“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.
“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
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).
“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.”
“This massacre shrinks homes into tents— / You sing with the displaced birds at its door.”
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.
In this essay by Husam Maarouf, he writes: “Isn’t it strange for someone to laugh in Gaza? Here, laughter is not because destruction is amusing or enjoyable—it is a moment of nakedness before the self, a full exposure. One has no choice but to laugh.”
It’s publication day for Poppy Seeds: Poetry from Gazan Youth, a new collection out from young people’s publication Naya Magazine. Here, we talk with co-editor Akshay Maheshwari about the idea behind […]
Earlier this week, The Lakes International Comic Art Festival published Gaza-based artist Safaa Odeh’s Safaa and the Tent, a collection of drawings and social-media posts translated by Nada Hodali. Nada talked about the book, its humor and grief, and the difficulties of translating a work that leaves you speechless.
