When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.
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Now, in Occupied Pleasures, a short video edited by Amber Fares and twinned with music from Stormtrap Asifeh, Habjouqa’s images are given even greater scope to display the humor and strange, stereotype-challenging juxtapositions in which she seems to delight.
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The photograph shows Vedran Smailović, known as the cellist of Sarajevo, playing in his country's largely destroyed National Library at the height of the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, in an act of resilience that has become iconic of the power of music to triumph over the ravages of war.
The Cultures of Resistance Network's Make Music Not War project area aims to give exposure to music that is created and performed by those immediately affected by political and military oppression who are committed to using their music as a force for justice. The network has done a more in-depth study of musical resistance traditions in four Middle Eastern countries: Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine.
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