The Key is a new online publication dedicated to covering Palestine as “the core issue at the heart of the modern world.” We’re joined by its editor-in-chief, Sara Yasin, former managing editor of the LA Times. The Key is an outgrowth of PalFest, an annual traveling literature festival that gathers Palestinian and international writers in Palestine.

You can find The Key at thekeymagazine.com

We talk about Lama Zuhair Khouri’s essay “The Conscripted Container” and Sara reads a poem by Tamara Nasr.

We encourage you to become a subscriber and supporter of The Key, which you can do at their website.

You can subscribe to BULAQ wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us on Twitter @bulaqbooks and Instagram @bulaq.books for news and updates. If you’d like to rate or review us, we’d appreciate that. If you’d like to support us as a listener by making a donation you can do so at https://donorbox.org/support-bulaq.

BULAQ is co-produced with the podcast platform Sowt. Go to sowt.com to check out their many other excellent shows in Arabic, on music, literature, media and more.

For all things related to Arabic literature in translation you should visit ArabLit.org, where you can also subscribe to the Arab Lit Quarterly. If you are interested in advertising on BULAQ or sponsoring episodes, please contact us at bulaq@sowt.com.

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The Egyptian feminist writer and doctor Nawal El Saadawi always spoke her mind. Her early books were explosive testimonials, based on her medical practice and personal experience, about sexual double standards and the abuses women faced because of them. She went on to write many more books, including novels, plays and several memoirs. Over the course of her life she was jailed, censored, fired, admired, and attacked by Islamists as an unbeliever. She is still one of the best-known and most translated Arab women writers.

Some of the books discussed in this episode include: The Hidden Face of Eve, The Fall of the Imam, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, Woman at Point Zero, Daughter of Isis and Walking Through Fire.

Ursula wrote about El Saadawy recently for The New York Review of Books.

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In this episode from a few years ago, we wandered through Arabic poetry and prose and talked about many different forms of literary love: regretful love, unreciprocated love, bad love, vengeful love, liberating love, married love.

We read this poem by Núra al-Hawshán:

“O eyes, pour me the clearest, freshest tears

And when the fresh part’s over, pour me the dregs.

O eyes, gaze at his harvest and guard it.

Keep watch upon his water-camels, look at his well.

If he passes me on the road

I can’t speak to him.

O God, such affliction

And utter calamity!

Whoever desires us

We scorn to desire,

And whom we desire

Feeble fate does not deliver.”

The Núra al-Hawshán poem, translated by Moneera al-Ghadeer, has a modern musical adaptation on YouTube produced by Majed Al Esa.

Yasmine Seale’s translation of Ulayya Bint El Mahdi. This poem and others were set to music on the album “Medieval Femme.”

Do’a al-Karawan (“The Nightingale’s Prayer”) by Taha Hussein

I Do Not Sleep, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, trans. Jonathan Smolin

The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz (1956-57)

Al-Bab al-Maftouh (The Open Door) Latifa al-Zayyat, trans. Marilyn Booth (1960)

All That I Want to Forget, by Bothayna Al-Essa, translated by Michele Henjum.

Rita and the Rifle, Mahmoud Darwish, made into a song by Marcel Khalife.

Ode to My Husband, Who Brings the Music by Zeina Hashem Beck

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