My body recognizes the feel of the air inside tents. It’s well-acquainted with the windy nights and the scorching days and everything in between.

The humidity, relentless in both summer and winter, wraps itself around me like a suffocating shroud. It swells my limbs, making my hands and feet feel heavy and stiff, barely capable of movement. In summer, my face and hands easily get sunburnt; they feel like they are literally on fire, such that I cannot bear the gentle touches of my nieces and nephews. In winter, the biting wind lashes at my hunched back leaving me with searing pain and numb fingers.

Within the confines of tents, I have longed for walls to straighten my back, to shield me from the relentless sun, the biting wind, and the unrelenting rain. -Shaimaa Abulebda

The Tent Is Closing in on Us

By Shaimaa Abulebda

After Mahmoud Darwish

The tent is closing in on us.

Our limbs are squeezed tightly together

in search of warmth in cramped space.

We wish for the unmerciful stones—

knowing they could crumble to rubble

and tear us limb by limb—

to surround us, to straighten our hunched backs.

The nights stretch long and bitter;

the cold wind coming from the sea

gnaws at our bones and lashes at our backs.

We wish for the treacherous ceilings—

knowing they could collapse upon us

and crush our frail skeletons—

to shield us from the dreadful rain.

The mornings are too short

spent on the weight of endless chores—

scrubbing hands raw, standing in the ceaseless queues—

distracted from the unsaid fears that haunt our nights.

Where do we go when the land and sky trap us?

Where to shelter away from houses and tents?

On what road do we stop to unload this misery?

Also by Shaimaa:

A Scene at Rafah’s Beach

‘Resistance and the Palestinian Folk Song’

‘She Stretched Out Her Hand’: A Translator’s Tribute to Mourid Barghouti

By Adil Babikir

October holds a special place in the modern history of Sudan. During this month, sixty years ago, the Sudanese people overthrew the first military dictatorship in what became the Arab world’s first popular uprising. This historic triumph ignited a wave of emotions and inspired a rich body of poetry, some of which was set to music and remains cherished to this day.

The late Sudanese poet Mohammed el-Makki Ibrahim stands out as one of the strongest literary voices that celebrated the October uprising. His “October Songs” resonate with unshakable resolve and boundless optimism, capturing the spirit of that momentous event:

The land is singing your green name, O October

The fields have burst into wheat, promise, and hopes

and the land, its troves flung open, is chanting:

With your name’s blessing, the masses have made it to victory,

the jail walls are down

and the chains are bracelets dangling

from a bride’s wrist! 

Yet, the poet’s dreams of a green future were repeatedly shattered over the decades — under the weight of military dictatorships, partisan rivalries, ideological strife, and, most recently, an all-out war.

Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in conflict, plunging the nation into a crisis of unprecedented scale. This war has already claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced over 8 million people, casting a heavy shadow of uncertainty over Sudan’s future as a nation.

Dr. Eiman Abbas El-Nour’s poetic response to the war oscillates between despair and hope. In the three English-language poems shared below, she confronts the grim realities of conflict while clinging to faint glimmers of resilience and renewal.

In the first poem, “This October is Not Green,” grief is palpable from the title itself — a stark contrast to Mohammed el-Makki Ibrahim’s celebratory poem “October Al-Akhdar (Green October)”.

It is a poignant meditation on loss and transformation. With vivid imagery and searing questions, Dr. El-Nour captures the harrowing disconnection that war imposes — on individuals, their sense of self, and their homeland. The tone is raw and reflective, portraying a world where familiar comforts have become alien.

The second poem, “A Butterfly Dream,” turns inward, exploring the fragility of love and memory amidst isolation. Here, fleeting moments of beauty and connection provide solace, even as the poet acknowledges the solitude and yearning imposed by war. The longing for home and shared humanity shines through, offering a tender yet heartrending counterpoint to desolation.

In “This Land is Ours,” Dr. El-Nour draws on the resolve and pride embodied in the national anthem, as referenced in the title, to transform grief into hope. Rain, a recurring symbol, becomes a metaphor for renewal— soaking the parched land and weary hearts with the promise of new beginnings.

In their swinging between despair and hope, these poems bear witness to the emotional landscape of a nation in turmoil.

(1)

This October is not Green

By Eiman El-Nour

Blessed be this moment of revelation

I can see you clearly through the fog

Courtesy of my new prescription glasses

And my caffeine heart

Sadness is clean and crisp

Its edges will make you bleed

Prudence is to stay in the middle

And follow one thought at a time

Keep all the doors locked

And face the inner sound

You’ve heard it before

Faint, shy, and trying to hide

Is this life a rehearsal for the eventual loneliness?

Is this war a drill

For letting go?

The poet peacefully

disappeared

Into the light

The busy streets of exile

Are filled with our scents and loud music

The colour of Home is red and slowly vanishing

And we are no longer who

we used to be

(2)

A Butterfly Dream

By Eiman El-Nour

How long can love last ?

How strong can a fatigued heart beat?

The love that feeds on the past

The heart that exists on memories

I try to paint a butterfly

Or write a joyful verse

Or make baobab juice

To have with my friends

I take a deep sigh

And close my eyes

I know I am all alone

We calm our souls

With visions of home

Sing silent songs

Share wordless talks

And pray for the dream to last

Till tomorrow

(3)

This Land is Ours 

By Eiman El-Nour

I watch your face

I know that you can see

Even with closed eyes

I feel your thoughts

In your rhythmic breathing

I pray for a miracle

Are you faking this tragic state?

To punish your prodigal sons?

To shake up your sleeping daughters?

Have we failed you this much!

What good can sorrow bring?

The promise of water

Will not quench your thirst

Our trickling tears

Will not moisten your drying veins

I am the bearer of good tidings

My precious queen

We have prayed for rain

We held hands

And hearts

And whispered and cried

Then it came..

The sweet taste of heavenly nectar

We were drenched

Soaked and blessed

God is Great..

And this is only the beginning!

Eiman El-Nour is Associate Professor in English Literature at Neelain University and Ahfad University. She is also Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge. She specializes in teaching African Literature and her main research themes include African women’s writing, Sudanese literature and Sudanese orality.

Adil Babikir is a Sudanese translator based in the UAE and is the author of The Beauty Hunters: Sudanese Bedouin Poetry, Evolution and Impact. His translations include The Jungo: Stakes of the Earth, a novel by Abdel Aziz Baraka Sakin; Mansi: a Rare Man in his Own Way, by Tayeb Salih (winner of Sheikh Hamad Translation Award, 2020); The Messiah of Darfur, also by Sakin; and Seven Strangers in Town, by Ahmad al-Malik.

When the Genocide is Over

By Basman Eldirawi

When the genocide is over

I’ll walk on tiptoe

Searching for my friends’ graves

Thinking of words to write for Eman, Ouda, Essa

Maybe an apology, but not on behalf of the world

When the genocide is over

I’ll meet my friends

We’ll cry our postponed tears, that Death’s hand rushed away from us

And the survival instincts we cursed before sleeping

Then we’ll sing

When the genocide is over

I’ll go home

I’ll count the neighbors’ children

Foolishly hoping the number doesn’t change, that my memory doesn’t fail me

I’ll fall asleep beside what’s left of a window

………………….and dream of their irritating noise

-Tr. M Lynx Qualey

عندما تنتهي الإبادة

بسمان الديراوي

عندما تنتهي الإبادة

سأمشي على أطراف أصابعي

أبحث عن قبور أصدقائي

أفكر في كلمات اكتبها لإيمان، عودة، عيسى

ربما اعتذار لكن ليس نيابة عن العالم

عندما تنتهي الإبادة

سأقابل الأصدقاء

نبكي بكائنا المؤجل بيد الموت المتعجل بالركض

وغرائز النجاة التي نلعنها قبل النوم

ثم نغني

عندما تنتهي الإبادة

سأعود للبيت

أعد أطفال الجيران

أتمنى بسخافة العارف ألا يتغير العدد أو تخوني الذاكرة

أغفو بجوار بقايا نافذة وأحلم بصخبهم المزعج

Image credit: Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages.

Basman Eldirawi (also published as Basman Derawi) is a physiotherapist and a graduate of Al-Azhar University in Gaza in 2010. Inspired by an interest in music, movies, and people with special needs, he contributes dozens of stories to the online platform We Are Not Numbers.

