It’s PUBLICATION DAY for ArabLit Quarterly Spring 2025: GRIEF

Starting today, you can find the Spring 2025 GRIEF issue in our online store (arablit.org/shop/), on Gumroad, Amazon, and in select bookshops worldwide. For a review or desk copy, for discounted student copies, and for those who can’t afford the magazine, please email info@arablit.org.

Also, read the extended version of our LETTERS section at arablit.org/grief/ and the complete version of Hekmaa Yagoub’s “A Feminist Shrine,” translated by Najlaa Eltom, at arablit.org/thefeministshrine/. 

From the Introduction

Much of the pop science around grief focuses on getting through grief to a place on the other side. I was in middle school when I heard about the “stages of grief;” by my teacher’s reckoning, these were something you fought your way through, box by box, like a game of Snakes and Ladders. You had to be careful not to hit a bad patch and be dragged back down to anger or denial. Then, once you had eased your way forward, step by careful step, you would reach the final square: acceptance. Grief was a malady, something to overcome so one could return to a state of clean emotional health.

This sort of grief, we heard, was spawned by individual losses: the death of a loved one, the breakup of a relationship, the loss of a home. And, we were told, it was meant to be vanquished individually, too.

Yet throughout most of history—including the histories of other species—grief has been not just communal, but a place where community is defined. When elephants pass a dead comrade’s bones, they touch the remains, and also each other. We are the we who grieve, they seem to acknowledge.

Just so, we bring together the griefs of this issue into a space of shared rage, shared love, and a shared way forward. We share in the horror of seeing small children covered in the grime of cement dust and smoke; the horror of manufactured hunger and deprivation; the horror of a whiteboard on which healthcare workers have written *REMEMBER US.* We share in the grief-rage of people kidnapped by governments, of climate collapse, of profit margins wedged open far enough to swallow people whole.

As this shared grief swells, sociologist Paul Gilroy suggests, in the anthology Palestine in a World on Fire, it could also spawn “other forms of identity, other kinds of attachments, new varieties of connectedness and association, new kinds of acting in concert [that] will become apparent to us as these pressures grow and intensify.”

He adds: “So I’m optimistic about that, if it’s possible to be optimistic about something that’s so terrifying.”

We created this issue of the magazine for just this sort of terrifying grief: one that is communal, material, ongoing, and also fertile. As Abdelrahman ElGendy writes in his introduction to our collection of grief-in-letters: “We consider grief not as a final act or resolution, but an opening.”

In “Do Not Reconcile: A Grief in Letters,” ElGendy curates six letters written to people who can no longer receive them. The project is inspired by Amal Dunqul’s Do Not Reconcile—a rithā’ poem where grief “becomes a springboard not only into lament, but into fury.”

Rithā’ poetry is also explored in Salma Harland’s “Fallen Cities and Lost Handkerchiefs,” where grief for the non-human means “meditating on transience, wresting meaning from absence, honoring the virtues of what has been lost, and ensuring its memory endures.” Another essay that centers classical Arabic poetry is James Montgomery’s “Afterloss,” where he translates al-Muʿadhdhal and al-Mutanabbi as a path toward writing about the physical and psychic transformations of grief on the human body.

There are funny moments, too, as in Alaa Abdulwahab’s “Ghostly Faces,” where a chorus of ghosts follow Alaa around as she comes to terms with the loss of her beloved cat Susu, which calls to mind other losses in her life, especially the death of her mother.

We have poetry-in-grief from Gaza; Batool Abu Akleen shares a poem of her own, “The Crow,” and translates two by her contemporary Wadah Abu Jami, while Wiam El-Tamami brings us new work by Nasser Rabah.

A poem by Dalia Taha, translated by Sara Elkamel, tells us that Death “oversalts our mouth with questions;” meanwhile in Olivia Elias’s verse, grief is a wolf.

From Sudan, we have an excerpt from “Ode to Hope,” by Babiker al-Wasila, translated by Lemya Shammat and Salma Harland, as well as an excerpt from Hekma Yagoub’s “The Feminist Shrine,” translated by Najlaa Eltom. From Syria, there is Fadi Azzam’s meditation on the loss of houses, translated by Ghada Alatrash.

Bahraini-British author Ali Al-Jamri brings us a poem that is very much about grief and community: Mulla Atiyya b. Ali Al-Jamri (1899–1981)’s “Where Are Your Hands?,” a lamentation written to be recited during Muharram. The issue ends with “On Alfeñique and Caring for the Dead,” in which food scholar Nawal Nasrallah writes about food’s role in communal grief, from ancient Mesopotamia to contemporary Latin America.

We hope this issue creates a space for the new attachments and types of connectedness that Paul Gilroy describes, and, as Abdelrahman says: an opening.

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