The Four Colours of Blood: An Interview with Norah Alkharashi and Yasmine Haj on the Arabic Poetry of Love and War

January 7, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas

The more we bridge our languages, the more effective our collective resistance can be.

In Arabic, the word for ‘love’ (حب) is nearly identical to the word for ‘war’ (حرب), differing by just one letter. The nearness and linguistic kinship between these two words is a felicitous metaphor for the tropes examined in the poetry anthology Arabic, between Love and War, published by Tkaronto, Canada-based trace press.

Arabic, Between Love and War assembles important voices from across the Arabophone world, such as Nour Balousha of Palestine, Najlaa Osman Eltom of Sudan, Rana Issa of Lebanon, Qasim Saudi of Iraq, as well as diasporic Arab poets in Canada, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and the United States. Edited by Palestinian poet Yasmine Haj and Saudi translator-scholar Norah Alkharashi, the anthology features poems translated from Arabic into English and vice versa, a number of which have garnered accolades such as the Lambda Literary Award, Atheer Poetry Prize, Arab American Book Award, and appeared in poetry collections published in Damascus, Beirut, Juba, California, Basrah, Algiers, and beyond.

In this interview, I spoke with both Haj (in Paris, France) and Alkharashi (in Ottawa, Canada) about the anthology and the ways in which the poetry of love and poetry of war converge.

Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): Congratulations to both of you on this riveting anthology, Arabic, between Love and War! How did this book come to be, and how is it particularly relevant and urgent today?

Yasmine Haj (YH): Thank you, Sam. This book is the epilogue to a workshop organised by trace press, ‘translating [x]’, in which Norah and I co-facilitated six online sessions on literary translation from Arabic. As we structured the workshop, we were drawn to the aesthetic of the words love and war in Arabic, and how the removal of one letter throws one word into its apparent opposite. We discussed the idea with the participants, some of which mentioned how tired they were of our world being discussed through the prism of war. This was in late 2022, early 2023, before Zionism heightened its genocide of Gaza and any reminder of indigeneity. We had no idea we would be editing this volume, with all its submissions, as we watched Palestine oscillate between those very two words, and other genocided lands fluctuate right along with it. Love of land, of people, and war waged upon that very existence, have been ongoing for more than a century, adding to the six hundred years of imperial annihilation and substitution. READ MORE…

Translation Tuesday: “Stray Dog” by Sadegh Hedayat

January 6, 2026  |  in Translations  |  by Manoo Mofidi

Two winters had passed since he’d sunk into this hellhole, since he’d had a proper meal, a comfortable sleep.

One person’s suffering is, very often, someone else’s joke. Pat, the dog at the center of this week’s Translation Tuesday, has never spoken with a human being, but he understands this well. Following an accident that separates him from his owner, Pat’s life is reduced to a pathetic spectacle in Varameen square, begging for scraps of food from a crowd of shopkeepers and street vendors who think it good luck to beat him often, their enthusiastic cruelty only escalating as Pat’s body and mind deteriorate. What follows is, at once, a powerful meditation on the suffering of non-human animals and an indictment of human cruelty in the face of nature’s capriciousness. Written in blunt, sensuous prose by Sadegh Hedayat and elegantly translated by Manoo Mofidi, “Stray Dog” is sure to haunt and alarm. Read on.

A few small stores—a bakery; a butcher shop; an apothecary; a coffee shop; and a barber shop, all of which there to halt hunger and provide life’s basic daily needs—formed Varameen Square. The Square and its people, under the brutal sun, half-burned, half-naked, longed for dusk’s first breeze and the evening shade. The people, the shops, the trees, the animals were all lethargic. The hot air weighed heavy, and a soft dust haze undulated in the cerulean sky, with the car traffic adding to its density.

On one side of the Square stood an ancient sycamore tree, trunk hollowed, bark frayed, but which, with ever more stubbornness, had stretched out its crooked and sickly branches. A wide platform had been set up under the shade of the dusty leaves of the tree, where a couple of kids were selling rice pudding and pumpkin seeds, lyrically beckoning passersby. A thick, muddy water toiled its way through the brook in front of the coffee house.

The only structure that stood out was the famous tower of Varameen, half of whose cracked cylindrical body could be seen with a cone on top. The sparrows nesting in the crevices of its fallen bricks were napping, having been silenced by the heat. Only the intermittent cries of an approaching dog broke the quiet.

