Posts Tagged: Afghanistan

On Trauma, Memory, and Language: Talking with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

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Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi discusses her new novel, SAVAGE TONGUES.

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The Lonesome Home: A Conversation with Aria Aber

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Aria Aber discusses her debut poetry collection, HARD DAMAGE.

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Abstracting Yourself: A Conversation with Robin Hemley

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Robin Hemley discusses his new essay collection, BORDERLINE CITIZEN.

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Terror Is a Faggot with Halal Sausages Strapped to His Chest

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Dishonesty became a form of protection.

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A Parcel of Stories: Hard Damage by Aria Aber

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The speaker in Hard Damage, it seems, is writing herself to life.

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Nothing Foreign about It: Talking with Omar El Akkad

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Omar El Akkad discusses his debut novel American War, suicide terrorism, fossil fuels, and blankets.

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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles

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As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.

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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”

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“Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really?

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The Last Book I Loved: Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes

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Through incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy…

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War Narratives #8: Flashes of War by Katey Schultz

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Schultz enables readers to see past their own perspectives and empathize with both the Afghan child and the American war widow.

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Womanly Arts

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This is the hearth. This is the knot. This is home. The woman bent over a sewing machine, the steady hum of the motor, the needle rising and sinking.

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“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”

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German children’s book author Thomas Mac Pfeifer spent over a year interviewing children who had migrated to Germany from war-stricken countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the purpose of hearing and collecting their favorite bedtime stories into one book, Ein Stern, der in dein Fenster schaut (“A star that peers through your window”). […]

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“Home Not At Home”

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After Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was ousted and executed by General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, his son Murtaza went into exile and organized a resistance from the UK, Syria, and Afghanistan, where his daughter Fatima Bhutto was born. Bhutto documented her childhood in her 2011 memoir, Songs of Blood and Sword. In the most recent […]

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Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma

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Turning onto my street and looking south I feel the ground drop beneath me every time—I turn the corner and the sidewalk falls. I feel invisible then, as if I’ve vaporized.

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Soldiers-Turned-Authors on War Literature

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For NPR Books, Quil Lawrence talks with a handful of soldiers-turned-authors about the genre of war literature that has been catalyzed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These authors want their audiences to know that war is not all Hollywood-scale battle scenes, and warn against the glamorization of war stories and hero-worshipping of veterans.

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Letters to Laura from a McDonald’s in Brooklyn

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Tonight my loneliness is infinite and I could eat dinner or dance with my limbs wild because there is no gravity keeping me grounded.

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The Rumpus Interview with Whitney Terrell

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Whitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq.

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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: 69 Love Songs

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Everywhere people are shoving things into the ground—time capsules not to be opened until the year 2100, the more optimistic postmarked for 3000—letters to the future in the language of the now.

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Literature Out of Pain in Afghanistan

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As part of Electric Literature’s The Writing Life Around the World series, Fazilhaq Hashimi discusses the influence of pain and social activism on the literary landscape in Afghanistan: In Afghanistan, we do not write for fun, passion, or money but to express the immeasurable pain inside. Maybe that’s how the actual writing is. There must be […]

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American Ambiguity

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My racial awareness, perhaps even my awareness of myself as a person, self-consciousness, is a three-pronged paradox of shame, pride, and indifference.

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War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians

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Each character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.

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War Narratives #3: The Rumpus Interview with Matt Gallagher

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Matt Gallagher on blogging during his time in the Army, his memoir Kaboom and forthcoming novel Youngblood, and what makes for good literary fiction about wartime.

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Red Dawn

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But perhaps we were like people everywhere, trying to find some meaning in our existence, and an outside threat gave us both meaning and existence.

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The Rumpus Interview with Colin D. Halloran

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Writer and former US Army infantryman Colin D. Halloran on his new collection, Icarian Flux, how he used experimental narrative to explore his life with PTSD, and why he doesn’t want to be known only as a “war poet.”

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