America Through Radwa’s Eyes: ‘The Journey’
“Although I for one had to read up on the teen guru of the Divine Light Movement to see if Radwa was having me on. (She wasn’t.)”
Poetry
Friday Finds: Zeina Hashem Beck’s Bilingual ‘Duets’
But for non-Arabic readers of The Lifted Brow, there’s also no “need” to have the Arabic. You could hear one melody, without the other, and that too could be a privileged mode of reading.
‘The Responsibility of Translating Other Poets’
“One clear change since 2003 has been in the themes taken up by Iraqi poets and novelists and, indeed, by artists generally.”
‘A Confession,’ by Tunisian Poet Sami Messelmani
“their bright lights
infect me with an intellectual insomnia
shrinking my soul,
and blinding my eyes,”
Entirely Genuine and In No Way Conventional: Muhammad al-Tunisi’s ‘In Darfur’
“Al-Tūnisī was the only Arab and Muslim to reside in and write an account of the Sultanate of Darfur.”
Excellent & Idiosyncratic Lebanese Stories on WWB
This month’s issue of Words Without Borders is called “Turning the Kaleidoscope: Writing from Lebanon” and was co-edited by Olivia Snaije and Mitchell Albert.
Review: ‘Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature’
By reading Ashour’s work, the author remarks that “conspiracism, or waswasa, alerts us to lurking dangers, but it also constitutes a danger in and of itself.”
Crossing Cultures: A 19th Century Egyptian Story of Darfur
“[D]ull would s/he be of soul who could resist a country where one of the chief officers of state bore the title of the Sultan’s Buttocks (his military formation brought up the rear when the army was on the march) and where the court jester was also ‘the Keeper of the Sultan’s Anger,’ i.e., was the executioner.”
Friday Finds: Kurdish Literature
“Salim Barakat’s language is intimidatingly dense and complex, flaunting a vast and daunting vocabulary.”