Literature and Arts from the Center of the World
Ara Oshagan I am walking along the narrow and labyrinthine Armenian neighborhoods of Bourj Hammoud in Beirut—spaces with names like Nor (new) Marash, Nor Sis, Nor Yozgat. These are the… Continue reading Displaced: From Beirut to Los Angeles to Beirut
Twelve Gates Arts and the Collective for Black Iranians are hosting “Hasteem: We Are Here” from September 3-24, 2021. Maryam Sophia Jahanbin Content warning: enslavement, land and labor acknowledgement.… Continue reading Hasteem, We Are Here: The Collective for Black Iranians
Art historian Sophie Kazan speaks to Sagal Ali about the importance of art-making for the future of Somalia and her founding of the Somali Arts Foundation. Sophie Kazan… Continue reading For Somalia’s Sagal Ali and Her Country’s Future, Art Triumphs Over War
The following is excerpted from Chapter 14 in Ava Homa’s Daughters of Smoke and Fire and appears in TMR by gracious arrangement with the author. Ava Homa When his… Continue reading Flagbearer of a Stateless Nation, from “Daughters of Smoke and Fire”
Agha Shahid Ali Tonight Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar —Laurence Hope Where are you now? Who lies beneath your spell tonight? Whom else from… Continue reading Three Poems by Kashmiri American Bard Agha Shahid Ali
Brahim El Guabli I am Amazigh, Black, and Sahrawi. Amazigh language is my mother tongue. My mother is Black, and my father is Sahrawi. The only picture I own… Continue reading My Amazigh Indigeneity (the Bifurcated Roots of a Native Moroccan)
Kurdish writer Ava Homa on how statelessness, trauma and political exile shaped her novel "Daughters of Smoke and Fire."
Excerpted from the anthology Kurdish Women’s Stories (Pluto Press, 2020), by special arrangement with editor Houzan Mahmoud. The Prison Speakers Played Islamic Verses Kobra Banehi Kobra Banehi, also known… Continue reading The Harrowing Life of Kurdish Freedom Activist Kobra Banehi
Nevine Abraham Growing up in Shoubra, one of the most populated Christian suburbs of Cairo, I met all my Muslim friends at a French Catholic school, which they and… Continue reading The Complexity of Belonging: Reflections of a Female Copt
The Wrong End of the Telescope a novel by Rabih Alameddine Grove Atlantic (Sept 2021) ISBN 9780802157805 Dima Alzayat When in 2018 director Lena Dunham announced she had been hired… Continue reading The Limits of Empathy in Rabih Alameddine’s Refugee Saga
In this excerpt from the Amazigh-Moroccan novel "Cactus Girls" by Karima Ahdad, a fierce small-town girl from the Rif named Sonya remembers what it was like growing up under the spell of heroic women. Like the cactus of the title, Ahdad’s women are survivors in a barren landscape, one filled…
Omar El Akkad, author of American War and What Strange Paradise, looks at 20 years of blowback.
For a brutally honest look at what it’s been like to run a business and raise a family in Cairo these past twenty years, read Diwan’s founder Nadia Wassef’s “Shelf Life” How a labor of love consumes, challenges and fills her life with questions whose answers are often on the…
Nektaria Anastasiadou weaves a rich tale of thwarted love between Sephardic and Rum residents of Istanbul.
Aimée Papazian Art and text by Aimée Papazian; photos by Stephen Ironside “Voyage of Lost Keys,” a permanent art installation recently installed in the Fayetteville Public Library in Arkansas,… Continue reading Voyage of Lost Keys, an Armenian art installation