Literature and Arts from the Center of the World
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…
Hadani Ditmars The commemoration of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 unfolds in televisual real time and yet with a strange sense of suspended animation, as if we’re on a slow motion merry go round that we can’t get off. It’s not just that feeling of déjà vu all over again as…
The Slovak-Palestinian writer khulud khamis (sic) of Haifa appreciates the spiralling storytelling of her compeer, Akram Musallam of Ramallah.
Baraa and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy , by Youssef Rakha Palgrave 2020 ISBN 9783030613532 Sherifa Zuhur Baraa and Zaman: Reading Egyptian Modernity in Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy by Youssef Rakha is a surprising book, constructed as a series of separate paragraphs, like prose…