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Missile Sequence

September 5, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Translation

Piece appears below in English and the original Arabic.

Missile One

A straw basket hangs from the side of a vehicle parked at the corner of your street. You assume it’s displaying fresh parsley, or strawberries, and you approach the man you assume is the vendor. His eyes repel you like blazing heat as he trains his Kalashnikov on you; you falter, want to explain why you have come toward him, you look at the basket and are stunned to see that it contains RPG missiles, arrayed with delightful geometry, and now you need to apologise to him for your inquisitive staring otherwise he’s going to empty that rifle into your head. But it’s pointless attempting to do anything because you’re rooted to the spot, which is what always happens when you’re scared, so you take hold of your eyes with your hands and scrape out the pupils with your thumbs, then hand them to him with an I’m sorry, because it’s the pupils specifically that have got you tangled up with him. He looks at you and swiftly loads his launcher ready to fire it at you. You dodge right and left, crashing into the walls around you, you duck into buildings one after another, and then you find yourself in your own quiet home, your wife beside you laying the lunch, and there in the centre of the magnificent dish of rice is a home-cooked RPG grenade.

Morning Light

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction, Translation

By JEMAL HUMED
Translated by ADDIE LEAK

The piece appears below both in English and the original Arabic.

For the fighter Taha Mohammed Nur [1]

The hallway is cold and disquieting, lined with austere doors marked with consecutive numbers, giving no indication of their occupants.

The corridor is never-ending, leading to a room at its end whose grand entryway, formidable and rigid, seems to surveil the movement of the other doors.

He stood in front of it and straightened his service uniform. He took deep breaths, as if to expel the fear that had accumulated between his ribs on this particular morning inside the prison.

Excerpts From Great-Grandfather Hage’s Biography

April 22, 2024 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 27, Issue 27 Fiction

By ABU BAKR KAHAL

Translated by PERWEEN RICHARDS

The Falling Sun

Great-Grandfather’s name is Hage, which means “revered and noble,” though to some it means “loquacious,” while others deny all definitions and emphasize that the name means “he who imitates the sun or its likeness.”

“At that time, people thought the sun had fallen to Earth. ‘De K’al… De K’al… De K’al… The sun has fallen… The sun has fallen… The sun has fallen…’ they screamed.” That’s how the story was told by our great-grandfather—he who knew all the secrets of the past and how it was. It was known that he had memorized everything that storytellers told about those distant eras and their events.

Translation: “James Joyce” by Muhammad Zafzaf

September 7, 2023 Fiction, Translation

By MUHAMMAD ZAFZAF

Translated from the Arabic by LILY SADOWSKY

Piece appears below in both English and Arabic.

Translator’s Note

In “James Joyce” (1982), a stifled writer engages a hallucinatory Joyce in dialogue about writing, and in so doing, interrogates not only what—but also who—makes a great writer. Combining his trademark intertextuality with tense mixing and pronoun ambiguity, Zafzaf creates a haze of temporal unease. But however lost in time our writer is, he is distinctly aware of his place. Creative mastery is never simply a matter of skill but always also a question of positionality and circumstance. The freedom to be authentic or make new, to mean or will, is not equally free for all. Time is unstable; remembrance, unbalanced.

Translation: Excerpt from In Anne Frank’s House

July 6, 2023 Essays, Translation

By MAHA HASSAN

Translated from the Arabic by ADDIE LEAK.

Piece appears below in both English and Arabic.

Translator’s Note:

When In Anne Frank’s House (Al-Mutawassit, 2020) was published, it was met with near radio silence—a strange reaction to a new book by a celebrated author. In an interview I conducted with Hassan in fall 2021, she suggested that this reaction was one of fear. The fact that many in the Arab world conflate Judaism with Zionism—and Israeli oppression—means that writing about a young Jewish martyr like Anne Frank was automatically taboo, and any response to Hassan’s book would be wading into murky waters. Hassan was accused of writing about Anne Frank to court international favor, and the memoir was automatically labeled as political. In my later attempts to locate a publisher for the English translation, I came across a similar hesitation and mistrust—concern, among other things, that an author from an Arab country might not treat Anne Frank with the respect she deserves.

From A Distance, He Approaches

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By KHALID AL-NASRALLAH
Translated from the Arabic by NASHWA NASRELDIN

Barefoot. I don’t know how we did it.

Around noon on those April days, my father would do his best to stop me from going out. After lunch, he’d stomp around the house locking all the doors: the kitchen, the front door, the back door, the main living room. Sometimes he’d even try to drag me to his bedroom and force me to take a nap.

The Kitchen

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By ESTABRAQ AHMAD
Translated from the Arabic by MAIA TABET

The Troublesome

The Sink

During her worst fits, my waters couldn’t drown out her cries. Stacking plates, cups, spoons, and knives, her fists flailed against the sides of my bowl; she’d stare at the gushing water stream, her head slackened against her chest.

In a departure from daily routine, she went on an angry, blabbering rampage, hurling her son’s glass pill bottles into my lap, smashing cups and plates, and turning on the faucet. Water and bits of glass floated everywhere—oh, my, I got so dizzy and regurgitated the larger pieces that had lodged in the drain.

She kept kicking me as I coughed my guts up, and she smashed more plates with the skillet.

The specter of her son appeared, grabbed her wrist firmly but tenderly, and wrapped his arms around her from behind. She stopped and breathed a deep sigh but didn’t raise her head or turn around.

Body

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By SULAIMAN AL-SHATTI
Translated from the Arabic by MAIA TABET with LAURA ALBAST

Whenever she spoke, my mother habitually turned down her upper lip and clenched her teeth as if to control the flow of her words—filtering them, if you will. Her teeth were white and strong; they were free of blemishes, except for the three that had been chipped in an old accident. She leaned in toward whomever she was conversing with, an apologetic smile on her face, which our neighbor’s daughter described as radiating kindness. A colleague who was once delivering an urgent message to me couldn’t help but remark that even from a distance her beauty was striking. He must not have seen her moving about with the distorted gait that caused one side of her rear to rise as the other descended. Although it had become less conspicuous with age, her limp harkened to another old story, but whenever anyone inquired about it, my mother just smiled enigmatically. Some of the questions were innocent enough, but others seemed veiled––I couldn’t fathom their subtext, nor could I recall anything from the actual events that might help me discern the questioner’s motive. All I know is that I had grown used to the way her limp caused gasps of astonishment, making mouths salivate with unspoken questions and eyes gleam with curiosity.

Night of the Mermaid

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait

By BASSAM ALMUSALLAM
Translated by MAIA TABET

Her face emerged from the sea. And then her glistening body.

The rope writhed in his clenched fists like a fish fighting him, but then it subsided. It gradually slackened and fell still between his hands.

Berber Perfumes

May 8, 2023 Arabic Fiction, Issue 25, Issue 25 Fiction, Kuwait, Translation

By HOODA SHAWA QADDUMI
Translated from the Arabic by NARIMAN YOUSSEF

They say that, sometime at the end of the nineteenth century, a woman came on a wooden ship from Najd, married a wealthy man from the island, and, when she didn’t conceive, had a maqam built on the ruins of a pagan temple near the cliffs of the shore. Having had a dream where a man holding a staff spoke to her, the woman then named the maqam after the mystic Al-Khidr.