Tag: Albert Camus

A thousand tiny fettered steps

SoutherlyBlog

by Michelle Hamadache  I The mother in me is horrified at that little boy holding onto the pigeon. I’m thinking psittacosis. Mostly I adore his swag, debonair in adidas, his rakish lean against the walls of the kasbah, and his friend stage right eyeing the bird with such adult circumspection. Pigeon and boy front and centre, both bird and boy with me firmly in their sights. Does the pigeon looks happier than might be expected, given her situation? Louiza Ammi took that photo. She’s brilliant and she’s brave. She’s taken photos of riots and of graves. She’s taken photos of…

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The Strange Gaze of Justice: Words, Stones and the Moon

SoutherlyBlog

by Michelle Hamadache Amine’s favourite movie of all time is The Message. It stars Anthony Quinn as Hamza and it tells the story of Islam, from cave to page. It’s got this rousing song—Tala al Badru Alayna, O the white moon rose over us—that is sung as road-weary Muslims exiled in Medina return triumphantly to Mecca. If I could hum it for you, I would, but I’d kill it for you forever (tone-deaf), so you have to imagine Amine, bent over our son’s bassinet in the dead of night, patting our little boy—a week old and swaddled up like Moses.…

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The Love Between

SoutherlyBlog

by Michelle Hamadache There are two men who share my heart. One is my husband, Amine, and the other is Albert Camus. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they’re both Algerian, and though I’d never tell my husband, I wonder if I’d have fallen in love with him, if I hadn’t have fallen in love with Camus first. Amine and I met on New Years Eve 1991 on the steps of San Lorenzo, a medieval cathedral in Perugia, Italy. His lion-eyes, blue-black hair and fighter’s stance—poised, open-chested, heart first—were enough to tempt me down from the church steps and…

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Superb Mornings, Drunken Swallows.

SoutherlyBlog

by Christopher Cyrill I despise the word blog. I mean no offence to bloggers anywhere and mean no criticism of the concept. I just don’t like the word. I don’t like the word frangipani either. After keeping a writer’s journal for many years I found rereading them a kind of torture that I expect to be reserved for my postdays. (My purgatory, my perdition – read what you wrote down about fiction and process at the age of twenty-nine…now push this rock up that hill, forever.) I view all of my work to this point as juvenilia. And I can’t…

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