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Graveyards as Palimpsests: A Review of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

January 5, 2026  |  in Reviews  |  by Darius Sobhani

The book does not merely document—it exhumes, observing death and its afterlives with a unique combination of spirituality and doubt.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enríquez, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, Hogarth, 2025

On a visit to St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, in New Orleans, the narrator of Mariana Enríquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave describes a particular site: ‘Another grave has a sign that says “Crime happened here” in red, but the story, which is detailed on the lower part of the sign, is illegible, washed away by the rain.’ With this image, the Argentinian author provides the perfect analogy for her approach in this most recent non-fiction. In historical and literary terms, a palimpsest is a manuscript page—typically made of parchment—that has been scraped clean to be reused for new writing. However, the original ink often left ghostly remains—faint traces of the earlier writing bleeding through the new surface. Just as a palimpsest may contain multiple eras of writing on a single sheet, the graveyard is a site where history is simultaneously layered and scraped away by neglect. Thus for Enríquez, the graveyard is the ultimate palimpsest: a site where the past remains waiting for a sensitive traveller to decipher its remnants, akin to a medium searching for spirits.

In summary, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is a compilation of personal anecdotes that take place in specific cemeteries, with chapters set in Georgia (the state), New Orleans, Paris, and Guadalajara, among others. These places become testing grounds for the notion of graveyard as palimpsest, a methodological effect winningly achieved through Enríquez’s standout narration, which reads as equally friendly and eccentric, with a bleakly comic outlook and a fascination with the supernatural, while also tinged with a hardened scepticism. She is not any mere tourist of the morbid, but someone with a deep, almost joyful affinity, for the macabre. This odd combination of credulity and cynicism is best illustrated in the chapter detailing her visit to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. During a visit to Conrad Aiken’s grave, the narrator recounts the horrific predicament of his family—how he was orphaned as a toddler after his father murdered his mother and subsequently committed suicide—but frames it within a series of casual remarks. Rather than expounding at length on the gruesome story, Enríquez mentions the grave with a peripatetic levity, recounting it amongst the perceptions of other graves that she walks by, noting: ‘Aiken’s grave isn’t the only one with a bench—Johnny Mercer also invites you to sit down.’ READ MORE…

Widening the River of Hindi Poetry: An Interview with Sourav Roy and Tuhin Bhowal

January 1, 2026  |  in Interviews  |  by Devi Sastry

The contemporary moment turned out to be far richer and more diverse than we'd anticipated.

Edited by writer-translators Sourav Roy and Tuhin Bhowal, Perennial: The Red River Book of 21st Century Hindi Poetry anthologises the work of forty poets, with a team of twenty-six translators, providing a glimpse into the diverse voices that animate Hindi poetry today. As Roy notes in his introduction—which wonderfully contextualises the history and development of Hindi’s poetic traditions, as well as their intersections with global literary movements—the language can be imagined as a vast and brimming river. As an anglophone reader myself, this collection offered an inlet to its ever-changing currents, with reflections from writers across the length and breadth of India, and beyond. From lyrical odes to political satire, folklore to philosophy, Perennial offers an entry point into Hindi poetry’s contemporary dynamism.

In this interview, I spoke with Roy and Bhowal about their approach to the project as co-editors and translators, possibilities for fidelity and creative betrayal in translation, and what comes next for Hindi poetry.

Devi Sastry (DS): This anthology must have been a massive undertaking, compiling two hundred poems from forty contemporary Hindi poets. Can you share a little bit about the making of this collection? What was the impetus behind the project? What challenges and discoveries did you encounter along the way?

Sourav Roy (SR): Perennial began with a phone call from Dibyajyoti Sarma, the publisher of Red River, in 2019. The impetus was straightforward; there has been no major recent anthology introducing contemporary Hindi poetry to English readers. We initially envisioned a smaller, more manageable project—perhaps twenty poets, completed within a year, but as we began reading, the scope expanded organically. The contemporary moment turned out to be far richer and more diverse than we’d anticipated.

