Warehouse This is the ornate layer: in the supermarket warehouse, boxed children’s gardens rocking on a fork-lift truck,...

 

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