Recovering “Moroccan Other-Archives”: Reading Literature as a Space for Memory-Making
By Leonie Rau In his new monograph Moroccan Other-Archives. History and Citizenship After State Violence, Brahim El Guabli explores the possibilities of recovering historical narratives in the absence of a formalized archive by looking to the literary and cultural production of a society faced with multiple losses. Last month, Hoopoe Fiction released Alexander E. Elinson’s translation of Khadija Marouazi’s 2000 novel History of Ash, which is narrated in turns by two fictional political prisoners held during Morocco’s so-called “Years of Lead.” The period, which stretched between the 1970s and 1980s, was characterized by heavy state repression. Marouazi’s novel forms part of what Moroccan scholar Brahim El Guabli terms an “other-archive”: “neither academic history nor firsthand memory, nor […] conventional archives,” ...
‘They Fell Like Stars from the Sky’: Sheikha Helawy’s ‘Certain Understanding of Happiness’
By M Lynx Qualey ........They Fell Like Stars from the Sky & Other Stories ........by Sheikha Helawy, translated by Nancy Roberts ........Neem Tree Press, September 2023. Their bodies might be displaced, torn away from homes and villages. Yet the memories of women and girls in Sheikha Helawy’s short-story collection They Fell Like Stars from the Sky remain, haunting the spaces where they once lived. Helawy—an acclaimed short-story writer who won the Almultaqa Prize for her 2018 collection Order C345—knows the experience of being violently uprooted. Indeed, this book, translated by Nancy Roberts, is dedicated to “the contrary little girl I left behind under the oak tree in the village of Dhail El E’rj”—a village that was obliterated in the 1990s. The ...
‘The Common’ Issue 25 Launches Today with Kuwait Special Section
The Amherst, USA-based literary magazine The Common today launches its 25th issue, which features a special section of short stories and art from Kuwait ...
Publication Day for ‘Shalash the Iraqi’
It's publication day for Shalash the Iraqi's series of posts -- essays, short stories, satiric monologues, magical-realist sketches -- translated to English by Luke Leafgren nearly twenty years after their first appearance online ...
Kanafani and Shibli: Different Stagings of Palestine, Different Stagings of Death
In an essay that originally appeared in Turkish, novelist Süreyyya Evren explores the deaths in works by Ghassan Kanafani and Adania Shibli ...
A Conversation About Miral Altahawy’s IPAF-shortlisted ‘Days of the Shining Sun’
" This is a godless world, even though Allah is mentioned all the time. The only possible heroism in the novel is that of survival in face of misery." ...
5 Songs for the Launch of Haji Jaber’s ‘Black Foam’
Haji Jaber's Black Foam is full of diverse cultural, linguistic, and musical landscapes. It opens in Addis Ababa, Eritrea, one of the final stages in our main character’s journey from his tangled past to what he hopes will be a new life in Israel. Throughout the novel, Adal (later Dawoud, David, and Dawit) re-invents himself, finally managing to slip in with the Jewish community in Gondor, Eritrea. As he journeys through different cities in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Israel, the music he listens to changes. There is the Bob Marley we hear at a bar in Addis Ababa; spirituals on the journey from Gondar; Amharic music on the streets in the Neve Sha'anan neighborhood in Tel Aviv; classic oud music in Jerusalem. A FIVE-SONG TOUR OF THE NOVEL: In Addis Ababa, Eritrea ...
On the Translation of NTA-shortlisted ‘Exhausted on the Cross’
The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) announced yesterday that Najwan Darwish and Kareem James Abu-Zeid's Exhausted on the Cross was one of the four-book shortlist for their poetry prize, alongside works by Mandelstam (tr. Peter France), Dante (tr. D. M. Black), and atalka Bilotserkivets (tr. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia Orlowsky) ...
WatWat Takes Flight: Arabic Comics for Young Readers
Since its creation in 2007, the comics collective Samandal has published more than 17 magazines, six anthologies, and six graphic novels. What’s more, the collective has undertaken numerous initiatives for the promotion of comics in Lebanon. From this experience, the youth-focused WatWat or “Bat” project was born in 2018 ...
Translation’s Agitated Mirror
"Perhaps each iteration of the poem is a supplicant, yearning for a connection with Ibn Arabi’s original. Or perhaps each one is a lover, longing to see itself in another. Perhaps they are both." ...
