Women Recommending Women: 12 Arab Authors Share Their Favorites
By Essayed Taha To mark Women in Translation Month, we asked 12 Arab women authors to recommend readings by other Arab women that they have enjoyed and admired. The result […]
Rasha Omran
‘If I Were a Cat’: Rasha Omran’s Poetry in Three Languages
“If I were a cat / I would was my skin with my tongue / like this / your scent passing from my skin to my mouth, so I’d think I’d devoured you”
On Why Women’s Poetry in Arabic is Where It’s At
“For me, actually, I think we are impacted by male writers who are writing now, and they are writing about broken masculinity, which I don’t like either. So maybe women are free of this, relatively. Maybe they are marginalized, so they have more opportunity to think, to write.”
For National Poetry Day: 10 from New or Forthcoming Collections
Each time I begin to write about love
the other woman reaches out
and pushes my fingers from the keyboard
the lonely woman who lost everything
the wild woman
who looks like me
Rasha Omran: ‘Now Death For Me Is No Longer Abstract’
“The concept of exile, I think, is usually accompanied by a feeling of alienation. I don’t feel alienated in Egypt. I don’t feel that I am a stranger. But had I been in my country in this age, would I have written about my loneliness? I am not sure. I tend to think no. So, perhaps this collection can be included in the poetry of exile.”
Friday Finds: Rasha Omran Poetry Collection Free, Online
Each time I begin to write about love
the other woman reaches out
and pushes my fingers from the keyboard