When I walked through the shattered streets of Tulkarem refugee camp the day after a military incursion last November, the air was heavy with dust from demolished homes and bulldozed streets. I am the Palestine director of 1for3, a Boston-based non-profit organisation that works in Palestinian refugee communities. I was in Tulkarem to meet our team of community health workers at al-Awda Centre. The centre’s director guided a small group of us through the camp to see the wreckage caused by the Israeli military.
The cover of one of Saafir’s early demo tapes, via hiphopnostalgia.com
Most MCs rap on beat. Saafir didn’t. He swung.
The London Review of Books will be at the Hay Festival next week, with three events and (less important but still notable) 3000 limited edition LRB x Hay tote bags. Please join us if you’re there:
‘Home,’ Mark Fisher wrote in Ghosts of My Life, ‘is where the haunt is.’ And ‘the house always wins.’ My boiler whispers and grunts in the night. I feel the presence of my sofa creeping around behind me all day. The damp stains on the walls look like unhappy figures from Frank Auerbach’s charcoal sketches. I’ve just read Róisín Lanigan’s first novel, I Want to Go Home but I’m Already There, in which she uses the rental crisis in London as the background to a paranormal story that’s all too plausible.
In 2019, a group of scientists led by Owen Toon, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, modelled the climatic effects of a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan in 2025. The hypothetical scenario was a militant attack on the Indian parliament, leading to mobilisation along the Line of Control. Skirmishes in Kashmir escalate and the Indian army crosses into Pakistan, prompting a nuclear war.
My mother would say, simply and unmelodramatically, to anyone she knew well, that she wanted to die: ‘I’ve had enough’; ‘I’ve had a good life’; ‘It’s enough now.’ We watched the first Commons debate on the Assisted Dying Bill introduced by Kim Leadbeater last October. It was a strange experience. And even though the bill in its current form didn’t apply to my mother and she knew it, it allowed me to say uncomplicatedly that I knew what she wanted, that I thought she should have the right to die, and that I would probably want the same thing in the same circumstances.
Five hundred years ago this week, the rebels of the German Peasants’ War, or Bauernkrieg, were defeated in a series of battles. Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 peasants were killed. Everywhere in Germany this event is being commemorated. There are TV programmes, an opera, magazines, plays, readings and art works. Even places with barely a walk-on part in the Peasants’ War are doing something: Pfeddersheim in Baden is hosting a summer wine festival with medieval market to remember a battle in which thousands died in a place now known as Bluthohl (‘blood hollow’).