3) In this passage, Lina describes how difficult it was to translate her experiences of war into English after moving to Canada. As a translator, she explains that translating is not just about replacing words — it requires breaking apart an experience, feeling it fully, and then reconstructing or “planting” it into another language. But here, when it is her own trauma she is translating, she struggles. The English words feel lighter and unable to carry the emotional and historical weight of what she lived. This reminds me of something Sheikh Hamza Yusuf once said. He described a scholar as someone who “yutqin al ingliziya” (he mastered the English language), and his Sheikh responded, “Hal yutqin 3aqliyatuha?” — meaning, did he master its mindset? Language does not exist alone; it carries the worldview, history, and lived experience of the people who speak it. To truly understand or translate a language, one must understand its people and how they think. In Lina’s case, she not only has to understand Arabic and the mindset of the people whose experiences she carries, but she must also understand English and the mindset of the audience reading her work. She must deconstruct both “language baggages” and feel the story in both atmospheres before rebuilding it. This reminds me of the empathy game we played in class, where we had to take apart an object and reconstruct it by feeling and describing it blindly. Translation seems to require a similar kind of deep, embodied understanding. My question is: If Lina avoided her heavy identity as a young girl in Canada and treated her war vocabulary almost as something shameful, what changed later that allowed her to reclaim it? What development occurred that enabled her not only to articulate her own experience, but to translate entire worlds between Arabic and English? Was it that, over time, her understanding of both communities deepened, allowing her to move between them more confidently rather than feeling forced to choose one?

1) I don’t think the sentence or the message itself is “beautiful,” but I do think it is beautifully expressed and carefully placed in the passage. In a way, it reflects her own struggle that she emphasizes throughout the article — the struggle of faithfully translating lived experiences. She previously said there is something “violent” about it, and I think that idea is reflected here too, in the way she describes life being reduced to just words, just a headline.

The description of sentences as coffins that are too small to contain the multitudes of grief is just so profound, and so painfully true. It reminds me of a poem by Nizar Qabbani. He writes:

كلماتُنا في الحبِّ تقتلُ حبَّنا إنَّ الحروفَ تموتُ حين تُقالُ

“Our words in love kill our love; letters die the moment they are spoken.”

Though he is speaking about love here, I think it still relates in the way it captures how some feelings are lost in translation when they are turned into words. It is as if the weight of it all dissolves, becoming as light as air — as light as our breath when we speak.

2) I am not sure how I can put this into words. There is something so human about this passage, this description in particular. I think it stood out to me because I sometimes struggle with the idea of “making something beautiful out of what you’ve gone through.” For example, I sometimes feel ashamed to write poetry about my trauma — I do it anyway — but I do sometimes feel some type of way about it.

I am not always so tender. Sometimes I get afraid that if I give in to this feeling of shame, then I’d be letting my experiences harden my heart — killing what makes me human. Here, she talks about thinking she has become numb, but there is always something that gets to her, that makes her cry. As someone who is so well-versed in translating texts, you would think she only needed words to articulate herself. But some truths are far too great, far too heavy to be contained within language. They are too deep to translate — that is why they must be felt. That is why she cried. I think those tears are the truest and most sincere form of expression that exists, even though they are not always understood.

So maybe I shouldn’t be ashamed. Maybe that heaviness can be beautiful sometimes, not only through words, but in the way it keeps us tender, in the way it makes us human.