The Rakha

Author of The Book of the Sultan's Seal, The Crocodiles, And The Dissenters

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  • مرثاة الحياة الجديدة

    A New Poem in Arabic* انهيارنا. والبلاد. مليونُ طفل مقاتل. والجذوع التي تتلوى. كانَ عِندي جاذبية. يا صديقي الذي يصدّق. يا رفيق الحياة الجديدة. حتى مصارعُنا جَمرَكوها. ألفُ ناشطٍ يصرِف تذاكر. الجماهير الغفيرة. على رأي عادل إمام. وحياةِ أولادِك دقيقة. هل رأيتَ الحافلات. كل قنبلة مدينة. كل صاروخ مجنّح. والمزابل. والغرام. وقلوبنا التي تتمزق. والطموح…

  • Three Days Since the Ides of March

    and I just saw a phone video in which a Beirut apartment building collapses like a domino house. I don’t know the apartment building but the area looks familiar, and the speed with which the barely visible rocket brings the whole thing down makes it seem like an action flick or a video game. Unreal.…

  • On Surviving One More Year, Ambivalently

    Comrades and confidantes, one and all: It seems the wheel has turned again. As of January 1, I am officially in the last year of my fifth decade. It’s honestly hard to believe, but also the most believable thing. I’m less troubled by it than I feel I should be. Perhaps because the dread dismay…

  • I Have So Much to Say

    about what’s happening online and off. I think a lot about people who commit atrocities. I think about people who post about atrocities on social media. The way atrocities are sandwiched between glamour selfies and food porn. The way they’re packaged into moral positions that, no matter what people think they are, are actually just…

  • The Incredible Hannah & Postmuslim Jitters

    I want to share my conversation on The Dissenters with the incredible Hannah Hutchings-Georgiou [and] leave you with a tiny outtake from Postmuslim, which I wrote in the course of one essay, then tried to fit into another. In vain.