Featured on:Â www.simpledesktops.com
Resolution: 1024×768
Right click image, save as:
The khamsa
Take note
About the Author: saaleha
I am a writer and photographer (look up my work on www.shootcake.com) based in Johannesburg, South Africa. I have an MA in Creative Writing from the university currently known as Rhodes. My writing accolades include winning the 2014 Writivism Short Story Prize and the 2020 Ingrid Jonker Poetry Prize for my debut collection, Zikr.
I would love to see Take Note in legal pad yellow!
hmm… its called the hand of fatima, i believe… and its got some interesting stories behind it…
What are the stories that you’ve heard Shafs? I know that in Jewish lore it is known as the Hand of Miriam, and that some have traced it all the way back to the ancient Phoenicians (got that bit from the wikipedia link).
Yes it is, one that’s quite popular in north Africa. We’d see some taxis with multiples of these amulets dangling from every available space (and it happened more often than not that those were the ones with the drivers who would try and schnaai you. Perhaps it’s because their ripped-off customers were constantly giving them the evil eye).
I liked the idea of converging the offline with the online, from superstition to stationery.
I like the second one 🙂
(The first – well, I don’t believe in items like that. It’s superstition, isn’t it?)