FirstLook: A Memory of My Mother’s Scarf

My childhood memories are often like flickers I can touch but never quite hold onto.

I have held onto one, though: My mother kneels down to lift me off the ground, and as she does, the sheer fabric of the scarf covering her hair shifts in the summer breeze that smells of jasmine. She caresses me, and I remember the glint in her eyes and the light hitting just the right spot on her face.

To this day, wherever I go, the covers women use over their hair feel like odes to my mother. It is impossible for me to look at the women in my life as people defined by anything other than their ambition, determination, independence and ultimately their choices, their individuality. When I think of all the ways women through centuries have covered and adorned their hair, all the way from Asia to the Middle East to Europe, I see customs that can bring women and cultures together, not ones that have to divide us. Although the women in this photograph are in India, and I grew up in Egypt, it’s an image that brings me close to that moment with my mother.

—Laura El-Tantawy

www.lauraeltantawy.com

Berlin’s Transcultural Jam

Written by Ken Chitwood 
Photographed by Fabian Brennecke

A musical wave has been swelling for a decade in the German capital, which one local analyst now calls “the city of choice for a new generation of cultural talent from the Middle East and North Africa”—part of the greater demographic shift that has made people of Arab backgrounds Berlin’s fourth-largest ethnic-identity group. In street jams, clubs, studios, concert halls and online, new mixes of musicians are blending notes and ideas into genre-bending, transcultural fusions. “What we as artists in Berlin can do is tear down the borders in our head and invite others to do the same,” says musician Jamila Al-Yousef.

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FirstLook: A Mother’s Kiss

Photograph by Beawiharta

For more than eight hours, we navigated the Sekonyer River in a wooden boat, cruising through Tanjung Puting National Park in the Central Kalimantan region of Borneo, Indonesia.

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Creatives

FirstLook: The Sari and the Balloon

Photograph by Fatima-Tuj-Johora

On a winter’s afternoon in 2018 in Bogura, Bangladesh, I went out for a walk with my nephew. While walking, I saw a group of toddlers playing with colorful balloons and across from them boys playing cricket. I was struck to see a bright yellow sari hanging to dry in the sun, which really drew me into to the scene.

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