Palestinian Literature: Anti-Racist Approaches for English Teachers
By Ali Al-Jamri This essay was originally a presentation given to a network of teachers and is focused on the British education system, particularly the secondary school (11-16) English curriculum taught in most of the UK and its international schools. For non-UK readers, it is necessary to know that, at the end of secondary education, students sit their GCSE exams, including a mandatory exam on English Literature; for this, there are set texts and poetry ...
‘Not Just Passing’: A Poem by Hiba Abu Nada
Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator. Her novel الأكسجين ليس للموتى (Oxygen is Not for the Dead) won second place in the Sharjah Award for Arab Creativity in 2017. She was killed in her home in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli airstrike on October 20, 2023. She was 32. Not Just Passing Hiba Abu Nada Translated by Huda Fakhreddine Yesterday, a star said to the little light in my heart, We ...
On Queer-positive Sonic Expression and Activism in Palestine: 10 Songs
By an ArabLit contributing writer The current crisis in Palestine is humanitarian. It’s not queer. Not feminist. It’s a crisis of more than 14,000 dead, more than 6,000 of them children. The war machine doesn’t distinguish between LGBTQ+ and heterosexual individuals when it carpet-bombs densely populated residential areas in Gaza, or when Israeli settlers drive Palestinians in the West Bank out of their homes. Yet Israeli government and government-adjacent propaganda, with its bizarre combination of ...
Fiction
Short Fiction: Adania Shibli’s ‘A Tin Ball’
This story appeared in the FOOTBALL issue of ArabLit Quarterly, which you can still get in print and digital. A Tin Ball By Adania Shibli Translator anonymous The war, it seemed, was over, after it had reached the far extremes of violence ...
Short Fiction in Translation: Mahdi Issa al-Saqr’s ‘The Return’
Mahdi Issa al-Saqr (1927-2006) was born in Basra and published his first short-story collection, مجرمون طيبون (Criminals with Kind Hearts) in 1954. That same year, he and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab founded Modern Art Group, which published new Iraqi writing. Al-Saqr ...
Short Fiction in Translation: Ghassan Kanafani’s ‘The Crucified Sheep’
Introduction by Rachel Green This previously untranslated story, written in Kuwait in 1960 and published in Kanafani’s first collection, Death of Bed 12 (1961), provides a glimpse into some of the concerns of the author’s early Kuwait writings, or what ...
Poetry
‘Not Just Passing’: A Poem by Hiba Abu Nada
Hiba Abu Nada was a Palestinian poet, novelist, and educator. Her novel الأكسجين ليس للموتى (Oxygen is Not for the Dead) ...
On Queer-positive Sonic Expression and Activism in Palestine: 10 Songs
By an ArabLit contributing writer The current crisis in Palestine is humanitarian. It’s not queer. Not feminist. It’s a crisis ...
‘What Do We Do During Genocide’: A Poem by Mohja Kahf
Mohja Kahf writes from Arkansas, USA. The image is by Hesham, of a kitchen into which he’d moved only seven months ...
Interviews
A Conversation about ‘I’m Here With You,’ a Bilingual Fiction Podcast
The series “أنا معاك / I’m Here With You” is, as its creators write, “an immersive audio drama exploring the ...
In Focus: Poet Olivia Elias’s ‘Your Name, Palestine’
To mark the launch of Olivia Elias’s Your Name, Palestine last month, we share a conversation between the poet and her translators, ...
A Conversation with Derek Walcott Prize-winning Poet Mosab Abu Toha
This conversation originally ran last year, in November 2022, after Mosab Abu Toha won a 2022 Palestine Book Award for Things ...
Country Focus
From the archives
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.”
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.”
A Talk with Poet Golan Haji: ‘Languages Never Draw Geographical Boundaries’
” Jaziri wrote poetry with one set of alphabets which at that time were used in four languages: Kurdish, Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and Arabic. Sometimes, he used the four languages in one couplet. His poems are still recited and sung by Kurds. That coexistence of languages was quite natural, the alluring music was convincing, although I sometimes understood almost nothing.”