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.
Free printable Eid cards
Preparing for Eid and maximising one’s ibaadah in these final moments of Ramadaan can be quite the juggle.
If Eid gifting is on your lengthy last-minute-to-do list, here’s one less thing to occupy your head-space.
I’ve put together these Eid Mubarak cards for you to download and print.
Assemble the cards by printing each one on an A4 sheet of paper.
Follow the grey line and trim off the white border.
Orientate your paper so that it’s print side up and in landscape position.
Fold the paper in half horizontally. If you’re familiar with origami, this would be a mountain-fold.
Fold the paper in half again; this time the crease will be vertical and you’ll have the printed image on the front of the card which will now open from left-to-right.
The card will be blank on the inside, leaving you plenty of space to pen in your message and aadiyah for a loved one.
Click here to download the printable Eid cards pdf file (includes all three versions of the card).
Desktop wallpaper download: Sunset over Tangier
While in Tangier, we stayed at Dar23; a guest-house with a rooftop terrace that overlooked the port.
I will always associate a part of our time there with the scent of cooking fish and laundry baking off in the sun.
This design is my abstraction of the view from the guest-house’s terrace.
Click on the image to open the wallpaper to its full resolution of 1024×768, then right-click on the image to save.
An eerie familiar
A photograph by Marcelin Flandrin, circa 1910, of musicians in the royal Moroccan harem.
There’s a cross-temporal doppelgangerish echo coming from the woman standing on the right.
Displayed at Maison de la Photographie, Marrakech.
I knew a boy
I knew a boy
who puffed and passed on the roofs of higher education
with women who did no good for him,
who had his open heart shat in,
who then faked it because it was just harder to be real,
who dreamt too big for his head,
who did too crazy for us all,
who grew up
to become a father.
when the body betrays
a belly swells only
with a yearning.
a list of names
full-stops on a stain.
winter snaps
I put poems
in your pockets
for you to find
when you are cold.
Photowalk: Fietas and surrounds
Naeem and I spent last Saturday morning footing in Fietas with Darren Smith and Gus Silber for a photowalk through one of Johannesburg’s most interesting and textured areas.
I used to live in a commune not far from where we were shooting.
Krause street and De la Rey were part of my daily commute and even though I was taken by the decaying facades admired through anti-smash&grab car-window tinting, I just didn’t gather enough fortitude at the time to see these structures up close.
But there’s always guts in numbers.
The four of us started off at the 23rd Street mosque, walked down towards the De la Rey street subway linking Pageview to Fordsburg and ended at the in desuetude Jajbhay Memorial school.
The De la Rey street subway mural is a recent installation and tells the story of a community who were uprooted yet who also celebrated, worshiped and hoped for a time when the spectre of Apartheid would shrink away.
Brand Identity: Soul&Paper
Logomarks:
Label designs for packaging:
Business cards:
The cards arrived standard issue from the printers.
To customise them, I used corner-rounder and craft punches on each card, positioning the teardrop punch shapes so that when I use the card on a package, they would allow for a ribbon to be threaded through.