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To visit Lebanon after a revolution, explosion and collapse.

Today it is exactly one year since the port explosion in Beirut occurred. Over 200 people died and as many became homeless. PEN/Opp asked Bissane El-Cheikh, a respected Lebanese journalist, to write a...

Text: Bissane El-Cheikh August 04 2021
Article

Prose Poem in Arabic and Jordanian Poetry

Jordan is the country where the Arab Spring did not take place. The Hashemite Kingdom has survived and the regime remains stable. Maha Alautoom, a Jordanian poet and academic (born 1973), claims in...

Text: Maha Alautoom May 19 2021
Article

Eros as Activist

The task of the translator is to facilitate the love between the original and its shadow, says Gayatri Spivak. The poet and translator Helena Boberg (b. 1974) in this essay discusses the role of...

Text: Helena Boberg April 28 2021
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A portrait of the fugitive in his shelter

In this text, the pseudonym Jafaar looks back from his European life in exile on his and other dissidents' experiences of arrests and torture from Egyptian prisons. The notes are divided by colours...

Text: Jafaar April 14 2021
Article

From Collective Intimacy to the Horizon of the Self

The poet and translator Samira Negrouche writes from within Algeria as a country marked by grief, she keeps returning to this: the silence around the heritage, the lack of a cultural infrastructure...

Text: Samira Negrouche March 17 2021
Article

The ideal choice for a young Iraqi poet

“When life finally reached us / I was inside a coffin running around,” writes the Iraqi poet Ali Thareb in one of his early poems. Ali was born in 1988 in the city of Babil in Iraq. These lines...

Text: Ali Thareb March 10 2021
Article

National Allegories: The Case of Poet Abdel Wahab Latinos

Naljaa Altom is a Sudanese poet, writer, translator, academic, and intellectual activist. She was born in Khartoum in 1975 and since a few years back she lives in Sweden as a dissident. She also...

Text: Najlaa Eltom March 03 2021
Article

Children of the Dictatorship

Near the Janka Kupala Park in central Minsk there is a statue of the child soldier and war hero Marat Kazei. Children play around the enormous stone fundament, on which the fourteen-year-old Kazei is...

Text: Nadya Kandrusevich-Shidlovskaya February 07 2021
Article

To stage a Revolution

The array of theatres in Minsk when we lived there 1997-99 was perfect for a family with smaller children. Within walking distance, we had them in a row: the circus, the puppet theatre, the cinema...

Text: Jacob Hirdwall February 02 2021
Article

Female Poets and the Egyptian Revolution

An avid reader or a person interested in poetry often find that certain lines and images become indelible and keep recurring. A father cawing like a crow or a woman baking bread in the ruins of a war...

Text: Hoda Omran January 25 2021
Article

Belarus - A Nation Being Reborn

“He blocked the sun.” This is what Uladzimir Njakljajeu said in 2012 when the then Swedish Ambassador Stefan Eriksson was forced to leave Belarus. The one blocked was of course the President. Yes, the...

Text: Stefan Eriksson January 13 2021

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