EDITORIAL
assassination of journalists, abduction of protesters, and criminalization of homosexuality. The North Caucasus continues to be a volatile area that has thrown into relief questions of nationhood, ethnicity, and religion, namely Islam. The past two decades have also witnessed the emergence of trends and cultural currents in Russia, not limited to the metropoles like Moscow and Saint Petersburg but also encompassing cities like Kazan, Tatarstan, where Irina Bogatyreva was born, and Sochi on the coast of the Black Sea. Indeed, the two Russian writers featured in this issue are precisely from this new generation. Arslan Khasavov is quite similar to his tragic hero Artur, ostensibly a Muslim of Kumuk origins, and his and Bogatyreva’s growing body of work reflects an emphasis on research, mobility, and movement, all resulting from the collapse of the Iron Curtain at the dawn of the 1990s. In “Fiction,” we place the experiences of these new Russian writers alongside those from various Arab generations, all focused on breaking through the absurdity of ossified givens and, in the case of Yazan Khalili, mocking these stiff realities, or maneuvering between strata of society and place to probe “infinitesimal details,” as the urban planner states in Mansoura Ez-Eldin’s “Tayf Al Siqilli” (“Al Siqilli Dream”): “Fatimid Cairo remained a lifelong obsession of mine,” he admits. Not only do we present a novella and a collection of stories, but this experience has occasioned the authorship of a second novel in addition to As She Once Was. Egyptian writer Ez-Eldin is expanding the story she wrote for Portal 9 into a book whose hero is the aforementioned Cairene urban planner: Adam Khalifa appears in the dreams of the narrator, looking out from the window of his hotel room in the Ramses Hilton. He throws burning papers that “lit up like shooting stars before extinguishing as they hit the ground.”
Fadi Tofeili Translated from the Arabic by Eyad Houssami
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