Zone Workbook Part 3
Zone Workbook Part 1
Inspiration
Le Trio Joubran Gulbenkian
Andrei Tarkovsky
“Dear Mara, I have a faded fax that you sent me from the jungle of Chiapas. The words you wrote have melted into the yellowed paper with the years, along with the photo of Subcommondante Marcos on his horse and you holding his hand, smiling. Now, I can make out only shapes and outlines and in a few months, I think it will be gone. Do you remember how it began? It was 1993. I had been living in New York for a year.”
No Footsteps Remain: Letter to Mara Catalan by Laura Waddington
“I learnt how to shoot film with an Arri S, a small 16mm camera, designed in Munich in the 1950s. It had a beautiful curved body with three rotating lenses, mounted on a turret and was built like a tank. Light enough to carry on my shoulder, it never once broke. It only took one hundred foot spools—about four minutes of film—so I had to hone in on what interested me in a scene and draw everything that I could out of it. Fascinated, I used to imagine all the filmmaker’s eyes that had gazed through the camera; the many places it had travelled and the scenes it had filmed and the talented craftsmen’s hands, that had assembled it, decades earlier. I filmed mostly in black and white because of the way it abstracted things and rendered them more powerful. Limited by the price of film stock, I’d sometimes wait hours for the right light to film for only four minutes. There was a magic in that.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
“I miss black and white cinema. It is intrinsically artistic and more powerful. One could create volume and depth in the image. When filming in colour, the colours themselves provide the contrast, and define the separation of space. Let me say this: Picasso wouldn’t have achieved the same social and artistic impact with Guernica if he had used colour. For my part, I grew accustomed to photographing in black and white, creating what I call murals of light…”
From Shadows and Mexican Skies: An Interview with Gabriel Figueroa by Walter Rippel and Laura Waddington. Photo scanned from the Spanish print original of El Amante Cine, no. 12, Buenos Aires, November 1992.
Gabriel Figueroa was my favourite cinematographer at the time, thanks to his work on Luis Buñuel‘s and Emilio Fernández‘s films.
My first short film, and the start of a collaboration with Delfina Marcello.
“When I sat down to write my first short film, I thought of an incident that had happened to me in a hotel in Venice. A chambermaid had gone through my possessions and mistakenly recorded her voice onto a cassette inside my Walkman. The music tape was a gift from a friend so I continued to play it for years and the chambermaid’s voice wove its way into my life. Listening to that small trace, which she had left, I was fascinated by whether one can ever really know another person or only disconnected fragments.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
“In 1992, she landed on the set of Laura Waddington’s film The Visitor, the story of a chambermaid who photographs the traces left by a guest in the hotel room that she cleans each day: personal possessions, the first page of a diary, the cover of a French edition of Cesare Pavese’s This Business of Living [Le Métier de vivre].”
Delfina’s Cinema, Which Was in a Hurry by Roberto Ellero
“A friendship was born. And the genesis of the film, which the director traces back to a Venetian memory, is curious … Even more unusual are the recollections of the encounter with Delfina: ‘We shot The Visitor in a weekend in a Manhattan hotel room, carrying the camera and equipment into the hotel, hidden in suitcases. The actress, Delfina Marcello, whom I had picked to play the chambermaid for her beautiful face and a mystery about her, turned out to have come from Venice. At the end of the shoot, she told me that we had already met. Years before, while studying in London, she had worked as a coat check girl in a restaurant and had always remembered a shy school girl, who had handed her a coin and smiled. I didn’t recall our encounter but it was, indeed, the restaurant, where as a teenager, I used to meet my father.’”
Delfina’s Cinema, Which Was in a Hurry by Roberto Ellero
Self-portrait by Delfina Marcello, in collaboration with Jeff Cowen. From the Love Accessories: Delfina Marcello catalogue.
Still of Delfina Marcello on cardboard from Letters to my Mother, an unfinished film by Laura Waddington (1993), hanging on Mara Catalan‘s wall, Brooklyn 2024.
Delfina Marcello on cardboard from Letters to my Mother, an unfinished film by Laura Waddington. The still was based on Frida Kahlo‘s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair (1940), which Delfina’s character recreated in the film.
