Lost Spaces: Recovering Our Place

El ghorba © Sfiya

Narratives of Belonging

"When you’re a minority or a perceived outsider, it’s very easy for you to see the other side of things. You have a much easier time disconnecting from the prevailing narrative. When you look at the shared collective grief that stems from oppression, you can identify with a lot of it." Lubna Nazarani

Theatre Commentary

Staging Freedom: Decolonizing Theatre, Humanizing Palestinian Voices

Gaïna Clara Paul

To tell anti-colonial stories, participants, especially playwrights and directors, centred women’s voices in their art.

Meditation

Under the skies of Haifa, Jbala & Cergy

Nada El-Omari

I feel like I’m stuck inside a temple aflame, daydreaming of plucking a fig from a blaze. I want to ask you if you think we’re too young for this ghorba, but I don’t.

Art

Where the Gaze Breaks

Emma Haraké

The same technologies used to obliterate are also used to narrate.

Poetry

Chilloo

Himmat Singh Shinhat

The taste of salt carries memories that are not his, stories that Chilloo has never heard.

Short Story

People of the Elephant

Muhammad Sarfaraz Manji

Before we could hunt or think, whichever came first and will leave us first, there lived great creatures of ivory and bone that ruled this land.

Detail, The Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem Resurgent Nahda – Photo © Sheida Mousavi, 2024

Review

The Arab Exhibitions in Mandate Jerusalem: Resurgent Nahda—A Conversation Between Exhibitions

Sheida Mousavi

Palestinians were no mere passive subjects of colonialism schemes for Jerusalem’s future. – Nadi Abusaada

Art Review

“Sous un Nouvel Œil”: Reflecting on Migration, Identity and the Language of the Evil Eye

Camélia Bakouri

“When we leave a place, will we ever truly arrive at our destination?” Sfiya

My grandparents © Errol Sears and Maylene Yamin

Interview

How to Inhabit the Uninhabitable

Saarah Jabar

My childhood was coloured by the sweet dark syrup of Guyanese pepperpot.

Mullein, Laval University, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia commons

Poetry

Gloria & other poems

Louise Carson

swimming in words is it any wonder that when I surface and speak I sometimes say the wrong thing

Poetry

A giant grew inside my heart

Allan Hann

The lynx weren’t consulted, the black bear, never told.

Reconstructing Meaning

Even the birds in Gaza have wings but do not migrate - Photo Hla.bashbash, CC BY 4.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0

Tribute

Letters to a lost brother

Gisèle Yasmeen

My heart was full of love for this “foundling” brother with his gentle spirit. I was elated.

Book Review

Delightful food for thought: a review of Annapurna’s Bounty

Tabinda Burney

Our palates constantly evolve, perhaps with a tinge of nostalgia for the familiar and traditional food we grew up with...

Book Review

Spirit and Connection: A Review of Yahia Lababidi’s “What Remains to be Said”

Nilambri Ghai

"All languages are rough translations of our native tongue: the Spirit."

Book Review

river in an ocean—a translator’s guide to ‘decolonial translation’

Shahroza Nahrin

When Khairani Barokka asks if we must make everything comprehensible to the English-speaking world, I shift uncomfortably in my chair.

Roca dels Moros Cave, Catalonia, Spain – Source: Enric, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Essay

Archaeology is an Act of Love

Susana Hurlich

We are made of the same stuff that exists out there, way beyond our own small galaxy. It’s a very humbling thought.

Poetry

In Shadows, The Sound of Sixty Chainsaws & The Climb

Allie Duff

I have to get up close and personal with the feijoa tree...

Photo Essay

Beyond Context

Joseph Kary

Cultural exchange often works in two directions.

Meditation

between Uele and Hebron

Nada El-Omari

In Arabic, “wholeness” translates in a word that lifts when you say it rather than falling in your chest like in English.

Short Story

Sarah’s Return

El Arbi Mrabet

“The land belongs to the indigenous Palestinians — Muslims, Christians, Jews and others — whose forebears are the Canaanites. Did this Promised country fulfill its promises to you as it did to those of European origins?”

