“The sky and the earth are my coffin, and the sun, moon, and stars are my burial gifts”
Zhuangzi once said.
I envied him.
I envied the silkworm
that sheds its stiff cocoon of flesh
to become a butterfly of the soul.
I envied Kübler-Ross,★
who cared for dying children,
carrying a plush caterpillar that, when flipped,
transformed into a butterfly,
a small miracle for her young patients.
But what moved me even more
was the final moment of her own funeral—
her children opening a small box before the coffin,
releasing butterflies into the air.
And when the mourners opened their envelopes,
blue butterflies fluttered out,
rising toward the sky.
What are we to do with such beauty?
★ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: Swiss-born psychiatrist and world-renowned authority on thanatology (the study of death and dying).
파란나비
“하늘과 땅이 관이고 해, 달, 별이
나의 순장품이다” 라던 장자가
나는 부러웠습니다
그 딱딱한 육신의 고치를 벗고
영혼의 나비가 되는 누에가
나는 참 부러웠습니다.
임종을 앞 둔 어린이들을 돌 본
퀴블러 로스★
뒤집으면 나비로 변하는 애벌레 인형을
가지고 다니며 어린 환자들에게 보여 주던
그가
나는 참말 부러웠습니다.
더 기막힌 것은,
자신의 장례식의 절정을
그의 자녀가 관 앞에서 작은 상자를 열어
나비가 날아가게 한 것
조문객들이 미리 받은 봉투를 열자
봉투에서 파란나비가 나와
공중으로 날아 갔대잖아요
이 일을 어쩌면 좋아요
★「퀴블러 로스」 스위스 태생의 정신과 의사, 생사학의 세계적인 권위자
Poet Ms. Im Sol Nae received the Newcomer Award from the monthly literary magazine Jayu Munhak in 1999. Her poetry collections include The QR Code of a Leaf, Amazon, That Transit Station, The Cry of an Awakened Amazon, Hong Nyeo, and many others. She has also received numerous literary honors, including the Yeongnang Poetry Award, the Korean Literary Critics Association Award, the Korean Lyric Poetry Award, selection as a Sejong Excellent Book, the Poet’s Poet Award, and the Buddhist Literary Writers’ Award.
Türkan Ergör, Sociologist, Philosopher, Writer, Poet, Art Photography Model. Türkan Ergör was born 19 March 1975 in the city of Çanakkale, Türkiye. She was selected International “Best Poet 2020”. She was selected International “Best Poet, Author/Writer 2021”. She was selected International “Best Poet, Writer/Author 2022”. She was awarded the FIRST PRIZE FOR THE OUTSTANDING AUTHOR IN 2022. She was awarded the 2023 “Zheng Nian Cup” “National Literary First Prize” by Beijing Awareness Literature Museum. She was awarded the “Certificate of Honor and Appreciation” and “Crimean Badge” by İSMAİL GASPRİNSKİY SCIENCE AND ART ACADEMY. She was awarded the “14k Gold Pen Award” by ESCRITORES SIN FRONTERAS ORGANIZACIÓN INTERNACIONAL.
Talented athlete in the national kurash sport – Anarboeva Madina Ulmas qizi
Anarboeva Madina Ulmas qizi was born on January 22, 2010, in Avliyo village, Uzunbuloq QFY, G‘allaorol district, Jizzakh region. She is currently a 10th-grade student at School No. 33 under the G‘allaorol District Department of Preschool and School Education.
Since 2022, Madina has been actively practicing the national sport of kurash at the G‘allaorol District Sports School No. 1. Under the guidance of her coach Ravshanov Abdusalom, she has improved her skills and achieved high results in a short period of time.
During her sports career, she has achieved several successes. In particular, she became the champion of the Jizzakh region and confirmed her regional championship again in 2025.
One of her most significant achievements was winning 1st place in the 57 kg weight category at the Uzbekistan Championship held in Andijan from May 1 to May 4, 2025, becoming the national champion. With this victory, she earned a ticket to the Asian Championship.
