Isn’t It Our Time to Take a Break from Death?
While gasping for breath, I write. While my heart is panting, I count all my organs. Who will delete this wound from memory? Who will draw the hardships from my heart? Who will calm it?
Gaza
From a Palestinian Love Story: ‘This Stone is Mine’
This excerpt comes from pages 34–37 of Saga Hamdan’s 2024 debut novel This Stone is Mine (هذا الحجر لي), a story of love and loss between Gaza and Jenin.
‘I Bequeath Life to You, for We Die without Life Knowing Us’
“I have always tried to keep an eye on death, making plans to distract it, to make it wait, so that it would get bored and leave what remains of me, my remains. We are all remains here.” -Nima Hasan
How Do I Leave the Prison of Gaza?
“The world is small,” they say. But Gaza taught me that the world is too big to be shaken by the small tragedies that happen here. Too big to care about a starving human being who only dreams of crossing a crossing.
Beneath the Howl of Hunger
“And though the world may have looked away, let this much be remembered: we named the hunger. We bore it. We endured. Let that remain.” – Alaa Alqaisi
Five Poems by Hend Jouda
These five poems are by Hend Jouda, a poet from Gaza whose grandparents were displaced from the village of Ashdod in 1948. Born in the Bureij refugee camp in 1983, Jouda has published three collections: Someone Always Leaves (2013), No Sugar in the City (2017), and A Finger That Managed to Survive (2024).
Hunger That Defeats Language
“The hunger I’m experiencing now is not what I imagined. It’s not what you imagine, dear reader. It’s not just an empty feeling in your stomach. It’s a numbness that spreads from the gut to the brain. It blurs memories, weakens vision, and turns every thought into a deep excavation that the mind can’t bear. Hunger steals the simplest human abilities: concentration, patience, sensation, the desire to say something. Thinking becomes a luxury. Words become weights that cannot be lifted.”
‘A Resonant Death’: A Poem After Fatima Hassouna
“This massacre shrinks homes into tents— / You sing with the displaced birds at its door.”
GRIEF Preview: Nasser Rabah’s ‘A Swarm of Ants’
The Spring 2025 GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly is coming in three days — on April 30, 2025. Today, a poem from the issue in Wiam El-Tamami’s translation.