Borders

Inescapable Closure, by Faraz Aamer Khan. Image courtesy of the artist

This is not evening. This is not beauty or a sentence. This is not the moon chanting or the scarlet blue. This is not rain or lies tearing down. This is not a suitcase or a fleeing day. This is not Arabic jazz or a city of lights. This is not a mind wiping a past. This is not a muted mouth or a dare. This is not a praise outlining a body about to commit a cry, a cry about to define a life, a life about to contract chaos to wind itself of the fever in its memory. There is no consolation, just furies shivering in our spines and what we hoped we’d never have to see.

~ Nathalie Handal

Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Arab world, educated in the United States and United Kingdom, and has moved between cities in Asia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and the United States most of her life. Her recent books include the flash collection ‘The Republics’, lauded as “one of the most inventive books by one of today’s most diverse writers” and winner of the Virginia Faulkner Award for Excellence in Writing and the Arab American Book Award; the critically acclaimed ‘Poet in Andalucía’; and ‘Love and Strange Horses’, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. Handal is a Lannan Foundation Fellow, Centro Andaluz de las Letras Fellow, Fondazione di Venezia Fellow, and winner of the Alejo Zuloaga Order in Literature, among other honors. She is a professor at Columbia University and writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders.