What role does memory play within a state of perpetual displacement? How does one resist forgetting under this precarity? And what does it mean to truly remember when memory is the space where catastrophe and pain reside? Continue reading “We are Guardians of Memory”: On Sara Abou Ghazal’s Dreams of Ayn Ara
This morning, I sat down at my desk, ready to write about the upcoming novels I’m excited for– gifts, if you will, to help me get through the long, lingering months of February and March. Continue reading Upcoming Novels, Snowstorms & the Infinite Oddity of the Human Condition
Politics cannot be trusted, I know, but this week and until it lasts I only want to bask in the light of hope and in the possibility of change. Continue reading Elections, a Beam of Light, and Woolf: Finding Hope in Political Despair
Sticky post
Sure, I had the privilege of choosing to leave my homeland, but how much of that choice was really mine to begin with? Continue reading Dear Europe: I Promise I’m Not Staying (On Having a Turkish Passport & Nazlı Koca’s Novel The Applicant)
What is not to love about a postcolonial novel that complicates the concepts of “victory” and “heroism,” inviting questions about whose victory, whose hero, and whose version of events–whose (hi)story is being told? Continue reading Decolonizing History & Reclaiming the Narrative: Leila Aboulela’s River Spirit
How many of us, “congenial spirits” are left out there, as Woolf writes in The Voyage Out (1915), “feel[ing] intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.” Continue reading “Ravens, Cream, solitude, sublimity”: Virginia Woolf on Literature & Inner Peace
‘Shifting the Silence’ is raw and elusive, like the very reflection you’re reading here, but it will urge you to confront the incomprehensible. Continue reading In Search of Silence & a Life Worth Living: Etel Adnan’s Shifting the Silence
The value of In Quest of a Homeland for me lies in its honesty and contribution to, in historian Juliet Gardiner’s terms (1988), history as an ongoing dialogue between the present and the past. Continue reading A Man without a Country: In Quest of a Homeland by Yousof Mamoor
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