From July 31 to August 5, 2025, at the Asian Championship held in Geosang, South Korea, she won 2nd place in the 57 kg weight category, demonstrating her talent on the international stage as well.
Currently, Anarboeva Madina Ulmas qizi is a member of the Uzbekistan national team. She is also a candidate for the title of Master of Sports of Uzbekistan.
Her hard work, discipline, and determination make her one of the promising young athletes in the sport of national kurash.
John Biscello’s No One Dreams in Color begins as an artistic mystery and gradually morphs into a tone poem. The novel speculates on the nature of dreams and reality, the psychological effects of loss and grief, and the creative, and destructive, power of stepping out of consensus reality into the surreal.
Loss provides an emotional backdrop to the narrative. The main character finds himself strangely comforted by an indie film entitled Wendigo after the loss of his mother and his first girlfriend, then travels from Brooklyn to a small New Mexico town to find out what happened to the filmmaker, who has gone missing. He interviews an eclectic assortment of characters, including past girlfriends and artistic collaborators of the filmmaker, finding himself immersed in the town’s culture and mysteries. One mystery is that many other people have strangely gone missing throughout the town’s history.
Gradually, the story becomes less and less linear and more focused on images: a dancer in a torn leotard, a young teen on her bike with her face painted like her favorite fantasy character, a woman from imperial Russia perennially dancing in a disused ballroom. Time itself becomes fluid, shown through a bar’s clock that never tells the right time and by the main character completely forgetting a large part of his year. This reflects the way grief and loss warp our experience of time and memory, but also suggests that delving deeply into the surreal, into one’s own psyche and creative process, can cause you to “disappear” into your own world, away from those who love and need you.
Dreams, and the motif of sleeping and waking, play a major role in the tale. They are the first clue this novel is something more than realistic fiction: a woman and her boyfriend work at a facility dedicated to recording and analyzing dreams. The woman suffers from insomnia and can’t dream, while her daughter moonlights as a superhero while sleepwalking. Her boyfriend, a higher-level researcher, is privileged to be able to observe some of the recorded dreams, and observes that they might involve some of the same cinematic features as early film. We see dreams linked to art, amid an atmosphere heady with wine, weed, and talk of Borges, Jung, Bob Dylan, and the Beastie Boys.
The woman’s daughter loves comic books, which the book suggests may be our modern version of a cultural mythos. Her dreams are often nightmares of werewolves: not all dreams are sweet. Near the end, she sneaks out at night and burns down the dream laboratory, believing she’s acting at the request of a figure in the dreams. This highlights the destructive potential of losing control of oneself in the dream world, but could also suggest that dreams and the subconscious resist full, rational explanations.
Yet, the dream researcher’s character seems positive and thoughtful, not a stereotypical “mad scientist” or someone depleting dreams of their magic through over-analysis. He shows sincere compassion for his girlfriend, even when she wants to end the relationship, and is motivated to study dreams because of his genuine belief in their importance and beauty. He makes one of the most powerful statements about the dream-world in the entire novel, that perhaps when we go to sleep, we should shrug off our waking world as “just a dream.” His scientific study and other characters’ artistic endeavors and deep personal experiences seem to all have value in helping us understand ourselves and our world.
Children, and relics of childhood, recur throughout the story. Wendigo’s major scene consists of a man looking at photos of a little girl, and in later scenes, a boy in a party hat celebrates his birthday and another girl plays a fanciful game of hopscotch. The main character connects with his own childhood in ways both endearing and off-kilter. He eats peanut butter sandwiches in his hotel room as he did while a boy, writes a horror story about children playing hide-and-seek, and wakes up sucking his thumb after dreaming of a sexual encounter. No One Dreams in Color suggests through this motif that keeping some of one’s childhood imagination may make you as strange and unpredictable as charming, but that it may be essential to artistic creation.
A legendary monster in the tales of some of America’s Indigenous people, the Wendigo is linked to desolate winter landscapes, destruction and cannibalism, and being lost and isolated. In the imaginary film within this novel, a woman is slowly consumed by a winter landscape, while the male lead also loses himself to confusion and perhaps grief. This is perhaps a dramatization of the risks of entering into the level of private, sustained thought needed to create original art.