Tuhin Bhowal (TB): I’m still not sure about the massiveness of this undertaking, but we certainly did take a long time—more than five years by the time the book came out in print. To be honest, I did not start with any such impetus in mind, or what the project actually meant, because literature clambered into my head very late in life (my mid-twenties). I had moved to Bangalore in 2017, and I began reading contemporary Hindi poetry seriously in the following year. I got incredibly interested in translation, but I was a complete novice, so in the beginning, I was just excited at the opportunity to work as peers on a full-length book with someone like Sourav, who had already been delving deeply into Hindi and English literature—reading, writing, translating—for so many years. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #1 Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words by Daniel Saldaña París

December 31, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

París mediates on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

It follows that our most anticipated and widely read work of 2025, tackles the most batted topic of the year: AI. Daniel Saldaña París’s “Translation, AI, and the Political Weight of Words” (tr. Christina MacSweeney) tackles it head-on in an interesting project for Cita Press, and shares his reflections in a thought-provoking essay published in the Summer issue.

For context, Cita Press is an open access publishing project that “pairs contemporary authors and designers with public domain or open-licensed texts to create a free online library of carefully designed books by women, in Spanish and in English.” The project at hand, the “Literary Translation & Technology Project,” involves using  AI (Large Language Models, Neural Language Models, and Machine Translators), traditional translation tools, and of course, a literary translator to evaluate AI’s potential for creating open access editions of works in translation. París took on a Spanish translation of Ten Days in a Mad-House by Nellie Bly. In this piece, they mediate on translation through AI, where questions of ethics and effectivity take center-stage—can AI do as we do, but better?

Exactly how revolutionary is this new technology in terms of our profession? Based on my one-off experience of translating Diez días en un manicomio, I can say that the benefits are limited to speeding up the translation process while not necessarily improving it.

. . .

When choosing the most appropriate translation of a particular phrase or sentence, I keep in mind the readership of the text, in addition to its social function: I don’t make the same decisions when translating for a Spanish publishing house as I would for an independent Latin American publisher, or for an open access project that will be consulted by Spanish-speakers of different origins who are unfamiliar with my version of the language. At the other extreme, when translating, I am also conscious of the historical immutability of the original: I am working with a text written in 1887 and I must retain certain usages of that context, even when this may shock our contemporary political sensibilities. 

First, París stresses the unacknowledged and unpaid labor concerning the body of work that trains AI. Given that this work is largely skewed to texts by male authors, there is an inherent gender bias in AI results. This would likely apply to translating the subtleties of minority-specific content that the software isn’t adequately trained to handle. Not to mention, were you aware that “each ChatGPT consultation uses two glasses of water?”

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Announcing Our December Book Club Selection: The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer by Belal Fadl

December 31, 2025  |  in Book Club, Reviews  |  by Ibrahim Fawzy

Here, language tells the truth without mitigation, even when that truth is ugly.

Upon the premiere of Youssef Chahine’s Cairo at Cannes, the Egyptian critics in attendance resented its unflinching portrayal of the city’s poverty and density, claiming it as a derogatory and inciting the film’s eventual ban. In The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer, author and screenwriter Belal Fadl takes a similarly undaunted look at the capital: its swarming underbelly, its suffocating divides, and its unrelenting pressures that bloom both tragedy and absurdity. Written in a captivating style that listens carefully to the city’s manifold ranges, Fadl is determined to pull back the curtains, putting a middle finger up to politeness or grandeur, and drawing instead on chaos, comedy, and linguistic richness to portrait a Cairo full of adrenaline, be it from laughter, thrill, or the sheer will to survive.

The Asymptote Book Club aspires to bring the best in translated fiction every month to readers around the world. You can sign up to receive next month’s selection on our website for as little as USD20 per book; once you’re a member, join our Facebook group for exclusive book club discussions and receive invitations to our members-only Zoom interviews with the author or the translator of each title.   

The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer by Belal Fadl, translated from the Arabic by Osama Hammad, DarArab, 2025

Belal Fadl’s The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi and Sharawi the Adulterer announces itself with a provocation and never retreats from it: “Whenever I tell my story, I say that what led me to live with Um Mimi were two Polish breasts with unparalleled nipples.” From this opening confession, the novel signals that nothing sacred will be protected from language, and nothing obscene will be softened for the reader’s comfort. But this is not bravado for its own sake—Fadl’s novel is built on a wager: that obscenity, vulgarity, and excess are not moral failures of language, but its most truthful registers when class humiliation, bodily precarity, and institutional contempt are the subject. To read The Completely True Tales of Um Mimi (or to be more accurate, to read it in translation) is therefore to confront an ethical question: how does a translator render a voice whose truth depends on its refusal to be clean?

