‘Ghostly Faces’
This essay is from the Spring 2025 GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
Nonfiction
We Knocked Until Our Hands Broke
Gaza-based Palestinian author Alaa Alqaisi asks herself the question posed more than half a century ago at the end of Ghassan Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun”: Why didn’t they knock on the walls of the tank?
‘The Djinn’: By Ihsan Abdel Kouddous
The prolific and popular Ihsan Abdel Kouddous (1919–90) tells us about his run-in with djinn.
May Ziadeh’s ‘The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple’
May Ziadeh stands before the ruins of Baalbek in 1911 and reflects on the nature of impermanence and the colonial designs of Westerners.
Reflections on ‘The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple’
Dana Al Shahbari introduces May Ziadeh’s “The Memory of Baalbek’s Temple,” noting that when Ziadeh (1886-1941) boarded a steam train from Beirut to Baalbek, she returned “not only with a memory, but with a vision.”
‘The Thing’: For Jed Henchiri
In an extension of our GRIEF issue, Zied Abdelkader writes for Jed Henchiri, a physician, political activist, and one of the founders of the Tunisian Foundation for Young Physicians.
Almost Erased and Almost Discovered: Finding Alifa Rifaat
Sally Al Haq writes on Alifa Rifaat (1930–1996): “An erased writer wants to be discovered, wants to be read and witnessed. Every literary erasure entails this grief; of what’s been lost and what could have happened if this writer had been met with grace and freedom.”
Ragaa Elish: ‘Don’t Be Born Ugly’
In the preface to his short-story collection “Don’t Be Born Ugly,” author Ragaa Elish writes of ugliness: “They stand astonished before a phenomenon they can’t understand. It provokes all feelings of hatred in them, all the tragic bitter fruits to which the ugly person falls victim.”
Ragaa Elish vs Society’s Demons
Here, in an essay that originally appeared in Ultrasawt, Moaaz Muhammad explores the literature of legendary Egyptian writer Ragaa Elish, who declared in his short-story collection: Don’t Be Born Ugly.