Grief, a Wolf,

December 31, 2024, by Olivia Elias,

 translated from French by Jérémy Victor Robert

*

in these barbaric times….I live like a sick

person forced to save her energies consumed

by grief….a grief too big to fit into

a “normal” life….in a land where

Death doesn’t triumph on all screens

by lighting up giant phosphoric fireworks & piling up

corpses….during this period

of the year when tidy & nicely dressed kids are

unwrapping gifts adorned with ribbons

yesterday….grief came in like a wolf….leaving me

helpless….not knowing

what to do….how

a wolf that doesn’t feed only on bodies scattered

all over this otherworldly landscape

where nothing….but fire ice & nothingness….reign

*

fire….fed day & night by pyromaniacs….intoxicated

with destruction….blazing fire

that ignites heaven & earth….sparing nothing & no one

melting tents their occupants inside

transforming into living torches the wounded on a drip

with its devouring flames waging war

on newborns & children….whose promise of life has

no value & bodies are fungible

Human animals….who deserve their fate….they say

ice & nothingness….the white silence of the Mighty

over the new Khans’ crimes

the whiteness of their silence over our pain

their outraged protests reserved for others

the galactic indifference into which our cries fall

the cold that freezes the children shivering

in the tent

*

what to do….how

when the descendants of those

decimated on Europe’s ground choose

the executioner’s path

thinking they can save themselves by holding

our heads under water

an illusory dream that consumes their souls

& leads them to their loss

for blind force that doesn’t know any limit

is not force….but barbarism

& over the centuries will be told

the unconceivable….the unspeakable

the sacrifice taking place before everyone’s

eyes in this Ghetto of the Mediterranean

sealed on all sides

A poet from the Palestinian diaspora, born in Haifa in 1944, Olivia Elias writes in French. Until the age of 16, she lived in Lebanon, where her family took refuge in 1948, then in Montreal, where she studied and taught economics, before settling in France. Olivia Elias, only decided to publish in 2015 and her fourth collection Ce Mont qui regarde la mer (This Mount Overlooking the Sea) will be released in May 2025, in France. In 2022, she made her English debut with Chaos, Crossing, a bilingual and expanded version of Chaos, Traversée, followed a year later by the chapbook Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry, editor of both). Her poetry, translated into several languages, appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, in France and abroad. Marked by uprootedness and exile, it express a deep sense of solidarity with those banished and excluded from a dignified life. One of World Literature Today’s notable translations of 2022, Chaos, Crossing was finalist of the 2024 Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation.

Jérémy Victor Robert is a translator between English and French who works and lives in his native Réunion Island. He published French translations of Sarah Riggs’ Murmurations (APIC, 2021, with Marie Borel), Donna Stonecipher’s Model City (joca seria, 2020), and Etel Adnan’s Sea & Fog (L’Attente, 2015). He recently translated Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan, excerpts of which were posted online by Revue Catastrophes. Together with Sarah Riggs, he translated Olivia Elias’ Your Name, Palestine (World Poetry Books, 2023).

Goodbye, War…

By Doha Kahlout

I will return without you, war—

I will cut my nails stained by the black of fire and by bitter alienation, and I will let down my hair, matted with seasalt, abandoning all the clothes suffused with the disappointments of the road, the wakeups on mornings of displacement, the evenings made sleepless by fear, and

in my bag, I will carry all my pending calls, placing them in the embrace of an answer, and I will pour out (washing each of my features one last time) all my sadness and anger, the words I forced myself to choke down, and, because of the taste of sorrow that’s seeped into my bones, I will boil all the cooking pots, and I will wash myself with the stubborn water of the north

I will return with nothing, so that the eyes of war will cease chasing me— I will cut (with all my unwarranted patience) the synonyms of longing from my tongue, and I will toss them to a wave that will not return— I will extinguish the flame of my tears on the shoulders of reunions with Azhar, Amal, Khaled, Nour, Baraa, Rahaf, and Faraj—

I will race under Gaza’s feet so that it might forgive me the sin of abandonment and the selfishness of survival, and, in this confrontation, I will know loss and helplessness and collapse, and, because I know how to cross the ocean, I will cross it, and every Gazan who bears in his chest the oppression of the prophets (yet with no miracle to save him) will cross it— for a year and many months, the sea swallowed our share of life and no staff could see our hand waving from behind the screens.

My beloved Gaza, we will return with nothing, and from you we will possess you, and we’ll know, and we’ll love, and we’ll hate, and we’ll defeat the numbers and return as human beings, the way you always loved us and wished us to be.

Tr. ArabLit

وداعاً أيتها الحرب..

سأعود دونكِ أيتها الحرب، سأقصُّ أظافري الملطخةَ بسوادِ النار والاغترابِ المُر، وأُطلقُ شعري المُجدّلَ بملحِ البحر، وأتركُ كلَّ ملابسي التي جرّت خيباتِ الطريقِ كلِّها واستيقظَتْ صباحَ النزوح ولم تنمْ مغربها خوفاً ، في الحقيبةِ سأحملُ كلَ نداءاتي العالقةَ وأضعُها في حِضنِ الإجابة، سأسكبُ -في آخرِ مرةٍ أغسلُ فيها ملامحي- كلَّ حزني وغضبي والكلماتِ التي ابتلعتُها قهراً، ولأن طعمَ الأسى انسلّ في العظامِ سأغلى كل أواني الطبخ، وأغسلني بماء الشمال العنيد. 

سأعودُ دون شيء فلا حاجةَ لي بعيونٍ للحربِ تلاحقني، وسأقطعُ -بكل صبري غير المبرر- مرادفاتِ الشوق من لساني، وأرميها لموجةٍ لن تعود، وسأطفئُ لهيبَ الدمعِ على كتفِ لقاء أزهار وأمل وخالد ونور وبراء ورهف وفرج، سأندفعُ تحتَ أقدامِ غزة لتغفرَ لي خطيئةَ التركِ وأنانيةَ النجاة، وفي المواجهةِ سأعرفُ الخسارةَ والسقوطَ والعجزَ، ولأنني أعرفُ كيف أعبُر المحيط، سأعبرَه، ويعبرَه كلُّ غزيّ حملَ في صدرِه قهرَ الأنبياء دونَ معجزةٍ ينجو بها، عاماً وأشهر والبحرُ يبتلعُ حظَّنا من الحياةِ ولا عصا تبصرُ يدَنا الملوِّحةَ خلفَ الشاشات. حبيبتي غزة سنعودُ دون شيء ومنكِ سنمتلكُ، ونعرفُ،ونحبُ، ونكرهُ، سنهزِمُ الرقمَ ونعودُ إنساناً كما أحببتنا دوماً وفضّلتنا.

Doha Kahlout is a poet and teacher from Gaza. Her first collection of poems, Ashbah (“Similarities”), was published in 2018. She was selected for a residency at Reid Hall in Paris as part of the Displaced Artists Initiative, co-sponsored by the Columbia Global Center and the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, but has not been able to take up her place since the Israeli invasion of Rafah and the closure of its border crossing in May 2024. Read more of her work in translation by Yasmine Seale at The Yale Review; translated by Katharine Halls, in Vittles magazine; or by Wiam El-Tamami as part of the And Still We Write collection.

Find Doha on Instagram @doha_kahlout and donate to Doha’s GoFundMe.

Photo: Marcin Monko, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Nour Balousha’s “Feet Unable to Arrive” appears in the new anthology from Trace Press, Arabic, between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi & Yasmine Haj, and is reprinted here with permission.

ArabLit’s Nashwa Nasreldin, who translated this poem for the collection, says of Balousha’s poem:

When I first came across this stunning poem by Nour Balousha, it immediately gripped me. Though it opens with a familiar image of grief (weeping), it quickly moves into the abstract, pulling our feet toward — not even a place — but ‘something I don’t know.’ From then, the mesmerizing repetition of a powerful phrase of longing “I want” becomes both hypnotic and strangely energizing as the listing pulls us upwards into an almost exultant state of hope, before bringing crashing back down into a ‘well of corpses / and orphans.’ There is skillful work at play here, in the most subtle, heartbreaking hands of this poet.

Feet Unable to Arrive

By Nour Balousha

Translated by Nashwa Nasreldin

I want two eyes that can withstand all the weeping
and feet that can arrive at something I don’t know
because there is a thing we don’t know; it is there we wish to return
like the prairie that returns to its natural state
and shrieks
like the smiles that return to their natural state
and hide
like the roads that return to their natural state
and ruminate over the footsteps of passersby

I want something to return to
and a backdoor to escape
I want to embrace everything I lost in one fell swoop
I want a well crammed with hands and limbs
I want a rod to lean on
and a road to walk on
and a tear I can drop into all the warm harbours and stories
so it may dissolve
so the salt dissolved within it
can mutate into something new
even if it morphs into a doll
I’ll hold it dear

I want a beach
to love and which will love me
and love us
I want a light
that does not radiate
nor enters any place
I want it to be real
I want it to build
to restore something
to move towards us

I want one child to come back to life
even if he came back blurred
and weeping
I want him to come
I want to run
towards something
not a forest
not an ocean
not a story
but an idea
a single idea about safety
that disappeared in a well of corpses
and orphans

The Arabic of the poem is available in the bilingual collection, Arabic, between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi & Yasmine Haj.

Nour Balousha is a Palestinian poet, writer, and journalist based in Brussels. She is a member of the Palestine Writers Union, and contributes her expertise to numerous newspapers in the region. She is currently completing her MA thesis in Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Stockholm University.

Nashwa Nasreldin is a poet, writer, editor, and translator of Arabic literature. She has translated Shatila Stories, a collaborative novel by nine refugee writers (Peirene, 2018), and co-translated Samar Yazbek’s memoir, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria (Rider, 2015). Nashwa holds an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry, translations, articles, and reviews have been published in the UK and internationally. She has worked with ArabLit Quarterly and is Editor at the Poetry Translation Centre, UK.

Nour Balousha’s “Feet Unable to Arrive” is reprinted from Arabic, between Love and War, edited by Norah Alkharashi & Yasmine Haj, courtesy of Trace Press. Copyright 2024.”

