I Survived by Mistake
This deeply personal and introspective work explores survival—not merely physical survival, but emotional and spiritual endurance through love, war, and loss. Written by a Palestinian author against the backdrop of the Gaza conflict, the book weaves together reflections on love, betrayal, war, displacement, and the search for meaning in a world stripped of stability.
The narrative oscillates between intimate romantic relationships and the brutal realities of life under bombardment. The author chronicles a turbulent love affair marked by passion, jealousy, betrayal, and eventual dissolution, examining how relationships fracture under the weight of pride, misunderstanding, and external pressures. Simultaneously, he documents the devastating experience of war in Gaza: displacement, hunger, the loss of loved ones, the daily struggle for survival, and the erosion of human dignity.
Central themes include the nature of survival—questioning whether mere existence constitutes living, and whether those who survive emerge intact or fundamentally altered. The author grapples with grief over the death of his grandmother, the loss of his beloved, and the collective trauma of a people under siege. He explores the tension between hope and despair, the betrayal of humanitarian aid systems, the corruption of values in times of crisis, and the profound loneliness of carrying unspoken pain.
Writing serves as both confession and catharsis—an attempt to staunch internal bleeding and make sense of chaos. The prose is poetic, fragmented, and emotionally raw, reflecting the author’s belief that true survivors do not write; they simply endure. Ultimately, the book is a testament to the impossibility of returning unchanged from love or war, and the quiet dignity of continuing despite everything.
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Oh, Sorry! Rituals of Forgiveness, Crises and Social Struggles in Postmodern Capitalism
USD $ 29.00As the world grapples with the legacy of crimes of enslavement, colonialism, genocide and mass killings, imprisonment and murder of children, attempts at eliminating cultures and history of Indigenous peoples, looting and other crimes against humanity, the performance of public atonement has become increasingly prevalent. Apologies from state actors and institutions are issued in solemn ceremonies, often acknowledging the collective guilt for historical atrocities. Despite the solemnity of these events, there is a growing scepticism surrounding the sincerity of these apologies, particularly when they are not accompanied by tangible reparations, healing, reconciliation or systemic change. This scepticism is rooted in a perception that these acts of contrition are sometimes less about making amends to the aggrieved and more about assuaging the guilt of the aggressors and maintaining the status quo, providing the illusion of progress without the substance.
In this compelling work, Oh, Sorry! Rituals of Forgiveness, Crises and Social Struggles in Postmodern Capitalism, the authors unveil the complex interplay between public apologies, social justice and popular mobilisations. The chapters are devoted primarily to the experiences of Latin America, particularly of Mexico, Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil. But there is also a chapter on the struggles for Palestine — so relevant in the face of the current genocidal invasion by the Zionist State of Israel into Gaza, the world’s largest and most densely populated concentration camp.Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
Breaking the Chains of Silence
Breaking the Chains of Silence opens where any serious account of Kenya must begin: with silence. But this is not the quiet of peace or the calm of justice. It is a manufactured silence—forged by land theft, detention, exile, assassinations, police bullets, and media too intimidated to print the truth. It is the silence that follows the gun and precedes the next uprising.
This book bravely refuses that silence. It dismantles the comfortable myth that Kenya became free simply because a flag was raised in 1963. It rejects the official narrative that the struggle ended with independence, leaving citizens as spectators while a small elite inherited the state, the land, the police, and the economy. Instead, it insists that Kenya’s real history is not the story of presidents, but of working people—first fighting colonialism, then confronting the imperialism that survived under new flags and through local agents.
Crucially, the book refuses to imprison resistance in the past. It reads the present with urgency, seeing the courage of the Gen Z movement, the defiance of the RutoMustGo protests, and the young people who walked into streets patrolled by a contemptuous state. It sees their rejection of taxation, corruption, and police violence. Yet it refuses to flatter that moment into myth. It insists that spontaneous anger must evolve into organisation, protest into political education, and generational revolt must find its class foundation. The cry of the youth must meet the power of workers.
While the essays engage with current contradictions, they remain rooted in theory—one essential element for revolutionary change. The other is practice: putting ideas into action and facing the enemy where bullets and prisons are the reality. This combination of theory and practice lays the groundwork for a people’s revolution. It is for this reason the book includes Gathanga Ndung’u’s vital essay, From Mau Mau to Ruto Must Go: A Genealogy of Resistance, which connects historical struggle to today’s frontline.
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Cinema of Unfinished Witnessing
This is not a book about films in the conventional sense. It is a book about the conditions under which films become legible, forgettable, weaponised, or necessary.
Across essays that move between review and reportage, festival and platform, myth and documentary, Narendra Pachkhédé reads global cinema as a moral technology of the present. He follows the contemporary attention regime, the coercions of watchability, the choreography of awards and public virtue, and the quiet ways propaganda teaches a society what to feel plausible. The question is not only what we watch, but how we have been conditioned to watch: how viewing is trained by ideological settings, how sensibility is numbed by repetition and spectacle, how attention is corralled into habits that feel like choice.
