idk I'll eat your books

They said, “Beirut, the Paris of the East,”

As if splendor must be named through the beast

That once drew maps with blood and gold,

Claiming hearts it never could hold.

But what is Paris, if not Beirut's shade?

A pale reflection of the fire we made.

Before the shells and foreign plans,

Before the puppet strings of Western hands.

Your jets screamed over Martyrs' Square,

Not with grief, but market shares.

You came not with olive, but with oil,

And left us buried in broken soil.

And still they call it praise, a gift-

To name us with imperialist drift.

As if beauty here must wear your crown,

And not its own, once passed down.

So say it right, if names must twist:

Paris is the Beirut of the West-

A copy, faded, of a city blessed,

each poem lands like a small revelation:

darwish captures loss and longing so vividly you almost feel the weight of every word.

ashraf fayadh reminds you that writing can be its own kind of resistance.

naomi shihab nye blends sorrow and hope in a way that feels like home and exile all at once.

i love how the book moves between voices you’ve heard before and new ones like fatena al ghorra and mustafa abu sneineh. they write about olive trees and checkpoints, kitchens and crowded cities—everything feels immediate and real.

reading this feels like standing in a field where each poem is a blade of grass insisting on growing through the cracks. it’s raw and beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking, but always necessary.

Kamel Daoud's The Meursault Investigation is a powerful example of literary cannibalism. It rewrites Albert Camus' The Stranger from the perspective of the brother of "the Arab," the nameless man killed by Meursault in Camus' novel. Daoud gives him a name — Musa — and restores his humanity.

This is literary cannibalism as resistance. The original text is not just borrowed from but interrogated, deconstructed, and reassembled. It becomes a tool for reclaiming erased voices and exposing the silences of colonial narratives.

Other examples in this tradition include:Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, which retells Jane Eyre from Bertha's perspective.

A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, which reframes The Iliad through the voices of women.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard, which explores the minor characters in Hamlet.

You found the time you always longed for

To write a poem, to paint a picture

I would have made my body a canvas

Don't bury me in a garden of death

And do not burn my body as will my soul

Instead let me be the fertilizer

To the plants that will make

One last feast among friends

Or bury me below a tree

So I may give strength to fruit

For generations to come

Don't let my death be a waste