Translating the Unseen: Gaza’s Sky and Anne Carson’s Vision

By Alaa Alqaisi

It began with an email from Dr. James Heaney, a professor of English and Irish studies at Carlow University, requesting my help translating an Arabic text for his students to accompany their study of Wrong Norma, a 2024 work by Anne Carson. Carson—a poet of immense imaginative range, whose words ripple with mythic and philosophical undercurrents— was to be the cornerstone of the lesson. Yet, this text in Arabic, seemingly peripheral, emerged quietly within Carson’s reflections—written by Yemeni engineer and coauthor Faisal bin Ali Jaber—not as a mere footnote, but as a bridge, interrupting the abstract with something raw, something immediate, a bridge between Carson’s intellectual inquiry and the lived realities of war. The Arabic text was a meditation on war and its machinery, the faceless annihilation of modern violence. As I translated it into English, it became clear that this was no simple academic exercise. It was a confrontation with my own reality, as a translator living in Gaza, bearing witness to the truths the text articulated with almost unbearable precision.

The Arabic text, profoundly introspective, described a sky which underwent alchemical change, such that it no longer belonged to the realm of celestial beauty; instead, it had become mechanized and deathly—a conveyor belt for drones, bombs, and the faceless violence of modern warfare. These skies, once metaphors for freedom, had become heavy with the weight of human cruelty. As I read the text, I didn’t have to imagine its meaning. This sky was my own; the sky I live under in Gaza. Translating it was an act of reckoning with my reality. What does it mean to translate words about war when war shapes your daily life? As I translated, Carson’s voice—though absent from the Arabic original—seemed to loom over the text. Her ability to fragment and reassemble history, mythology, and emotion struck deeply here. The Arabic seemed to have been answering Carson’s implicit question: What does the facelessness of war do to the soul?

But herein lies the irony: Carson did not write this. The text was born in Arabic, in the rhythm and cadence of a vernacular that’s steeped in the life experience of human suffering. And yet, its journey to my hands felt circuitous and loaded. An Irishman, whose nation bears its own scars of colonial violence, asks a Palestinian translator in Gaza to translate an Arabic meditation into English, a language shaped as much by conquest as by poetry. This act of translation, then, was not merely a linguistic task; it was a negotiation of histories, identities, and traumas, all colliding on the page.

Wrong Norma opens with Carson’s “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” co-written with Robert Currie and Faisal bin Ali Jaber, an engineer from Yemen whose nephew and brother-in-law were killed in a US drone strike in 2012. Although composed a decade earlier, it echoed the war in Gaza that began in 2023. In “Lecture on the History of Skywriting,” Carson interrogates the way humans have always tried to imprint their presence onto the sky, from early myths to the mechanics of skywriting. Gaza has always been a city of confinement, a narrow strip of land densely packed with nearly two million people, hemmed in by borders and the sea. There is no expansive nature to soften its hardness, no force or open fields to offer solace. Only the sea stretches out before us, endless and indifferent, and above it, the vast sky. I cannot count how many times I have stared at the sky, particularly while standing before the sea, drawn to the invisible line where they meet. I was always curious about that line, about what lay beyond it, about the world that existed past the horizon. The sky, in those moments, seemed boundless, a canvas for possibility. But now Gaza’s sky is no longer a canvas for myths or dreams. It is weaponized, heavy with drones and death. Carson asks what it meant to write on the sky; in my context, the question becomes, What does it mean to live beneath a sky turned into a weapon? Translating this text into English, to sit alongside Carson’s work, felt like threading two different but deeply intertwined realities.

Anne Carson’s works often explore fragmentation in terms of language, time, and humanity. Her poetry lingers in places where meaning breaks down, leaving silence to take over. This Arabic text felt as if it were a response to her silences, refusing to let the faceless go unnamed; it resisted erasure and insisted on bearing witness. But translating it into English, the language that leans toward abstraction, was a delicate task. Arabic carries its weight differently; it’s rooted in rhythm, layered in meaning, and resistant to facelessness. English, with its grammatical economy, can smooth over the jagged edges of Arabic’s emotional density. How does one render the philosophical weight of this meditation on war as a continuum, a thread that binds human history together in blood and ash? These were not linguistic questions; they were moral ones. So I had the responsibility to ensure that the rawness of the original survived the journey into Carson’s intellectual universe.

As I worked, I could not stop thinking about the students who would read this text alongside Carson’s work. Would they see the parallels between Carson’s fragmented modernity and the Arab writer’s relentless witness to war? Would they notice the connections between an Irish professor, a Palestinian translator, and the shared human experience of violent conflict? Would they see Gaza in the text? I imagined their discussions, their interpretations, and I wondered if they could feel the weight of these words. Or would distance—geographical, linguistic, emotional—render the text too abstract, too distant from their lives?

Anne Carson once wrote, “words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.” As I worked on this translation, her observation became uncomfortably real. The words didn’t sit passively on the page; they pushed back. They demanded to be carried, to be heard, to move between English and Arabic, between Yemen and Gaza and Carlow. They forced themselves into spaces that might prefer silence, bouncing across borders and languages, pressing their weight into every corner of understanding. Yet, as they moved, I couldn’t help but wonder: what did they truly accomplish? Did they change anything, or did they simply echo the same unbearable truths in a new form?

When the translation was done, I sat quietly for a long time. I was distracted by how strange it was. The text about faceless war had brought so many faces into view: the writer’s, the professor’s, the students’, my own. And as I sat, I realized I wasn’t just a translator in this process. I was a witness, carrying the weight of a story that felt both deeply personal and painfully universal. The words had crossed borders, traversed languages, but I was left questioning their impact. Does translating the realities of war make them more bearable, or does it simply reshape them into something easier to consume from safer places? In rendering this sky into English, into a language of distance and abstraction, did I preserve its unbearable weight—or did I risk reducing it, smoothing its jagged edges for those who will never be beneath its destruction?

I don’t have the answers. What I do know is this: the sky remains—vast, faceless and unforgiving. It looms above, a silent witness and an unrelenting weapon, indifferent to our attempts to capture its meaning. It watches us as we write, translate, and struggle to articulate the weight of what it has become, and so I am left with one unshakeable question: When language breaks beneath the enormity of war, how do we find the words—or the strength— to carry on?

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.

A Story

By Sargon Boulus

Translated by Miles Cayman

Suddenly by chance and without warning

The table had

Vanished, the guests dispersed

And with the rain poured down onto the roof

Anonymous bullets

Carrying out vengeance’s promises to the letter

Or announcing the beginning of a lively rural wedding

And I found myself

In the center of a city no one knew me in

Telling the strangers at intersections

A story they didn’t believe a word of

Some of them stared back with the eyes of wolves

Some glanced at my ragged shoes

And some didn’t see me

As if I’d stripped myself naked past the bones

Or leaked a grave secret, inciting a terror

Then snow began to fall on the world

Miles Cayman studies Arabic at the University of Chicago. You can read his poetry and translations in Subnivean, GASHER, and The Paris Review, among other publications.

Sargon Boulus (1944–2007) was an Iraqi poet and prolific translator of world poetry into Arabic. He wrote six original collections including Arrival In The City of Where (1985).

A Body of Nakedness

By Ramzi Salem

Translated by the author

On this night, my dear,
.we follow the trail of torn stars,
.with no fear of lightning,
.no fear that the sky will fall upon us.
.We patch up our sorrows with church candles,
.thread them into a shawl of patience,
.and sip our features with a glass of yesterday’s wine,
.then bury them in the wet clay,
.hoping one day they’ll sprout a house of memory.

On this night, my dear,
.our hearts spill out like weary shells,
.flowing with seafoam.
.Our blood mixes with the salt of tears,
.and we beget another child,
.to be a stone in the slingshot of the wind,
.and a narcissus that follows the footsteps of the sun,
.far from the surrealism of a coffin.

On this night, my dear,
.we clothe ourselves in each other.
.You become my soft coat—
.gentle and comforting, like my mother’s prayers,
.wrapped around me to keep me from melting,
.until I’m a mummy in the tent’s pyramid,
.to be resurrected when the war ends
.or to witness the panic of the plain.
.And I become your wide, warm bed—
.cozy, embroidered with jasmine,
.big enough for all your exhausted thoughts,
.where you can lay your body down and sleep,
.without fearing the sea’s scorpions, or its vengeance.

On this night, my dear,
.the cold gnaws our bones like a ravenous dog
.that has run out of corpses to devour.
.Black waves engulf us as a light snack,
.filling the gaps between their teeth.
.On this night, my dear,
.gulls cut off heads and feast on them,
.spiders abandon their webs,
.and we seek shelter in their threads.
.On this night, my dear,
.the persecuted distances choke,
.the air kills itself amid fields of wheat,
.and gunpowder might become a mirror
.where we see fate more clearly.

On this night, my dear,
.our habits shatter before our eyes,
.and we won’t be able to retrieve them.
.We won’t ask God for rain,
.or for night to fall with its songs.
.We won’t light scented candles
.and dance impatiently around them.
.Instead, these candles will become a homeland,
.painting our silhouettes on the tent’s walls,
.multiplying us in warmth and number.
.We won’t fill our cups with colorful drinks;
.they’ll become caves
.where cockroaches take shelter,
.fleeing the stampede of bare feet.

On this night, my dear,
.everything will hurt—
.except one thing:
.Death,
.and though it will not change its habits
.nor pity a body stripped bare,
.dripping with mud in a fabric nest,
.and though it will not lose its way in the vast maze
.where tents are lined up like rows of shrouds,
.on this night, my dear,
.death will come—
.swift, light, barefoot, intoxicated, dreaming.
.We won’t sense it,
.we won’t hear it,
.we won’t bleed until our veins turn white,
.we won’t scream until our voices are hanged.
.We will die instantly,
.without feeling anything.
.Isn’t that what you always asked for, my dear?

