Ma Bibliotèque published Yes, I Am A Destroyer (2020) to beguiled claps, debut book of Jordanian-Palestinian poet and fiction writer Mira Mattar blurbed by Sharon Kivland and Lisa Robertson as oscillating between lucidity and dissociation, demonic and angelic, maniacal and generous, & accidentally elegant in prosing the bad city with refusal of subjection and anarchical vigour. I snapped it up lately and am yet to read, but in the meantime found ‘The Guest’, Mira Mattar’s 2012 short story in Mute Magazine (find more at wwws of 3:AM Magazine and Makhtin). It is an unnerving vignette of a humanity-bereftness in a hospitality setting, opening with a ghoulish-green-pixel’d graphic of luxury-yacht espace intérior ~ the ensuing locus. “CL”, “head stewardess” who subversively embroiders subtle “CL” initials onto her standard white work gloves, prepares a room for “the guest” judged to have packed in surveillance anticipation. Still, she cannot avoid feeling “Stupid. All her things have betrayed and humiliated her” (gross razors toothpaste-tubes price-tags) and that she’s missed the mark (“But though she had located her smartest most casual smart-casual clothes, the guest still somehow got it wrong”). After vapid on-board dinner where “the guest” and others are unable to speak, only emiting “a common word like ‘iPhone’ or ‘tiramisu’” intermittently, “the guest” the next morning following an alienating breakfast tries to teach language to mysterious “the child” who will only write “X” or “0”. At night “the guest” sleeps naked next to the empty body-form of her clean-pressed jammies in foetus position. Pristine, cruel, empty, negligent, faux-functional. Free Palestine (read Mira Mattar on starvation as a tool of genocide in Gaza via culinary magazine Vittlesand see also arablit.org and gazapassages.com).

At Mute Magazine since 2012 and online here