In Conversation: Songs as Memory, as Solidarity, as Resistance
From Iman Humaydan’s ‘Songs for Darkness’
Part Six, Emile Habiby’s ‘The Six-Day Sextet’
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.”
‘A New Year in Gaza’: By Ibrahim Nasrallah
The people named in this poem are the writers, painters, and musicians martyred in the genocide. They are only a few of the many artists who were martyred in the past two years of war against Gaza.
Interviews
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.
Said Khatibi and the Algerian Crime Novel
Algerian novelist Said Khatibi talks with us about his latest novel, and the conversation turns to organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.
In Focus
From the archives
‘Writing in Gaza’: by Yousef el-Qedra
The Story of a Poem: Refaat Alareer’s ‘If I Must Die’
Jonathan Smolin on the Relationship Between Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s Politics and His Novels
“My book really is an examination of how he participated in the coup ,and how he believed fundamentally that the Free Officers were going to install democracy, and—once he realized that they were actually installing military dictatorship—the way he dissented, in the editorials and in person, the way that he was jailed, and the way he turned to fiction to express his dissent directly to Nasser.”