On this night, my dear,
.nothing is worth mentioning.
.It’s just another night
.where we die, as usual,
.unnoticed,
.as usual.

جسد من عراء

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

نقتفي أثر النجوم الممزقة

دون خوفٍ من البرق

ودون أن تقع السماء علينا

نرتق أحزاننا بشمع الكنائس

نحيكُ بها وشاحًا من الصبر

ونرتشف ملامحنا بكأس من نبيذ الأمس

ثم ندفنها في الطين المبلل

عله يُنبت يومًا بيتًا من الذكرى

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

تندلقُ قلوبنا كأصداف متعبة

تجري مع زبد البحر

تختلط دماؤنا بملح المدامع

وننجب طفلاً آخرًا

ليكون حجرًا في مقلاع الريح

ونرجسًا يتعقب خطى الشمس

بعيدًا عن سريالية النعش

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزيتي

يلبس كلانا الآخر

تكونين لي معطفًا رقيقًا

ناعمًا، مطمئِنًا كدعاء أمي

يلتف حولي ليحفظني من الذوبان

فأصير مومياء في هرم الخيمة

لأُبعث عندما تنتهي الحرب

أو لأكون شاهدًا على جزع السهل

وأكون لك فراشًا دافئًا، كبيرًا

مريحًا، مطرزًا بالياسمين

يتسع لكل هواجسك المُنهكة

تريحين جسدك وتنامين فوقه

دون خوف من عقارب البحر وعقابه

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

يعض البرد عظامنا ككلبٍ جائع

نفذت الجثث من حوله

وتبتلعنا الأمواج السوداء

كوجبة خفيفة تسد فراغات أنيابها

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

تقطع النوارس الرؤوس وتأكلها

وتهجر العناكب أوكارها

ونتخذ من خيوطها ملجئًا لنا

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

تختنق المسافات المضطهدة

وينتحر الهواء بين طوابير القمح

ولربما يصبح البارود مرآة

نرى فيها القدر بوضوح أكبر

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

تتكسر عادتنا أمام أعيننا

ولن نستطيع اللحاق بها

لن نسأل الله أن تمطر

ولا أن يهبط الليل بالأغاني

لن نشعل الشموع المعطرة

ونتلهف للرقص حولها

ستكون الشموع وطنًا

يرسم ظلالنا على جوانب الخيمة

ليزيدنا عددًا ودفئا

لن نملأ الكؤوس بالشراب الملون

بل ستكون كهوفًا

تلجأ إليها الصراصير

هربًا من غزارة الأقدام الحافية

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

كل شيء سيكون مؤلمًا

باستثناء شيء واحد

وهو الموت

وعلى الرغم من أنه لن يغير عاداته

ولن يشفق على جسدٍ من عراء

يتقطر طينًا في عُشٍ من قماش

ولن يضل طريقه في متاهة شاسعة

تبدو فيها الخيام كأنها أكفان متراصة

ففي هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

سيأتي الموت خاطفًا، خفيفًا

حافيًا، حالمًا، منتشيًا

لن نشعر به، ولن نسمع له حسًا

لن نُجرح، ولن نُخدش

لن ينتحر السقف فوق رؤوسنا

ولن تخنقنا الجدران الإسمنتية

لن ننزف حتى تبيض عروقنا

ولن نصرخ حتى يُعدم صوتنا

سنموت فورًا

دون أن نشعر بأي شيء

أليس هذا ما كنتِ تطلبينه دومًا يا عزيزتي؟

في هذه الليلة يا عزيزتي

لا شيء يستحق الذكر

فهي مجرد ليلة أخرى

نموت فيها كعادتنا

ولا يشعر أحد بنا

كعادتهم

Ramzi Salem is a Palestinian poet who lives in Belgium. He has published many poems addressing various topics, including Palestine, exile, homesickness, and recurring wars. He is currently working on his first collection, which primarily highlights the disastrous effects of the devastating war that erupted in the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023. This collection deeply explores the pain of loss, suffering, hunger, and cold, and expresses his feelings as an expatriate—his constant anxiety and fear, along with longing and homesickness. It also reflects on the world’s failure and the loss of humanity.

This poem comes from the collection  ذات حافية، نصوص عارية انسانياً (Barefoot Soul: Narratives Stripped of Humanity).

Dream-Drenched Theft

By Anas al-Ghouri

Translated by Victoria Issa

When I was a child, my parents urged me to pray at the mosque,

perhaps to pack my balance with good deeds,

perhaps for reasons then unknown to me.

Wearing threadbare rags and plastic shoes,

I carried my small body through the alleys of the unemployed,

past our neighborhood mosque.

I walked briskly, my steps drawn to another mosque,

the grand one, bedecked with splendor and beauty.

I sat by the shoe racks, ashamed by the contrast

in our appearances,

my eyes wide, marveling at the sight.

Row upon row upon row of shoes:

I dreamed of wearing them—

a pair for playing, another for school—

instead of the plastic ones that tore at my feet.

I filled the pockets of my imagination with those dreams,

forgetting the balance of good deeds that busied the pious crowds.

The call to prayer startled me,

waking me from my reverie.

The imam’s sermon had ended, while I

hadn’t heard a word.

With my pockets weighed down by wishes,

I slipped into the last row of worshipers, mimicking their prayers.

When the prayer ended,

I emptied the wish-filled pockets and raced to the shoe racks.

I grabbed my old shoes—

and snatched another pair.

They were beautiful—white with blue stripes—

and I held them tightly, studying their size, their perfection, before

I fled with my treasure,

the shoes granting me wings.

Once I was sure no one had followed me,

I stopped.

I slipped off my plastic shoes, tucked them under my arm,

and slid into my prize:

soft, comfortable, and light—

a perfect fit.

I jumped.

I danced.

I kicked an imaginary ball.

I ran home, weightless, swift as the wind.

Before I entered, I slipped off the shoes,

which tore off a shred of my little heart!

I hid the shoes beneath my shirt,

tucked under the rope that served as my belt.

I checked—no sign of them showed beneath my baggy clothes.

Inside the house, no one noticed.

I darted to the roof and

tucked the shoes behind the water tank,

hoping to return later

to reclaim a childhood suspended in time.

Anas al-Ghouri is a Syrian poet and writer, born in 1985. He migrated to Jordan during the Syrian civil war, where he worked as a bookseller. He currently resides in Norway. His published works include: The Cawing of Crows in My Throat (poetry collection, Honna/Elles Publishing, Egypt, 2024), Barefoot Soul: Narratives Stripped of Humanity (poetry collection, Dar Fadaat, Jordan, 2022), and They Stole You from You (novel, Dar al-Ketab, Jordan, 2021). His forthcoming novel, Shattered Margins, is eagerly anticipated.

Victoria Issa is a Jordanian writer and translator who works between Arabic and English, translating a wide range of genres. She is particularly passionate about children’s literature, poetry, and narratives on migration and women. Victoria is an alumna of the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorships (2023/24) and the 2024 summer school at the British Centre for Literary Translation.

Photo by Hada Litim.

Dialogue

By Mostafa Ibrahim

Translated by Abdelrahman ElGendy

(1)

The world whispered

to the boy in class:

“Either you trace

my lessons,

or live them. Forget

the blackboard.”

The photographer

told the man

with the camera:

“Either capture

the story,

or live it.

The frame is richer

than the picture.”

World, I write for the legions

to come. I snapshot the story

for someone

else.

(2)

The boy told his comrades

in the prison cell: “Kiss

the gun, embrace it, sleep.

Shame clings

to the living,

glory, to the dead.”

(3)

He spoke, then set

down his glass.

Absence is absence, but a friend’s

memory lingers. Today,

I’m here with you. Tomorrow,

I won’t be. The world’s always

a step ahead. I caught

myself laughing two days

ago, while you, my friend,

haven’t made it

one year under

the dirt. I dreamed

of the clock in the parlor,

its hands chipping

at you. I sifted

through pictures to revive

your face, but even your clothes

forgot your scent. I can’ t

tell if I fear forgetting

you, or if I fear tomorrow

I will be, too,

forgotten.

ديالوج

(١)
-قالت الدنيا للولد ف الفصل
يا تعيش بتكتب ورايا
ف الحصة يا تعيشها
إنسي إن فيه في الفصل سبورة
– قال المصور للي جاب الكاميرا
يا تعيش بتاخد صور للقصة
يا تعيشها
الكادر دايماً أغلي م الصورة
يا دنيا أنا بكتب للجاي بَعْديا
وانا جاي بعدي ألوف
وإن كنت بَاخُد صور للقصة مش ليّا
ف انا نفسي غيري يشوف

(٢)
قال الولد لرِفاقته ف المعتقل
بوسوا المسدس واحضنوه وناموا
العار لمن داموا
والمجد للّى إتقتل

(٣)
قال الكلام ده ثم حَط الكاس
“الغياب هو الغياب”
والذكرى ف قلوب الصحاب.. أبقى
أبقى النهارده معاكم بُكرة مش هَبقى
والدنيا سابقة بخطوة كل الناس
حتى أنا
قفشت نفسي من يومين بَضْحك
وانتا ما كمّلتش يا صاحبى ف التراب.. أول سَنة
وحِلمت بعديها بساعة الصالون
وبإن عقاربها أبتدت تاكلك
وإنى براجع م الصور شكلك
حتى هدومك نِسيت الريحة
ما اعرفش خايف أصدق.. إن أنا نسيتك
ولَّا إنى بُكرة مسيرى هتنسى.. زَيَّك؟

Mostafa Ibrahim is one of Egypt’s most prominent contemporary poets. Hailed by the late Ahmed Fouad Negm as his “heir to the throne of poetry,” Ibrahim is renowned for his groundbreaking colloquial Arabic poetry collections: Western Union: Haram Branch, Manifesto, and Al-Zaman. The winner of the Ahmed Fouad Negm Colloquial Poetry Award, English translations of Ibrahim’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Literary Hub, and ArabLit.

