Isn’t It Our Time to Take a Break from Death?
While gasping for breath, I write. While my heart is panting, I count all my organs. Who will delete this wound from memory? Who will draw the hardships from my heart? Who will calm it?
Nonfiction
‘Prison in a Burning Tank’
“These are the worst days. I don’t know why I’ve been using superlatives so much lately, or saying “for the first time,” as though my mind were instantly classifying every experience against prior facts or illusions. Perhaps it would be enough to say they’re terrible days, without comparing them to other dark ones.”
How Do I Leave the Prison of Gaza?
“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.
Beneath the Howl of Hunger
“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
How War Transformed My Literary Taste
Husam Maarouf writes about what it’s meant to be a reader before and during genocide.
From the KITCHEN: ‘Teita’s Bitter Orange Jam’
We are around 25% of the way toward our goal with our summer “Buy a Back Issue” campaign. This essay, by Egyptian author and food scholar Salma Serry, appeared in KITCHEN issue of the magazine.
Armed with October: Thawra and Poetry, from Khartoum to Toronto
Here, Khaldah Salih and Fathima Cader interweave a translation of “October Al Akhdar” with their reflections on the lessons that historic and ongoing struggle in Sudan provide for liberation struggles everywhere.
On Alfeñique and Caring for the Dead
This essay is from the Spring 2025 GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
Hunger That Defeats Language
“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.”