tamari articles

in Tamari's Popular Music article he mentioned the four communities in Jerusalem- Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian. umm... Armenian? scuse me? now i just feel stupid because i was completely unaware of this other community, but the more i think about it the more i realized that Armstrong didn't really address them either. so its not just me =)
i really like the idea of this reading, that it was all informed from the diaries of a person (jewish musician) from the past. i would be interested in reading The Memoirs because theyre told in an ancedotal styple, which is one of my favorites to read- you get the same information but in a much more entertaining and easy-to-read style.
ps whats an Ud? is that the thingy in the picture? kinda looks like a guitar.
i love the phrase that Tamari uses that describes when Wasif would skip out of work- "creative truancy" haha that made me laugh.
wasif's diaries were incredible descriptive of the city both inside and outside the city walls.... i feel like in my diary entries id be crying about a boy or a math test and not chronicling the growth of the neighborhoods outside of my city.
i found the "Lepers, Lunatics and Saints" article to be SO cool and interesting. now-a-days we never really hear about leprosy.... we (or at least I) think of it as a biblical disease, something so far in the past. but here we are, talking about it from 1948, an era not so far from us.
i found it disgusting, however, that all arab leprosy patients were marched to the eastern front. MARCHED. these sick, weak people were marched from place to place.... ironically remiscient of the Holocaust.
i also found it interesting that this article mentioned that one of the chief ideologies of the Zionists were that Palestinian arabs had no "crystallized conscious nationalism of their own" and so they could be easily absorbed into Hebrew culture. uhhh yeah im pretty sure if you talked to my (Palestinian) boyfriend's family they would have a bigggg problem with that statement!