Still of Delfina Marcello from Letters to my Mother, an unfinished film by Laura Waddington (1993)
“When I started shooting video, I was constantly comparing it to film so I made the decision to film without using my eyes for a few years, in order to unlearn my habits and assumptions. I bought a spy camera and sewed it into the lining of a traditional Turkish waistcoat, covered in small circular mirrors. By removing one of the mirrors, the camera gazed out at the world, unnoticed.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
Experimenting with ways to conceal the spy camera on my person with Delfina Marcello, July 1994. See Zone Prologue
Workbook about the making of Zone (Unpublished, 1995), Part 1. First pages showing the spy camera setup.
Workbook about the making of Zone (Unpublished, 1995), Part 3. End of the jourmey.
“When I think of those years, I think of the happiness, the empty streets around North 1st, summer days on the roof, your voice from the dark room shouting out stories … I remember a party you gave crashed by people, who were so beautiful from everywhere, filling the street with dance until dawn; rides in the old Cadillac; boats passing; the old flamenco player; all the fun we had taking photos, making films, helping each other. You say, ‘when I think of you then, everyday was a new adventure‘.”
No Footsteps Remain: Letter to Mara Catalan by Laura Waddington (Photo by Mara Catalan)
”In 1996, I wrote a story about a young woman, travelling around the world, sending back video letters to a friend in New York. That year, I contacted people on the internet and asked them to videotape their countries with Hi8 cameras, as if they were my protagonist. A mixture of friends and strangers in fifteen cities sent me over fifty hours of cassettes. The footage, which I received, was extremely diverse. Some people had filmed their towns for weeks, living inside my protagonist’s mind, others had recorded their daily routines, homes, family and friends … The challenge was to transform such a wide variety of images into the rhythm of one person’s journey, and eyes.”
Scattered Truth part 2a (On The Lost Days) by Laura Waddington
Photo by Mathilde Kohl.
“I searched second hand stores for old video equipment. I began to re-film the footage off various screens, passing it en route through an old analogue colour corrector, which I pushed to the edges of its parameters and using my first ever digital video camera, the new Sony DCR-VX1000, whose manual options I constantly explored. It was the first three chip Mini DV camcorder and is called by some ‘the grandfather of digital cameras.’”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
Photo by Mathilde Kohl.
The Lost Days, the GMI Video Wall, Leicester Square, London, 1999 (curated by FACT, Liverpool).
The Lost Days, the GMI Video Wall, Leicester Square, London, 1999 (curated by FACT, Liverpool).
The Lost Days, the GMI Video Wall, Leicester Square, London, 1999 (curated by FACT, Liverpool).
Cargo ship behind the scenes footage. See Cargo: Prologue
“In 2000, I travelled with my small camera for a few weeks on a container ship with Filipino, Rumanian and Polish sailors, who were delivering cargo to Syria and Lebanon, to make a video for the Rotterdam Film Festival’s thirtieth anniversary project, On the Waterfront.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
Cargo ship behind the scenes footage. See Cargo: Prologue
“They had been hot, exhausting days, the sailors obliged to work with decrepit and malfunctioning loading equipment. They hated the Syrian ports. Shortly before I’d boarded the ship, two of the crew, sleepless and overworked, had been crushed by falling containers, as they unloaded cargo there. A voice had come over the satellite radio, ordering the ship to carry on its endless journey and they had had to abandon their paralyzed shipmates in a hospital, with promise to return later.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
Shot inside the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria
“I had spent the time hidden inside the boat, crouched behind a porthole. It was a military port, full of soldiers, and the captain had warned me that if they discovered a filmmaker on board, I’d be arrested and the ship would have to set sail without me. A few times, some men banged violently and insistently on my cabin door but I stayed silent and unmoving, while my camera recorded fragments of a life below: soldiers running, a man stealing wood, figures on a submarine…”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
Shot inside the Russian naval base in Tartus, Syria.