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El Precio de la Dignidad
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Tras los Acuerdos de Paz de 1992, la esperanza de una vida digna se desvanece ante la persistente pobreza y las políticas neoliberales que mantienen a las familias campesinas en la miseria. Para sobrevivir, Patrocinia trabaja incansablemente cortando caña de azúcar, mientras la falta de oportunidades lleva a su esposo y, posteriormente, a sus seis hijos a emprender el peligroso viaje migratorio hacia Estados Unidos. El libro documenta los horrores de este periplo: el abandono, la extorsión, el secuestro y la constante amenaza de la muerte.
Una vez en el norte, los hijos de Patrocinia se enfrentan a la dura realidad de la vida indocumentada y a la maquinaria represiva del ICE, especialmente bajo la administración de Donald Trump. La autora establece un poderoso paralelismo entre la violencia de los escuadrones de la muerte en El Salvador y la persecución sistemática de los migrantes.
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Night Settles Upon The City
USD $ 22.00 USD $ 23.00Price range: USD $ 22.00 through USD $ 23.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Night Settles Upon The City
USD $ 22.00 USD $ 23.00Price range: USD $ 22.00 through USD $ 23.00Written with urgency out of a war-time Beirut, this poetry collection registers the griefs and the heroism of the Lebanese, under siege yet again. Sabbagh lends his lyrical voice here, to give a voice to the voiceless, trying to find some harmonic sense out of catastrophe. This book will compel readers, both Lebanese and those with any kind of human heart. While much of the work was written swiftly, on impulse, and almost like, as one of the poem’s title’s has it, a ‘War Diary,’ in verse, this work aims nonetheless to last in its significance and resonance at a time when the world as a whole (let alone Lebanon herself) has become so unpredictable, so fickle and so perilous. Night Settles Upon The City aims to be a worthwhile addition to the contemporary literature of war and, more specifically, to the literary representations of the modern Lebanese reality and experience.
Omar Sabbagh is a poet who is privileged to write about war and destruction from the relative safety of his study. But this double-edged illusion is insidious — mental and emotional inwardly, and physical for those who are directly under attack. It is visceral, political, heart-wrenching — yet the poet seeks out light and hope through the act of writing, for the sake of ownership and sharing. He may say that “I cannot read minds and nor / will I ever wish to”, but he writes for the importance of record-keeping, seeking solace, both private and public — as the Night Settles Upon The City of Beirut.
— Sudeep Sen, Winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary PrizeOmar Sabbagh has long brought us a world in which personal experience stitches a hyphen between the eastern Mediterranean and the northerly British archipelago. Now he makes the tension inherent within that richness explicit, in a love-letter to his family and home city of Beirut. Written while the ‘night’ of war ‘settles upon the city’, his introductory ‘Thoughts’ show us how unthinkable war remains, even when it arrives on the doorstep. This is a book of witness to what cannot happen, and yet does.
– Fiona Sampson, Professor Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL.Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning WW Norton 2022 – Washington Post Book of the Year, New York Times Editors’ Choice, finalist Plutarch Prize, finalist PEN Jacqueline Bograd Award, Sunday Times Paperback of the year.The poet Omar Sabbagh lives in Beirut. His voice is playful, almost surreal at times. He talks of ‘the hairbrained monocle of war’ and suggests that if you live long enough in a place like Beirut ‘laughter becomes a lover’s distance-giving kiss’. Night Settles Upon the City offers us a poetry that is neither ideological nor partisan, not of the frontline but of a deeply threatened warzone. Its terms are easy-going, sorrowful, humane, formally intelligent and tinged with apprehension. It is humanity being human. Reading it is relief and hope.’
— George Szirtes FRSL, Eliot Prize winner.Night Settles Upon the City by Omar Sabbagh is a profoundly reflective and evocative collection that blends personal experience with the brutal realities of life in a war-torn Beirut. Through a tapestry of poems, essays, and prose, Sabbagh explores the intersections of love, grief, intellectual contemplation, and the relentless backdrop of violence. The writing oscillates between moments of tender introspection and stark depictions of societal collapse, embodying a kind of philosophical meditation on suffering and survival. Sabbagh’s voice is distinctively lyrical, capturing both the intimacy of individual loss and the broader existential weight of conflict. His reflections on war and its aftermath are imbued with a sense of historical consciousness, yet deeply grounded in the immediacy of personal anguish and resilience. The collection is not just about bearing witness to destruction, but also about finding fragments of humanity amidst the ruins. A haunting and powerful work that invites readers into the fragile space between beauty and despair.—Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, Kulturnest Co-founder & Managing Director
The Arabic term for poet means the one who feels, unlike the Greek origin of poetry, which describes the craft itself. Omar Sabbagh is the quintessential poet in the Arabic sense. In this collection, he vibrates with Beirut, where he now lives, at a time when the city’s famous cultural vibrations are overwhelmed by murderous quakes caused by the Israeli war machine.
