mjspice's review
4.0
Review for
The Green Book by Amal El-Mohtar
2 stars. Meh.
50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire by Pamela K. Taylor
4 stars. This was good but where's the rest the of it? It ended way too abruptly.
The Faithful Soldier, Prompted by Saladin Ahmed
3 stars. An earlier work of the author. It was ok imo.
Kamer-taj, the Moon-horse
3.5 stars. An old Turkish fairy tail which was all over the place lmao. It did bring to mind many other well known stories which makes me wonder if they were all from the same source or were the constantly borrowed from each other.
The Green Book by Amal El-Mohtar
2 stars. Meh.
50 Fatwas for the Virtuous Vampire by Pamela K. Taylor
4 stars. This was good but where's the rest the of it? It ended way too abruptly.
The Faithful Soldier, Prompted by Saladin Ahmed
3 stars. An earlier work of the author. It was ok imo.
Kamer-taj, the Moon-horse
3.5 stars. An old Turkish fairy tail which was all over the place lmao. It did bring to mind many other well known stories which makes me wonder if they were all from the same source or were the constantly borrowed from each other.
amalelmohtar's review
5.0
(reposting from this blogpost.)
Once upon a time, a woman named Alissar approached a great King and asked him for a piece of land on which to found a city. The King laughed, tossed her a bull's hide, and said she could have as much land as the hide covered.
Alissar took the hide, and a pair of scissors, and in seven days and seven nights, she had slendered the bull's hide into miles of the finest leather thread, and marked out the borders of what became Carthage.
This story is relevant to the Arab/Muslim issue. Please bear it in mind.
Everything in this issue is engaging with the authority of texts, undermining and re-asserting and deconstructing that authority in a number of ways. Of the original fiction offerings, one story is told in the decaying fragments of a copy of a text, this copy itself framed by an authoritative catalogue description; one is a story illuminated by citations of a text interpreting Scripture, the most authoritative text there is; one is a story guided by text granted authority through its inscrutability, through its randomness, through the decay of textual coherence and authority.
There is a circle closed between my story and saladinahmed's, I feel: where mine is a story trying to present a whole built of fragments, his is a story focused on the fragmentation of what was once a whole -- and while a textual device is initially one of the means of demonstrating that fragmentation, it also becomes the means to shoring them up. Even the reprint, "Kamer-Taj the Moon-Horse," makes a comment on the authority of texts -- though that authority is the means to evil, and must be undermined in order to bring about a joyful resolution.
In the poetry, ach. Samer Rabadi's "Me and Rumi's Ghost" is ALL ABOUT addressing textual authority, dismantling it, and then reforming it into something rich and strange. I wrote a story about a woman who's a book, and this is a poem about a man writing a poem about a poet who is a poem about a man. Jawad Elhusuni's "Tur Disaala" dislocates authority by means of linguistic dissection, saying if these words were different words -- similar-sounding, but in a different language -- the world would be a different world. And oh, gods, Sara Saab's "Al-Manara Dirge" collapses a whole city into a text to be read, collapses it into a love-letter she is writing to it by means of its own brokenness, making alphabets and punctuation of its craters and rubble, constellations of its bullet-holes, ready to be translated into astrology.
This issue was originally conceived of as a response to a text: a text that took upon itself the task of authoritatively deciding who could participate in the story-building of a nation, who was allowed to write it and who was obliged to toe its narrative line. There is a beautiful, devastating symmetry, then, in the fact that these stories and poems form so potent, layered, and sophisticated a counter-narrative. These stories and poems stand, and speak, and sing, and this is what they say:
we speak your language as well as you do, but we are not colonised by it; we will use it to speak our stories, translate our lives into your understanding, and show you how much you miss by trying to silence us. We live between your lines, and though you have never heard of Alissar, we will show you how vast a country lies between them -- how many city-lengths we can scissor out of the bull's hide you deign to grant us.
Elizabeth Moon gave us a hide.
Catherynne Valente gave us scissors.
Once upon a time, a woman named Alissar approached a great King and asked him for a piece of land on which to found a city. The King laughed, tossed her a bull's hide, and said she could have as much land as the hide covered.
Alissar took the hide, and a pair of scissors, and in seven days and seven nights, she had slendered the bull's hide into miles of the finest leather thread, and marked out the borders of what became Carthage.
This story is relevant to the Arab/Muslim issue. Please bear it in mind.
Everything in this issue is engaging with the authority of texts, undermining and re-asserting and deconstructing that authority in a number of ways. Of the original fiction offerings, one story is told in the decaying fragments of a copy of a text, this copy itself framed by an authoritative catalogue description; one is a story illuminated by citations of a text interpreting Scripture, the most authoritative text there is; one is a story guided by text granted authority through its inscrutability, through its randomness, through the decay of textual coherence and authority.
There is a circle closed between my story and saladinahmed's, I feel: where mine is a story trying to present a whole built of fragments, his is a story focused on the fragmentation of what was once a whole -- and while a textual device is initially one of the means of demonstrating that fragmentation, it also becomes the means to shoring them up. Even the reprint, "Kamer-Taj the Moon-Horse," makes a comment on the authority of texts -- though that authority is the means to evil, and must be undermined in order to bring about a joyful resolution.
In the poetry, ach. Samer Rabadi's "Me and Rumi's Ghost" is ALL ABOUT addressing textual authority, dismantling it, and then reforming it into something rich and strange. I wrote a story about a woman who's a book, and this is a poem about a man writing a poem about a poet who is a poem about a man. Jawad Elhusuni's "Tur Disaala" dislocates authority by means of linguistic dissection, saying if these words were different words -- similar-sounding, but in a different language -- the world would be a different world. And oh, gods, Sara Saab's "Al-Manara Dirge" collapses a whole city into a text to be read, collapses it into a love-letter she is writing to it by means of its own brokenness, making alphabets and punctuation of its craters and rubble, constellations of its bullet-holes, ready to be translated into astrology.
This issue was originally conceived of as a response to a text: a text that took upon itself the task of authoritatively deciding who could participate in the story-building of a nation, who was allowed to write it and who was obliged to toe its narrative line. There is a beautiful, devastating symmetry, then, in the fact that these stories and poems form so potent, layered, and sophisticated a counter-narrative. These stories and poems stand, and speak, and sing, and this is what they say:
we speak your language as well as you do, but we are not colonised by it; we will use it to speak our stories, translate our lives into your understanding, and show you how much you miss by trying to silence us. We live between your lines, and though you have never heard of Alissar, we will show you how vast a country lies between them -- how many city-lengths we can scissor out of the bull's hide you deign to grant us.
Elizabeth Moon gave us a hide.
Catherynne Valente gave us scissors.
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