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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,...

Walter Benjamin said of Kafka that his work dealt in ‘the purity and beauty of a failure’ That ‘once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream’ Wresting the Czech novelist from the critics who had variously lumped him into one of two camps – the psychoanalytic or the mystical – Benjamin was keen to assert the far more prosaic origins of Kafka’s absurdity: the ultimate fallibility and smallness of man that ultimately renders all fleeting and often fortuitous achievements, funny   What Kafka dealt with from an almost metaphysical perspective, became the subject of latter-day comics dealing in the far more kitchen-sink enactments of this same scenario – the petty anxieties of the Petit Bourgeois This was the social strata rendered humourless by the bald ambition and anxiety that attends climbing the social ladder, becoming an easy target of ridicule along the way Kafka is the Paul Klee to Tony Hancock’s John Bratby, but the state embodied by both, the sense of wry detachment, and sense of alienation from the systems of governance and bureaucracy that ultimately decide one’s fate, also continued the experience of childhood I have often marvelled at the ways in which our society maintains the idea that adulthood should constitute the discarding of such scepticism, to me, insisting on a form of delusional and uncritical conformity The childish amongst us, of which a large concentration seem to exist in the fields of artistic expression and academia, are those who have not yet ceded to the forces of economic one-up-manship, who no different to how we were when we were five, see much of the world as constituting a mystery of jargon and dumb stress   I have long been interested in the psychic impacts of social mobility The orphan state it creates in the winners, and the anguish left for everyone else This state of detachment from bureaucratic forces, the imperviousness to success and failure that I describe here, ought to be the experience of childhood And yet I wonder whether it was a prelapsarian state cut short for

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

December 2011

James Richards: Not Blacking Out...

Chris Newlove Horton

Art

December 2011

Artist James Richards appropriates audio-visual material gathered from a range of sources, which he then edits into elaborate, fragmented...

Art

January 2017

New Communities

Robert Assaye

Art

January 2017

DeviantArt is the world’s ‘largest online community of artists and art-lovers’ and its thirteenth largest social network. Its forty...

poetry

September 2012

Crossing Over

Eleanor Rees

poetry

September 2012

As he sails the coracle of willow and skins his bird eyes mirror the moon behind cloud. Spring tide...

 

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