An Apology to May Ziadeh

January 29, 2026
A table by a window overlooking piles of snow
Connecticut, United States of America

Dear May,

I address you by your literary name, the name you chose for yourself, rather than as “Marie,” the name given to you at birth without your consent.

I write to ask for forgiveness.

You may well wonder who this foolish woman is, intruding on your rest, writing to you from the world of the living: a stranger whose name you never knew, someone you never met. And you would be right to wonder. You and I never met. I was born ninety-seven years and two days after you.

Yet I have known you since childhood, my Nazarene friend. I remember the first line of yours I ever read: “I heard the child laugh, and my ethereal soul trembled within my earthly body.” I am now approaching forty-three, and I still carry that line with me, along with the memory of the evening when I first encountered it: a winter night in Amman in 1993. The phrase “the scorpions of his hair” struck me then, and it still rises in my mind whenever I hear your name.

So why am I writing to you now, asking for forgiveness?

I wronged you, and even if it was a small wrong, it weighs heavily, all the more because my intimacy with the beauty of your language and the boldness of your thought did nothing to prevent it.

A few days ago, someone mentioned that you disliked being photographed. I replied without thinking:

“That’s a shame. She was very pretty.”

In that one sentence, I repeated a long history. I set your work aside and returned you to the narrow space that confined you for much of your life. I placed you, once again, among women whose appearance is noticed before their ideas, whose image precedes their voice.

That sentence came before any mention of how daring your language was for its time, how far your thinking exceeded its surroundings, how your prose opened new paths in Arabic writing. That comment, carelessly blurted out, belongs among the countless remarks that diminish women whose talent is reshaped by the gaze and speech of others.

In that moment, I stumbled blindly, like the poet from decades ago who might have spared you had he restrained himself:

If tomorrow I do not delight my eyes with May,
I shall deny your dawn, O Tuesday…

After all this, who could fault you for refusing the camera? Why should a woman welcome display simply because others admire her appearance? Worse still, some announce their desire to turn her beauty into a tool for promoting their own “product,” whatever that product may be.

What pains me, May, is that I said this while knowing you as a writer. I knew your intellectual rigor. I knew the heavy cost you paid for refusing to exist as an ornament in literary salons.

What pains me more is that I believed myself immune to this reflex. I thought I had crossed beyond the limits imposed by patriarchal authority, whether enforced by men or reproduced by women. I called myself a feminist writer, only to discover how much work remains, how many restraints still linger in my mind and spirit, before I can carry your legacy with integrity.

This is what I apologize for. This is what I commit to confronting within myself.

You don’t owe me anything. I write because naming failure creates responsibility. All I can do now is return to your work, listen with care, and continue the path I stepped onto at the age of ten.

Your books belong to you.

For those of us who came after, the task is to guard them from decay.

With love,
Ibtihal

 

Editor’s note: ArabLit will be publishing May Ziadeh’s Sawāniḥ Fatāt in English translation late this year; Ibtihal is the book’s chief editor.

 

Ibtihal Rida Mahmood is a writer, editor, translator, and poet. She is the translator and co-editor of Snow in Amman: An Anthology of Short Stories from Jordan (2015) and the English translator of Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (2017). Her essays, translations, and criticism have appeared in The Markaz Review, New Internationalist, Qantara, The Seattle Globalist, and Women Writers, Women’s Books. Her poetry and literary translations have been featured in international anthologies, including The Art of Being Human (2013), Premio Mondiale di Poesia Nosside (2014), and Versus Versus: 100 Poems by Deaf, Disabled & Neurodivergent Poets (2025). She is a contributing editor at ArabLit. She also publishes the Substack newsletter Naked Shadows on a Black Wall.