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Kaleem Hawa

Kaleem Hawa has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and Artforum, among others.



Articles Available Online


Hating it Lush: On Tel Aviv

Essay

May 2023

Kaleem Hawa

Essay

May 2023

I   They made the desert bloom, tall sparkling towers and clean Bauhaus lines, and apple-ring acacias, and teal blue shuttle buses, and stock...

Poetry

Issue No. 28

Three poems from issue 28

Sarah Barnsley

Valzhyna Mort

Kaleem Hawa

Poetry

Issue No. 28

Valzhyna Mort, ‘Music for Girl’s Voice and Bison’   Sarah Barnsley, ‘Virginia Woolf Has Fallen Over’   Kaleem Hawa,...

‘A STRANGE NEW FISH EMITS A BLINDING GREEN LIGHT’, the article in National Geographic announced Off the coast of Bermuda, an intrepid correspondent curled up inside a Bathysphere, a round steel chamber with a porthole, had been lowered by rope into depths where no man had gone before His deep sea observations, appearing in the June 1931 issue, were followed by an account of another far-flung curiosity: the coronation of an African king In November of the previous year, Ras Tafari Makonnen had been crowned His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Elect of God, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah in a spectacular weeklong celebration in Addis Ababa In sixty-eight pages of text and colour photography, the magazine described how world leaders and monarchs, film crews, and chieftains in prickly lion-mane headdresses had converged from all directions onto the landlocked Christian kingdom, the last uncolonised territory in Africa From Great Britain came the Duke of Gloucester, King George V’s son, bearing a traditional English coronation cake and a trunk full of ancient manuscripts once stolen from the country From Italy came the Prince of Udine with the gift of an airplane; from America, President Hoover’s emissary came laden with an electric refrigerator, five hundred rose bushes, and a complete bound set of National Geographic Cover of ‘National Geographic’, June 1931                     ‘The studded doors of the Holy of Holies open ponderously,’ narrated Addison E Southard, the United States Consul General in Ethiopia, who was reporting on the ceremony for the magazine The Conquering Lion and His Empress entered the Throne Room at dawn, suffused with a golden-red light Forty-nine bishops in groups of seven had been reciting the Psalms for seven days and seven nights without ceasing, stationed in the seven corners of the Cathedral Ras Tafari, who traces his lineage back to the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—in the Ethiopian version of the story, they sired a child—was anointed with seven

Contributor

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa

Contributor

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa has written about art, film, and literature for the New York Review of Books, The Nation, and...

after Mahmoud Darwish    Why is a boy an exclamation,  and why are his dead a period?,  why do his sinews tighten when he sees  a Palestinian body? Does his vision narrow  because of their flight,  or because their world is raining with salt?  Why is a boy with a gun different  from a boy with a jail cell?,  if the tools of rupture are our arms for  repurposing the body, and the arms of  the state are our means of repurposing the male,  are we finally useful and breathing and nervous…?  Does the white mean Night’s arrival?,  or does night signal the white’s escape?,  and when that white city boy becomes  a White City man,  does the hate in his heart subside?,  or does it become an ellipses,  a Bauhaus history of stories started  and left unfinished 
You Arrive at A White Checkpoint and Emerge Unscathed

Prize Entry

November 2019

Kaleem Hawa


READ NEXT

Art

March 2013

Beyond the Mainstream and into the Digital

Vid Simoniti

Art

March 2013

Claire Bishop. Everywhere I go, some curator or artist wants to be rid of this turbulent critic.   In 2006...

feature

May 2013

Haneke's Lessons

Ricky D'Ambrose

feature

May 2013

‘Art is there to have a stimulating effect, if it earns its name. You have to be honest, that’s...

Essay

Issue No. 20

Notes on the history of a detention centre

Felix Bazalgette

Essay

Issue No. 20

Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention...

 

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