Silk Road Theatre Company

Today I discovered the Silk Road Theatre Company and its play Precious Stones which bridges not only the divide between Jews/Muslims, Israelis/Palestinians, but also between sexualities. In editing my most recent compilation of contemporary Muslim literature, I find this particular piece of performance art most fascinating and intriguing…

Are the taboos starting to loosen? Insh’Allah…

Although I have not seen the play myself, I have read a colleague’s review and it seems like a hidden gem… at least, hidden apparently to those of us outside of Chicago and urban campuses.

For more information on the Silk Road Theatre Company visit their website: http://srtp.org/

Persepolis Movie

There is some wonderful news coming from the Iranian community and that is the release this summer in France (and later this year in the US) of a film version of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. The film has already debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the festival’s Jury Prize, which Satrapi “dedicated to all Iranians.”

At time where relations with Iran are strained and there is a need for building bridges between the sociopolitical landscape of the Middle East, and especially Iran, Satrapi’s cartoon memoir brings to life a remarkable childhood together with a poignant, maddening, and yet altogether beautiful commentary on modern Iran.

Of all the summer movies, this is the one that I am looking forward to the most… even if it doesn’t come out in the US this summer, it’s still the best summer movie in years.

Visit the Persepolis blog here: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=160626197

Fulla

I was never obsessed with Barbie. My Barbies were secondary to my fairy villages and leaf piles growing up in a small town North of Boston. The most interested I got in my Barbies was when my Ken doll’s leg popped off and I lost his clothes. At this point I felt rather bad for my Barbies and so Ken became a one-legged-nudist-polygamist and they all lived in (except for Ken, because as I mentioned before, I lost his one-piece tux jumpsuit) in their ballgowns in a compound under my bed. I never had a Barbie Dream House: I had a dustbunny dreamhouse.

While I was in graduate school, I was re-introduced to the joy of Barbie-esque dolls with the introduction of Fulla. Fulla is an 11 1/2″ plastic Muslimah manufactured by New Boy Toys in Syria and I am totally obsessed with her. I have three Fulla dolls (and four Razanne dolls, another version of the Muslimah Barbie doll, but not as cool, eventhough she does have a Girl Scout uniform and of course more Princess Jasmine stuff than I know what to do with—as soon as I do my research, I’m going to give it to my four year old neighbour) and one of them even wears a button that says “I am the Jewish Vote.” I really want the Fulla doll that comes with a luggage cart because she brings back memories of niqaabis and transplants from the empire in Heathrow while flying back and forth between London and the United States.

I brought my Fulla doll in to show my Arabic class and I told them that when I go home at night from teaching them, I close the door to my office and sit on the floor and play with my dolls. I’m pretty sure that they believed me.

I have a Fulla towel, too. Now they have a lunchbox and a notebook and a pool and cereal and I’ve even heard that there’s a Fulla abayya, but I haven’t been able to find one of those yet.

My undergraduate adviser wants me to go to the Gulf and get fluent in Arabic. At first I resisted because I refuse to do anything that man wants me to do (he just wants me to go anywhere where there’s a questionable internet connection, a continent, and an ocean between us), but now that there’s Fulla, I may be convinced. I can say that: “No, I didn’t go to the Gulf because DC told me to, I went because they have Fulla and lots of her!”