© Donia Maher and Ganzeer. By arrangement with the authors. Translation © 2014 by Elisabeth Jaquette. English lettering by Salma Shamel. All rights reserved
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© Donia Maher and Ganzeer. By arrangement with the authors. Translation © 2014 by Elisabeth Jaquette. English lettering by Salma Shamel. All rights reserved
© Donia Maher and Ganzeer. By arrangement with the authors. Translation © 2014 by Elisabeth Jaquette. English lettering by Salma Shamel. All rights reserved
Ganzeer, wearing a t-shirt with the sticker design for which he was arrested during the Arab Spring. Cairo, Egypt, 2011. By Gigi Ibrahim for the Egyptian Liberal.
Find out how Ganzeer went about creating this story in his interview with the arablit blog: “Ganzeer on the Visual Language of ‘The Apartment in Bab El-Louk’.”
Then, watch Ganzeer talk about his generation of young artists in his TED Talk, “Intellectual Liberation of Cockroaches for Advancement of the Egyptian State.”
Finally, read an interview in which Ganzeer compares street art in Egypt and the U.S.
Visit Donia Maher’s Facebook page, with many examples of Egyptian comics (mostly in Arabic.)
Visit Elisabeth Jaquette’s website, where you’ll see images from this story and find out about one of her non-translation-related interests.
Listen to pronunciations of the Egyptian Arabic terms in this story, read aloud by Noor Naga.
(Listen on SoundCloud.)
To understand where “The Apartment in Bab el-Louk” fits within Egyptian literature, and find out how it ends, read “The Case of the Arabic Noirs” from the Paris Review.
Look through a 21-year-old photographer’s “cinematic” images of Cairo.
Then, look at photo-portraits of Cairo residents: In Cairo, a Painterly Cast of Characters.
Mural, Egypt, 2013, photographed by stttijn. License: CC-BY 2.0.
To learn more about Egypt’s history, read the BBC’s timeline of key events from 7000 BCE to 2018.
Or, find out about current events in the newspaper The Egypt Independent.
Bab el-Louk: A neighborhood in downtown Cairo.
mishmisha: “Apricot” in Arabic; sometimes used as a name for a pet.
Donia Maher is an Egyptian artist and writer. In 2010, she received a production award from al-Mawred al-Thaqafy (Culture Resource) for The Apartment in Bab el-Louk. She lives in Cairo.
Ganzeer, a graphic designer since 2005, has been involved in contemporary art since 2007 with a variety of exhibitions between Cairo, Germany, Holland, Poland, Italy, Brazil, USA, Emirates, and Amman. He has become most known outside of the typical art sphere for his street art and activism efforts throughout 2011. The Guardian of London has described Ganzeer as a major player in an emerging “counter-culture art scene on the mainstream radar,” and Al-Monitor.com has placed him on a list of fifty people shaping the culture of the Middle East today. Art In America‘s C. Viveros-Faune has associated Ganzeer with today’s “New Realism,” a label attributed to an art-form responding to a host of global challenges connected to the majority of people outside the standard art bubble.
Elisabeth Jaquette is a writer and translator. Her translations of Arabic literature have been published in Jadaliyya and Asymptote and are forthcoming in Portal 9. She has also worked as a translator for the Palestine Festival of Literature. From 2007–13 she was based in Cairo, where she ran a monthly bilingual literary salon, and she is currently the Arabic reading group chair for UK publisher And Other Stories. Jaquette was a CASA fellow at the American University in Cairo in 2012–13, and is currently a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University.
Watch a music video directed by Ganzeer, with a similar color palette to the book.
(Watch the video on Vimeo.)
Next, visit Ganzeer’s website, where you can look at comics, or read his online graphic novel The Solar Grid (“An ailing Earth. A superior Mars. And two orphans who will change everything”).
Egyptians will never give up the struggle for freedom and democracy. By Alisdare Hickson, 2013. Mural by Ganzeer and volunteers.
Finally, watch a video on Ganzeer’s project “All American.”
(Watch the video on YouTube.)
Recent books include Minor Detail by Adania Shibl, The Frightened Ones by Dima Wannous, and many more, linked on her website.
Watch a New York Times documentary in which a Cairo woman searches for an apartment: “She Wants Independence. In Egypt, That Can Be Dangerous.”
Try “Sharing,” a story from China, or the graphic reportage of “Slaves of Moscow.”
*For Teaching Idea 1
If you enjoyed the shaped poem on page 9 of this story, take a look at John Hollander’s OI/Cat poem, on page 98 of this 1984 issue of Poetry Magazine. Poetry Magazine also published Five Shaped Poems by Hollander in 1966.
To learn about shaped (or “concrete”) poems from Brazil and other parts of the world, read Concrete Poetry: A World View.
For classic examples, read Lewis Carroll’s “Mouse’s Tale,” from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or George Herbert’s “Easter Wings.”
Interested in more? Take a look at the Poetry Foundation’s
collection of concrete poems.
*For Teaching Idea 2
© Donia Maher and Ganzeer. By arrangement with the authors. Translation © 2014 by Elisabeth Jaquette. English lettering by Salma Shamel. All rights reserved