Five Poems by May Ziadeh
“sometimes my soul is wild, / an egret flying far / beyond the ocean’s edge, // and sometimes I curl up, / tender as an anemone when touched, / as salty and as damp.”
Nonfiction
In Memory of May, by May Ziadé
“Are you related to *the* May Ziadeh?”
Why Bring May Ziadeh into English? Why Now?
We asked ourselves (and each other) why we wanted to bring May Ziadeh’s Musings of a Young Woman into English. Why May? And why now?
Standing Tall Like Trees: From Gaza to Canada
How do trees survive when fall strips them of their green leaves, and snow suffocates them, turning them into rigid white ghosts that frighten birds and leave no room to breathe?
‘A City with No Secrets’
The problem with this city has always been not a lack of love, but that intimacy, affection and love hang in the atmosphere and suffocate, just out of the population’s reach. Whenever I walk around its wide and ordered streets, I imagine myself colliding with tiny particles of human warmth, but never grasping them.
Rhyming Recipes
Why versify a recipe, let alone an entire recipe collection?
The Loneliness of the Spared
“I am a walking dissonance, a transmission without a terminal.”
May Goes On: (Re)-Introducing May Ziadeh
On May 1st—yes, May in May—the English translation of Sawanih Fatat (Musings of a Young Woman) by May Ziadeh arrives as the second title in ArabLit’s ERASED, NOT FORGOTTEN series, following Out of Time: The Collected Short Stories of Samira Azzam (tr. Ranya Abdelrahman).
Dima Wannous’s ‘Damascus: A Tomb and a Prison’
“We passed a vast area near my house in Mazzeh, its surface covered with unfinished cement buildings. The driver told me it was a residential and commercial development owned by Asma al-Assad. The next day, one torture survivor told me the purpose of the project was to hide corpses[.]”