Literature and Arts from the Center of the World
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
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… Continue reading 20 Years Ago This Month, 9/11 at Souk Ukaz
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… Continue reading Reading Egypt from the Outside In, Youssef Rakha’s “Baraa and Zaman”
On the fall of Kabul to the Taliban, Hadani Ditmars remembers the treasures and the ruins of Afghanistan and Iraq.
TMR’s guest editor Aomar Boum admires the growing movement of political cartooning in North Africa and the Middle East.