Fathia Debech’s Katara Prize-winning ‘Melanin’: A Look at Racism and Identity
With her debut novel, Tunisian author and translator Fathia Debech won a prestigious Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel.
Reviews
A Search for Beauty and Appreciation: Kay Heikkinen on Translating ‘Velvet’
” I will never look at rain the same way I used to; the author talks about it as if it were a living being with a will, attacking the earth, and how it has an effect on the streets.”
‘Hara Hotel’: On Centering the Western Narrator and Stories About Syrian Refugees
“It reminds us of the colonial narratives advancing how the colonized people are in desperate need of saving.”
‘Heaven is Not with Us’: War Criminals or Victims?
“But when it comes to war crimes in civil wars, what is judged as sinful, and what heroic?”
The Iraqi ‘Irvine Kafka Poe’
The comparison is both oddly specific and also strangely unhelpful: Blasim is “Iraq’s Irvine Welsh.” Yes, yes, Irvine Welsh is a name I should instantly recognize. But to be honest, I had forgotten why. Irvine, my brain said. Irvine, California? Worse, my brain had linked the name “Irvine Welsh” to novels and screenplays by the American writer Peter Hedges.
The Flying Flesh of Amjad Nasser’s ‘Adam’s Kingdom’
“The ugliness of reality has surpassed the imagination of our ancient poets, and where modes of torture and killing machines have overshadowed the most creative minds of filmmakers, it is futile to invoke the ancient muses.”
Forgetting and Remembering the Fearless Zaynab Fawwaz
“I was also drawn to Fawwaz years ago because of her incredible work on historical biography – and I now have no hesitation in calling her massive biographical dictionary of women (published 1893-6) a work of feminist history.”
‘Me and Haim’: an Algerian Odyssey Through Racism
“In fiction, the Algerian Jewish woman and man still await the main role.”
Review: ‘The Unmaking of the Arab Intellectual’
“She takes issue with how literary contributions by Saudi female writers have been dismissed as belonging to a ‘chick-lit genre’ by offering a rereading of Saudi novelist Seba al-Herz’s ‘The Others.’ She invites us to think of the work as a critique of ‘secular nationalism and the secular-nationalist intellectual, which have hitherto framed the Arabic literary canon.'”