Sonia Nimr,
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands. Trans. Marcia Lynx Qualey. Interlink Books, 2020. $15.00 (paperback)
We do not allow our characters rest. They are called upon to entertain us by darting to and fro, falling in love, living out our political agendas and often leading impossible lives we will never live. But I like that Sonia Nimr’s Qamar, the protagonist of Nimr’s
Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, rests while she’s reading, in full view of us readers. Qamar is a bibliophile, and when exhausted by the adventurous demands of her life, be it piracy or racing across continents looking for someone lost, she turns to books for a breath of fresh air, reading for days on end. At one point, she even opens her own bookshop, something of a family legacy. After everything she’s been through, I like seeing her stop to rest with something she’s not had the time for. Something that she loves.
December 16, 2020 at 4:10 pm
Artist, director and poet Hind Shoufani insists that her Palestinian-ness is a political act. It is a choice to be on this side of history, she tells me, whether we triumph or not, whether I carry some piece of identification paper with blue colours on it, or green colours on it, or rainbow glitter tie-dye on it.
Born in the Palestinian diaspora in Sidon in 1978 to Palestinian parents, both of whom were activists, Shoufani has for years explored her Palestinian identity through different expressions of her art: In this life I have chosen to use my language and my camera, and my body performing on stage, and my angry throat dialectics, to commemorate our regional experience, to add to this arsenal of cultural memory, communal histories and personal perspectives.