Start of a correspondence with Peter Hutton about filmmaking and the sea, prompted by his seeing Cargo at the Rotterdam Film Festival and getting in touch. A meandering conversation unfolded despite our never meeting. Among his words about his maritime travels:
“I spent a rainy November on the west coast of Ireland watching the weather and light out over the Atlantic. Ive never seen the sea look so foreboding and so beautiful. All my life Ive had dreams of falling off cliffs over the ocean..in cars, on foot …when I saw the first cliffs on the Aran Island I couldnt move I was so terrified by the drama of the sea . When I was working on ships I would always dream that the ship was sinking and Id have to swim underwater to rescue my camera and film from the drawer under my bed. Such is the life of a mariner.” (March 29, 2001)
After his death, I discovered that we happened to share a birthday, which was also the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges, whose words at the end of The Maker reminded me of the person, and the filmmaker, whom I glimpsed in Peter Hutton‘s letters and films:
“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”
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“There, my understanding of what constitutes a true image of reality completely changed and I have never looked at images or reality in the same way again. Where the only illumination was that of distant car headlights, far off street lamps and police torches, I constantly brushed up against the limits of what my small video camera could capture. Fragile and at breaking point, the images which emerged, were on the verge of disappearance.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
Taking notes in Sangatte for Border, March 2002. Photo by Heath Bunting
“One night, near the Channel Tunnel, where Afghan and Iraqi refugees were trying desperately to jump on the trains headed to England, I met an Afghan man. He was cold, underdressed and very depressed. He was a house painter, born in the Panchir Valley. He told me that one morning he had left his house and when he came back there was no house, his whole family had been killed in an American bombing.”
Abdullah and the Fireflies: On Reading Survivance des Lucioles by Laura Waddington
Photo of Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud taken from a wallet and placed on the ground for me to film, as I sat talking with Abdullah. Massoud had been killed on September 9, 2001, by explosives hidden in the camera of suicide bombers posing as journalists. His assassination, a harbinger of what was to come.
“I used to dream that the huge corrugated iron hangar, where the migrants slept, was a vast processing plant for the suppression of memory and history: fragments of the migrants’ past and our shared future blocked from travelling across the border, without which we wouldn’t understand the terrifying years to come.”
Scattered Truth part2b by Laura Waddington
The tearing down of Sangatte Red Cross camp, December 23, 2002.
“In Greece, they had spent several months in the port of Igoumenitsa trying to hide inside one of the trucks bound for Italy. When the long orange truck had appeared, the smuggler had warned them that it was too dangerous to hide inside: it was a diplomatic truck, he said, its two trailers tightly sealed, and they would be concealed deep inside. But after months of waiting in the port, they were growing impatient and decided to go against his advice.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
Filming in the port of Patras, 2002. Photo by Mathilde Kohl.
“And so I came to love video for being a form of writing. I feel it’s a medium which leaves room for the personal, the intimate, the patient, letting one’s story and the way it should be filmed emerge gradually through accidents and chance meetings.”
The Small, the Fragile, the Unfinished Voice by Laura Waddington
Iraqi Suitcase TV
First sketches for M's Story (not in the final project)
“One night, in Brussels, I had a dream that I was drawing M’s account. The next morning, I took a tram to an art shop. I bought two black pens and a small notebook and I began to draw. Not having drawn since I was a child, I imagined that my sketching was temporary, a few pages to give to an illustrator to carry on in place of me. But immediately I liked the improvised nature of the pen with its lack of claim to accuracy, and became interested in the stark gap revealed between M’s words and where my untrained line couldn’t go. Faced with the limits of my comic book-like sketches, I hoped that the reader’s mind would wander into the spaces between and beyond the images, to reflect on the zone of terror that M described alone.”
Early sketches for M‘s Story, not used.
Istanbul drawing Ms Story
Behin And Samin Bolouri, بلا چاو (Bella Ciao)
“Most of all, there is Pasolini’s 1975 text about the disappearance of the fireflies, a phenomenon he believed coincided with the destruction of culture. Pasolini, who foresaw all that has now occurred and warned of a “true fascism” that would seep into our souls, our words and gestures. A few days later, when I went into a café in Amman to ask where I could find a copy shop to print out some extracts of the book and the owner insisted on printing out the whole of Survivance des Lucioles on his small home printer and offered it to me as a gift, I remember thinking, as I had many times, that one could still find something there, in the Arab world, a human contact.”
