Al-Bayati: ‘When I Met al-Sayyab in 1947’
“His illusions, his distant dreams, and his winged fantasies seemed to flutter quietly with emotion and land on his poems, leaving their enchanting colorful feathers on them.”
Nonfiction
Adonis: ‘When al-Sayyab Visited Beirut in 1957’
“I remember now Badr Shakir al-Sayyab – I see him in our house, with a group of friends, sitting on small straw chairs, sharing a table, or improvising a seat on the floor.”
From BILA HUDOOD: An Excerpt of Charles Akl’s ‘Food for Copts’
“A study of Coptic school sandwiches – or how to get your mother to make you the best chicken sandwich in the world.”
From the Archives: ‘Cooking with Naguib Mahfouz’
In honor of the “Kitchen” issue of ArabLit Quarterly, a re-run from 2016, about the history of sharkasiyya, a dish important in Mahfouz’s Palace Walk. This piece also ran on kitchening […]
Friday Finds: Celebrating Iman Mersal
But there’s also much more of Mersal’s work to explore online.
Friday Finds: Abdelfattah Kilito’s ‘Why Read the Classics?’
“Isn’t our notion of the classic influenced by the other? Doesn’t the standing of Arabic literature rely upon foreign literature?”
Ahmed Bouanani and Morocco’s Seventh Art
“It was the only book that Ahmed Bouanani wanted to publish, but he died believing that the manuscript had been destroyed when his house burned down.”
Friday Finds: Excerpt from ‘My Mother’s Glasses, a Tunisian Prison Memoir’
“It was Friday, May 9, 1975. We had just ended a hunger strike a few days earlier.”
Afro, Indigenous, and Palestinian Futurisms: Writing Across Space and Time
This is where M. Asli Dukan has arrived in her own work, as she moves away from the label of Afrofuturism towards a more unifying vision, what she has started to call “abolitionist futurisms.”