Abdelrahman ElGendy is an Egyptian writer and translator from Cairo. He is the author of Huna, a memoir exploring the politics of dissent and erasure through the lens of his six-year political incarceration in Egypt, forthcoming from Hogarth, Penguin Random House. ElGendy’s work appears in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Nation, Guernica, Mizna and elsewhere. His poetry and prose translations from Arabic appear or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Literary Hub, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. His essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays, Best of the Net, and Best Literary Translations. The winner of the 2024 Samir Kassir Press Freedom Award, ElGendy is a 2024-25 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University.

Translated and introduced by Fatima Elbadri

Acclaimed Sudanese poet Mohamed N.M. Ali dedicates his latest collection, “نداء السكون” (The Call of Stillness), to “all of Sudan, the people, its land, and to the souls of the martyrs and the lovers.”

The Call of Stillness is drenched in the tides of longing, grief, and love. In this collection, yearning is visceral and refuge lies in the spaces between phrases. Mohamed N.M. Ali’s words are that of a chanting mystic, a lover searching for life’s meaning, and of the Sudanese heart carrying deep sorrow at the burning of its nation. A burning that erupted on April 15, 2023 and continues, wretched and cruel in its thievery of Sudan’s people and lifeblood.

In “The Bewildered Vision”, the poet asks, “what benefit are [my] words for the country?” The answer lies in the solace that comes only with bestowing words upon communal pain. Just as there is lyric to song, so there must be words to describe the deepest of sorrows, in order to heal the wounds of both self and nation.

The Bewildered Vision

By Mohamed N.M. Ali

Translated by by Fatima Elbadri

I know that I am tired,

and that my country is no longer my country.

It showcases me at the auction,

for I am a poet and nothing else.

And what benefit are words for the country?

If I die, they will say about me: “he and he”

and a rare photograph of me will be released.

And, after a short while,

I will be forgotten and erased from the page of memory.

But, perhaps by chance, one day,

my name will pass through a fleeting seminar,

and they will say about me that I

was a weaver of language,

that I was a friend of the bewildered vision.

They will say that they do not desire,

nor illustrate,

in the way that they dream.

الرؤى الحائرة

أعرف أني تعبت

وأن بلادي ليست بلادي

تعرضني فى المزاد

.فأنا شاعر ليس إلا

.فماذا تفيد الحروف البلاد

إذا مت سوف يقال بأني وأني

.وتنشر لي صورة نادرة

وبعد قليل من الوقت

أنسى.. وأشطب من صفحة الذاكرة…

أو ربما صدفة ذات يوم

سيعبر إسمي في ندوة عابرة

ويقولون عني أني

…كنت أسير اللغات

وكنت صديق الرؤى الحائرة

يقولون ما يشتهون

.وما يرسمون

كما يحلمون

Wings

Leaving it, toward it

Escaping from it, unto it

The sorrow of night was in full bosom

And my hand, broken

The heart, blind

And I search for myself

In the wings of the soul

In the doubts of certainty

In the tremors of wildfires

In the evening of oblivion, the hungry one at the city market

Behind a garment hung by the wind

In the midst of rainfall

Between two sorrows

From wilderness and the dominion of stone

And the explosion of time in the fever of place

جنوح

خارج منها إليها

هارب عنها عليها

كان حزن الليل ممتليء النهود

ويدي مكسورة القلب ضريرة

وأنا أبحث عني

فى جنوح الروح

فى شك اليقين

فى ارتعاشات الحرائق

فى مساء الغفلة الجائع فى سوق المدينة

خلف ثوب علقته الريح

فى صدر المطر

بين حزنين

من التيه وسلطان الحجر

وانفجار الوقت فى حمى المكان

Mohamed N.M. Ali is a Sudanese poet and journalist from Argo, Al-Shamaliya. He holds a degree in Philosophical Studies from Cairo University-Khartoum Branch Faculty of Arts. He has published several collections of poetry and was awarded The Tayeb Salih International Award for his poetry collection Songs of the Questions. His work as a journalist and literary correspondent has spanned decades, and includes working for several Sudanese newspapers, as well as Aljazeera Net and Qatar’s Alwatan. He is currently displaced in Egypt.

Fatima Elbadri is a Sudanese-American writer whose work includes themes of culture and communal experience. She holds a degree in English Literature from the University of Iowa. She was selected as first runner up for the 2023 Maureen Egen Writer’s Exchange Award in poetry. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Rowayat, The Passionfruit Review, Kalahari Review, African Writer, The Marbled Sigh, and elsewhere.

Do You Hear Me? What Now?

By Ibrahim Nasrallah

Translated by susan abulhawa

What now?

We tell you now, as we told you seventy-seven years ago: What now?

You slaughtered us with a bloodlust no murderer has matched
but we did not die.
So what now?

You invaded our cities and villages, our wheatfields and olive groves,
our green plains and towering mountains.
You splattered our faces with the blood of our children at every sunrise.
What now?

You made up fifty thousand new names for all of our cities and villages,
and all of our rivers, brooks, and springs,
and the valleys nestled between two mountains, between two mighty stones.
What now?

You stole our herbs and wildflowers, our blooming slopes and deep valleys.
You stripped our birds of their names,
and claimed the clothes our mothers embroidered with their hearts
and the tender gazes of their daughters and sons.
What now?

You devoured our thyme, the fruits of our vineyards, the blue of our sea.
You kidnapped our waves and stuffed them into a dim barracks that you secured with bullets under that banner of death you call your flag.
You wrote your anthem with the anguished wails of our mothers as they collected the torn flesh of their children from the rubble and the screams of the wind.
What now?

You cast us away behind every river and ocean and sea, to banish us; to beautify your savagery with our absence.
You scrawled on the walls of every massacre that we do not exist, neither here nor there, and you swallowed the clouds in our sky (but you caught neither their lightening nor their thunder).
You erected checkpoints to arrest a future meant for us, because you know the past only knows our faces.
So what now?

You crammed us into the darkness of your dungeons, so that our lives could fuel an eternity you claimed was yours alone.
You fortified your fear of our olive trees with nuclear bombs gifted to you since the first emergence of your claws.
What now?

Whenever you wished for a plane, they gave you a hundred.
Whenever you desired a tank, they granted a thousand.
Whenever you wanted a warship, they gifted you a fleet.
Whenever you awoke to shoot one of our children, they sent all you could fancy of bombs too heavy for the earth to bear.
Whenever you came upon the laughter of a little girl,
or an old man who has been here two thousand years before you,
you would remember that you were never here.
You filled your Talmud with fresh hatred,
erased the street that heard her laughter
and shattered the cane he pointed at you, saying:
“Leave this land and never show your face here again.”
So we tell you as we told you fifty-seven years ago: What now?

You hate trees.
Have you ever seen anyone hate trees more than you?
A genocide of three million trees obliterated at your hands since the dawn of the millennium.
(We will not mention our dead and wounded, for this world does not care about our martyrs.)
Who hates trees more than you?
To rip them from the earth, to set fire to their roots,
to scatter the birds from their nests,
to orphan the grass,
to build dens for hyenas on our hills,
to sharpen the fangs of our children’s nightmares,
to plant wounds between the hearts of lovers.
So we tell you, as we told you forty years ago:
What now?

The land you scorched will reap only dead fruit. What now?

Were five hundred villages not enough to erase?
Cities whose fields you churned,
whose alleys you choked with gunpowder,
whose shadows you hunted with bloodhounds,
whose graves you buried as deep as you could.
(You may kill a person, but you cannot bury his shadow.)
So what now?

All these walls you hide behind,
from Washington to London to Berlin.
All these regimes, remembering they haven’t wiped out a people somewhere on earth for some time,
hand you everything you need to destroy us—
lest the generals and theorists of ethnic cleansing
forget how exterminations are done.
But what now?

For you, all the Arabs with no trace of Arabness
the crescents stripped of Islam,
and crosses for two million Jesuses in Gaza.
All of them bow to kiss your bloodstained hands,
to smudge your fingerprints from the scenes of massacres,
and from the weapons.
Hymn singers, enchanted by:
“Glory to God in the highest. On Earth peace and goodwill among men,”
plant the glory of your cruelty on Earth,
and place war in your hands like a precious sword,
so that joy may be yours alone.
(For peace on Earth is not for us.)
So we tell you as we told you thirty years ago: What now?

Rabid dogs tear at our souls in Ramallah,
while “men” of straw imagine they have a sense of humor, and say:
“Does a victor return home on foot?”
And they laugh before the glow of their screens, mocking Gaza’s agonizing march,
as if they had forgotten—amid their barking—
that every evening, they will crawl back to their humiliation in Ramallah’s suburbs,
licking the footprints of your soldiers.
But what now?

