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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,...

Britain has always been a nation capable of telling itself a good story It has rarely mattered whether that story was true The story itself is usually enough: to bring the troops to the beaches, to quiet the servants in the cellar, to quell the coloniser’s unease, to ward off the threat of uprising, to clinch the referendum vote   And on a sunny day in May, the story Britain told itself was one of inclusivity and progress, eked out in gentle doses, in the form of a biracial divorced millionaire American bride for the brother of the future king Revellers camped out on the streets of Windsor, in sleeping bags not unlike those of the homeless who sleep there every night, though the former slept more soundly, without the threat of evacuation And while the nation cheered for the international couple, who had been quietly fast-tracked through Britain’s punishing immigration process, tens of thousands of UK-foreign couples denied spousal visas under the Conservatives’ draconian immigration laws will have watched the wedding on separate continents, if they could bear to watch at all While 2,640 members of the public were invited by the Royals to stand outside of St George’s Chapel, roughly the same number of men and women sat in mostly windowless cells, at Britain’s nine immigration detention centres And across Westminster, Home Office officials likely clinked champagne flutes with relief, as the nation turned its eyes away from the ongoing disgrace of the Windrush scandal to glimpse a television actress’s first wedding dress of the day: a pure white garment of double-bonded silk, held together by minute stitches, invisible, the way the workings of power always hope to be   The Modern Royals! declared fawning international magazine covers in the days and weeks that followed, seemingly unaware of the contradiction in terms For the first time since Brexit or Grenfell, the eyes of the world were on Britain, and the nation delighted in the pretty, self-flattering image the wedding conveyed If you squinted, and didn’t think too hard, Britain appeared on that day to be a nation proud to be inclusive,

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


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Interview

Issue No. 9

Interview with Rebecca Solnit

Tess Thackara

Interview

Issue No. 9

Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby, like many of her books and essays, is a tapestry of autobiographical narrative, environmental and...

Interview

October 2014

Interview with Otobong Nkanga

Louisa Elderton

Interview

October 2014

Some things are meant to be lost. You can’t collect emotions. As the artist Otobong Nkanga tells me this,...

feature

September 2013

For All Mankind: A Brief Cultural History of the Moon

Henry Little

feature

September 2013

For almost the entirety of man’s recorded 50,000-year history the moon has been unattainable. Alternately a heavenly body, the...

 

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