Navigating Chaos

Desert sky © Kathryn Jordan

Poetry

Distance and Time Unknown

John Ganshaw

We think we know, but we are floating in a comatose space.

Poetry

Blame a Palestinian & This, for instance

Nicola Vulpe

... the only thing I know is that words come after words until they don’t.

Commentary

The Heartbeat of the Montréal Intifada

Karla Stephan

Music, which was my personal refuge in the genocide, became my powerful tool for advocacy.

Essay

Degrees of Change

Tahieròn:iohte Dan David

"You want to change the world? Then get them to sing your own song. But—first—you must find out what your song is. To do that, you must find out who you are, and be proud of that.” Harry Belafonte

Meditation

À la gauche de Ti-Paradis, Croix-des-Bouquets et Yaffa

Nada El-Omari

I tell you a little deaf girl said she can’t hear the bombs but what she imagines in her mind is usually reality. You tell us about a song you don’t sing anymore

Art

Small Creatures

Susan Dubrofsky

These creatures are made of remnants that I have around me – wire, paper, pieces of wood, cloth, feathers, paint and whatever else I find.

Poetry

City Called Heaven

Kathryn Jordan

An iguana moves to catch my eye. Time seems to stop. These lost creatures stare, tell how they were pulled from their burrows . . .

Reflections

Kahani Sunao

Sumair Sattar

Our conversation went downhill quickly, as it often did when Amma remembered it was her grandmotherly duty to set me on the “right path.”

Theatre Commentary

How “Vierge” hits home with a daughter of the African diaspora

Ceta Gabriel

Friendship, religion, family, and betrayal—this play is an excellent representation of Black girls from the African diaspora growing up and acclimating to Canadian culture.

Essay

REBORN, IN INK AND FIRE – 3 poems by Auschwitz prisoner 135633

Joseph Kary

If forgiveness is the price of peace, it is one that many people in the aftermath of war will find impossible to pay.

Poetry

To soldiers who committed suicide & Word sonnets

Cyril Dabydeen

One lifetime only a world without wars, and peace to sustain, you see – no other territory to conquer – the tree growing taller...

Book Review

Buried truths and fragile connections: A review of Twist

Maya Khankhoje

Optic fibres are as thin as the hair of a human baby but if twisted into thick bundles, they can be very resilient. Resilient, yes, but not unbreakable.

Mutating Capitalism

Port au Prince tent city after the 2010 earthquake - UN Photo/Logan Abassi United Nations Development Programme, CC BY 2.0

Essay

If Words Fail, Power Speaks: Silence in a Mutating World

Marie Thérèse Blanc

When I was a child and my parents moved from Europe to Morocco, I had all the words.

$Poetry as kinship: STEADY. AGAINST THE ABSURD confronts a fractured world$

Book Review

Poetry as kinship: STEADY. AGAINST THE ABSURD confronts a fractured world

Darine Houmani

In these poems—powerful, fragmented, and multilingual—historical traumas share emotional space with hope in our fundamental humanity.

Poetry

You’re all weapons of war now

Allan Hann

I used to be afraid of the visions, especially in the woods at night.

The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer, illustrated by John Burgoyne (Scribner, 2024), 128 pages

Book Review

The Serviceberry: A Model for Nurturing a Different Economics

Maya Khankhoje

Capitalism, by definition and action, is a pyramid scheme. How can this pyramid be toppled?

Poetry

Scorched Birth

Vishesh Abeyratne

Soon the veins and arteries of cities are clogged with caravans of the outraged.

Poetry

to be forgiven & tanka

Ilona Martonfi

... you ask the boreal forests named after Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind ...

Poetry

The Weight of Dust

Dipti Gupta

... see which lives we lift and those we lay down in the silence ...

Book Review

Travelling Out of Bounds

Anna Fuerstenberg

Some were lied to about the truth of their ancestry, while others are drawn to cultures and lives very different from their own.

Essay

Nationhood Has No Borders

Rana Bose

There is a fable that Mahatma Gandhi was asked by a reporter what he thought about Western civilization, and his reply was, “It would be a good idea!”