1.⁠ ⁠A sentence, expression, or paragraph that I found beautiful

“Sentences become coffins too small to contain all the multitudes of grief.”

This line kind of stuck with me when I read it. I found it beautiful because it expresses something I have felt before but never knew how to put into words. Sometimes pain is simply too big for language. You find yourself lost and unable to find the words that can make your pain feel tangible to others. There are moments in life where you try to explain what happened, but the words come out smaller than the feeling itself. That is essence of the line is trying to capture. What made this feel personal to me is that it reminded me of how, after losing my father, people would ask simple questions like “Are you okay?” or “How are you feeling?” and I would not know what to say. Not because I had nothing to say, but because whatever I said felt too small for what I was carrying. The sentence felt beautiful to me because it understands that grief is larger than expression. It shows that life can’t be reduced into a single sentence or a headline. A person’s journey carries many emotions that can only be felt. What I like about this sentence is that grief feel tangible and seeable like how a coffin is. Mounzer showed that a sentence can hold meaning, but sometimes it still cannot hold a person’s full loss. That is what makes this line so impactful and so beautiful at the same time.

2.⁠ ⁠A sentence, expression, or paragraph that tells a very important and deep truth

“To be witnessed is what gives one’s life meaning; that is what gives death its cause.”

I think this is one of the deepest truths in the whole article because at the centre of everything, every person wants to feel seen. People want to express their emotions freely through their real identity. They want to be heard, without having their voices drowned and this is what gives life meaning. Otherwise, you’d feel like silence is death. People want to feel seen in their pain, their story, their humanity. What Mounzer is saying here is that being witnessed is not something small. It is actually what protects a person from being erased and having their autonomy eradicated and taken away from them. This hit me personally because I’m very expressive person, who likes to be heard and seen for who I am and what I stand for. There are painful experiences that make you feel separated from everyone else, and that is what makes unique and gives your story meaning to live by. This sentence also reminded me of things we talked about in class, like voice, identity, and the danger of reducing people to one story. In war especially, people are often turned into numbers. Refugees, victims, casualties. But this line pushes against that. It reminds us that behind every label is a whole life. A whole memory. A whole voice. I think that is why this truth felt so special to me. It is really about dignity and refusing to let suffering become anonymous.
3.⁠ ⁠A place in the article where I have a question
“But told to whom? Who is the reader I’m addressing when I am writing in English?”

My question: When someone writes in a language that is not their mother tongue, do they gain wider audience, or do they lose part of themselves in the process?
This question felt very personal to me because I move between Arabic and English all the time, and I have noticed that they do not carry emotion in the same way. Sometimes English feels more polished in academic settings, and easier to organize, but Arabic can feel closer, and more alive emotionally. Arabic is a beautiful language with plenty of expressive vocabulary. In translation, words can lose meaning and emotion. Writing in English might make a story more accessible to the world, but it can also make the writer feel like they’re leaving a part of themselves behind. In reality, some people lose their identity in the process and forget how to express themselves in their mother tongue. In other words, they become lost in translation. There are things I can say in Arabic that feel different when I say them in English, almost like the meaning survives, but the feeling changes. So, this part made me wonder whether translation is always an act of connection, or an act of loss.