Burning In the Past Tense
by Shadoud, Suhail
Burning in the Past Tense is a reading and discussion (in Arabic & English) by Suhail Shadoud with Brent Edwards & Lynn Love. About the author and panelists: Suhail Shadoud was born in Syria. He attended medical school at the University of Damascus and New York University. He has worked as a translator, editor and Arabic instructor in Syria and at Georgetown University. He currently lives in New York City where he practices medicine and teaches Arabic at Columbia University Brent Edwards teaches in the English Department at Rutgers University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora (Harvard University Press, 2003) and the co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP, 2004). His translations include essays, poetry, and fiction by Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Edouard Glissant, and Sony Labou Tansi. He is co-editor of the journal Social Text. Lynn Love writes about media arts, science and technology. From 1999-2005, she was affiliated with The Rockefeller University in New York, first as a science writer and then as the university’s Media Relations director. Based in New York, Lynn travels frequently to Beirut. About the Book: ?Sharp language like the guillotine of exile, and with infinite meanings.? Ali Al-Raee, Tishreen (Syria) ?Shadoud’s book has to be read the way archeologists look for antiquities. The pieces of mysterious and disparate boards need to be gathered and reassembled seeking for the original text.? Ali Al-Azir, Al-Balad (Lebanon) ?This kind of writing is closer to a visual dialogue, that is based on movement rather than on words.? Maher Sharaf Eddine, Annahar (Lebanon) ?… In it we discover the sources of prose and the lingering shadows of poetic stories. He reinterprets the tales of people thrown in the vast museum of life, with its mountains, lands, alleys, and houses of mud and decaying concrete.? Akram Alkatreb, Al-Mustaqbal (Lebanon)