This new website of mine, especially the empty photography section, will be properly updated soon. In the meantime you can find some of my articles here and follow me on Twitter @JasminRamsey for regular updates.
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Unsettled, with Amira Hass
I am learning the art of interview while crawling with those who have been walking for years. This time with award-winning Israeli journalist, Amira Hass. An excerpt from my piece in Guernica Magazine below:
When it comes to her coverage of Palestinians, Israeli journalist Amira Hass is one of a kind. Yet she blends right in at the Canadian bus station where I pick her up. Vancouver is the second stop on the nationwide speaking tour organized for her by the advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. She greets me with a warm smile and lifts her small but heavy bags into the trunk of the car. Hass is used to taking care of herself while traveling, doing it weekly as she navigates through Israeli military checkpoints while tracking a story or simply trying to visit a friend. Before I can help her with her bag, in fact, she helps me with mine. When she sees me struggling with my bag outside her lecture venue, she takes it from my shoulder, laughing, “I know. I do it too.”
Hass has worked for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz since 1989. She left her academic roots during the First Intifada and started her media career there as a copyeditor. A few months later, she convinced the paper to send her to Europe to cover the Romanian revolution. In Romania she proved her skills as a writer, and in 1993 her editors assigned her to Gaza. She had become familiar with the area while volunteering with a group that had her visiting Gazans to deliver money they were owed from Israeli employers who’d withheld their pay. It was during this time that her “romance” with Gaza began.
No one encouraged Hass to live in Gaza; in fact, she was specifically told not to. But determined to learn about the occupation from the inside, she moved there in 1993 and made a permanent home in the West Bank in 1997. This initiative made her the only Israeli journalist to live and work among Palestinians full-time.
‘Romeo and Juliet is a great plea for peace among men’
My leisure book (the book I read when I tire of trying to understand politics) is an incomplete collection of Pablo Neruda’s essays and letters. His prose is similar to his poetry, imbued with his passion for love and his Communist spirit, but it is more personal, more direct. For example, in “I Refuse to Chew Theories”, Neruda explains why he can’t get through poetry disquisitions, which are written by “overly learned persons” who “obscure the light, to turn bread into a coal, a word into a screw.” Most infuriating for Neruda is the way these “adulators” isolate “the poor poet from his brothers” by telling him “fascinating lies” such as “You are a magus”, and “You are a god of obscurity.”
One of the great pleasures of reading this inimitable poet’s prose is the insight it provides into the way he saw the world and how his own experiences and convictions informed his readings of literary classics.
What is Romeo and Juliet about? Most people will answer with something along the lines of love and death. But Neruda’s description goes further than that, pointing out something which on second thought seems obvious but has been overshadowed by the story’s plot, or, by our simplistic exaltation of it.
Excerpt from ‘Shakespeare, Prince of Light’
This Autumn I was given the task of translating Romeo and Juliet.
I accepted the request with humility. With humility, and with a sense of duty, because in fact I did not feel capable of decanting that passionate love story into Spanish. But I had to do it, since this is the anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the year of universal veneration of the poet who opened new universes to man.
Translating with pleasure, and with honor, the tragedy of those star-crossed lovers, I made a discovery.
I realized that underlying the plot of undying love and inescapable death there was a second drama, a second subject, a second principal theme.
Live Loudly
The final scene from Vier Minuten, a 2006 German film by Chris Kraus that you never watched but really should have.
The Beginning
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