My sister screamed in the night
Take me to my brother’s house
And there she screamed that same night
No no! Take me back to the house of my father
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Egypt
Iman Mersal, Stepping Away from Poetry
“Now, after a translation of Simic’s ironic voice, and a prose book full of complicated feelings around being a mother, can we expect new shadows from both in Mersal’s coming poems?”
Friday Finds: ‘Another Trip to the Tower Mirage,’ by Yasser Abdellatif
and marble like ivory
gleaming damply
with daylight dwindling
till shadows swallow
stealing footfalls
and three lifts to the left.
Basma Abdel Aziz on Writing ‘The Queue’
“In both my fiction and my academic writing, I have long been interested in the mutually constitutive roles of ruler and ruled. I am intent on exploring how this manipulates people’s fates, and am determined to resist the ways it reshapes their understanding of the world.”
An Author-Translator Conversation: Donia Kamal’s ‘Cigarette Number Seven’ and Archiving Romantic Ideals
“One thing I want to add to that is that ‘Cigarette Number Seven,’ in dealing with the unfinished dream of one woman, is mainly about the idea that everything – experiences, emotions, attempts to change the world— moves in cycles that never reach a clear end or resolution. There can be a lot of pain in that.”
Ruling: Alef Bookstores To Be Taken Over by Egyptian Government
“The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) condemned the confiscation of the assets of Alef Bookstore in all its branches all over Egypt’s governorates.”
Friday Finds: Miral al-Tahawy’s ‘Writing the Body and the Rhetoric of Protest in Arab Women’s Literature’
“That was a girl who intuitively knew that modesty resides in denying her female identity.”
Must-read Classics By Women: 6 by Radwa Ashour
“Forthcoming in translation is Ashour’s The Journey, translated by Michelle Hartman and set to be released by Interlink Books.”
Must-read Classics by Women: Latifa al-Zayyat’s ‘The Open Door’
“In 2017, The Open Door still makes a thrilling romantic read about finding a feminist lover in an anti-feminist world, while also asking: How does one find the rediscover one’s authentic childhood self as an adult? And how, in this world of injustices, does one productively resist?”
Eternal Nightmares of the Hounded Mind: On ‘Post-Revolutionary Egyptian Dystopias’
“Is this authority really that clever and strong, or is it the people’s imagination that makes it terrifying?”
Mustafa Çorbacı Escapes Youssef Rakha Novel ‘Sultan’ Seal,’ Resolves to Write Column
In addition to being printed in Al-Ahram Weekly, “Postmuslim“ will appear at http://thesultan.blot.im every Friday starting on July 7.
Launching Sahar Elmougy’s Long-awaited ‘The Hill’s Musk,’ A Rewriting of Mahfouz’s Amina
“She’d drowned herself in anti-depressants that left her a breathing corpse until, one day of July, Mariam found herself walking coldly into the kitchen and turning the knob on the cooker on so the gas would flow freely into the house. Minutes later, she turned it off quietly and opened the kitchen window as if to clear the house off the smell of potato frying.”
