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Excerpted from El Ghourabaa: A Queer and Trans Collection of Oddities
This week’s excerpt is from the forthcoming El Ghourabaa (Metonymy Press), a collection edited by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch and Samia Marshy that assembles inventive, fun, experimental, playful, and wonderfully weird works by Arab and Arabophone queer authors.
Below, we share two evocative teasers by George Abraham and Karim Kattan.
Excerpt from “Heritage” by George Abraham in El Ghourabaa
Come morning, he won’t even remember my name.
Come midnight, we’ll be washed of his every trace:
the blood pooling in moonlight, staining oceans
empty of biology’s brief mimicry. I said I love him
because he too was born on the wrong side of a wall;
perhaps, in funeral quiet, this is the whitest he’ll ever be.
We thank him for his service behind a makeshift altar—
& what of gratitude isn’t a thinning bloodline?
His head pillowed by a flag of blood & star. In life,
he’d want to cook, he’d never let us leave empty stomached.
His brother grips my hand. Asks what are you?
Transfixes his eyes on the wounds I bulleted into my own face.
All he knows of divinity was once heresy & clipped wings.
Excerpt from “Night Work” by Karim Kattan in El Ghourabaa
One night, when Tony wasn’t sleeping over, Anton was woken up at around three am by loud, banging noises. He shot up, his body like a lightning rod responding to similar sounds in his distant memory. The sound went on. The windows were about to break. “What the fuck,” he mumbled.
They lived in an occupied city, pockmarked with checkpoints. Soldiers and military jeeps patrolled regularly. He was used to their noise. Though the check-point near him was usually closed at this time of night, he supposed the sound might be coming from there. The first, most probable hypothesis was that the soldiers were up to something. But why the construction noise? He could distinctly recognize the roars of bulldozers, the ebbing sound of drills, the metronome of back-up beepers.
After a while, windows still shaking and the cacophony still raging, he decided to go back to sleep. When he woke up, a few hours later, he recalled a flurry of sounds, beepers, drills, wheels, but upon leaving his bed, he promptly forgot about the sounds of the night.
* * *
George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are a board member for the Radius of Arab American Writers, and a Kundiman fellow. With Noor Hindi, they are co-editing a Palestinian poetry anthology titled HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US (Haymarket Books, 2024) and are a Litowitz MFA+MA student at Northwestern University.
Karim Kattan is a writer born in Jerusalem. He writes in French and in English, and his work has been featured in various art spaces, exhibitions, and biennales, including the MMAG Foundation in Amman, Bétonsalon in Paris, B7L9 in Tunis, Arquetopia in Puebla, Art Kulte in Rabat, the Berlinale Forum in Berlin, Frac des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou, and the 58th Venice Biennale. He was one of the co-founders and directors of el-Atlal, an arts and writing residency in the oasis of Jericho (Palestine). In English, his work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Strange Horizons, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, khōréō, +972 Magazine, Translunar Travelers Lounge, The Funambulist, Words Without Borders, and more.
The full contributor list includes Etel Adnan, Rabih Alameddine, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, Joe Kadi, Marlin M. Jenkins, Leila Marshy, Trish Salah, Olivia Tapiero, Nour Symon, Yehia Anas Sabaa, Nofel, Hoda Adra, Ralph Haddad, Seif Siddiq, Karim Kattan, Andrea Abi-Karam, Bazeed, George Abraham, Sarah O’Neal, Micaela Kaibni Raen, Nour Kamel, and Barrak Alzaid, Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch, and Samia Marshy.
Preorder El Ghourabaa here on All Lit Up, available mid-June 2024.
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