When I arrived to the so-called upper epochs, it’s not as if I knew where I was going. I’d been underground for a while—years likely passed before I’d surfaced. Now I was scaling the hinterlands from their disproportion. The way they’d been trampled and debased, made worthless and dead—enough to make you grind your teeth […]
No one will ever know what it’s like to be a Ghost
My mother passed out on the night of December 22, 1984 when her gynecologist, tipsy at a Christmas gathering, mistakenly directed the nurse over the phone to give her a general anesthetic instead of a local one. When the doctor arrived in the morning, he delivered a baby that was, in medical slang, “a blue […]
Transcendent Human / Ordinary Human
Early in the morning, the last day before I left Beirut, the dollar was still at 1500LL. I walked toward the Corniche in the dark before dawn, waiting to take a taxi (service) to the airport. In Farsi, we call the sky before sunrise “Wolf and Sheep” (گرگ و میش). The term was probably coined […]
Issue: 03 03/22_08/22
ش.ب.ح (Ghost) Guest editor: Mirene Arsanios Written contributions by Haytham El Wardany & Lama El Khatib, Suneela Mubayi, Christian Nyampeta, Salma Shamel, and Asiya Wadud. Artistic contributions by Maxime Hourani. ب.ش.ر (Human) Guest editor: Sumayya Kassamali Written contributions by Majd al-Shihabi, Alexandra Chreiteh, Golrokh Nafisi, Hicham Safieddine, and Hana Sleiman. Artistic contributions by Aline Deschamps. […]
Human (ب.ش.ر)
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 […]