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Asmaa al-Ghoul is a Palestinian journalist from the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip, where she was born in 1982. She currently lives in France. A human rights activist, she also writes essays on literature and culture for newspapers and periodicals, including Al-Hayat (London), Al-Ayyam (Palestine) and the online Romman cultural review. Her first short story […]
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As I was sitting in a taxi stuck in a queue of cars at the Atara Israeli army checkpoint, heading to Nablus to meet a beautiful widow I’d got to know on Facebook, it struck me that the timing of my trip to Nablus that day was unfortunate – there had been a martyrdom operation […]
Ever since I was a child, I dreamt of learning to play the guitar. With time, this passion turned into a weevil, a gluttonous one that nested in my brain, grew up as I grew and shared my life. My guitar weevil turned into a series of misfortune: whenever I saved enough for the guitar […]
Here, people are only observed by the eyes of the night watch. The walls of Acre have not yet been completely built. Nor its lighthouse that looks over the sea to the west. The stones are cleansed by the sweat of the builders, scorched by day and then are cooled down at night by the […]
“It was a pitched battle…” – a description he had often read out to his classmates from history textbooks but never thought he would one day use as he had just done, speaking to his friend, to describe that night. He didn’t even know what ‘pitched’ meant. He just felt it captured the passion of […]
“Well then tell her that she intends to get out of here, mister,” the Israeli policeman called out. He was standing, arms folded, at one entrance to Mandelbaum Gate when I explained to him that we had come with my mother who intended to go through after being allowed to pass. I pointed over the […]
As she waited for the train, she grabbed an orange ribbon out of the hand of a settler who had a blond beard and a white kippa. Then she sat down again in the shade. The ribbon rippled in the breeze, and the station PA announced a five-minute delay to the arrival of the Haifa […]
I could smell the stench of death. From the first shades of darkness, I smelt the stench of death. A stench above me, a stench below me. Wherever I turned, I smelt the same stench. A putrid smell, like the smell of burning human flesh. Little by little, it flooded my nostrils. I tried to […]
“I’m a romantic, you brutes, and I adore Nizar Qabbani!” This was Karim’s only reply to people’s accusations and taunts. And it was on the basis of this reply that the camp residents had added the epithet “the Romantic” to his name. Whenever I saw Karim the Romantic coming back to the camp along the […]
We didn’t stay long at the bar. After we got Melanie’s text, I had the feeling that each of us wanted the other to finish their drink so we could take off for one of our houses. I could tell from the way we skipped from one topic of conversation to another, cutting them short […]
Although I was only ten years old, I could understand that something important had happened. Every time our bedroom door opened, my mother shut it again so we wouldn’t hear the frantic whispering in the living room. “Meetings” like this only happened in our house when something serious was going on. The door to the […]
When Suzanne came back from Switzerland, she’d left three-quarters of her body weight behind. That wasn’t her only loss, however, or the most significant. And I don’t think she’d object if I told you that losing her husband as soon as she got back wasn’t her greatest loss either. I’d been working mornings as a […]
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