ArabLit Quarterly Spring 2025: GRIEF (PRINT)

The GRIEF issue of ArabLit Quarterly brings readers & writers together into a space of shared rage, shared love, and a shared way forward. We share in the horror of seeing small children covered in the grime of cement dust and smoke; the horror of manufactured hunger and deprivation; the horror of a whiteboard on which healthcare workers have written REMEMBER US. We share in the grief-rage of people kidnapped by governments, of climate collapse, of profit margins wedged open far enough to swallow people whole.

We created this issue of the magazine for a grief that is communal, material, ongoing, and also fertile.

In “Do Not Reconcile: A Grief in Letters,” Abdelrahman ElGendy curates six letters written to people who can no longer receive them. The project is inspired by Amal Dunqul’s Do Not Reconcile—a rithā’ poem where grief “becomes a springboard not only into lament, but into fury.”

In James Montgomery’s “Afterloss,” he translates al-Muʿadhdhal and al-Mutanabbi as a path toward writing about the physical and psychic transformations of grief on the human body. In Egyptian author Alaa Abdulwahab’s “Ghostly Faces,” a chorus of ghosts follow Alaa around as she comes to terms with the loss of her beloved cat Susu, which calls to mind other losses in her life, especially the death of her mother. We have poetry-in-grief from Gaza; Batool Abu Akleen shares a poem of her own, “The Crow,” and translates two by her contemporary Wadah Abu Jami, while Wiam El-Tamami brings us new work by Nasser Rabah.

And we have more on grief throughout the centuries: from Sudan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, and beyond. As Abdelrahman ElGendy writes in his introduction to our collection of grief-in-letters: “We consider grief not as a final act or resolution, but an opening.”