Again, Fanon’s words come to mind: “The town belonging to the colonized people . . . the native town, the Negro village, the medina, the reservation, is a place of ill fame, peopled by men of evil repute. They are born there, it matters little where or how; they die there, it matters not where, nor how.”

Don’t we all move and imagine if we stopped someplace, we never would?

Submissions open Friday, May 29, 2026 and close Monday, July 6, 2026  Please read the full call for submissions carefully. … Continue reading "Call for Submissions: Mizna 27.2, Ancestry/Indigeneity"

Don’t we all move and imagine if we stopped someplace, we never would?

"Postmortem," an excerpt from Sarah Cypher's novel The Skin and Its Girl, invites the reader into a mindset where departures from realism enable new linguistic maneuvers, such as subverting calcified stereotypes of Arabs and Arabic speakers in American supremacist culture.

An inventive, familial relationship with language is part of "Wahmi," an excerpt from Key K. Bird's in-progress novel, Conjoined States. Bird situates us in the prose: "I didn’t know how deeply cultural my family’s usage was, the oaths and the swearing alike, until I started to read fiction by Arab writers."

In "On the Other End of Translation" and "On Sunday Night I am Tired of Proving I Deserve Languages," Elina Katrin, one of Mizna editors and the Tongues Untethered folio curator, explores how poetic form can enhance linguistic dichotomy, question the expectation of fluency, and present languages—Arabic and Russian—as something lived and experienced within the body and outside it.

janan alexandra's “Come From,” “Learning to Write in Arabic,” and “Arabic Abecedarian” take us to a language-place full of questions and paradox, presence and absence, intimacy and estrangement all at once. Illuminating these contradictions and the ways they exist simultaneously is a unifying seam that runs across all three poems.

We exist within an indispensable asset—language. Sooner or later though, writers who belong to multiple tongues, cultures, and heritages come across a curiosity: how to break away from English and honor our ancestry through the plurality language asks of us. In this folio, four writers of SWANA heritage —janan alexandra, Key K. Bird, Sarah Cypher, and Elina Katrin—share their strategies for doing just that.

this poem suffocates on my tongue, one of the many tongues of the executioner