Manal Mahamid

Born in Um El-Fahem, 1976
Lives and works in Haifa

Manal Mahamid's work is related to Ghada Al-Samman's book of poems Dancing with the Owl, which is concerned with this bird's rejection in Arab culture and with the mythical powers of sight with which it is associated. Mahamid presents hybrid images composed of an owl's body and a female face cast into concrete, whose colors call to mind a field of flowers growing out of the hard surface. "I am an Arab woman who has lived through one thousand years of wars, invasions, fires, sorrow, and tragedies. Between one ceasefire and the next, some of the tribe males set out to war against me. Although they have succeeded in burying me alive for another one hundred years, I rise out of the sand and burst into flight. I am tired of death, of the culture of death, of the media of death, of its loud spokespeople, its symbols, its microphones, and the skulls hung on doorposts. I want to embrace my life, not my death."
From: Dancing With the Owl (2001)


Ghada Al-Samman

Born in Damascus, Syria, 1942
Lives in Paris

Ghada Al-Samman is a writer and journalist whose work centers on political and feminist concerns. In 1962 she published her first book, a love story titled Your Eyes Are My Destiny. A year later, after completing her university studies, she left Damascus, never to return. She moved to Beirut, worked as a journalist, and published books that established her reputation as a writer interested in social, cultural, and philosophical concerns. Her book Beirut Nightmares (1977) describes the civil war that took place in the city in the 1970s.
In the late 1960s, Al-Samman married the publisher Bashir al Daouq, the father of her only son. She founded her own publishing house, and published non-fiction, prose, and poetry. In 1993, she published love letters sent to her in the 1960s by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, a native of Acre, who was killed in 1972. This publication awakened great public interest, and she was accused of attempting to mar Kanafani's reputation and act against the Palestinian cause. Since 1980, Ghada Al-Samman has been living in Paris, and writes regularly for the Arabic-language press in London.