Category: Non-Fiction
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Book Review: Returning to Haifa
What is a homeland? Ghassan Kanafani poses this question in Returning to Haifa, his final novella before his death. Throughout the story, he spirals through a plethora of definitions that each feel incomplete: an oak tree, two chairs, an abandoned son – only to reject them at the end. For Kanafani, a homeland is an…
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On Being Alone, Not Lonely
You don’t realize how alone you are, how few friends have left you, all at once. It hits in waves. When you want to try a new coffee shop and the only person that crosses your mind is busy. The rest, you think, you haven’t been in touch with in a long time. They haven’t…
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تعبير كتابي عن الضيعة والطبيعة
كانو بأيّام المدرسة، بصفّ العربي، يقولولنا نكتب عن الضّيعة وطبيعتها. كل سنة بحياتي المدرسية، كان هيدا موضوع دايمًا أساسي، بس بصفّ العربي، وما بعرف ليش ما كان موجود بصف الانجليزي مثلاً. كتلاميذ، كنّا نضرب ع راسنا ونستغفر الله كل ما نعرف انّو لازم نكتب عن هالموضوع. وكنت قول بيني وبين حالي: شو هالشغلة البايخة يلّي…
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Book Review: Tasting The Sky: A Palestinian Childhood
Imagine you are three and half years old, a war has just started, your family is about to flee and you are unable to tie up the one shoe you had on. In the split of a second, everyone you’ve known your entire life has disappeared – gone. All while the Israeli enemy is spreading…
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العفن الذهبي
إلى جدي بدري مكارم… حضورك هديّة آخر أيّام العصر الذهبي… ’٧٥ ،كانت بيروت بعدها عم تتلألأ ،غافلة عن روابط ما كانت شايفتها بعد .وعن سطور بعد ما انكتبت ،الشوارع مليانة .والناس بعدها بتحكي بالقروش ،بعدن عايشين وقتن عمهلهن …كأنّو الوقت مارق من حدّن .من دون أيّ عجلة ،مدينة إلها نكهة …بس كانت عم تغلي وناطرة…
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Book Review: The Kite Runner
“The man who has a conscience suffers while acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.” Published in 2003, The Kite Runner is Khaled Hosseini’s debut novel and masterpiece. The book has sold millions of copies worldwide, inspired several adaptations, and won various awards, including the Alex Award, the Borders Original Voices Award, and the Outstanding…
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Book Review: The Blind Owl
While existentialism emphasizes an individual’s search for meaning, absurdism acknowledges the impossibility of attaining certainty in an irrational world. Both philosophies are profoundly reflected in Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Isolated and alienated, the narrator struggles to find meaning amid psychological fragmentation and blurred boundaries between reality and hallucination. Ultimately, the narrative engages with nihilistic…
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But What If I Don’t Want To Be a Content Creator?
When I first joined social media, it didn’t look like what it does today. To create a Facebook account, I had to lie and say I was born in 1980-something. I was still in school, and we used to write inside jokes and birthday greetings on each other’s ‘walls.’ We used to update our ‘status’…
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Book Review: the Granada Trilogy
Colonialism, deportation, and apartheid: history repeats itself. Actors change, yet politics prevail, as individual stories lose to mass graves. The Granada Trilogy by Radwa Ashour follows consecutive generations of the Muslim family of Abu Jaafar and his children after the fall of Granada in 1492. Radwa Ashour (1946-2014) was an Egyptian novelist, university professor, and…
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Book Review: A Thousand Splendid Suns
A few weeks ago, the Taliban issued a law in Afghanistan permitting men to beat their women and children, provided they do not leave any fractures or open wounds. With this law, domestic violence is treated as a matter of discretion rather than a criminal offense, and women and children continue to suffer under the…