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| Image credit - Ayla Hibri |
Ayla Hibri's "A Palm Tree Bows To The Moon" has something so intrinsically "Asian" about it. By that I mean that notion of "waiting", a little like watching a Wong Kar Wai movie. Things happen but do not, they could be next door but also thousands of miles away. Local but also non-decrepit in terms of locale. They speak of joy - that image of the fireworks on the cover comes to mind - but in a detached, observant, grainy way. A little like a Proust book when things happen in the past and though vivid they are also blurry and somewhat belonging to someone else's photo album.
The sparse words - poems - sometimes really reinforce the mood of the image or stray away from it, and truth be told Hibri is a better visual story teller than one in words, but as she said "misery loves company, so they invented language". And in the introductory sentence of the book, she puts it outright:
"it looks like nothing
all cities are the same"
Good for us that, whereas all cities are the same, all books are not the same. Kaph books has - through Ayla Hibri - a strong outing for a mesmerizing output.