The novel’s narrative arc is deceptively simple (almost cliché). It’s 1991, and a young man from Alexandria arrives in Cairo to study media at Cairo University, determined to escape an abusive father and a suffocating household. His grades win him admission, but his finances dictate his fate. Having endured a humiliating stay in a flat with “decent, pious, and religious young men who knew God and had learned the Quran by heart,” he is evicted for attending an R-rated film, and ends up renting a room in the ground-floor flat of Um Mimi, a retired madam, on a nameless lane known only as “the street behind Casino Isis.” READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #2 An Interview with Anton Hur

December 30, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Hur holds language in the highest esteem. Rightly so, for when we all turn to dust, poetry is our final imprint on the universe.

Our runner-up for the title of most widely read article of 2025—also courtesy of Assistant Interview Editor Sarah Gear—is our interview with Anton Hur from the Spring issue. A Korean-English translator who debuted in our pages nine years ago, Hur’s work includes Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki by Baek Sehee, I Decided to Live as Me by Kim Suhyun, and Beyond the Story: 10-Year History of BTS (number one in the NYT’s 2023 bestseller list). Hur is a literary force with much to learn from, this enlightening interview takes us through his writing, thoughts on language, AI, activism, and his role as a judge for the International Booker prize.

Gear points to Hur’s blog as a boon full of advice for emerging translators, such as how to draft successful pitches to publishers, amongst other notes. In this interview, for one, Hur acknowledges the frustrations of the current publishing industry that is, to no one’s surprise, “racist and sexist and homophobic and xenophobic.” This is a gap that can be addressed by hiring more translators of color and those working from their heritage languages—Hur’s success is a testament against native-speaker elitism in the translation space.

In 2025, Hur has translated the likes of Bora Chung, Le Young-do, Sung-il Kim, Kim Choyeop and Park Seolyeon. With ‘at least five’ titles slated for 2026, Hur’s writing is the gift that keeps on giving. That includes, of course, his own exceptional novel, Toward Eternity.

The discussion of this novel offers profound takeaways. The plot explores the larger role of language and poetry through an AI machine named Panit, who learns how to understand poetry. Toward Eternity, as described by Gear, “explores the nature of what it is to be human and, I would argue, the intrinsic importance of literature—a reflection of Hur’s academic background in Victorian poetry, his experience of translation, and his belief in the power of language.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #3 An Interview with Jen Calleja

December 29, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Calleja is a worthy mentor for aspiring translators. Here, she offers a deeply informative dive into the niche.

Our third most widely read piece of 2025 hails from our Fall issue: a fascinating interview with literary translator Jen Calleja conducted by Assistant Interview Editor Sarah Gear. Much of this discussion is anchored by Calleja’s experimental memoir, Fair: The Life-Art of  Translation (Prototype, 2025), the summative advice of an industry veteran with a body of over twenty translated novels from German (including International Booker Prize nominee The Pine Islands  by Marion Poschmann).

Needless to say, Calleja is a worthy mentor for aspiring translators. Here, she offers a deeply informative dive into the niche. The distilled life lessons in Fair are many, and as Gear says, it reads as both an “inspiration and manifesto.” This interview also spans the lives of translators in general, challenges of the field, and the implications of AI.

A key theme to anchor the discussion: What does it mean to be a translator? Calleja boldly takes this on, describing the core of it as “holding hope for dialogue and understanding that is face to face.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #4 Anthropocene by Carolina Brown

December 28, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

A cocktail with notes of dark humor, existential dread, and a macabre aftertaste to complete a hard-hitting flavor.

Our fourth most popular article of 2025 is a stand-out from the Summer 2025 issue: “Anthropocene” by Carolina Brown (tr. Jessica Powell). In this literally biting cli-fi, we follow two postdocs investigating the excrement of an endangered penguin species in Antarctica. To give you a taste of the narrator’s acerbic voice, here’s how the story begins:

I’ve caught myself, several times a day, thinking about Octavio’s pelican dewlap. The thing about doing research full time is that it leads you to fantasize; you spend a lot of time alone and sampling is a repetitive task. Also, who hasn’t dreamed of killing a coworker? Everyone has, obviously. Of course they have. People have this image of scientists as evolved, circumspect types. What’s that word people use to describe Brits? Phlegmatic. 

