The Markaz Review

12/23/2025

🌒 [TMR 56 - NOIR]

In “Tahmina—a story from Iran,” Abdollah Nazari, translated from Persian by Salar Abdoh, follows a woman who has been running her whole life—from war, exile, and debt—and finds that even in a supposedly quiet town, the dangers and compromises of survival still won’t let her rest.
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🔗 Read the story: https://bit.ly/tahmina-a-story-from-iran

12/23/2025

📰 [TMR WEEKLY]

Latest articles in TMR Weekly:

• In “Christmas in Kineta—a story from Greece,” Ioanna Karystiani, translated by Nektaria Anastasiadou, follows an unexpected holiday gathering of cast-off sons and an aging mother on the coast, where tenderness and resentment surface over one long night.​
https://bit.ly/christmas-in-kineta-a-story-from-greece

• In “The Friend of the Fallen: James Baldwin in Istanbul,” Öykü Tekten walks the streets and archives of the city that became Baldwin’s refuge, tracing how Istanbul shaped his writing, politics, and ideas of home and solidarity.​
https://bit.ly/the-friend-of-the-fallen-james-baldwin-in-istanbul

• In “Emm Kamel: The Future Is Here and So Is the Past,” Amal Ghandour looks back at a year of political despair and fierce cultural resistance, reflecting on what it means to live—and keep thinking—in a time when history and catastrophe feel inescapably intertwined.​
https://bit.ly/emm-kamel-the-future-is-here-and-so-is-the-past

12/19/2025

Message from our editors 💬

This year at The Markaz Review, we’ve amplified nearly 200 writers from Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) and its diasporas, and more than 1,000 voices since our founding—building a literary home at what we call the center of the world.​

At a time when voices from our region are silenced, targeted, or distorted, we stand firm: literature is essential, and freedom of expression must be celebrated, not threatened. Every essay, story, or poem we publish is made possible by readers like you.​

As a nonprofit literary arts publication, your support directly pays our writers, editors, and the small team that keeps this platform alive. Help us continue publishing bold, nuanced, boundary‑pushing work by and about SWANA writers and artists.​

❤️ Stand with us and keep these stories alive: https://bit.ly/donatetmr

12/18/2025

We are all born with a mother tongue, though it is not always necessarily the tongue in which we feel most at ease as we grow up. Sometimes because this mother tongue has been lost along the way, quietly and passively, through unease and disuse, often as a result of pressure to assimilate, be it familiar or cultural; at other times, this loss can be swifter, and more aggressive, via migration, forced exile, or outright policies designed to estrange us from our language(s) of origin.

Beguiling and chimeric, a mother tongue is not always as easily acquired (and maintained) as we believe, nor as maternal and nurturing as we are taught. Sometimes it is imposed, cold as steel. Maternal languages are usually — rightly or wrongly — associated with authenticity, whether of expression or identity, which in turn inspires shame, pride, or longing, and often all of these at once. But no matter how distant, our mother tongues remain a kind of homeland, a map back to our earliest forms of expression.

Here at The Markaz Review, we are endlessly fascinated by the myriad paths language can take, and notably how different languages intersect, collide, clash, or merge. We are especially intrigued by the so-called “major” and “minor” languages of a country or region, for instance, Tamazight, spoken by Morocco's indigenous inhabitants, or the Kurdish spoken in Turkey and Iraq.

For our first bimonthly issue of 2026, MOTHER TONGUE, we are looking for tales of tongues — forked, split, wounded, enchanted, inherited, castaway, and more. We welcome your interpretation of the theme, whether it be centered on “mother” or “tongue,” in the form of compelling essays, short stories, poetry, art, reviews, and commentaries, as well as reflections about translation. Tell us which tongue you speak, or wish you spoke, and most importantly, tell us the why.

