HIDDEN COMPANIONS (English) Edition) by Ahmad Nabil

Paperback

The Old City of Jerusalem comes alive in Ahmad Nabil’s Hidden Companions, a testimonial and visual archive of Palestinian folklore, now translated into English.

A man wakes every day to find coins under his pillow, a young lonely girl strikes up a friendship with a spectral voice, a veiled woman changes form to delude ordinary senses, a petite girl in all black breaches a group of young girls returning from a wedding, a goat and her two kids draw an unsuspecting young man into a hidden room, a group of curious boys conjure the spirit of Marx. Jinns and ghouls, guardians and tricksters, wizards and possessors. In the Old City of Jerusalem, the Unseen beings are a natural element of everyday life.

With rich, vivid descriptions and in stunning illustrations, Ahmad Nabil weaves a literary account of paranormal stories: held, shared in whisper networks, relayed over conversations, and passed down as inheritance. This English translation by Fatema Alhashemi traces a captivating world largely unseen in popular narrative. 

Ahmad Nabil is a visual artist and researcher in the fields of Arab and Islamic mythology and paranormal phenomena. He focuses on their relationship to land, natural resources, and their integration into intangible heritage for the preservation of land and collective memory. In 2015, he founded The Fiction Council in Jerusalem.

For more information, see http://thefictioncouncil.org.

Fatema Alhashemi is a Bahraini writer, artist, and translator based in
New York City. She has translated several poetry collections, including
Remember I Was a Good Man by Ahmed Saleh and Ash and Air by Nadine
Murtaja. She is currently writing an Arabic-language short story collection
that reimagines global mythology through contemporary characters
set in imagined Arab cities.

Jenna Hamed is an artist and art worker based in Queens, New
York with roots in Jerusalem, Palestine. Jenna’s background in tactile-
driven analog practices and critical examination of art production
has influenced her current interests in documentation methods via
image-making, poetics, archiving through the book format. In 2024,
she established Jay Seven Inc., a studio-gallery in Brooklyn dedicated
to producing art installations and publishing initiatives rooted in craft,
research and constraints.