October 10th through October 28th 2019
Rashed A. is a Palestinian-Jordanian writer living in London. He’s been published in The Cardiff Review and Smith Journal. He is the co-founder of LIFTA, a studio and small press based between Mexico City and the Middle East. Rashed was an artist-in-residence at Dar Jacir in the Fall of 2019. He has been shortlisted for the 2020 Fitzcarraldo Essay Prize and his short story Next Week was long-listed for the Desperate Literature prize. He is currently writing his first novel.
As part of his residency at Dar Jacir, Rashed A. worked on a novel based on his mother’s family history. During this emotional first visit/return to Palestine, Rashed also used his time to explore the landscape, the locations, and to conduct interviews for his work. Rashed is working on a series of essays that center around different themes including issues of memory, violence, displacement, abjection, absence, writing, liminality. The essays are part of a project that looks at the ways we work and write through, or rather, within, absence.
The essay that Rashed wrote about his time in Palestine, Nothing For You, was performed and read online as part of our online public program. It is a meditation on rupture and the violence of return, but also the cliché of it, what it feels to experience something that has been written about and mythologized for oneself and making sense of it in the granular sense: the embodiment. The essay was shortlisted for the Disquiet Prize and is the basis of a larger work he’s writing, slated to be published at the beginning of 2021.