Send in your submissions: https://bit.ly/tmr-submissions

12/18/2025

🎨 [TMR 56 - NOIR — FEATURED ARTIST]

In “Featured Artist Ala Younis: Ambiguous Architectures in Abu Dhabi,” Arie Amaya-Akkermans explores how the Kuwaiti-born artist uses models, mosaics, and archival images to map a city where buildings are demolished and rebuilt in 20-year cycles, turning Gulf architecture into a stage for unstable histories and fragile futures.​

🔗 Discover Younis’s world of shifting skylines and political memory: https://bit.ly/featured-artist-ala-younis-ambiguous-architectures-in-abu-dhabi

12/16/2025

📰 [TMR WEEKLY]

Latest articles in TMR Weekly:

• In “A Portrait of Nevhiz, Turkey’s Rebel Artist,” Selin Tamtekin traces the life and work of Nevhiz, whose bold lines and fauvist colors have challenged state violence, patriarchy, and artistic convention since the 1960s.​
https://bit.ly/a-portrait-of-nevhiz-turkeys-rebel-artist

• In “If You See Something—an Iraqi Film on Asylum,” Alex Demyanenko reviews Oday Rasheed’s drama about an Iraqi doctor seeking refuge in New York, torn between the fragile life he’s building and the crises he left behind.​
https://bit.ly/if-you-see-something-an-iraqi-film-on-asylum

• In “A Literary Festival Talks About Africa from Africa,” Lulu Norman reports from the Marrakesh African Book Festival (FLAM), where writers are reshaping debates on African literature, decolonization, and who gets to tell the continent’s stories.​
https://bit.ly/a-literary-festival-in-marrakech-talks-about-africa-from-africa

12/11/2025

📝 [TMR 56 • NOIR]

In “An Unwritten Poem,” new fiction by Omar Khalifah, translated from Arabic by Barbara Romaine, an aspiring Palestinian poet in New York City tries to solve an unsolvable mystery—how to write the one poem that might change everything while moving through a city thick with memory, exile, and desire.​

🔗 Read the centerpiece story: https://bit.ly/an-unwritten-poem-new-fiction-by-omar-khalifah

12/10/2025

🌒 [TMR 56 • NOIR]

In the opening editorial, “Escaping the ‘Cockroach’—On Melancholy and Noir,” Jordan Elgrably and Mohammad Rabie trace how noir has seeped into our everyday lives: from corrupt states and endless wars to the quiet melancholy of scrolling through one crisis after another. They ask what it means to keep our humanity—and our imagination—alive in a world that feels permanently shadowed.

🔗 Read the editorial: https://bit.ly/escaping-the-cockroach-on-melancholy-and-noir

12/10/2025

GREAT « CABO NEGRO » REVIEW in DIACRITIK BY JEAN-PHILIPPE CAZIER. Merci très fort fort fort à l’écrivain et critique Jean-Philippe Cazier pour cette incroyable critique de mon film CABO NEGRO, publiée ce matin à DIACRITIK. Merci et Choukran pour cette longue, très profonde et très juste analyse. C’est un honneur pour nous tou.te.s, l’équipe du film et moi.Vous pouvez la lire ici: https://diacritik.com/2025/12/09/abdellah-taia-ce-que-les-corps-ne-disent-pas-cabo-negro/ -111918 Allez voir CABO NEGRO, sorti dans les salles françaises la semaine dernière… Amour tendre et Besos tendres à vous tou.te.s…Abdellah Taia

12/10/2025

Ah, the epistolary novel...

This is part of an interview with the Lebanese author Hoda Barakat that took place on September 30 2025. It has been translated from French and edited for clarity and length. You can also listen to…

12/05/2025

📣 TMR 56 • NOIR is live!

The world feels sharper, stranger, more shadowed than fiction. This issue dives into luminous darkness—stories of war and surveillance, cities and crime, desire and dread—through essays, fiction, poetry, and art from across the SWANA region and its diasporas.

🌟 Featuring work by: Jordan Elgrably, Mohammad Rabie, Omar Khalifah, Barbara Romaine, Arie Amaya-Akkermans, Ala Younis, Abdollah Nazari, Salar Abdoh, Stephen Rohde, Rana Asfour, Alex Demyanenko, Mirna Al-Mahdi, Saïd Khaitibi, Alexander E. Elinson, Melis Aker, Majd Aburrub, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Mohab Aref, Lina Mounzer, Bejan Matur, and Robert Bociaga.

🔗 Read the new issue now: https://bit.ly/tmr-56-noir