In Defense of Humanity “Are we not human, too?” (منّا إنسان كمان؟) In conversations with migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, I heard this sentence so repeatedly that I came to understand it as the refrain at the heart of the kafala system, rhetorically posing the question of foreign humanity inside Lebanese syntax. The brutal simplicity of these three words […]
Fire (ح.ر.ق)
The Book of Dreams In the summer of 2020, pandemic shutdowns and far-reaching fires in California kept residents like myself inside for weeks. A muddied orange glow shifted the skies for days on end and I, with the many others, mourned the loss of life and land, stunned by the enormity and physical transformation the […]
What Sorcery is this?
In Tim Burton’s 2012 film Dark Shadows, adapted from a Goth sitcom aired on American TV between the 60’s and 70’s, Johnny Depp plays the role of Barnabas Collins, long undead and inadvertently awoken from a centuries-long slumber by construction workers. In a classic trope of the time travel genre, Barnabas, not a time traveler […]
Ghost (ش.ب.ح)
Notes Towards an Alliance with the Revenant To write is to work for the dead, to create the conditions needed for the ghost to return. In order to do so, the writer must let go of the desire to tell a story. The dead don’t tell stories. They return to disrupt narratives that insist on […]
The Third Place: In the Shadows of Anxiety and Recovery
A few years ago, I was approached to compose music for a film. It was a film written in Arabic; the plot was set in an Arabic-speaking country, centered around a local, historical anecdote, and all of the actors’ dialogue was also in Arabic. The rough cut included selections of temporary musical segments that were […]
Waiting for the Moths
Celebrating the memory of Ghassan Kanafani in 2018, Palestinian novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah addressed the late author and activist in a facebook post:“Do you know what the fate is, of the story that we do not write, of our unwritten story? Allow me Ghassan, to ask you from the heart, because I can scream and turn […]