Wiam El-Tamami
As seen in:
MSN,
The Paris Review,
Ploughshares,
Independent (Nigeria),
ArabLit,
The Markaz Review,
The Dial
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Articles by Wiam El-Tamami
“Confound” by Wiam El-Tamami — The Dial
It started with a pair of socks. They appeared in the hallway — tucked into one another, a small, black bundle — and at first I thought they belonged to my flatmate, until I remembered that she had been away for a week already when they appeared. Then there was a bowl, appearing in the kitchen one innocuous Sunday afternoon, a yellow bowl I had never seen before. Did it belong to my friend who had come over for dinner the night before, and brought over broccoli?
‘What have I survived’: New Poetry by Mahmoud Alshaer
Gaza, Poetry Gaza, Mahmoud Alshaer, Poetry, Wiam El-Tamami By Mahmoud Alshaer Translated by Wiam El-Tamami I survived—came out of yesterday alive, carried out on the shoulders of the wind. Now I can cry—not to confess, but to clear the silence pent up in the throat, which preserves the shadows of sounds. Unshackle me from the time that circles my wrists. A new day breaks, knowing nothing of my history: how I spent half my life measuring the distance bombs leave behind in the soul.
Making of a Poem: Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami on “The War Is Over”
By Nasser Rabah and Wiam El-Tamami May 28, 2025 For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets and translators to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Nasser Rabah’s poem “The War Is Over,” translated from the Arabic by Wiam El-Tamami, appears in our new Spring issue, no. 251. Here, we asked both Rabah and El-Tamami to reflect on their work. 1. Nasser Rabah How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else? I live in Gaza.
Paris Review - The War Is Over by Nasser Rabah, translated by Wiam El-Tamami
The critic Fredric Jameson died at the age of ninety on September 22, 2024, a little more than a year after the first of the three conversations that form the basis of the text below. In spite of Jameson’s years, the news came as something of a shock, given the productivity he kept up into his tenth decade.
From Mahmoud Abu Hashhash’s ‘Violation’
Palestine, Poetry #ReadPalestineWeek, Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Wiam El-Tamami By Mahmoud Abu Hashhash Translated by Wiam El-Tamami My friends, faraway and safe in their houses and streets their offices and parks write to me asking: Are you still alive? They don’t reply when they receive my cryptic response * The night is pregnant with bombing. This evening I bought a beach chair and table, second hand. I thought: they’d be good on the balcony. And for transporting the wounded, if need be.
Poems by Nasser Rabah, Amanee Izhaq and Mai Al-Nakib
A Year Nasser Rabah Translated by Wiam El-Tamami It’s been a year since I’ve heard singing in the street, seen someone dancing at a wedding; a school bus coming or going; a flower passed from one hand to another. For a year we’ve been passing around the hateful cake of war. Not a child left out, nor a garden, a book, a wish. By day, we train our eyes to swim in blood and not get wet. We train them to miscount our missing limbs.
New Poetry by Nasser Rabah: ‘Amjad’
Poetry Nasser Rabah, Wiam El-Tamami Poet and short-story writer Nasser Rabah is on the list of finalists for this year’s Arabic Flash Fiction Prize from ArabLit and Komet Kashakeel. He and translator Wiam El-Tamami share this poem. Nasser Rabah Translated by Wiam El-Tamami Grief is cheap; death a worn-out horse; the hospitals heaving with the calls of the drowned. Who will listen to me tell the story of Amjad? Who will give me their heart — and a moment of silence? I tried to tell the driver.
This Shattering by Wiam El-Tamami
Author’s Note It’s an old folk tale: a group of blind men encounter an elephant, and each comes away with a different story of what an elephant is. So it was with my family. In our case, the elephant was a war—a sudden invasion of the country that we had made our home. I was six, my sister was eight, my mother thirty-six, and my father forty-one. My memories of that time are vivid but impressionistic: flashes of images, scenes, sensations.
Cairo Song - Independent Newspaper Nigeria Original
WIAM EL-TAMAMI ‘as in not much new / as in no news is good news / as in the war is over; has been for decades now / ’ – Victoria Adukwei Bulley, ‘not quiet as in quiet but’ Cairo. From my parents’ seventh-floor balcony I watch pigeons swoop and dive, as frantic as the city below them. Cairo is a relentless roar. A barrage of car horns, motors rushing and rumbling. Gangs of street dogs, barking, snarling, stalking the neighborhood.
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