Seven walls blocking God’s four directions.
No South here, no North, no East, no West.
Make sure the walls are higher behind which the sun rises,
so we forget it is there,
so you can be even more certain
that sunlight was created for none but you.
And walls beneath the earth,
water’s throat clogged with cement,
to crush the fingers of those who slip through the night’s darkness,
imagining freedom’s embrace and the warmth of their beloveds.
What now?

Everywhere, we are there:
from Chile to Japan,
from The Hague to Johannesburg,
in water, in desert,
in mountain and plain,
in blood and oil and rage,
in the nightmares of princes,
in the recklessness of presidents,
and in the giant fridges called homelands—
stockpiled alongside cattle of all colors, ready to be your sacrificial feast.
So we tell you, as we told you 471 days before death:
What now?

A thousand massacres, thirty wars, hundreds of thousands of dead,
twenty thousand gouged eyes,
a hundred thousand amputated limbs,
stretching to dust away this darkness,
millions of backs bent under the weight of years and wounded hearts

All this, and that, and more,
tell you now, as they have always told you:
You will not stand today.
And you will not stand tomorrow,
in the way of our return.

Ibrahim Nasrallah was born in 1954 to Palestinian parents who were uprooted from their land in 1948. He spent his childhood and youth in the Alwehdat Palestinian refugee camp in Amman, Jordan, and began his working life as a teacher in Saudi Arabia. After returning to Amman, he worked as a journalist and a cultural Director. He has been a full-time writer since 2006, publishing 14 poetry collections and 22 novels, including his epic “Palestinian Comedy” series of 12 novels covering 250 years of modern Palestinian history. Four of his novels and a volume of poetry have been translated into English, including his novel Time of White Horses which was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2009 and for the 2014 London-based Middle East Monitor Prize for the Best Novel about Palestine. Lanterns of the King of Galilee was also longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2013. Three of his novels have been translated into Italian, one into Danish and one into Turkish. He is also an artist and photographer and has had four solo exhibitions of his photography. He has won eight literary prizes, among them the prestigious Sultan Owais Literary Award for Poetry in 1997. His novel Prairies of Fever was listed by The Guardian newspaper in the top 10 most important novels written about the Arab world. In 2012, he won the inaugural Jerusalem Award for Culture and Creativity for his literary work. His novel The Spirits of Kilimanjaro won the Katara Prize for the Arabic Novel in 2016. He was awarded the 2018 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for his novel The Second War of the Dog. In 2020 he became the first Arabic writer to be awarded the “Katara Prize” for Arabic Novels for the second time for his novel A Tank Under the Christmas Tree.

susan abulhawa is a novelist.

The poem “أتسمعني؟ وماذا بعد؟” originally appeared at Al Quds. Image: Saleh Najm and Anas Shari.

This poem is set to appear in Nasser Rabah’s Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece, which is available for pre-order from City Lights, and appears here with permission. Coming April 2025.

I Was Sand

By Nasser Rabah

Translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, Khaled Al-Hilli

I was sand gently grazed by grass woven through me.
Clouds pass me over, or girls as they come out the gate
of a nearby school. Rain and hail wash me, and the sun
and plows bear down on me in their dull movement over
a wheat field in the far-flung reaches of a nondescript village.
I was sand, like any other, so ordained for my simplicity
that time was of no concern to me, nor distance, nor the
passersby. One afternoon — I only remember it now sticking
its back out like a nail on a wall — I didn’t see them when they
brought the water to mix with my sand and I fainted. I only found
out the truth about myself years after my horrific awakening,
staring at a single scene, repeating over and over.
I realized that I’d become a stone in a prison cell.
A stone staring at a blind man’s wall hours on end, counting
its days by the wounds prisoners etched on its cold silence,
by the departing dead, by those coming in carrying on their
broken backs a suitcase of hope. Hope I left behind,
scattered on an afternoon of a far, far‑flung field.

Nasser Rabah was born in Gaza in 1963. He got his BA in Agricultural Science in 1985, before going on to work as Director of the Communication Department in the Agriculture Ministry. He is a member of the Palestinian Writers and Authors Union and has published five collections of poetry, Running After Dead Gazelles (2003); One of Nobody (2011); Passersby with Light Clothes (2014); Water Thirsty for Water (2017); Eulogy for the Robin (2021), and two novels, Since Approximately an Hour (2018), and The Enclosure of the Gazelle (2024). Some of his poems have been translated into English, French and Hebrew. He lives in Gaza.

The collection was translated by Ammiel Alcalay, Emna Zghal, and Khaled Al-Hilli.

Image courtesy Heinrich Böll Foundation Palestine & Jordan.

The great twentieth-century poet Mahmoud Darwish was born on this day in 1941. Today, author-translator Alaa Alqaisi shares a letter to Darwish and a poem, after Darwish’s “In Praise of the High Shadow.”

In Praise of What Is No Longer Ours

By Alaa Alqaisi

This poem is in response to Mahmoud Darwish’s “مديح الظل العالي,” an excerpt of which has been translated as “In Praise of the High Shadow” by Saifedean Ammous.

It is not for me to be, or not to be.
It is not for me to create, or not to create.
That choice was taken before I was given a name.
Before the sky carved its judgment into our homes,
Before the sea forgot its promise.
That choice was never mine.

What do I want?
A homeland?
What good has a homeland done
For those who have never known its embrace?
Have the borders of a map ever shielded a child
From the hunger of an endless war?

What do I want?
A passport?
Would a passport stop the earth from swallowing us whole?
Would it make the rubble speak the names
Of those buried beneath it?

What do I want?
Not a flag—
For I have seen flags draped over the bodies of the young,
Wrapped around them like shrouds.
They do not bring the dead back to life.
They do not turn the dust into a home.
What do I want?
Not a newspaper—
For I have seen my story printed in the margins of history,
Erased before it could be written,
Translated into silence.

What do I want?
Not police—
For the law here is the sound of approaching drones,
And the judge is the one who holds the rifle.

So leave.
But leave to where?
The roads are closed,
The sea is locked,
The sky is a border drawn in fire.
You say, leave to yourself,
But where is the self
When the pieces have been scattered?
A body in the north,
A father in the south,
A home in the past.
What is left of me
When even my shadow
Has been burned into the walls?

You walked exile like a river,
But here, exile is the stillness of a land
That has forgotten its own name.
You were the master of departure,
But we are the prisoners of waiting.
You carried the homeland on your back,
But here, the homeland is the weight
That crushes us beneath it.

How vast is the wound,
How narrow the breath,
How small the grave,
How endless the war.

I do not write this in praise.
I write this because I am still here,
Because I am still here,
Because I am still here—
And that, Mahmoud, is the only victory
I can claim

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.

The Last Flower atop Memory’s Stone

By Fadwa Tuqan

Translated by Adey Almohsen

What follows is a short poem by Fadwa Tuqan, one of Palestine’s most eminent poets. The poem did not make it to her collected works as compiled by Dār al-‘Awdah and appears to have only been published by Beirut’s Shi‘r magazine in 1959. Tuqan was one of several Palestinians who regularly contributed to Shi‘r and participated in its weekly salon (khamīs shi‘r). Others include Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Tawfīq Ṣāyigh, Thurayyā Malḥas, Salma Jayyusi, and, a little later, Mahmoud Darwish. Given this sizable Palestinian presence, I think it necessary to examine Shi‘r as a forum of Palestinian intellectual and literary history.

The poem itself exemplifies a spirit—uncommon neither for the time nor for the magazine’s cohort—that struggled to break free from past delusions and memories, despite their seductive pull. The 1947–9 Nakba not only incited such a sense of disillusionment within Tuqan and her co-nationals, but, significantly, having shattered them as do “furious, stormy winds,” made the tasks of self-reconstitution and national resuscitation all the more urgent, all the more existential. -Adey Almohsen

It was a delusion which we gave shape and life,

and then quenched with color and perfume.

We adored it. Adored our precious, profuse delusion,

and confined yearning to its horizon of sight.

It was a delusion, which inhabited us for a short moment.

So, we endowed it with imagination and sentiment.

And graced it with light, shades,

soaring hopes, and countless dreams.

On rainy nights, warmth drew us to it—a temple that

passion’s fecundity satiated with poetry and art.

On wings of reverie, we circumambulated it,

and at its inner sanctum we prostrated.

We recited;

oh, how many verses of love we recited to it.

And, oh, how very long we played to it

tunes of the great rapture.

It then faded one night,

when blew furious, stormy winds that blight.

It faded, leaving behind nothing but

a memory, laden by so many a cut.

Some of a memory,

for which we readied a grave and shroud.

Burying it silently, and heaping parable upon it.

And atop its stone, we laid the last flower

that scented poetry through death’s climes.

The Arabic original ran in Shi‘r 3, no. 1 (1959). Above image is from the Library of Congress.

Fadwa Tuqan (1917–2003) was a poet from Nablus. She was among the most celebrated Palestinian and Arab poets of the twentieth century with many poetry volumes and books to her name.

Adey Almohsen is an intellectual historian of the Arab world from the late eighteenth century to the present. He is completing a book titled, In the Nakba’s Wake: An Intellectual History of Palestine. He is a senior lecturer in history at Grinnell College and a 2025 fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).

A Helmet of Brass

By Haitham K. Al-Zubbaidi

Translated by Ali Layth Azeez

Nothing in me betrays the clouds’ expectations
except that
I am so deep in aridity.

Nothing in me stirs the stars’ wonder
except for this helmet of brass.

So, whenever a lightning of war ignited,
I gleamed,
gathering the kohl of sorrows
from the forest of patience and mothers,
and disappeared.

