or what it is like
“Get your sweets from the candy man/ get your truth from the shelf/don’t buy into the fairytale/ just be good to yourself” No Small Thing/ TEARS FOR FEARS (2022) Maali Almeida. Photographer. Gambler. Slut. Perhaps also the most interesting, confusing, and bemusing literary character I have encountered since, as a 16-year-old, I first discovered Mohun Biswas […]
In Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator recollects his childhood experiences in aristocratic France, reflecting on the loss of Time and the lack of meaning in the world. Other than the narrator’s story, Proust explores the nature of human consciousness and our capacity to connect with other human beings. How an […]
Like the proverbial Man of humankind, Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart was a man of many personal achievements but one always challenged by his arrogance. As a young man, he had brought honour to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat and worked hard to earn his place as a clansman, warrior, farmer and family […]
In a year when everything about everything seemed to be incendiary, all news confusing, all social media angrily polarised, it was certainly more comforting to recluse in the parallel universe of fiction and cinema and reflect on the complexities of human relationships. The world has become a George Orwell novel. Fascism, xenophobia and hate pass […]
In the 2006 novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy, a father and son spend their days walking through a harrowing post-apocalyptic landscape foraging for any edible remnants left over from an untold disaster that went before. A lucky day for them would be when they come across a tin of preserved food in a long-abandoned […]
Every artist is a cannibal/ every poet is a thief/ all kill their inspiration/ and sing about their grief/ over love It’s been the best of times, it’s been the best of times. I’m writing this like a film editor clipping off the badly acted bits that couldn’t be recast. Or the actor who improvises […]
Michael Stipe and Kurt Cobain Freddie Mercury, Barack Hussein, Jack Kerouac, Kahlil Gibran, Oscar Wilde and Obi Wan, Om Kolthoum, Naguib Mahfouz, Rumi, Khayyam and Amos Oz, Lennon, McCartney, Charles Darwin Tank Man, Hitchens, James Baldwin, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, Pablo Neruda, Che Guevara, Carol Ann Duffy and Angelou This, my heroes, is […]
Music Although our cult of fast distractions and great disruptions is hell-bent on crushing the album beneath its caterpillar tracks, the long play musical form will always remain a pillar of art. Admittedly making an album seems to be a difficult feat for the insta-everything generation, but it is still an ideal to aspire to. […]
There is apparently a scientific reason why, as we grow older, we tend not to resonate with newer trends in music. The songs we fall in love with when we’re younger will typically guide our subsequent listening habits and they are also the songs that we carry with us as we age. Our music tastes […]
“Why Colombia?” was a question I was often asked by friends when I first mentioned that I would be going there. A few of them raised their eyebrows and gave me a supposedly ‘knowing wink’. (This confused me, since I couldn’t figure out the suggestion in the wink, or what it was I was supposed […]
Music It could be my advancing years or the death of my brain cells, but I am increasingly unable to decipher one musical style from another, unless the piece of music was recorded in the twentieth century, or does not have the ‘pop’ tag attached to it. We live in eclectic times, or rather we […]
The tide is perennial, My heart sincere, Icarus, he fell apart under the ozone layer. The unrequited handshake the disappointed tear. All wings were not meant for flying Make-believe is amorphous, big dreams disappear, Mercutio, he fell down on his own frontier, The infected heartache, The suffocated prayer. Most hopes have a habit of […]
This is not an English port, but it has a point. Air full of humid, history and salt and sky full of weather this isn’t just a sea, son it is the holy water of hope where we come to be cleansed from the fickleness of life drink – drink but never forget this is […]
‘What is freedom of expression? Without the freedom to offend, it ceases to exist. ‘ Salman Rushdie In early January 2015, Alan Wadi Okego, a 25-year-old Moi University student, was arrested for posts he had made on social media against the Kikuyu ethnic community, and was charged, among other things, for ‘insulting’ President Uhuru Kenyatta […]
Now here’s the real story, tailored and spun like the emperor’s yarn for no one to hear he said, who said, a synopsis she made a scarecrow in the yard to keep the coast clear you’ve put on too much weight, one of them wrote, the people I know that you know but who won’t […]
waking is a curse it strips away the wizard’s curtain and opens your eye this dream, this dream, to dance in the steps of conformity, drink away the blissful waters of Lethe there are no Edens on the quester’s path, no bowls of milk for the cats who see through kings These are […]
Just so that I can say some things I have been wanting to say all year, I am going to start my annual rant of ‘what-a-great-year-it-has been’ that nobody really gives two hoots about, with some negatives. First, I do not think Sia’s Chandelier is a great song, nor is it worth all the attention […]
I remember the last time they made me listen to the haunting rhythm of life I heard the purposeful staccato syncopation of your grandfather’s swan song vhoop vhoop vhoop Can you hear it, the sonographer asks now but I was instead coiled in a stupor, like sitting at The Hatter’s table in several layers of […]
Now again I remember you capacious, the smile, Hammersmith & City a woollen scarf, the colours of Autumn eyes beaming like the sunshine from a film where’re you from? you asked my coffee spills, big lady pushing at Euston Square it’s alright you said, laughing nervously Press pause. Rewind. I will evoke this on […]
It’s a sunny day in Camden, and I walk with a gait like a star in a play there’s a song playing somewhere, I think it is Blondie from back in the day I know all the words, it’s a song I could write but never reveal so I hide in the tune, thoughts that […]
I’m the devil with the horns and this is the pain in my eyes look, look I am done with forgiveness I would like to pierce you deeply, one more time before I go before your friends applaud as you kill me for the last time come, let us dance then matador in a […]
NOORMOHAMED 