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.
Gaza
Laughter Without Joy: Between Gaza’s Reality and Beckett’s Stage
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’
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 […]
‘Safaa and the Tent’: Narrating Gaza through Comics
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.
‘They Even Assassinated My Library’
However, for me, the most precious of all the manuscripts in my library were the six stories I wrote in Israeli jail. These were the first stories I ever wrote, penned during a few months of incarceration following my participation in the First Intifada in 1992. I wasn’t quite 19 when I wrote those stories. I “published” them by hanging them on the wall of the prison.
‘To the Poet Who Knew the Storm Would Return’
“Dear Mahmoud, I write to you from Gaza, not as it was, nor even as it is, but as something in between—a city trapped in the silence of its own destruction.” – Alaa Alqaisi
New Poetry after Darwish: ‘In Praise of What Is No Longer Ours’
The great twentieth-century poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941. Today, author-translator Alaa Alqaisi shares a letter to Darwish and a poem, after Darwish’s “In Praise of the High Shadow.”
Nasser Rabah’s ‘I Was Sand’
“I Was Sand” is set to appear in Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, which is forthcoming from City Lights next month.
Three Short Stories by Omar Hammash
Today, we share three short-short stories from Gaza, by author Omar Hammash.