Samar Yazbek on Redefining Collective Memory
Mahmoud Darwish: ‘Till my End and Till Its End’
Publishing from the Fault Line
Fiction
From Iman Humaydan’s ‘Songs for Darkness’
“She closed her olive-green eyes and sang songs she’d learned from the women in her family.”
Part Six, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’
This is the sixth and final installment of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which has been made available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.
Part Five, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’
On Mondays this winter, we are publishing installments of Emile Habiby’s The Six-Day Sextet, which is available in an open-access, non-commercial translation by Invisible Dragoman.
Poetry
From ‘My Butterfly That Does Not Die’
Refaat Al Areer had set the scene, declaring, “If I must die,” and Alaa Al Qatarawi’s sorrow metamorphosed into a butterfly that perseveres. She writes, “If I die, my butterfly does not die.”
Interviews
Samar Yazbek on Redefining Collective Memory
“Sometimes, I believe that silence itself could carry meaning in the face of this barbarity. Sometimes, I tell myself that I’ll stop documenting atrocities and only write literature. But all of this only makes sense in the context of our desire for justice, our desire to preserve the true essence of humanity.”
In Conversation: Songs as Memory, as Solidarity, as Resistance
Iman Humaydan, Michelle Hartman, and Emma Hardy discuss the new translation of Iman’s book “Songs for Darkness” and songs as a tool for the transmission of memory, of solidarity, and as a method of resistance.
Translating Noir: On ‘The End of Sahara’
In this conversation with ArabLit’s Tugrul Mende, translator Alex Elinson talks about how literary prizes affect the translation landscape, the draw of detective novels, and how he hones voice in a novel with many starring characters.
In Focus
From the archives
‘Resistance and the Palestinian Folk Song’
‘When Darkness Falls’: On the Shortened, Brilliant Life of Iraqi Author Hayat Sharara
“The word eib rings in my head, it is eib to love, to sing, to get sick, to divorce, to show your emotions…and.…and. I felt these social chains were burdening me with fear, despair, and confusion, and I almost abandoned work on the book, but when I looked at the materials that I had collected, I knew that if I didn’t publish it now, it would never be published.”
Egyptian Novelist Shady Lewis on Coptic Identity, Church-State Relations, and Citizenship
“In Ways of the Lord, Christians are mistaken for being Jews and are accused of spying for Israel, which demonstrates the lack of recognition of Copts and their conflation with other minorities.”