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 namesakes of towns that hearken back to a distant past, to places and lands from which these communities, my communities…
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. Consistent with their desire to uplift South and West Asian diasporic artistic voices, Twelve Gates Arts (12G), a gallery in…
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 Makhlouf I first came across the name of Sagal Ali and her work to rebuild the cultural sector in Somalia,…
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 grandpa drew a yogurt mustache above Alan’s lips, the boy dissolved into giggles. Picturing himself with real whiskers thrilled Alan,…
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 rapture’s road will you expel tonight? Those “Fabrics of Cashmere—” “to make Me beautiful—” “Trinket”—to gem—“Me to adorn—How tell”—tonight? I…
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 of my maternal grandfather tells me that his roots run deep into sub-Saharan Africa. My category of Moroccan citizen has…
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 as Kasnazani, was born in 1966 in the city of Baneh, in East Kurdistan (Iran). She narrated her story as…
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 I attended for twelve years. We spent recess together, exchanged visits and play dates, and shared teenage secrets. Our friendship…
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 by producers Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams to adapt Marissa Fleming’s nonfiction book, A Hope More Powerful than the Sea:…
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, started with a single key — a key to a house that was burned down during the Armenian genocide. This…