Abdullah and the Fireflies: On reading Survivance des Lucioles by Laura Waddington
Source: Pier Paolo Pasolini – Le fascisme de la société de consommation (YouTube)
Jean-Pierre Gorin on Sans Soleil by Chris Marker.
Source: YouTube.
Close-Up by Abbas Kiarostami (1990), final scene.
Source: YouTube
“I had immense respect for Buñuel, he was an extraordinarily intelligent man. I remember during the filming of Los olvidados, he gave me a camera position, I composed the image and asked him to examine it. He looked through the viewfinder and said to me: ‘That’s a beautiful landscape, Gabriel. But I have a better suggestion: why don’t we turn the camera around 180 degrees and film those dirty geese flapping their wings in the mud?’ [laughter]
From Shadows and Mexican Skies: An Interview with Gabriel Figueroa by Walter Rippel and Laura Waddington.
Source of YouTube video: El sueño de la liebre. El cine de Luis Buñuel y Gabriel Figueroa. Trailer for the exhibition at the Filmoteca de Cataluña, Barcelona, Spain, April 27–August 27, 2023.
Source: FotográficaMx, Colección Fundación Televisa (YouTube)
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Victor Erice. Trailer.
Gilles Deleuze, Qu’est-ce que l’acte de création ? Conference given at the FEMIS, Paris, March 17, 1987
Source: Gilles Deleuze on Cinema: What is the Creative Act 1987 (YouTube)
Notebooks on Cities and Clothes by Wim Wenders (1989). First minutes.
Source: YouTube
Mute interview with Samuel Beckett, Hotel Riadh, Nabeul, Tunisia, October 23, 1969. On the occasion of his receiving the Nobel Prize, Beckett agreed to an interview with Swedish television on the condition that no questions would be asked.
Samuel Beckett and Victor Waddington looking at Jack B. Yeats‘ painting The Music (1946), probably at Galerie Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1954. Source: National Gallery of Ireland.
“But I don’t remember your father, just the ghost of an image of a very elegant old man on a country road, and a stranger who came up to me at his funeral and explained that your father had saved him and other children from the camp of Bergen Belsen and asked me to never forget.”
Letter to My Father about The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello by Laura Waddington
Colm Tóibín on Giacometti, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2015.
Source: Louisiana Channel (YouTube)
James Baldwin in conversation with Nikki Giovanni part 1, on ‘Soul!’, WNET, November 1971 (A transcript was later published as the book, A Dialogue, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co, 1973)
Source: (YouTube)
Lhasa de Sela and Patrick Watson, Fiume Nights, Montreal, April 2009
Source: Vincent Moon / Petites Planètes (YouTube)
Georges Didi-Huberman on Pier Paolo Pasolini, in conversation with Laure Adler, Semaine Spéciale Pasolini (3/5) : Dans l’atelier de pensée de P. P. P., Hors-champs, France Culture, Radio France, May 2015
Source: Le Sémaphore (YouTube)
Ausência, written and spoken by Vinicius de Moraes (accompanied by Toquinho), MPB Especial, TV Cultura, Brazil, 1999.
Etel Adnan on art and urgency.
Source: San Francisco Museum of Art (YouTube).
Jean Renoir on the danger of blueprints and the sincerity involved in making art.
Source: lachambreverte (YouTube)
Blaise Cendrars, La prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, presented by curator Sheelagh Bevan, the Morgan Library & Museum.
Source: The Morgan Library & Museum (YouTube)
Ryuichi Sakamoto playing Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, in September 2022, part of Opus directed by Neo Sora.
Source: Ryuichi Sakamoto (YouTube)
Paul Celan reading Todesfuge.
Source: paulantschell (YouTube)
Derek Walcott reading Tiepolo’s Hound, March 13, 2001. Part of the series Artists on the Cutting Edge, University of California Television.
Source: University of California Television (YouTube)
Forough Farrokhzad interviewed by Bernardo Bertolucci in Tehran, 1965.