—Gilbert Achcar, Professor of Development Studies and International Relations at SOAS University of London.Beirut’s Omar Sabbagh, lover of beauty, poet of lush lyrical power, addresses the spirit of the great Dr. Edward W. Said in one poem, saying these troubled seasons make him “restless now in (his) resting place.” I’m captivated by a further description of Said, “living paper, breathing ink of one whose thoughts still seem to think.” There is healing in such sensitive recognition. Wise voices we always needed are suddenly needed desperately. Sabbagh invokes his love for a precious home frequently under siege and his care for all the people who made and surround him. Gratitude for the wisdom, kindness and rich affections of Night Settles Upon the City.—Naomi Shihab Nye, recipient Lifetime Achievement in Poetry Award, the Wallace Stevens prizeIn Night Settles on the City, Omar Sabbagh gives voice to the bewilderment, fear, rage, and despair so many of us in the Middle East are currently feeling. His eloquent, tender poems grapple with the impossibility—yet absolute necessity—of language at a moment when words otherwise fail. Like all the best poems, Sabbagh’s challenge, soothe, haunt, and rehumanize us, ultimately arousing our better selves.
—Mai Al-Nakib, author of An Unlasting Home and The Hidden Light of ObjectsBoth erudite and demotic, felt through the body and ‘guided by ear’ Omar Sabbagh’s voice powers through the remote attacks on Beirut – the city in which he currently lives – the hourly atrocities and unspeakable suffering to reach us and to speak for us. ‘What’s to understand?’ he asks ‘That murder can be finessed?’ In his seminal new collection, Night Settles Upon the City, night becomes a ‘dark and violent animal’ with its ‘panther’s pelt’ of terror ‘slowly curving round us’ through which we hear the voice of the aggressor reflecting that ‘…each murderous attack/ I order seems to drain this world of innocence.’ Yet Sabbagh’s own voice remains measured, balanced, especially in the portraits he paints of his beloved father…‘It gets worse each day watching him/ ageing’ (‘The Old Man and his Walking Stick’). This poem ends with the lines ‘an old man and his son, fighting a war/ in a warzone we all must visit’. Alongside unimaginable horror we are shown the ordinary griefs and losses that we all suffer – of ageing, of failing, of being human; and it’s the humanity and compassion with which Sabbagh bears witness that will secure this book’s future among the handful of classics that will come to define our era.
— Jenny Lewis, MA Oxon., MPhil., PhD, Tutor for Poetry, Oxford UniversitySelect options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences
USD $ 8.00 USD $ 32.00Price range: USD $ 8.00 through USD $ 32.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
White Saviorism in International Development: Theories, Practices and Lived Experiences
USD $ 8.00 USD $ 32.00Price range: USD $ 8.00 through USD $ 32.00Given the growing interest in understanding the meaning, manifestations, analyses and implications of racism in North/South relations, White Saviorism in International Development seeks to remedy the shortcomings of the development studies literature on the prevalence of White Saviorism in Western development initiatives in the Global South. The volume comprises theoretical chapters, testimonies, stories and lived experiences from 19 contributors from across the Global South. With sensitivity and intelligence, these practitioners and academics create a tapestry that unveils the implicit and explicit forms of White Saviorism in international development.
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Nous sommes toujours là
USD $ 26.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
Nous sommes toujours là
USD $ 26.00Depuis le début du génocide contre les Palestiniens à Gaza, mené par la violence coloniale israélienne, les établissements d’enseignement supérieur ont été systématiquement détruits. Les campus sont en ruines, les universitaires et les étudiants ont été tués ou déplacés de force, et ce qui était autrefois une population étudiante florissante et intellectuellement dynamique vit maintenant sous la menace quotidienne de bombardement, de famine forcée et de mort. Pendant près de deux ans, les étudiants ont été coupés non seulement de leurs universités, mais aussi de leurs rêves, de leur avenir et même de leur sentiment de sécurité le plus élémentaire.
Pourtant, malgré ce traumatisme inimaginable, beaucoup écrivent encore.
Nous sommes toujours là est une anthologie de ces voix – brutes, non filtrées et courageuses. Il présente des histoires courtes et longues, des poèmes, des essais et des témoignages écrits par des étudiants des universités de Gaza. Ce ne sont pas des réflexions rétrospectives ou des analyses à distance ; ce sont des mots en temps réel, émergeant des profondeurs du génocide, du déplacement et du deuil. Ces écrits peuvent être leurs derniers espoirs d’atteindre le monde, un dernier acte de résistance par l’expression.
