Effacement of the Mother
When I came home from war, I felt relief. Now that I’m home after childbirth, I’m still waiting for relief. War ends. Motherhood does not.
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Posts Tagged: Iraq
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Julia Stoops’s Parts Per Million
Kashan stares out at the crowd. “Saddam was hard. This is also hard.”
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A weekly roundup of indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
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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Home Is Here
There is no singular Muslim story, no definitive identity for the entire religion. […] Here, four women discuss what it’s like to be a minority in America in 2017, post-9/11 and post-Trump.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”
“Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really?
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A bookstore on wheels is headed to Baghdad, Iraq, once the literary capital of the Middle East until it was invaded by American forces. Not content with celebrating Independent Bookstore Day along with the rest of the country, two stores plant to launch Texas Bookstore Day in August. San Francisco’s Mission Bookstore is planning to […]
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The Strangely Plausible Abyss of American War
In Akkad’s dystopian scenario, the US faces a resurgent Mexico and a vast and newly powerful North African-Arabian empire.
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The Last Book I Loved: Poeta en San Francisco by Barbara Jane Reyes
Through incisive and uncompromising verse, Reyes unearths the hypocrisy at work in exalted American democracy…
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We Brown Women
Our bodies will not be your banners. We are not yours to use and abuse, we are not yours to dupe. We see through your words, and we see your violence.
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The Mirror’s Shards
In the face of colossal and destructive political lies, we need a more nuanced understanding of the world than simply truth versus lie.
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War Narratives #8: Flashes of War by Katey Schultz
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
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.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his story collection Insurrections, father relationships, hip-hop, knowing when to abandon a project, and choosing not to workshop certain stories.
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Sand Becoming Glass
You can call a soldier a hero or a murderer. You can call them a warrior or a monster. You can call them savior or Satan. You could call them Brother. Maybe even mother.
...moreThis Week in Books: Civilianized: A Young Veteran’s Memoir
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
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On Suffering and Sympathy
What is the distance between sympathy and action? How do we travel from one to the other?
...more“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”
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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Fresh Comics #12: Rolling Blackouts
Some books take such a mammoth effort to produce that it’s hard to want to be critical of them. Rolling Blackouts is one of those books. The nearly 300 pages of delicately crafted, watercolored panels make evident that Sarah Glidden is a workhorse of a talent. The dialogue—which is mostly transcribed from conversations—is incredibly natural and nuanced; […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad discusses his debut novel Guapa, the Orlando shootings, the importance of queer spaces, and Arab literature.
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Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
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.
...moreSoldiers-Turned-Authors on War Literature
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
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
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 Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz Sharif discusses her new collection Look, the difference between nearness and similarity, and the level of ownership we have over stories.
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War Narratives #7: Turning a Corner
As we sat around telling the funniest stories we could remember from our time in Iraq, I noticed that the easy cynicism of our twenties was gone, and so was the rigid hierarchy of the military.
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War Narratives #6: The Rumpus Interview with Phil Klay
When you’re writing fiction, you can follow your own ignorance. You can write something and realize how flawed you are.
...moreWhat Was Once Breathing
Iraqis are generalized as victims, refugees, or, in the worst case, corpses. Betty Rosen, writing for The Point, dives into Iraqi fiction and its relationship with corpses as a way of practicing radical empathy in troubling times, with Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer, Hassan Blasim’s The Corpse Exhibition, and Ahmad Saadawi’s untranslated Frankenstein in Baghdad.
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