This beautiful little love story has some extraordinary bits about the Syrian revolution, the subsequent civil war(s), love, families, sectarian sentiments, and the sea: On the second day of Ramadan, I come home from work to find Jesus, Maalik, and Qais sitting on the back steps, vaguely matching in short-sleeved plaid shirts, whiling away the […]
Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow Line is an odd novella. A ghost story, a beautifully symmetrical tale, a strange little fable, or a metaphor for the First World War (as Wikipedia seems to say)? A young man is given command of his first ship. He finds that the previous commander of the ship had gone mad and died. […]
Imagine a trans-textual “proletarian” protagonist, one that has travelled the world, gets stuck into adventures aboard ships and on land, and has a laconic easy sarcasm and a way with words. A kind of working class Marlowe with a better sense of humour and no penchant for imperial condescension. Imagine, then, that this character […]
From Hegel through Schmitt to Foucault and onwards, there is a way of thinking about sea and land not as inert backdrop but as factors determining politics, history and the transformation of the world. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History is geographically deterministic and intensely racialised. His reading of Africa and Africans doesn’t even bear thinking about. And […]
How wonderful is it that Foucault considers the ship the perfect heterotopia: Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is […]
Do you remember that haunting Conrad quotation from Heart of Darkness that says “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” It is amazing and powerful, and […]
A facebook friend sent me a URL to a blogpost which introduced Sons of Sinbad by Alan Villiers… What struck me was the contention that the book was “probably the only work of western travel literature that focuses on the seafarers of the Arabian Peninsula.” I bought the book and read it cover to cover on a plane […]
The poem has a whiff (or more than a whiff) of orientalism about it – but I love the last verse: ‘Cargoes’ Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from […]
Turner, South Shields, 1823 My friend Isabelle mentioned the Yemeni community of South Shields to me (she also sent me that amazing Turner posted above). Significant numbers of Yemeni seafarers, who used to work on British merchant vessels, settled in various coastal towns in Britain and established seafaring diasporas. The Yemenis of Britain […]
