Fault lines

This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content. "Fault lines began with a text. This text weaves together multiple narratives of conflict and an attempt to reconcile oneself with the existence of violence, both at physical and emotional levels. It takes as a premise that all violence is related to oppression, which may take its form in censorship, in a bombing, in domestic violence, in barbed words. It also takes as a premise that we are all connected, that blood runs through all human veins, as rivers run through all parts of the earth. Layered text in the background, in both English and Arabic, describes the 2007 bombing of al-Mutanabbi Street - but a relatively illegible overlapping of letters reflects the jumble of an explosion,