“Ibrahim Nasrallah’s novel paints a chilling picture of humanity in all its destructive potential.”
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Palestine
‘Returning to Haifa’: A ‘Depressing and Necessary Reminder of What Is Still at Stake’
“It is fifty years since Kanafani wrote Returning to Haifa. Far from being a story of dispossession and degraded circumstances that feels historical, the novella and its staging came across to me as a truly depressing – and necessary – reminder of what is still at stake, so many years later.”
On Mahmoud Darwish’s Birthday, 13 Poems
“It is not enough to love, for that is one of nature’s magical acts, like rainfall and thunder. It takes you out of yourself into the other’s orbit and then you have to fend for yourself. It is not enough to love, you have to know how to love. Do you know how?”
Ahlam Bsharat’s ‘Code Name: Butterfly’ Chosen as 2018 Read for ‘One Book, Many Communities’ Project
The hashtag for the campaign is: #lap1book.
A Story by Huzama Habayeb: ‘A (Somewhat) Realistic Dream’
“Cursed are those who indulge in idealizing the moment when the sun lights up the horizon!”
ArabLit in Australia: A Conversation with Amal Awad
“There is just too much emphasis on women as barometers for society.”
Teaching with Arabic Literature in Translation: ‘Palestinian Literature and Film’
It’s popular to think that literature gives us a “window into the lives of others” and other similar cliches, but marginalized, stigmatized subjectivities such as the Palestinians’ aren’t a costume that we can try on and take off at our whim by opening and closing a book. The desire to better understand diverse Palestinian experiences through their literature is noble, the claim to authoritatively know Palestinians through it isn’t.
A Crowdsourced Thread on Palestinian Literature
“Who are some good Palestinian novelists/poets/essayists to read?”
More of Ibrahim Nasrallah’s ‘Palestinian Comedy’ Makes It Into English: ‘Gaza Weddings’
“Gaza Weddings,” first published in Arabic in 2004, is part of Nasrallah’s Palestinian Comedy project, an eight-novel series in the spirit of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine.
Huzama Habayeb on the Painful Process of Writing and the Joy of Reading
Yet it was in Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Habayeb says, that she found what it meant to be a Palestinian. “I cried because of this discovery.”
Mourid Barghouti on Poetry, ‘An Editing of Life’
“Poetry, Barghouti pointed out, is his way to explore and discover ideas, but ideas don’t drive the poem.”
4 in Translation By Naguib Mahfouz Medal Winner Huzama Habayeb
“But the broom grows skinnier by the day, just like her.”
