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
Nonfiction
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.”
‘Ghostly Faces’
This essay is from the Spring 2025 GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly.
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.