Source: Koyaanisqatsi (YouTube)
The Mirror of the Soul: The Forough Farrokhzad Trilogy by Nasser Saffarian (2002), excerpt (a Facets Video release).
Source: Facets (YouTube)
Mahmoud Darwish in the documentary Mahmoud Darwich : et la terre, comme la langue (1998) by Simone Bitton, in collaboration with Elias Sanbar.
Source: mdfoundation1 (YouTube)
Le Trio Joubran playing at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, April 9, 2014.
Carl Theodor Dreyer interviewed by Julian Jebb (1965)
Source: YouTube
Un metteur en ordre: Robert Bresson (1966), extract. Interview conducted by Roger Stéphane, part of the French TV series Pour le plaisir.
“But in Ozu’s world, objects are charged with weight – and like the intricate, shifting lines, and colours, and shapes and gently changing landscapes of his films – with their hidden patterns, they reveal truth and tell their own story, sometimes ahead of time – like signposts dotted along a trail.”
Small Gestures. Notes on a clip from ‘Tokyo Story’ by Laura Waddington
Kikuji Kawada discusses Chizu (The Map) (1959-65).
“I had only read one graphic novel at the time. I turned my attention and soon my awe to gekiga, the socially engaged comics that had emerged in Japan, at the end of the 1950s, with their harsh themes, vivid black and white drawings and cinematic techniques. Uncompromising portraits of the human condition, they carved out room between deceptively simple images and dark societal commentary for their audience’s imaginations to go to work.”
On Mirrors and the Making of M’s story by Laura Waddington
Source: Yoshihiro Tatsumi drawing at TCAF 2009 (YouTube)
Mimmo Paladino, creation of a new artist‘s curtain for the Teatro Regio in Parma, 2021
Source: Mimmo Paladino – Sipario d’artista, Teatro Regio di Parma (YouTube)
Miró Tapís (1973) by Pere Portabella, extract. The film documents the making of the World Trade Center Tapestry by Joan Miró and Josep Royo, that would hang in the lobby of 2 World Trade Center (the South Tower), New York from 1974 until its destruction in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Source: Film Secession (YouTube)
David Hammons’ Ted Joans: Exquisite Corpse at Lumiar Cité, Lisbon, 2019 (in which Ted Joan’s cadavre exquis on computer paper, Long Distance 1976–2005, featuring drawings by, among others, Paul Bowles, Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka and Octavio Paz, was exposed). (TV report Artes e Espetáculos, RTP Africa, March 29, 2019, with interview with Terri Geis, Manthia Diawara, and Jürgen Bock.)
Source: Maumaus, Lumiar Cité (YouTube)
Daido Moriyama’s Printing Show, a recreation of the 1974 performance of the same name. Tate Modern, London, October 12, 2012.
Source: Tate (YouTube)
Henri Matisse making a paper cut-out.
Source: StudioHugoGrenville (YouTube)
Luis Buñuel: Un cinéaste de notre temps by Robert Valery. Source: YouTube.
Ending of Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993).
Source: Agraell (YouTube)
Dans la Ville Blanche (1983) by Alain Tanner, extract.
Source: Umahlke (YouTube)
“When I recall those months, that I spent immersed inside layers of video, searching for something, which I never found—Zone reveals little of the long experiment— I think of the words of Michelangelo Antonioni:
“Under the revealed image, there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, every reality.”
I had failed to get beneath the shallow surface of video … I wanted to push the experiment further, this time passing through other people’s eyes.”
Scattered Truth part 2a by Laura Waddington
YouTube Clip: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Professione: reporter) (1975).
Svetlana Alexievich’s Nobel Prize Banquet speech, Stockholm City Hall. December 10, 2015.
Source: Nobel Prize (YouTube)
Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Blood Sign #2/Body Tracks) (1974)
Source: texto sobre tela (YouTube)
Bas Jan Ader, Fall 1 (1970), Fall 2 (1970), Broken Fall (1971).
Source: Manual Vivas (YouTube)
Gordon Matta Clark, Conical Intersect (1975).
