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.
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.
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.
What does one do with a man who fits the floor with wearied socks and jeans.
What does one do with a man whose mouth will never tune to mushrooms or fennel.
What does one do with a man who constantly points out, in a maddeningly accurate fashion, that I procrastinate.
What does one do with a man who nags and nags and nags me to write The Book.
What does one do with a man who tsks tsks at my cussing?
What does one do with a man who forgets to put the milk away?
What does one do?
except to
Thank God
for everyday
with a man
who fits the floor with wearied socks and jeans,
whose mouth will never tune to mushrooms or fennel,
who constantly points out, in a maddeningly accurate fashion, that I procrastinate,
who nags and nags and nags me to write The Book,
who tsks tsks at my cussing,
who forgets to put the milk away.
Mahmood is maybe nine or ten or somewhere older but you can’t be sure with kids like him who know the world once their eyes can focus on it.
He should’ve been in school all those times he ran up the stairs to ask if we needed washing or ironing done.
Did Mahmood ever sleep? Late nights, early mornings, there’s Mahmood running up those stairs and that, delivering and collecting laundry.
Teachers, if he had any, would’ve probably written him in as a pleasant child on an end-of-year report. He had one of those smiles often described as quick and easy, and an arm that readily extended for a respectful handshake.
I wonder what Mahmood is doing today.
—
I wish I could remember the name of that taxi driver we flagged down on two separate occasions.
What are the chances, in a city of many millions, that we’d meet the same soul for a second round?
The first time was outside the train station. His taxi was stock-standard Cairo-battered, held together by the Will of Allah. His fare was fair for the distance so we jumped right in. He was a wired chap; lots of energy coursing through him, manifesting as odd twitches and classic ants-in-pants syndrome as he wiped down his dashboard while navigating the streets. He asked us if it would be okay for him to stop the cab so he could clean it. We were in no hurry and perhaps we were a little charmed by his brand of crazy. He ran a rag over half his taxi, got back in and drove us to Madinat Nasr. His taxi broke down just as he dropped us off outside Wonderland. He was the kind of person you remembered easily in prayer.
A few weeks later, we flagged down a taxi in Heliopolis. It was one of those new black and white metered ones, a Chevrolet with plastic still on the seats. And the same driver from the train station. He recognised us; the odd agnabee couple with broken Arabic tongues. His energy levels notched all the way to the top. He made a good show of setting the meter to zero before he pulled off. He offered us sweets while searching for a CD. He popped it in and set the volume up. It was Sean Paul. I didn’t have the heart to say that I really preferred Umm Kulthum. We were his guests and he played a wonderful host. Our hearts soared at the upgrading of his taxi, at his deserving good fortune. In that moment I asked God to always accept this man’s prayers. Never had I wanted more for a total stranger.
I wonder if he is in Tahrir Square today.
The final version of the Zuma’s Bastard cover, with a promotional bookmark.
One of the posters I designed for a series announcing the book’s launch:
Zuma’s Bastard is available at Exclusive Books stores nationwide, as well as on www.kalahari.net
It could also be, ambitiously, a six word memoir or epitaph:
“She constructed interesting and meaningful sentences.”
Force formulating/following resolutions into a more tangible and active space.
Just roll the dice each day and do.
Download the template here (sign-up required).
With my bare behind exposed to the tepid Arabian evening air, the Almighty brought me squat down to earth.
Our bus had parked at a rest stop between Medina and Makkah, with bladders that had long shed the desired stoicism.
We had to go, but we couldn’t.
These bathrooms had been imported from a ring in hell. I was certain that the cleaning staff was commissioned from a local mental institute who advocated paint-by-shit therapy.
It was too early on in my pilgrimage and I was yet to amass the required reserves to deal with other people’s business. I’m sorry Allah, but I can’t take this test today.
At the mostly empty field next to the rest stop ablution and toilet blocks, I saw a woman hold up her swathes of ihram to squat. If it was good enough for that sister, it was damn well good enough for me.
Our bladders soon swelled to five. We made our way to the very end of the field. In the mix of uncomfortable laughter and nervous terror that we would be discovered by keffiyeh-sporting custodians shouting ‘hajja, hajja’ as moonlight bounced off of our derrières, we fell into easy camaraderie. The energy stayed with us all the way to the bus, each of us now trying to hold in our frothing secret.
Before we left for Hajj, we were told to prepare ourselves psychologically for some of the bathrooms we would encounter. It was fair warning, but how does one go about conditioning the mind and body into shedding it’s bourgeois notions of sweet-smelling latrines and three-ply toilet paper? It was indicative of our life stations and prejudices, that we couldn’t just relieve ourselves anywhere, as if a lavatory had to be deserving first, before we honoured it with our waste.
All of this changes when there are no alternatives to present themselves. And so scoured away, were our silly sensibilities.
At the time, I felt it a sad indictment that an urge as base as this was proving to be my ultimate test.
But was this not part of the Hajj? Was I not here to do away with this sort of peripheral pettiness. By the time we arrived at Mina the week after, all thoughts of spray-bottle-decanted-dettol and surgical gloves had fled (though it did remain useful to have a belt of elastic to hold up my abaya).
I was here for God, and I refused for my humanness to get in the way.