Yet, the novel still points to the vast power of the personal and shared cultural subconscious to create beauty from raw materials. The title, No One Dreams in Color, reflects the dream analysis lab’s observation that dreams appear black and white on their screens while dreamers can remember vivid colors. Our imaginations fill in much of the richness and texture of our dreams, creating the reality that we see around us. Through the continual motifs of philosophy, art, literature, mythology, and music, Biscello suggests that this may be as true of our waking as of our sleeping hours.
No One Dreams in Color was a rich, textured, and thoughtful read!
Poet Ms. Koo Myongsook was born in Nonsan, Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea. She graduated from Sookmyung Women’s University with a degree in Korean literature and later earned her Ph.D. in literature from Bielefeld University in Germany. She received the New Writer’s Award from the monthly literary magazine Simunhak in 1999 and from Poetry and Poetics in 2009.
She has held various academic and cultural leadership positions, including Visiting Professor at Soka University in Japan, Visiting Professor at Waseda University, Director of the Sookmyung Leadership Development Institute, Director of the Museum and Cultural Center, President of the Korean Women’s Literary Association, Chief Editor of Our Literature, Chairperson of the Korea Gender Equality Education Promotion Institute, Policy Advisory Member for the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family, Mediator at the Seoul Family Court, Chief Editor of Siseon, Director of the Literature House Seoul, and Vice President of the Korean Women’s Literary Association.
Currently, she is an Emeritus Professor at Sookmyung Women’s University, President of the Glocal Women’s Network, Director of the Korean Women’s Organizations Council, Director of the National Museum of Korean Literature, Advisory Member for Korea Women Consumers News, Senior Vice President of the Seocho Cultural Center, and Vice President of the World Poetry Literature Society.
Her poetry collections include How Many Bushels of Rice Has That Woman Washed to Cook?, Walking, Life Is, Sky Tree (selected as an excellent literary book in the 2014 Sejong Book Program), The Art of Flowers, You, Pietà, Heartfelt, Asking the Spring River off the Way of Poetry, and Where Do Clouds Go?.
Her academic publications include Understanding Korean Women’s Literature, The Horizon of Han Moo-sook’s Literature, Women Communicating Through Literature, A Collection of Women’s Literature (From Liberation to the 1960s) Vol. 1-6, Diaspora and Korean Literature, War-time Literary Discourse and the Reconstruction of Collective Memory, and edited works such as Anthology of Women’s Short Stories from the Liberation Period, Anthology of Korean Women’s Essays (1945-1953), Anthology of Korean War-Era Women’s Literature, Bibliography of Works by Korean Women Writers: From Liberation to the 1960s, and Selected Works of Representative Korean Women Poets.
She has received numerous awards, including the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education Award, the Manhae “Nim” Poetry Award, the Excellence Award from Poetry and Poetics, the Seocho Writers’ Association Grand Prize, and the Grand Prize from the World Poetry Literature Society.
“To Be Born a Woman in the Desert of Sacred Masculinity”
I never imagined, while watching the film “Naga” that many of its scenes would remain in my mind for so long. I usually forget details of films I watch, and only the story remains in my memory. However, I believe that the fact that all the details of “Naga” remain in my memory is due to the film’s strong connection to reality.
From the very first scene in “Naga” the viewer is driven to fear the lived reality: a man storms into a hospital in 1975 and commits a massacre, simply because a “male” doctor delivered his wife, who had a difficult delivery and nearly lost her life. It’s a terrifying moment, but it’s not a coincidence; it becomes the key to everything that follows in the film.
Although the rest of the story seems, on the surface, to be unrelated, the film focuses not on the events but on the mindset that produces them. From here, the threads of events begin to unravel. Between Past and Present: Identity Crisis and Inherited Norms
What “Naga” masterfully creates goes far beyond a simple narrative through characters moving from point A to point B. Through the journey of its heroine, Sarah, the film reveals a society caught between eras, stuck in a state of cultural stagnation, where modernity struggles to break free from its entrenched traditional rules. The violent opening scene is not an isolated incident; it mirrors a complete generational and psychological crisis.
