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My grandmother was 16 years old during the Six-Day War. Fought from June 5 to June 10, 1967, this was a war between Egypt, with a coalition of other Arab states, and Israel. It began with escalating tensions between Egypt and Israel, primarily over issues such as the blockade of the Straits of Tiran and military build-ups along the Sinai border. Egypt, under the leadership of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, found itself facing off against a well-funded US-...

Under the shackles of a divine curse, Sisyphus is a man damned to push an ever-heavier boulder up a mountain; only the universe’s death and the cessation of all creation will bring this unending toil to its conclusion. Regardless of the speed or pace at which he pushes the rock, and whether he does so with a smile or in agony, the boulder will inevitably roll back down.

In Alaa Al Aswany’s ‘The Yacoubian Building,’ the pervasive themes of sex and penetration resonate throughout the narrative, prominently manifesting in the characters of Busayna, Taha, Hatim, and Souad- all of whom occupy the role of the penetrated and consequently experience feminization.

In Amir Ahmadi Arian’s novel "Then the Fish Swallowed Him", the specter of the abject looms large, permeating every facet of existence for its protagonist, Yunnus. Arian confronts the reader with a world saturated in revolting imagery—decay, death, feces, blood, and injustice—where the boundaries between the human and the inhuman blur.

In Tayeb Salih’s novel “Season of Migration to the North,” the character of Mustafa Sa’eed views himself as a lie, a disease; he is not human but rather an embodiment of colonialism. From a young age, Sa’eed was taken from his country and surrounded by Europeans who imposed their idea of what a Sudanese man should be.

Sol Hachuel’s death lives and breathes within the prayers of Muslim and Jewish women alike. As a saint, her spirit brings healing and bestows “baraka” or luck upon Moroccan women, further healing the wounds inflicted by colonization that strategically divided Jews and Arabs/Muslims, facilitating a smoother French expansion into North Africa. After her death, Sol’s legacy became ingrained in colonialist ideologies, positioning her as the epitome of the effeminate Jewish victim, thereby reinforcing the paradigm that contrasts Jews with the perceived violent and backward Arab/Muslim barbarian.

Through Shibli’s detached and fact-based narrative style, she shows how these are technically mundane everyday atrocities that exist within the lives of Palestinians, while still highlighting that they are, in fact, just that – atrocities. This everyday restriction of movement, destruction of buildings, erasure of history through the maps, and very real threat that exists during every interaction with an Israeli soldier- somatically lives within the body of every single Palestinian.

Dr. Victor Frankenstein created his monster to discover the ever-expanding mysteries of existence and push the boundaries of what human-beings are capable of. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, these desired discoveries were ones of the creation of life and interworkings of consciousness- What is a human being? What is life? Can we control existence?