Torn Apart (Déchirures), Joyce Mansour’s second volume of poetry, is a collection of 117 numbered poems that together appear to undertake an exploration of what the poet sees beyond the fabric of religious belief when that fabric is subjected to… Read More ›
Fadwa Tuqan wrote Song of Becoming in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War that resulted in the defeat of the tripartite Arab coalition (Egypt, Syria, and Jordan) by Israel. The defeat also meant that the Palestinian struggle against dispossession,… Read More ›
Written in spring 1971, this poem depicts the desolation of New York City as emblematic of empire. Adonis wrote the poem after a visit to the United States, during which he participated in an International Poetry Forum. Unlike his poem… Read More ›
This most famous poem of Faiz Ahmad Faiz (Mujh Se Pehli Si Muhabbat) appears in his collection Naqsh-e-Faryadi (The Picture of a Dissenter), published in 1941, the year that Faiz married Alys George, an English journalist and human rights campaigner… Read More ›
In the original Arabic of this poem by Mahmoud Darwish, there are 24 numbered stanzas representing the journal of a “wound,” specifically Palestinian. It is the diary of the violated and wounded, of the dispossessed and occupied. “Wound” here is… Read More ›
One of the few poems by Hafez Ibrahim available in English translation, Describing a Suit is an excellent illustration of Ibrahim’s famed use of irony and sarcastic humor to call attention to social issues. A leader of the neoclassical movement… Read More ›
Since the 1990s, with the seemingly unending cycle of violence that has defined the Second Palestinian Intifada and the ‘War on terror’, Western media outlets have bombarded their viewers with the stark imagery of disaffected Arab youth. Terms like jihadi,… Read More ›
Rachid Boudjedra (1941– ) began writing in the 1960s, a period during which the Algerian novel in French shifted from a critique of colonialism to a questioning of social, political, and religious structures. Like most of the Algerian Francophone writers,… Read More ›
The most celebrated, controversial, and critically acclaimed series of novels by Abdelrahman Munif (1933–2004) merits the title of epic by way of the work’s time span covering many years, the endless chain of memorable characters, and the many plot threads. A… Read More ›
The first great family saga of modern Arabic literature, The Cairo Trilogy tells the story of patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family over the course of more than 30 years, from World War I to eight years before… Read More ›
Written in Arabic by Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh (1945– ) and translated into English as Beirut Blues by Catherine Cobham in 1995, Barid Bayrut is one of most haunting and compelling novels about enduring the day-to-day challenges of the Lebanese… Read More ›
Classical criticism and theory. The Arabic literary tradition has preserved critical statements that are as old as Arabic literature itself. The earliest critical remarks form part of the anecdotal heritage ascribed either to the poets themselves or to some important… Read More ›
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