I counted the flock of losses,
gathered the wailing of the fallen,
into pillows of poetry
for the tears of silk,
then dusted them with ash
and got lost.

I am too aged for war
fifty years
wrestling its raging bulls,
collecting its relics year by year:
horns,
heads,
skins,
bones.
I line them up

at the gate of hope,
offering them all to the divine,
so that the sky might rein in its bulls
and spare the fields of words,
so a new cedar might rise
in the myth of death and the impossible.

Nothing in me betrays the doves’ faith
except this:

I do not know how to coo.

Because Homer is Blind

By Haitham K. Al-Zubbaidi

Translated by Ali Layth Azeez

We never knew Greece,
but we sought refuge on its shores,
and it sheltered us,
and, for a moment,
enticed us with its blissful coastlines.

We never knew the Greeks,
but we heard of their theaters,
of goddesses of wisdom,
of cities besieged,
then plundered,
then burned,
in tales worn dull with time.

Greece knew nothing of us
except for the sunlit hue of our faces,
bathed in olives,
spilling over us
like midday sand,
searing our skin
with the fire foretold
in the lines of new myths.

Greece never knew our names,
our tribes,
our travels,
across the deserts where we grew,
as sexual trees and facts
until we incited the clouds,
troubled them,
and so upon our sands,
they poured down

lava,
scoundrels
and stubborn illusions.

The Greeks never learned our tongue,
nor the taste of our tears,
nor our lament.

Our eyes never liked the wild sea,
but ever since we first wore illusions,
we have roamed the heaths,
shading our heads
with palm fronds and dreams,
calling the flood of illusion upon the desert a sea,
pressing toward it in hopeful strides,
-Oh, my people, it is no more than an illusion!

Our sea is sweet,
but the sea of others is one of torment.
This is not a sea of our making,
nor is this moon the one of our dreams.

We are the truth
on the path of falsehood,
drawing it,
fabricating it,
and stuffing it full of certainty.

We, the ones burdened by the cruelty of the desert,
have no sea,
but the flowing “sea” of verse[1],
which we compose,
which we ride,
which we fill with ships.

And because Homer never knew us all,
he never spoke of us to his people,
he never said that:

We are the writing and the carvings on the impossible,
we are the letters of the alphabet,
we are the obelisks that are rich
with talismans and rhymes.

That:
We invented the miracle of names
from the ache of the rebaba,
then inscribed upon clay
the pains of wounded violins,
so their sorrow could be preserved
in the oasis of agony
the Euphrates once outlined.

We devised the verse of creation:
Tammuz shall be crucified twice,
and upon the palm trunks,
we hung our elegies,
and upon the desolate hills,
like thorns, the sorrows of mothers grow.
We grow, too.
And from pain torn open in the flute’s toneholes,
we rise each dawn,
bareheaded, hastening forward,
offering the seasons their splendor, their names,
when the rites are complete.

From the language of sorrow echoing through the night,
we gave our laments the names of melodies:
Nawahand, Hijaz, Bayat.

On towering obelisks,
the slaughterer inscribed his tales with our blood.
So say what you will of us,
chant whatever verses you please,
in Greece, no one will like the sound of our melodies,
and no tree will know our name,
no road will recognize us.
No woman will fathom the impact of the desert on us,
and take us into her tavern,
and quench our fire with wine.

And because Homer was blind,
he saw in us nothing but savages
Abyssinians or Turks,
Or cursed Saracens from the damned East.

And because Homer never heard our voices,
he never believed
that we were the ones who created
all these verses, these strings,
on which he played his proud song,
of Greek triumphs at majestic Troy.

It was we who taught the god of war his might,
his authority, his power.
And how the vanguards of Phoenicians and Greeks
build their fortresses upon the shores,
then retreat across the sea
to distant islands.

And because Homer never truly cared,
he saw in us nothing but Persians,
barbarians,
degenerates,
Caucasians,
gypsies and killers.

He calls us herders of mountain goats,
worshippers of myth,
eaters of clay.

Not once did he write
a single line in his epics
of moons that bloom from our skulls,
of the reeds that lured the madness of the flute into our blood.

And because Homer never laid an eye on us at all,
he saw in us nothing but
sailors of a diseased illusion,
pirates of a bitter time.

He never read the obelisk of our eternal sorrow,
since the time of a great goddess spreading love in Uruk,
between water and reeds,
to a god of stone raising the banner of the outcasts,
to a god of dates
who ferments our sorrow, kneaded with palm fronds in Basra:
“Sweetening the soul upon our tongues, pouring wine into our being.”[2]

Is it because Homer is blind
that he paid no heed to our blood?
That he did not believe we spoke of peace?
That he no longer listens to this confession, this chant?
He overlooked us… and believed the lie of ships
that roamed the sea for years
filled with weary soldiers
and a selfish captain, craving only glory.

And we — there in Uruk — still sing through the labyrinths of eternity,
offering hymns to the goddesses of meaning in the sky.

And we build towers, hoping to ascend to the sky,
so it may see us.

And because we fear for this cooing,
lest flames consume it and vanish.

For the verse of lamentation, we have become
an obelisk,
a ziggurat,
a tablet of clay.
Yet Homer never traced upon the stones
the laws of cities
waging love to survive.

[1] In Arabic, the word بحر (English: sea) is used for the sea and for poetic meter.

[2] This quote is taken from a poem by Abdulameer Jarass (1965-2003), Poems Against the Wind (1993).

A Note from the Translator

Studying poetry can have its drawbacks for poets, as they may be drawn to imitate the poets they study, especially those from different languages, cultures, and histories. At first glance, a reader of Al-Zubbaidi’s poetry might conclude that he is influenced by T. S. Eliot. However, this influence is not of the negative kind. Al-Zubaidi cleverly escapes the vicious trap of mere imitation by employing techniques similar to Eliot’s, particularly allusion and classical references, not to turn his poetry into a melting pot of disparate mythologies and texts, but rather to weave them into a uniquely Iraqi and contemporary framework. While Eliot used classical references to evoke a sense of fragmentation and cultural decline, Al-Zubbaidi repurposes them to reclaim historical narratives and infuse them with new meaning. His poetry challenges the Western literary canon, urging it to recognize the voices that have long been ignored. Rather than presenting a world disillusioned by modernity, Al- Zubbaidi’s poetry restores continuity, bridging the past with the present and placing Iraq’s literary and historical identity at the center of his work. Through this, he not only dialogues with the Western tradition but also reshapes it, asserting a poetic vision that is both deeply rooted in Iraqi heritage and strikingly modern. As a man who lived through multiple wars, he channels the collective memory of his people into his poetry, transforming personal and national suffering into a lyrical testament of resilience. His verses do not merely mourn lost histories but also revive them, challenging dominant narratives that have long overlooked Iraq’s intellectual and artistic contributions. Al-Zubaidi’s engagement with classical and modern influences does not dilute his voice but strengthens it, allowing him to carve a space where Iraqi identity asserts itself against erasure.

Haitham K. Al-Zubbaidi (b. April 18, 1971) is an Iraqi poet and academic from Wasit Province. He holds a Master’s (1998) and Ph.D. (2005) in English literature from the University of Baghdad, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature. His research explores comparative literature and modern poetry, while his poetry blends history, mythology, and human experience. His published collections include The Weeping Table (2000), The Fog (2002), No One Told Me I Was Defeated (2013), and Because Homer Is Blind (2022).

Ali Layth Azeez is an Iraqi scholar, translator, and content creator. He obtained a master’s in English Literature from the University of Baghdad. He has translated a collection of Gothic short stories and Julia by Sandra Newman (publication pending) into Arabic. He currently works as an instructor at the American University in Baghdad.

Enter “Butterfly’s Burden”

By Dalia Taha

Translated by Sara Elkamel

for Mahmoud Darwish

I picked up “The Butterfly’s Burden”
and could not put it down.

Every poem I read, I read again,
and it was that way for days.

Poetry possesses this power.
You can read the same poem

a thousand times,
and always find dew on the words.

In poetry, I found language in the war
where every word

had lost its meaning,
save for enough.

In the book with a dead poet’s
photo on the cover,

every words was where
it had always been,

and very much alive—
and they voiced what no one else

could say: You can start your day
without words

and end it
without words.

You can start the day with fog
and stay right there.

Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator. She was awarded the 2024 Banipal Visiting Author Fellowship in recognition of her literary achievements. Taha has published three poetry collections, a novel, two plays, and a children’s poetry collection. Her plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels, among others. Taha teaches at both Birzeit University and AlQuds Bard University. She works and lives in Ramallah.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist, and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, among other publications. A Pushcart Prize winner, Elkamel was also awarded the Michigan Quarterly Review’s 2022 Goldstein Poetry Prize, Tinderbox Poetry Journal’s 2022 Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize, and Redivider’s 2021 Blurred Genre Contest. She is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021).

*

Baghdad Melancholy

By Hameed Qasim

Translated by Ghareeb Iskander

1

When I went out

I forgot my scent in her room

And I left—by mistake—my fingers on the bed, searching

For the salt of her body

But I smell it now.

This is Baghdad’s melancholy waving to me from afar.

It has the scent of bad tobacco, which clings to my fingers.

And now I’m forced to watch it, quietly.

Continuing in this impoverished life,

I cut my expenses, shackled by worries

Where there are no friends, no air that doesn’t remind you of shadowy hardships.