Although the camel appears later in the story, it is the film’s central symbol. The angry camel, who lost her young child to the recklessness of Sarah’s lover, Saad, embodies many things: the silent mother, the wounded community, and the unresolved collective trauma that strikes the wrong targets. Sarah, who runs away from her father’s house to attend a desert party, finds herself in a surreal confrontation with the ghosts of patriarchy. The camel is not her enemy, but her reflection. Both are victims of a reckless and arrogant masculinity, yet both are condemned as dangerous, brutal, and in need of self-control.
She confronts her fear of men, her shame about her femininity, and the fragility of emotional trust. In that brief period, she realizes the hollowness of her lover’s promises, the complexities of her seemingly gentle father, and, most importantly, the deep rage of a mother figure betrayed by society. The camel becomes a merciless, incurable, and furious mother.
In the final scene, we see Sarah running into the desert, pursued by the enraged camel. But the real pursuit is symbolic—she is escaping from memory, from inherited guilt, from societal control. But this is not an escape; it is a transition, as this pursuit symbolizes her liberation from the “unconscious” in which she was trapped. She may not defeat the camel, but she survives. This survival, this breathless emergence into the present, is victory. It’s not a neat ending, but a cry of “I’m still here.”
The true audacity of “Purity” lies not in the cigarette or the lover’s encounter, the removal of the veil, or attending a mixed-gender party in a remote location, the risky dialogue, and the female escape on motorcycles, but in its exposure of internal divisions. The film dares to expose the psychological cost of a society that no longer functions.
It is a film daring in its cinematic language: the inverted opening shot, the raw chase scenes, the visual poetry of light and space, and the precise rendering of desert lighting, whose expressions convey everything, even silence.
The music blends horror and humor, defies linear construction, and even the few extended scenes (like the camel chase or the police chase) feel part of a wider, more emotionally chaotic world. In short, “Naga” is not just the story of a rebellious girl—it’s about a society suffocating under its weight, about mothers crushed and resurrected as monsters, about love betrayed, and about women punished not for their sins, but for their pursuit of life. The film is about pent-up anger, reluctant awakenings, and the urgent question of identity in a world that punishes femininity for its mere existence.
………..
Naga is a Saudi film, debuting on Netflix on December 7, 2023. The film is written and directed by Meshal Al-Jaser and stars Adwaa Badr and Yazeed Al-Majioul.
She is a poet, teacher, editor, writer, and playwright born in Najaf, Iraq, in 1967, who now lives in the United States. Faleeha was the first woman to write poetry for children in Iraq. She received her master’s degree in Arabic literature and has now published 27 books. Her poems have been translated into English, Turkmen, Bosnian, Indian, French, Italian, German, Kurdish, Spain, Korean, Greek, Serbia, Albanian, Pakistani, Romanian, Malayalam, Chinese, ODIA, Nepali and Macedonian. She is a Pulitzer Prize Nominee for 2018 and a Pushcart Prize Nominee for 2019.
Faleeha is a member of the International Writers and Artists Association, a winner of the Women of Excellence Inspiration award from SJ Magazine 2020, the winner of the Grand Jury Award (the Sahitto International Award for Literature 2021), a member of the Women of Excellence selection committees for 2023, a winner of a Women in the Arts award for 2023, a member of Who’s Who in America 2023, on the judging panel for the 2023 Sahitto Award, the winner of the HerStory Award from the Women’s Federation for World Peace New Jersey 2024, a Cultural Ambassador between Iraq and the USA since 2018, a Cultural Ambassador and worldwide literary advisor for PEN CRAFT Bangladesh.
She is also honored to be appointed as a 2024 Peace Ambassador by the Universal Peace Federation and to be a member of The Founding Mothers Global Women’s Congress 2024. You may email Faleeha Hassan at d.fh88@yahoo.com
