Ahmad Diab is a Palestinian writer and academic. He was most recently Assistant Professor of Arabic Literature at UC Berkeley, where he taught modern Arabic literature, Palestinian cultural studies, and courses on AI and Arabic language technology. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from New York University. His scholarly monograph on Palestinian representations of other Arabs is forthcoming from Stanford University Press, and his Arabic translation of Edward Said’s After the Last Sky was recently published by Dar Al-Saqi. He is also the founder of Hudhud, an AI-powered Arabic language learning app for heritage-speaking children.
From this author
This collection of some of the most compelling pieces Al-Shabaka has published contextualizes and discusses the unique difficulties of Palestinian refugees displaced across the Middle East – from becoming refugees a second or third time due to the ongoing Syrian civil war to over-researching camps “famous” for tragedy while under-researching other refugee situations and exile communities.
If Joseph Conrad was right when he said that we live as we dream, alone, then an inverse of that statement might carry some truth as well. Unlike life and dreams, death and nightmares can be communal, as Syrian Palestinians have discovered. The fortunate among them can now look from their Facebook balconies into the heart of darkness that they barely escaped.
One hot summer day in 2011, the residents of the beleaguered Homs neighborhood of Al-Khaldyeh were struggling to identify the bodies of two men. There was something unusual about the bodies even by the now morbidly gory Syrian standards. They were merely skeletons with worn-out fatigues, and a few personal belongings.