Source: Public Delivery (YouTube)
“When I dip a copper plate in a bath of nitric acid, the acid is my knife. I don’t think of it as an imitation of a hole: for me the hole is real.” (Antoni Tàpies). Video about the exhibition ‘The acid is my knife’ at Museu Tàpies, 2020, and with footage of Antoni Tàpies making prints, from the BBC Omnibus documentary, 1990.
Source: Museu Tàpies (YouTube)
Message from Jim Jarmusch for the homage to Antoni Tàpies at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, May 21, 2012.
Source: Museu Tàpies (YouTube)
Murs/Muros/Walls. Interview with Juan Goytisolo, in the context of 1989. Europe, Twenty Years on from the Fall of the Wall. The Long Shadows of Dictatorship, CCCB, Barcelona, 2009.
Source: CCCB (YouTube)
Irma Boom on designing the book Weaving as Metaphor about the work of Sheila Hicks.
Source: Louisiana Channel (YouTube)
Seamus Heaney in Making Sense of a Life: A conversation with Seamus Heaney. Interview conducted by Tiago Moura for Newshouse, April 2010.
Trailer of Chile, la memoria obstinada (Chile, Obstinate Memory) (1997) by Patricio Guzmán.
Source: YouTube
Hans Ulrich Obrist visits Etel Adnan in Paris.
Source: HENI Talks (YouTube)
Marcel Khalife singing Ommi at the Amman Citadel, Jordan, 2016.
Source: Roya Music (YouTube)
Jean Dubuffet’s Coucou bazar. Television report, November 23, 1973.
Source: Ina Culture (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel) (YouTube)
Luis Camnitzer on ’Art Thinking’, and on art schools as behaviour schools, and power centres.
Source: Guggenheim Museum (YouTube)
António Lobo Antunes visits George Steiner‘s home in Cambridge, October 9, 2011 (in conjunction with the magazine Ler, and CLEPUL, Center for Lusophone and European Literatures and Cultures).
Source: CLEPUL (YouTube)
Writers Uncensored: Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz: The City as Man, The Lannan Foundation, 1991.
Source: Deep Dish TV (YouTube)
Or by Dumb Type (Japan, 1997), extract.
Source: Epidemic Video (YouTube)
Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa’s Video Letter (1983).
Source: Dagomir Rotyork (YouTube)
Elias Khoury reads from Yalo at Face-to-Face: Confronting the Torturers, part of the 2010 PEN World Voices Festival.
Source: PEN America (YouTube)
“The kindness of the men in the tiny store where I eat foul for breakfast. Every morning they blast Fairuz from a beaten-up CD player, like scores of restaurants, shops, and taxi drivers across the city. I wake up to the sound of some of my favourite songs: Zaali Tawal, Wahdon, Kifak inta. She has the voice of an angel.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
“I spend the afternoon and evening with Bassam, dinner at Al Quds and later a drink in a small, deserted bar on Rainbow Street. He talks about his fascination for Federico Garcia Lorca’s essay on duende, the films of Yousry Nasrallah, and the poetry of W.B. Yeats.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
“Bassam … loves the films of Tarkovsky and most of all Mirror. I leaf through his very worn copy of Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, which has travelled with him, and find the passage that I discovered in a bookshop in New York when I was twenty-one: “The goal of all art, unless it is aimed at the consumer, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him, what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
“We are gathered on the balcony in Jabal al-Weibdeh. Hisham is playing guitar, Bassam is in a bad mood and gets irritated when I record him. Saad arrives with a plastic bag full of books, which they gather around and thumb through eagerly, excitedly discussing a new Arabic translation of Edward Said’s Orientalism, just published in Cairo”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
“Yesterday Saad talked to me about the poems of Bukowski. I wake up in the middle of the night and stare out of the window for a few hours, remembering life in New York … Saad said, ‘I don’t accept to be forced to choose between Saddam’s secular dictatorship and the present democracy of religious groups. I refused the first life but I also have the right to refuse the second. I want something else, not this terrible thing imposed on us by America!’ No Leaders Please, I realise, could be a blueprint for his life.”
The Iraqi Suitcase by Laura Waddington
Video Source: SpokenVerse (YouTube). No Leaders Please by Charles Bukowski, read by Tom O‘Bedlam.
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