A magazine for the 2009 Special Needs Awareness Jalsah.
Editor: Fatima Surty
Layout & Typesetting: Saaleha Idrees Bamjee
Project & Event Co-ordinator: Fatima Talia
Jalsa hosted by Madressa Ihsan in association with the Muslim Students Association (MSA) of the University of the Witwatersrand
Illustrations & Photography:Illustrations were kindly provided by the children of Madressa Ihsaan.
Copyrights belong to all respective photographers.
Some of the pages:
With rain in hair, qahwa in belly and the cardamom still coating the insides of our noses, Cairo soaked through my shoes, socks and skin. Done in by puddle misjudgment, who-knows-what solutes were beginning to squat under my toenails from the dodgy detritus of doings and the leavings of 7000 cats.
After a great dance of squishy hopping about, I felt less eeeghwaikeeooogheey and a bit more 9-years-old-after-madressah-braving-the-oceans-of-the-civic-centre-parking-lot-as-a-keen-stomping-adventurer-on-her-journey-home.
The rinsing through of passing years
puts a fair amount of
stretch and fade
in to the spaces between mistakes.
Just three more minutes
on this cycle
and you will never have happened.
via Hamish
1. I have a real problem managing time.
2. Hence I’m a pro-procrastinator.
3. It is difficult for me to wake up early especially if there is nothing pressing to attend to.
4. I sing along to jingles and other tracks when I watch TV or listen to the radio.
5. Chaos is my element.
6. I’m always up for eating strange things.
7. I like the bitterness of schweppes dry lemon and malts.
8. My dreams are often strange and textbook. (There’s one I would like to translate into an art installation; a swimming pool shell filled with condoms that have had little notes placed in them by people writing about their regrets or unfulfilled dreams)
9. I’m easily distracted.
10. I can lose hours on repetitive games.
11. I really, really don’t like conflict.
12. I’m selfish. Not because I want to be, but because I don’t know how to be any other way. (I am an only child)
13. My stuff is everywhere.
14. I speak silly.
I ran one of those vintage photoshop actions on the photo of a window in Masjid Bilal. It’s just down the road from our flat in Madinat Nasr. I’ll be posting more pics soon. Perhaps I should retitle my 20-ken project to “The Year of Shooting Recklessly”. I’ve been a bit suck about the writing. Our place is on Naguib Mahfouz street, so I’m trying to channel some prolific writer spirit. So far all I’m filling up with is karkadey and basboosah. Good gorge, Cairo’s wonderful.
We spotted this on our way to the Cairo Book Fair:
Acute Fail.
If I had known I’d be seeing six of my words in typesetted/isbn-ed glory, I would have put a bit more pith into them.
Though still, freaking yay! And they send you your very own contributor’s copy. I’ve got nothing but heart for Smith Magazine and HarperCollins.
If we do not write,
we will forget
and be
forgotten.
[I’m reminded of my late maternal grandfather who would keep rectangles of cardboard torn from cigarette cartons in his pocket and use them to note down any thing of interest. He was a meticulous record-keeper, and each family member had their own file in the curious grey cabinet I’d spend hours scratching through as a child. Birth records, school results, newspaper clippings, First Aid certificates, letters; that’s how I met my mother’s brothers who had passed on before I was born.]
Food, friends, family;
A full house
makes for a big home.
