Alaa Alqaisi and What Caution Cannot Do

On Alaa Alqaisi’s The Thin Border

Today is the Dublin launch of ArabLit contributor Alaa Alqaisi’s The Thin Border: Living in Extra Time. It is available through Skein Press.

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Reading Alaa Alqaisi’s The Thin Border: Living in Extra Time (Skein Press, 2026) is both strange and oddly familiar, like looking into a mirror and seeing a face that is nothing like your own, yet recognizing it well enough that you can slip through to the other side. In this slender chapbook, in which Alaa writes about what to do in a life after genocide, she mentions a feeling much like this stranger-recognition. Memory, she writes, does not always come through a near-replica of something you once experienced, like the childhood madeleine. Instead, it can arrive through the unfamiliar:

“I can be looking at a landscape entirely foreign to me and suddenly recognise an arrangement of light, a colour of earth, a tree or a smell or a stretch of sky; something that opens the hidden door through which memory enters.”

It is through this hidden door that we, too, step into The Thin Border. This small chapbook-essay describes Alaa’s experience of surviving genocide and the “extra time” in which she now finds herself. Although it is small, like Hisham Matar’s The Return, the pages have a way of folding themselves outward, of being more than they first seem.

For me, The Thin Border carries an additional layer of the uncanny, since Alaa writes near the beginning: “And perhaps because I did not know how to simply live after having spent so long learning not to die, I began to make another bargain with existence. I measured my worth through what I could produce. I worked. I wrote. I accepted another task, another deadline, another project.”

First, it’s familiar because it’s my own way of dealing with grief. But second, I first came to know Alaa around eight a.m. on a Monday, two years ago, when she sent in her first email to ArabLit. In it, she said simply that she was a translator and was interested in whatever work we might have for her. A short flurry of messages followed, and she turned in her first draft translation at around one p.m. that very same day. In the time since, Alaa has written and translated extensively for ArabLit (often volunteering to do more work), and also for dozens of other platforms and publications around the world.

I feel a kinship with this kind of compulsion; the kind that, as she writes, turns “productivity into evidence that survival was not wasted.” The descriptions of grief, in The Thin Border, are both impossibly distant (for any of us who have not survived genocide) but also close, similar to the way James Montgomery measures his personal grief against that of the sixth- and seventh-century poet al-Khansa in Loss Sings.

Alaa describes a surviving-grief that is close, but also many other griefs that persist in parallel universes, where, “My mind simply assumes that things have continued without me; that the friends I lost are somewhere living out the rest of their days, that Refaat Aareer will return to teach, that my family’s house is still standing.”

In several places in The Thin Border, Alaa hints at these other universes, other realities, and I want to be clear that there is no universe in which she is not an extraordinary writer. Surviving genocide has not made her the writer she is. No matter what universe, she has that sort of Proustian attention; the ability to study a thing long after the moment when the rest of us have lost our minds, keeping at it until she really sees it.

And yet there is something else, she tells us, that developed through surviving genocide. Something like a detachment from fear.

Most writing, I find, is crammed full of caution. Most writing walks carefully down a line, doing things that other writing has done already, working in ways that other writing has succeeded. Most writing worries a lot about the future, about audience. Some people will call this kind of caution self-censorship, but to me self-censorship suggests a conscious act. Instead, I think it’s more that our constant calculation of futurity stops us from seeing what’s in front of us. We become caution-blind.

Calling someone’s writing “fearless” usually means they have loudly transgressed some social taboo or another. The Thin Border is not that. Alaa writes very clearly about the extra considerations she now has, in exile. How her voice hesitates. How, “It watches itself. I sometimes feel that even my anger leaves me moderated, wavering, professionally dressed.”

And yet her writing also recognizes that caution will not save us. “There were people more courageous, more careful, stronger than I was, who were killed.” And so fear, in this extra time, does not have the same grip on her that it had before. “Not because fear has left me,” she writes. “My body can still panic over small things. Fear simply no longer convinces me in the same way. I have already seen how little caution can guarantee.”

This is what Alaa’s writing does best, in The Thin Border and elsewhere. It does not allow itself to be blinded by caution, steered by the consideration of some future that might not even exist.

It is this same caution, I think, that blinds us into being quiet. Into not risking jobs, social circles, relationships. I am not interested in whether whether this caution is effective, but in how it leads to a visual field that is full of spaces we cannot see.

Alaa’s writing in The Thin Border, like Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger, has a way of opening up the doors that our cautious blindnesses have shut. These are Alaa’s doors, of course. But through some strange literary transmogrification they become our doors as well. And if we read carefully, a wider range of our own thoughts and truths and memories can enter.

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—M Lynx Qualey, founding editor, ArabLit.