DAY 1 // HAYAT

in ,

The history of letting go in order to get in books started with Moses, they don’t mention it, but if you set foot close to his grave you’ll see the crowds of all the words God couldn’t sing into his left ear which he cut off, you’ll see the other half of the truth that wasn’t handed to us. A man’s desire to stay a king, to stay in between the walls that held his mother’s perfume, and just as I am trying, to stay a storyteller.

Sometimes, we need to shed parts of us to stay faithful to the stories we’re telling, Van Gogh and Moses cut off their ears, the modern storyteller misses a step on the staircase, forgets how much sugar to take with their tea, not pack books when travelling, fall in love more often than they should or claim that they don’t believe in love in the first place, publicly, in our papers or in cafés where atmospheres and people with better stories than us come to get their coffee are sold. In the romantic era, John Keats decided to leave Fanny Brawne for his body to ache for her so that his poems would swell. Milena and Kafka never touched, and that turned him to an insect, something so ugly and gruesome that the norm of crushing a bug was created. 
 I stayed in bed for so long the other day staring at a wall the furniture pieces started making noises afraid that my silence will eat me up and turn me into a sibling of theirs, or that’s how heavy my heart felt anyway. I couldn’t reply to the messages confirming the ride to my mother, it’s been over a year since I last saw her but I tell the nightstand with a short hand that it’s because of all that I put into the paper the night before, the paint chips on my eyelids and I refuse to not write again. This is how far one would go. If you’re not a Majnun howling with the animals, if your pain isn’t as big as the world the words will come out dull, the vocabulary will be home-work good enough only.

O ALLAH // JUMANA ALJOHANI

in ,

O Allah, I seek refuge in you from being among the ignorant.
O Allah, this life is inclined to drag people into the gutter,
And I seem susceptible to falling.
I stumbled and stumbled and each stumble seems to weigh more than the former.
O Allah, I seek refuge in you from the evils of my feelings, my seeing, and my hearing.
Make the trivial and temproray matters in life seem as they really are.
If forbidden matters in life seemed artistic,
Make me appreciate Your presence and Your mercy instead.
If forbidden matters in life seemed aromatic,
Make them malodorous and remind me that Paradise is just divine in all its forms.
O Allah, Your mercy is beyond all the power of mankind,
Beyond the Earth, the seas, and all that is infinite.
When everything, O Lord, seems like a forlorn hope,
When I am at the edge of giving up,
Just remind me of the reason why I’m here in the first place.

ICH // WIDED KHADRAOUI

in ,

This is your face,
a women says holding up a 
leaf from an azemmur
as a mirror
and this is your story, 
pressing dust into my palms. 
This land of barbed questions,
in spite of everything,
this is your only identity.
I didn’t recognize myself in the shade of the Aurès.

This is my inheritance, 
centuries of spilled blood, 
storing it for the alter of the ancient gods.
Cultivating false courage, 
this is how legends are destroyed.
From the mountains 
they still come unrepentant.
Still grinding galena,
still trying to rediscover the 
geometrical path to Home.

The nations who call themselves the free people.
The attempt to eradicate continues,
occupied, then ruined.
Yet history could not be eliminated,
which rooted itself deep 
soaked with lineage and 
the bold repetitions of stories
articulated by women who
can not differentiate 
between
warrior and queen, 
thinking they are synonymous.

For too long we have been silent as you 
attempted to block admission, 
imposing the shape of your words into our mouths, 
and
breaking loom after loom.
Under the risk of collapse,
on the verge of revolution 
we’ve finally realized that we too, are 
also the guest of eternity. 
Now, we can finally master tifinagh* 



*Azemmur = olive tree tifinagh= our language

خلقوا ليموتوا // KHALED ALQAHTANI

in
هم دائمًا متأهِّبين ومستعدِّين، إلَّا أن أي دفعة من وطنهم الدافئ تكون مباغتة بالنِّسبة لهُم.
لا يشعرون بالألم عندما يُيقذفون خارجًا، لا يشعرون بأي شيء على الإطلاق! إلَّا الأخير، الذي كان دائمًا يقف على الحافَّة، بجلدِهِ الشفَّاف اللَّزِج، بين الحياة والموت ينظر بأجساد البقيِّة وهي تسقط.
يتشبَّث بكل ما أُوتي من قوَّة، مع أنه يعلم بأن مصيره سيكون كالبقيَّة، ولكنه يريد بأن يحظى بلحظةٍ أخيرة مع نفسه، ليتأمَّل حاله وحال من سيأتون بعده، وكيف بأنه بهذه اللحظة يعيش حياةً ميِّتة.
أي موجة ستأتي الآن ستلقيه ليلقى حتفه كالبقيِّة،
ها هي الموجى الأولى آتية بقوَّة ولكنها لا تستطيع اسقاطه...
موجة ثانية..
موجة ثالثة، حتَّى سقط.
وما زال الأمر يتكرَّر بالنوُّور والظلام، ولا يشعر بها إلَّا الأخير.