It is time to move on from the superficial status halal and haram have been consigned to. Change is the order of the day.
Hassan Mahamdallie
Queens Park Savannah sits in the middle of the capital of Trinidad and Tobago, Port of Spain. It is a vast open field, famous for being the focus of Carnival, the cultural explosion of freedom that marks the start of Lent in the run up to Easter.
When I was a kid back in the 1960s, the whisper-quiet branch library across the road from the family house was my refuge, my salvation and my inner life-raft, upon which I bobbed across the oceans of time and space, and place and person.
I start with an admission. I have no idea how comedy and humour work.
In the days following the murder of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter protests take place in 2,000 cities and towns in all 50 states of the USA.
It is a portrait of an English Rose. The pretty blonde girl in the photograph is looking slightly upwards and beyond the camera lens.
We can’t choose where and when we are born and grow up, or how we spend those teenage years where we are told everything should be possible, but rarely turns out to be so.
In Ahmed Saadawi’s award-winning novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Hadi the rag-and-bone man picks through the debris and carnage after the daily explosions and suicide attacks terrorising his city.
A bank of seventeen small video screens mounted on pegs grow out of the gallery wall like mushroom spores. Each screen projects a talking head: man, woman, young, old, black, brown, white, all musing on the future. Their future, their family’s future, their nation’s future, the future of the planet, my future, your future, our future.
Every city moves to its own beat. It was only when my friend Mahmudul Hasan took me one evening through the narrow streets of the Old City, down to the Buriganga River boat terminal at Sadarghat, that I felt the Dhakan bassline in my belly for the first time.