Essays and Features

 

“The least we can do at this critical historical moment is to respect the suffering of the Syrians (and the suffering of everyone who was tortured by the Syrian Baath regime, regardless of their nationality) and to remain silent for a while. To come to grips with all this suffering, pain, loss of reason, and torture, we perhaps need a long time,” writes Basma Al-Khatib, a Lebanese writer and novelist.  

 

The sudden arrest of award-winning Algerian-French author Boualem Sansal and the ensuing silence regarding his release have produced a global outcry, bringing literary, cultural, and political circles to the writer’s defense. Sansal becomes the second author to agitate Algeria’s political and literary scene in recent months, next to fellow Algerian-French writer Kamel Daoud, whose recent legal tangle over his Prix Goncourt-winning novel “Houris” remains ongoing. Both cases raise apprehensions among critics and writers over Algeria’s course toward further restrictions on freedoms, especially concerning criticisms of the country’s history amid current talks about Morocco’s autonomy proposal for Western Sahara.

 

 

The Lebanese at home and abroad have been glued to their television and social media screens since September 23, awaiting news of the military operations that went beyond the bordering southern villages and reached areas as far as the deep south, the Bekaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut. Mount Lebanon, Central Beirut, and even the north of the country were not spared from Israeli raids.

 

Plumes of black and gray smoke billow behind the outline of Baalbek’s historic Temple of Jupiter like a foreboding shroud, disrupting the blue of the skyline with heavy, hazy air. That the ancient Roman ruin’s brush with destruction left it seemingly unscathed offers little reassurance, overshadowed by more pressing fears that the city and its cultural heritage won’t be so lucky next time.