Alex feels uncomfortably real—the details of their study are intriguing, and their isolation is felt as raw misery. The tension that builds between Alex and Octavio is intense and engrossing; we’re kept on our toes by razor-sharp exchanges and an unapologetic stream of consciousness. A well of pity for Alex quickly morphs into a raging sense of alarm for our futures. The touch of climate horror presents a perfectly believable future to our present, belying an entirely appropriate sense of anxiety. READ MORE…

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #5 Pickled by Johanna Sebauer

December 27, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Society must confront the question: do we really still need the pickle?

Coming in at number five is a matter of contentious debate, a real pickle. No, really. Winter 2025 gave us “Pickled” by Johanna Sebauer (tr. Lillian M. Banks and Aaron Sayne), a hilarious morsel of Austrian humor.  This is a piece that distills the fanaticism of trends and the infectious capacity of unworthy opinions.

What comes first, milk or cereal? Toothpaste or water? Yes, there is a correct answer. Yes, it’s still wrong to someone, vehemently so. With a finger on the heated pulse of such disagreements, Sebauer adds to the genre with the identity crisis of a pickle—the question being, should it exist?

In a newsroom office setting, instigating character Pertak is burned by pickle brine while opening a jar. In total shock at the unchecked damage of this vicious snack, he takes it upon himself to raise the alarm. What should be a lone man’s subway take evolves into a national tirade against the pickle. Our unfortunate narrator becomes witness to a gag gone rabid.

 Isn’t it time we took a closer look, he wrote, at pickles packed in vinegar? The liquid can rob a person of his sight, yet it is being sold on local supermarket shelves as-is, no warning labels, within easy reach of children! Who knows what damage accidents involving pickle juice have already caused? And what about our much-vaunted socialized health care system, already on shaky ground: shouldn’t we help save it by calling these liquids what they are? A menace!

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #6 from Elegies of the Earth by Ahmad Shamlou

December 26, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

With protest as poetry, resistance as love—Shamlou offers inspiring sentiments to guide us in the new year.

Our sixth most-read article of the year is a golden find from our Summer 2025 issue, an excerpt from the late Ahmad Shamlou’s (1925-2000) “Elegies of the Earth” (tr. Niloufar Talebi). A nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Shamlou’s time-honored status as a poet, translator, editor, and Irani cultural icon is a known fact. What better time to honor the literary great than the year of his centennial? With a body of work that stretches past seventy, we have Niloufar Talebi to thank for these deftly translated verses that impart Shamlou’s belief that “poetry should incite, uplift, and endure.”

As the people’s poet from a time when poetry was public speech, Shamlou’s contemporary blend of East and West has aged all too well. His legacy lives on through poignant works; feather-light in speech yet dense in meaning.

Sample an excerpt:

from Nocturnal (Among the Eternal Suns)

Among the eternal suns
your beauty
is an anchor—
a sun
that frees me
from the dawn of all stars.

Your gaze
is the fall of tyranny—
a gaze that dressed
my bare soul
in love
so fully that now
the darkest night of never
feels like nothing but a comedy of ironies.

Your eyes told me
tomorrow
is a new day—
eyes that spark love!
And now, your love:
a weapon
to wrestle with my fate.

*

I had thought the sun lay beyond the horizon,
that no escape remained but an early exit,
or so I had believed.

Then came Aida, undoing the eternal exit.

 

August 1962 
From Aida in the Mirror (Nil Press, 1964)

Shamlou’s romantic view of love as the ultimate weapon against oppression is a tale as old as time, one that continues to endure in its truth. Fearless and bold in its emotion, composed in mesmerizing language, this piece unlocks that which supercedes all: sacred freedom.

It’s also ultimately an eloquent reminder of what matters most from a revolutionary that came before us. With protest as poetry, resistance as love—Shamlou offers inspiring sentiments to guide us in the new year. 

As we reach the second half of this year’s round-up, check-in tomorrow for number five!

READ OUR SIXTH MOST WIDELY READ ARTICLE OF THE YEAR

*****

Discover more on the Asymptote blog:

 

Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #7 Love and Mistranslation by Youn Kyung Hee

December 25, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

This seamless work of lyrical criticism charts a path that begins with this: poems as gifts.

Poems, they are also gifts—gifts to the deeply attentive. Fate-carrying gifts. 

