‘On the Back of Restless Winds’
In his 2015 autobiography, A Time of Wind, Anxiety, and Freedom (أزمنة الريح والقلق والحرية ), Sudanese scholar Dr. Hayder Ibrahim Ali offers a rare and insightful account of Sudan’s intellectual and political life.
Nonfiction
‘The Tale of a Child Who Has Not Yet Burned’
This excerpt comes from the first chapter of the extraordinary literary memoir The Fire: The Tale of a Child Who Has Not Yet Burned, by Mohammad Abdo Najari, published in Damascus by Dar al-Hassad in 1996.
’48 kg’: Creating Life from a Desire to Diminish and Fade Away
Gaza-based Palestinian writer Husam Maarouf responds to Batool Abu Akleen’s ’48 kg.’
Songs of the Unspeakable
When can loss that never ends be said to have happened? When will absence finally finish arriving? Who is the self if left partial, displaced from identity to be found neither here nor there? And if loss defines us, when may we be ourselves?
Books as Breath: Gaza’s Living Story
Salah and Abdullah’s small bookshop in Nuseirat is a testament to the power of literature. A model of Palestinian endurance.
Shrinking Language, Bursting Memory
“Under siege, time is stolen piece by piece, and language shrinks to match the narrow space it is allowed. People abandon long sentences because every additional word must justify the power it consumes, the battery it drains, the risk it takes in that particular minute.”
Tracing a Line, from Arwa to Enayat
“Every time Arwa and Enayat stepped from the private to the public, they returned disappointed. I should clarify that I am not offering an idealistic theory that assumes the world should reward people for their intentions and desires. However, I imagine that their experiences could have been less cruel in other societies that don’t seal the public sphere up so tightly.”
‘Gaza, the Game the Elephant Swallows Every Time’
Writer Husam Maarouf returns to Deir al-Balah in what feels like the same displacement and return he experienced only months ago.
Inji Efflatoun’s ‘A Meeting at the Prosecutor’s Office’
This book was the subject of a recent episode of the BULAQ podcast; today, with permission, we bring you a section from the memoir soon after Inji Efflatoun meets her beloved husband Hamdi, who she was originally wary of — since he was a public prosecutor — although she is reassured he is actually “a committed Marxist.”