Silence is a Sense is out in the US today.

I wrote a piece for LitHub “On the Language of Revolution Ten Years After the Arab Spring” speaking about the ethics of representation and how we articulate trauma:

The literature—in English or Arabic or French, from Lebanon to Algeria—speaks of cycles, of recurrences, of revolutions. War and trauma. The personal and the political. A people inconsolable before history. The literature foretells that the Arab Spring would not be so simple as we (perhaps a little irrationally) had hoped. This is a literature that testifies to colonization and wars of independence, that warns against totalitarianism and sectarian divides, that bears witness to civil wars and occupations and everything in between. For more than a century we’ve been binding our pain to words, cloaking our fears in symbols and metaphors, inscribing our many varied traumas on a body of work that will outlast us all.