—Paul Celan, letter to Hans Bender, May 18, 1960

 

Merry Christmas! #7 is a perfect pick for today. A crowning jewel of our Spring 2025 issue, The Gift, is  “Love and Mistranslation”  by Youn Kyung Hee (tr. Spencer Lee-Lenfield). Youn’s prose is beyond gorgeous—translator Lee-Lenfield described it best, saying she “revels in tight and rhythmic choreography of long sentences, in menageries of carefully chosen vocabulary, in sheer love of the expressive capabilities of Korean.” Complementary to the season, this seamless work of lyrical criticism charts a path that begins with this: poems as gifts.

The concepts of ‘poem’ and ‘gift’ are flipped inside out as Youn flows from one point to the next, enlightening us further with each progression. Key observations point to the ‘postal essence’ of gifts, and poems as ‘words in motion.” Youn likens the latter to the message in a bottle—the poem is adrift, a precious gift for the reader who meditates on the meaning, and impassioned by the art, pays it forward through translation.

A poem-gift is only unlocked by the deeply attentive. The reader becomes a poet through translation, and in turn, the sender-poet becomes the recipient. In the process of engagement, ‘mistranslation’ is poetic embellishment, born out of a love for the message.

Youn deeply appreciates the artistry of exchanging one term for another, the symphony of finding words that capture the ‘right’ meaning. After all, “What should we call this person, who says in poems what the poet does not say, if not “a poet”? And so, mistranslations increasingly disappear. Even mistranslations are a different language turning into a poem.”

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #8 The House of Termites by Ubah Cristina Ali Farah

December 24, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

Whether displacement is forced or voluntary, there is one prevailing symptom: loss.

Coming in at number eight, “The House of Termites” is a poetic essay from our Winter 2025 issue by Somali-Italian writer Ubah Cristina Ali Farah (tr. Brandon Michael Cleverly Breen) that paradoxically succeeds at being both unique and universal. As she reflects on a life between borders, from Somalia to Italy to Belgium, Ali Farah ponders a question close to all migrants: What does it mean to live in exile?

This work is a treasure trove for the reflective reader. Sure to be bookmarked, there is a goldmine of pensive moments to glean wisdom from. One of many to start us off: “Migrating means disappearing into yourself, dying and being reborn, running the risk of becoming invisible, or rather, of being seen in another way.”

Whether displacement is forced or voluntary, there is one prevailing symptom: loss. There is a constant undercurrent of disconnection from the physical space one inhabits and their distant home. Ali Farah draws on the wisdom of James Baldwin to describe this condition:

My obsession had always been that of reimagining Mogadishu, my “Garden of Eden,” even if it was anything but a terrestrial paradise. “Maybe life only offers the possibility of remembering the garden or forgetting it,” Baldwin writes in Giovanni’s Room. “One thing or the other: you need strength to remember, you need another kind of strength to forget, and you need to be a hero to do both things together.” 

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Our Top Ten Articles of 2025, as Chosen by You: #9 When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend by Bassam Yousuf

December 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Haajar Abu Ismail

This evocative piece blends warm and melancholic notes that linger long after reading.

One day, as I was undergoing yet another round of torture from the secret police in the infamous Palestine Branch, I cried out: “Abdullah al-Daliyah!” Abdullah al-Daliyah is one of our Alawite ancestors, a saint whose name the men from my village invoke to this day when they’re in dire straits. The man torturing me suddenly stopped and yanked off my blindfold. With a wild-eyed stare, he demanded: “Who are you?”

I kept quiet, since in the opposition we were strictly forbidden ever to disclose our names. He shouted in agitation: “Say something! Are you Bassam?”

I nodded. Turning away, he marched around the interrogation room, then closed the door and continued pacing up and down without looking at me. Finally he wheeled around and asked, his eyes full of tears: “Don’t you know me?”

I shook my head. After ten years, he was unrecognizable. With a sigh, he bowed his head. “I’m Abdullah . . . ”

Occasionally, one comes across circumstances so unbelievable they can only be engineered by fate. Coming in at No. 9 in our countdown of the most-read articles of 2025, this poignant piece of nonfiction follows Syrian political activist Bassam Yousuf (tr. Katherine Van de Vate) as he reflects on his relationship with a childhood friend, Abdullah. In this essay featured in our Summer 2025 issue, Yousuf traces their parallel paths as he sides with the political opposition, and Abdullah with the Assad regime—a choice that culminates in their bitter reunion. The title gives it away: “When I looked into the face of my torturer . . . I recognized my old school-friend.”

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