And yet, I remember you.

And I point at you, at the woman, and her cheap bag:

– Won’t you stop lying?

– You lie every day?

“I love you.

How are you? How’s your health?”

I look happy

When I exchange lies with you:

“You ask about my health?

I’m fine………and my health is good

I sing a lot, laugh a lot, and drink a lot

I waste a lot of what’s left of my reputation

I’m fine!

And you still ask about my health?”

I no longer have enough money to go to work.

What will I do with my health?

حين خرجتُ

نسيتُ رائحتي في غرفتها

وتركتُ – سهواً- أصابعي في السرير، تفتشُ

عن ملح جسدها على الفراش

لكنني أشمُها الآن.

هذه كآبةُ بغدادَ تلوحُ لي من بعيد

لها رائحةُ تبغٍ رديءٍ، يلتصقُ بأصابعي.

وها أنا الآن مجبرٌ على أن أراقبها هادئاً.

أستمرُ في رداءةِ الحياة

أقترُ مصاريفي، مكبلاً بالهموم

حيث ليس ثمة أصدقاء، أو هواء لا يذكرك بالمشقات الغامضة.

ومع هذا، أتذكركِ!

وأشيرُ إليك، إلى المرأة، وحقيبتها الرخيصة:

– ألا تكفين عن الكذب؟

– كل يومٍ تكذبين؟

” أحبكَ

كيف أنتَ؟ كيف صحتكَ؟”

فأبدو سعيداً

وأبادلكِ الأكاذيب:

” تسألينَ عن صحتي؟

أنا بخير.. وصحتي جيدة

أغني كثيراً، وأضحكُ كثيراً، وأشربُ كثيرا

وأُفرّطُ بما تبقى من سمعتي كثيرا

أنا بخير!

وتسألين عن صحتي؟”

لم يعد معي ما يكفي من النقودِ للذهابِ الى الوظيفة.

ماذا سأفعلُ بصحتي؟

2

O city

Now I look out at you from the window

I do nothing but look out at you from the window!

And—to spite the fingers—I’ll place the ember of my cigarette

In the lower part of your navel, I mean your persistent spider’s web,

The house of our sins and eternal disobedience

The one that exudes a sticky lust, like our melancholy

Then I’ll see: Where does this bastard hide the silk of his weak song,

Keeping it from the tailor of texts?

Then I’ll expose him, calling out to our memories from behind glass

And there is no surprise in this:

The false grows and flourishes.

However, when they realized the power of memories—

They took us out of them!

أيُّتها المدينة

أنا الآن أطل عليك من النافذة

انا لا أفعل شيئا سوى ان أطل عليكِ من النافذة!

وأنا- نكايةً بالأصابع- سأضع جمرة سيجارتي

أدنى من سُرتك، أعني بيت عنكبوتك الدؤوب

بيت آثامنا وعقوقنا الأبدي

العقوق الذي ينضحُ شهوة دبقةً مثل كآبتنا

ثم سأرى: أين يخبئ حريرَ أغنيته الواهية، ابن النعال هذا،

بعيداً عن خيّاط النصوص؟

ثم أفضحه مناديا ذكرياتنا من وراء الزجاج

وليس في هذا شيءٌ مدهش

ففي الظاهر ينمو المستعار ويزدهر

غير أنهم – حين أدركوا قوة الذكريات –

أخرجونا من ذكرياتنا!

3

Suddenly, as I see you, my eyes are falling on the path,

I laugh and then call out, anxiously, waving my hand in the emptiness:

Oh God, oh God… oh. God.

Oh, God… why?

Why, oh God?

Why the smell of the cigarette, sour, like me, like the clouds that lean against the sea,

and the smell of bread, the smell of wine, the smell of our fermented slavery

all waving to you, to my mother’s melancholy.

Oh God!

I step off the bus alone, and I say: Oh…

But I cannot finish

There is nothing but old air

Enough to fill our baskets with regret

And our lives with dirt!

And so, I watch the spider that climbs the shoes in Sattar Kawoosh’s painting

She drags her bottom across my shinbone

before she stretches her sticky silk across the striped trousers.

I whisper to her through the smoky threads:

Tell me: Behind these indescribable miseries,

which departure is worth setting before the eyes of the beliefs that help you live?

Intuition?

Nature’s contempt?

Too much shoe polish?

Yesterday’s rain in the garage?

The dead of Tayaran Square?

No….

None of this.

Don’t leave me like this.

بغتةً، وأنا أنظر إليكِ تسقطُ عيناي على الدرب،

فأضحكُ ثم أنادي مهموماً بيدي في الفراغ:

يا الله، ويا الله… يا الله

يا الله… لماذا؟

لماذا يا الله؟

لماذا رائحةُ السيجارة، حامضةٌ، مثلي، مثل الغيم الذي يتكئ على البحر، وثمة رائحةُ الخبز، رائحةُ الخمرة، رائحةُ عبوديتنا المختمرة.. تشيرُ إليكِ، إلى كآبة أمي.

يا الله!

أهبط من الباص وحدي، وأقول: يا…

ولا أكمل

ليس ثمة سوى هواء عتيق

ما يكفي لملء سلالنا ندما

ما يكفي لملء حياتنا بالتراب!

لذا، أراقبُ العنكبوت الذي يتسلق الأحذية في لوحة ستار كاووش

يجرجر مؤخرته على عظمة الساق

قبل أن يمد حريره الدبق على البنطلونات المخططة

أهمس له من خلال خيوط الدخان:

قل لي: أي افتراق وراء تلك الكآبات التي لا يستطاع التعبير عنها

يستحق أن يضع أمام عينيك العقائد التي تساعدك على أن تحيا؟

الحدس؟

ازدراء الطبيعة؟

الإفراط في تلوين الأحذية؟

مطر الأمس في الكراج؟

قتلى ساحة الطيران؟

لا….

لا شيء من هذا كله

فلا تدعني هكذا.

4

There, I was kissing you… in the front of the baby birds, close to the smell of the river and the scent of the palm trees, holding your warm hands, far from the plane that is just now landing, and no one hears us when we cry under the noise of its engine,

No one will hear us crying under the columns of pouring light…

Oh, God!

هناك، كنتُ أقبلكِ… على مرأى من أفراخ الطير قريبا من رائحة النهر ورائحة النخل، أمسكُ بيديكِ الدافئتين، بعيدا عن الطائرةٍ التي تهبط تواً، ولا أحد يسمعنا حين سنبكي تحت ضجيج دوي محركها،

وتحت أعمدة الضوء المنهمر…

يا الله!

5

Here I am, listening………I hear them whispering:

“Oh stranger… Oh stranger…”

As I see them flocking by the millions, all of them strangers,

Strangers to the country

Here I am now in the garage, in the middle of the crowds

Forced

To stand far from you, as you wake up to the soot of your streets

Gathering the bodies and blood of your children.

I can do nothing for you

I am lonely………defenseless, and sad, too.

Your melancholy, oh Baghdad, assails me

It has a foul burnt smell that sticks to my mouth.

So, what should I do?

ها أنذا أصيخُ السمع…  أسمعهم يهمسون:

” يا غريب… يا غريب…”

فيما أراهم يتدفقون بالملايين، كلهم غرباء…

غرباء البلاد

ها أنذا الآن في الكراج، وسط الحشود

مجبرٌ..

على أن أقفَ بعيداً عنكِ، وأنت تستيقظين على سخام شوارعك

تلملمين جثثَ ابنائك ودماءَهم

لا املك أن أفعل لك شيئا

أنا الوحيد.. الأعزل، والحزين كذلك

كآبتُك يا بغدادَ تداهمني

لها عطرُ احتراقٍ رديءٍ، يلتصقُ بفمي

فماذا أفعل؟

Baghdad 2008

Hamid Qasim was born in Baghdad in 1955. He is an awarded poet and a journalist. Qasim has published dozens of articles in the politics and media, and many poetry books, including Playing in the Garden and Thinking in 2016 and An Old Notebook in 2022. He is a member of the Union of Iraqi Writers and a member of the Iraqi Journalists Syndicate. He obtained a master’s degree in modern Arabic literature from the University of Baghdad in 1996.

Ghareeb Iskander is a poet, translator and researcher living in London. He taught Arabic at SOAS, University of London where he received his PhD in Near & Middle Eastern studies with an emphasis on literary translation. He published serval books including A Chariot of Illusion (Exiled Writers Ink, London 2009); Gilgamesh’s Snake and Other Poems, a bilingual collection, which won Arkansas University’s Arabic Translation Award for 2015 (Syracuse University Press, New York 2016); English Poetry and Modern Arabic Verse: Translation and Modernity (I. B. Tauris, London 2021). He was longlisted for the 2021 John Dryden Translation Competition. He is a judge of the Sarah Maguire Prize for Poetry in Translation 2024. Iskander translated Derek Walcott, Ted Hughes and other world modernist poets into Arabic and Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Hasab al-Shaikh Ja‘far and other Arab modernist poets into English.

Nasir Mounes was born in Iraq in 1963. He is a painter, designer, graphic artist, and a poet. Mounes made many exhibitions in the Middle East and Europe including Iraq, Jordan, Syria, The Netherlands, France, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and Germany. He published many books that synchronize between poems with painting. Mounes made many hand made art books in Arabic, Dutch and English. This type of art represents one of his most interesting art works and therefore, he is utterly interested in participating in international exhibitions for such kind of art.