Tag: Michelle Hamadache

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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Of Knaves and Knights and the Long In-Land Road

SoutherlyBlog

by Michelle Hamadache THE FIRST BORDJ There’s an alchemy that dissolves time and divisions and brings to the surface like the city of Atlantis from the waters of our mind, from the liquid space of what we know and of what we forget, instantiated moments. An arcane compound that is geographic, as much as synaptic, imperial, incantatory, an inheritance and a newborn thing, inhuman, as much as human. The first time I heard Amine refer to me as roumia, followed by his mother concurring that, yes, the roumi do have some strange ideas, I lost perspective, my sub specie aeternitatis…

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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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March Monthly Blogger – Michelle Hamadache!

SoutherlyBlog, News

Due to a tidal wave of unforeseeable circumstances, Christopher Cyrill is suspending his blogging for the moment. He’ll be back in with us in December this year to continue his elegant essays on the writing life. But this month our monthly blogger is the excellent Michelle Hamadache, one of Southerly‘s first fiction readers. Her bio is below: Michelle Hamadache happily teaches creative writing and English Studies at Macquarie University. Apart from swimming, lying in the sand, watching her children cartwheel on the beach at night-time, and Sunday morning coffee with her husband, teaching is her favourite thing to do, after…

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