Articles

"The writers featured in this collection belong to the same generation with remarkably diverse voices. When read together, they reveal a shared landscape: a region where identity is constantly negotiated, where memory resists erasure, where loss becomes language, and where literature remains one of the last spaces in which human experience can be examined without simplification."

"Egypt must be shown as she truly is— Egypt, in truth, is nothing but an image. He filled his poetry with the history of the prison, recorded hunger, and pain, losing, and loss. Our people are the ram, gathered above it, beasts and hyenas. Inside the prison, lions — envied the free."

"A fence around the cemetery? Are they afraid the dead might escape?"

"Egyptian poet and lyricist Galal El-Behairy has now spent over five years in prison. PEN International is deeply concerned over his health condition as he pursued a hunger strike to protest his unfair imprisonment. We hold the Egyptian authorities responsible for his physical and psychological health and well-being."

"They built us a roofless house  our leaders called it national unity,  so that it fell upon each of us  to supply the meat and bone"

"Life is nothing but a distance travelled towards erasure."

"somewhere behind the gunfire.  I reached out my hands  the way believing women reach out,  the way sorceresses do,  the way mothers reach out, giving birth beneath a tree."

"It slipped further, time, when I admitted great disappointment, and gave myself over to hatred... Time was slipping away... but I was faster— I had already fled, before fleeing I severed my own peace, fed it to the wind, hoping some other city might catch a fever, when it notices my wounds"

"Where are your stones, the stones we used to pray on? Where have the birthdays gone? Who will carry this weight for us now?"

"Two poems from a young writer from Gaza: "And so I wear this coat sewn out of place and time,  a silent pact, both prison and sublime.""