Les droits d’auteur de la vente de ce livre sont intégralement reversés aux étudiants auteurs de Gaza.
Survivant aux extrêmes les plus sombres de la souffrance, de la destruction et du déplacement, de la famine et de la menace constante de mutilation ou de mort, ces jeunes écrivains nous parlent avec une lucidité perçante. Leur résilience est leur seule forme d’optimisme. Paradoxalement, les lire soulève le cœur.
– Ian McEwan, auteur d’Expiation et d’Amour ÉternelUn recueil bouleversant, douloureux et pourtant plein d’espoir, de la jeune génération du peuple de Gaza. Le Sumud, la résilience, n’a jamais été aussi puissant et clair qu’il ne l’apparaît dans cette collection incontournable et urgente. —Ilan Pappé, professeur au Collège des Sciences Sociales et des Études Internationales de l’Université d’Exeter, auteur de Une histoire très courte du conflit israélo-palestinien
Au cœur de la souffrance, les mots naissent — et sous les décombres, la créativité s’élève. Ce livre est plus qu’un recueil de pages écrites ; c’est l’écho d’âmes résilientes et le cri de plumes qui ont parlé lorsque les voix ont été réduites au silence. — Professeur Dr. Omar Kh. Melad, Président de l’Université Al-Azhar de Gaza
Nous Sommes Toujours Là n’est pas un livre sur la guerre — c’est un livre sur le fait d’être en vie après que le monde a décidé que vous avez déjà disparu, écrit dans des pièces qui ne tiennent peut-être plus debout. Ces pages sont des dépêches du fil étroit du présent : des lettres de la faim, des fragments de vies interrompues, des éclairs d’espoir si inflexibles qu’ils brûlent. Ici, des jeunes gens façonnent le témoignage de leur temps sur terre, sachant que leur temps peut être court. Vous ne quitterez pas ce livre avec le confort d’une conclusion. Il restera avec vous bien après que la dernière page aura été tournée. — Leila Sansour, réalisatrice et fondatrice d’Open Bethlehem
Ces réflexions poignantes de Gaza, en prose et en poésie, du milieu d’un génocide, sont à la fois déchirantes et pleines de vie et de promesse. Israël a peut-être physiquement tué nombre de leurs jeunes auteurs, mais il ne tuera jamais leurs mots, qui vivent dans ce puissant recueil de leurs écrits. — Ghada Karmi.
La mort n’est pas une idée pour ces jeunes écrivains, mais une réalité quotidienne. Ce recueil témoigne de la puissance des mots. Il révèle comment l’amour, la créativité et l’espoir peuvent nous galvaniser contre la peur et l’inaction. — Selma Dabbagh, auteure du roman Out of It et éditrice de l’anthologie We Wrote in Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers.
Sara Alkhaldy, l’une des contributrices de Nous Sommes Toujours Là, une nouvelle anthologie d’écrits d’étudiants de Gaza, déclare : “Je voudrais pouvoir mettre en bouteille l’odeur de notre maison et l’emporter avec moi en partant.” Rula Elkhair écrit à propos des études pendant le déplacement : “Même dans des endroits sans électricité, sans eau et sans internet stable, j’ai installé un eSIM sur mon téléphone et je suis montée sur le toit sous le bourdonnement des drones pour télécharger des cours. J’ai passé des examens dans des cafés au bord de la mer. J’ai étudié en ayant faim, en ayant peur, en étant en deuil.” — Selma Dabbagh dans la London Review of Books Connaissance des Faits Pertinents.
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avec les étudiants contributeursLa version anglaise de ce livre est disponible ici : We Are Still Here
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The Stories We Carry
The Stories We Carry is a compelling collection of essays that explore identity, trauma, and resilience through deeply personal narratives. Edited by Merlyna Lim and Kathy Dobson, this volume brings together twenty-two contributors—academics, artists, journalists, and storytellers—who refuse to separate personal experience from scholarly inquiry.
The collection unfolds in three interconnected movements: Self, Scar, and Struggle, examining how identity is shaped through history, gender, embodiment, and migration; how trauma and exclusion leave lasting marks; and how survival requires ongoing negotiation with institutions, technology, and community. Each essay is accompanied by hand-drawn illustrations, making the personal visible and visceral.
The contributors challenge academic conventions that dismiss personal writing as less rigorous, arguing instead that the narrated self is a legitimate site of knowledge. Their stories address Islamophobia, poverty, colonialism, queerness, neurodivergence, immigration bureaucracy, and the politics of belonging. This is not a book seeking inclusion in broken institutions, but one that insists the table itself must be rebuilt. It asks readers to sit with complexity, contradiction, and the unfinished work of being human.