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December 2021

The Swing of Collapse "Mazaj-Mood" by Ayham Jabr Like a shadow, this feeling of impending doom accompanies us. As though everything is in this slow, incomprehensible process of collapse. But maybe it's not so slow. It's at a strange speed-somewhere between the steady crumbling of an old house over time, and the sudden destruction of a building because of an earthquake. Everything is falling apart, but not too fast that it takes us by surprise, and not slow enough that we can do anything about it.  - Muzna, November 16, 2020   *** There is a common phrase reiterated at the end of every conversation: "It

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Non-Fiction, Thematic Essay
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معنى الاستمرار: عجزٌ أم غضبٌ أم إنكار؟ "Untitled" by Charbel Al Khoury What are we going to do in the years to come? I've never had this question be so central to life. It is everywhere.  - Livia, January 7, 2021   ***   The road to Bekaa, from Beirut, seems peaceful and beautiful, as if everything is alright. How does the sun rise as if nothing has happened?  The fields at the side of the roads look like they do every year. So do the trees, and the bright green grass. It almost feels like the other side of the story. A peaceful calm morning can hide the

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Non-Fiction, Thematic Essay
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Perpetual Limbo "Face it" by Pascale Ghazaly A friend recently told me that the choice between staying and leaving is the choice between hell and purgatory. It resonated. Hell is here; purgatory is elsewhere, somewhere in between, never fully belonging, alienated and in limbo.  I don't want to live here. Where the large pink clouds at sunset, setting behind the buildings on Sidani Street, give me flashbacks. Where I feel guilty because I turn away from a person begging (and have you noticed how the number of beggars has increased, how they keep getting younger and younger by the day?). Where I worry

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Non-Fiction, Thematic Essay
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محاولات للنجاة "34.5531° N, 18.0480° E 1,2,3,4" by Lara Atallah I hope that no matter what they do-no matter the trauma, the pain, the destruction-we can continue to imagine the possibilities. To dream. To bring to life new worlds, worlds we are deserving of. - Aida, January 26, 2021   ***   The more stressed I am, the more attentive my gaze becomes. I search for the tiniest manifestations of nature in my periphery. This is how I survive the daily wounds of this city. A red dragonfly on a car's license plate. A tiny lizard crawling the sidewall in the parking lot. A Palestine sunbird feeding off

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Non-Fiction, Thematic Essay
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Encountering the Pandemic and Its Noise "Red" by Pascale Ghazaly It's a complete lockdown again. I spend my days on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. I view stories, read tweets, scroll, repeat. Fascinating and depressing how we end up spending hours-more than half a day-on social media. On each platform, it feels as though I am wading through a crowd. I can sense the presence of everyone behind their screens scrolling too: a community of social media addicts.  A wave of virtual collective nostalgia to pre-pandemic times: posts about countries people visited; old photos from previous years; portraits of the people they miss; past

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Non-Fiction, Thematic Essay
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"Case 1" by Charbel Al Khoury "Case 8" by Charbel Al Khoury Dear Reem,  Greetings from Beirut.  Yes, I finally visited Beirut again on Thursday. It took me a lot of time to plan and negotiate my full-time job and curfew hours. It was raining heavily all the way on the highway. We even had floods yesterday! Nothing new, right? Excuse my complaints so early in the letter, but I'm challenging the system. I'm now complaining regularly because this is what people normally do in such uncertain times. Complaining needs to be normalized again in the face of toxic positivity. You left almost three months

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prose, Thematic Essay
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Photograph by Tania Traboulsi Words without Music The only belonging I actually lost on August 4 was my lyrics notebook. Although our little apartment suffered heavy damage, nothing was completely lost. Doors and windows had flown out of their frames, a table's legs broke, plants fell out of pots, our newly bought TV split in half, a bookshelf shattered into millions of pieces. Some things could be fixed, others had to be thrown out. But nothing disappeared. Nothing except my lyrics notebook.  I left our Mar Mikhael apartment that night and asked my friends who went back the next day to look

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Non-Fiction
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Still from "In Mansoura You Left Us" A film review of In Mansourah, You Separated Us An old man is standing. Behind him, large rocks are followed by a horizon with mountains covered in brown, ochre, and dark green. He wears a gray hat and a jacket that seems too large for his nervous body. On the jacket, we see military insignia, green and golden. He's standing straight almost as if he were taking an official shot. The camera does not move. Suddenly, we hear the director's voice, as she asks in French, "How come he survived and seventy-three others died?"

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Film Review
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"Absence" by Omid Shekari When I think of Humphrey Davies, I think of Uncle Humph. I call him uncle not out of a juvenile sense of biological attachment, but as belonging to that branch of the lineage of translators which I endeavor to be a part of. I write of Uncle Humph's passing and find myself unwilling to acknowledge it. Unwilling and resentful. How could he suddenly up and leave us like this with no warning, when we needed him so much? When I agreed to Rana Issa's offer to co-translate Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq's travelogue three years ago,

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Non-Fiction, prose, Tribute
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