I’ve called many places home, but I’ve never described any as kindred.

Local poet and dear friend Noor Hindi phrased my integration with Dearborn as “worming into a warm place.” My sense of belonging was apparent within a week of my arrival and was continuously reinforced for the 2.5 months of my residency. The fact that this all happened during the dead of winter didn’t faze me at all.

As many traveling artists can probably relate, leaving my hometown to be here felt like plunging into cold water. As I explored my new environment, I felt my mind rewiring and relearning inspiration and curiosity after a year and a half of numbness, grief, and despair over our tax-funded atrocities in Gaza and the creeping imperial boomerang around us.

It was within Dearborn’s community of Arab American visual artists, poets, and organizers—who intersect and support one another in ways I’ve never witnessed elsewhere—that I was reminded that art will always bring us back to our humanity and ground us in our diasporic identities. In my new friends’ homes, studios, poetry readings, voice memos, and favorite cafés, I was able to shake the pervasive doubt that making art in this time is futile. The relationships I built here weren’t just life-affirming—they redefined for me what it truly means to be in community. To give and receive respect—interpersonally, creatively, and intellectually as hellfire blazes around us.

I wish this residency for every artist, particularly those feeling tokenized and uninspired by their current environment. I especially wish it for artists who regularly have doors slammed in their faces when seeking opportunities from institutions that are beholden to Zionist funding. For the few months I was in Dearborn, the absence of censorship allowed me to exhale deeply.

I have been in an uncomfortable transition back home, having to re-work where funding comes from after the closure of many arts grants, and also fighting the New York real estate market and rising costs of living. To have this month of respite from that struggle has been incredibly nurturing for my psyche. I think it is important to note this because as people living inside of capitalism, we can get very project- and productivity-focused. What are your metrics? How much did you accomplish? And while I have made great progress on the creation of this performance, some of my biggest achievements have been internal, due to the time and space an artist residency can provide.

Prior to arriving in Dearborn, I had joined Y3lda’s We Are the DJ collective of women DJs. We are all at various stages of learning, but it’s an amazing community of mostly Arab female DJs, and bringing that into my time in the Detroit area, with such a rich history of dance music, has been such an exciting undercurrent. In my spare time I have been practicing mixing, and I am now 99% sure there will be a collective dance/participatory moment during this performance. (But I don’t want to spoil that just yet.)

It’s hard for me to completely say goodbye because I do not yet feel complete here. I believe I will be back. So please stay in touch. And send me your favorite Arab dance music.

Here’s a few of my own:

Khamis Henkesh - El Disco

Muslimgauze - All the Stolen Land of Palestine

This Arab and Persian Funk and Discomix by my fave Nooriyah and Yas Meen

xoxo

-s

I did a lot of experimenting with materials to try and get the right density/composition. What I landed on was black oil paint mixed with olive oil and salt. This made it light enough to be suspended in water. (Unmixed, it just sinks to the bottom.) The salt created a little heaviness, so the ink goes a little below the surface of the water. I was interested in that for a potential side view, but I ended up shooting most of the imagery as an aerial shot.

I work with Super-8 film as well as digital video, so for these, I decided to shoot them on black & white super-8 film, which I will process when I return to NY. (I work with an organization called Mono No Aware, which is committed to the preservation of analog moving imagery.) That film will then be scanned digitally, and I will complete the edit in Adobe Premiere to be projected in performance. (There are several reasons for this, one being that I could potentially layer other images with the digital scan of the film. The other being I would rather not add an analog projector into my tech.)

Below you can see an example of the effect that occurs when I agitate the paint to create motion, and the really nice magnetism it contains. The blob just wants to go back together. There’s definitely a metaphor there. (My super-8 camera shoots more of a square frame, so imagine just seeing the water and paint without all of the distraction on the edges.)

I have one roll of film left to shoot before I leave town! I am moving away from the paint experiment but may find some abstract nature imagery, like moving water, leaves, shadows, light patterns, etc. I want it to be abstract enough that an audience could project their own meaning onto it but strong enough that it holds the space and feels purposeful. I’m excited to see these projected on walls soon.

My collaborator Estefania wrote a beautiful reflection on that week that includes the following:

It’s a process that moved in undulating waves. Like standing on the shore of an island constantly changing as the tides came in and out, taking and then depositing sand onto a landscape in perpetual flux.

We spoke and moved, wrote, and tried to tell stories with our bodies, with words, telepathically, communicating well, other times realizing that a vivid internal dialogue had in fact been a monologue.

When we first began we started with the selves. Our own experience of what it means to belong, to cultivate community, to experience loss, feel transplanted, uprooted, to feel the gravitational pull of a loss. A pound of flesh removed from your chest that you were never explicitly made aware of..…and yet the loss is felt. What it means to know yourself and how it’s more a journey rather than a destination. Like a radioactive element, moments can break off protons and suddenly uranium is lead.

As we discussed the intricacies of our own upbringings, our traumas and moments of growth and joy, our conversations began to reach out from that center of the self and tendrils touched on other ways memory/connection/loss/ancestry/identity/spiritualism/blood and so much more has played out for us. Some points focused on what we could explain. The science of blood connection, we spoke of genetics and DNA and the bonds that we carry within our very marrow. The tangible, albeit intangible (unless you happen to carry an electron microscope in your back pocket) parts of our connections. Our faces on other bodies, punnett squares, shared mannerisms divided by an ocean, our vices played out between different lips, the diseases passed down on our personal recipes, like a tale told round a camp fire.

But we also touched on the invisible.

As I dug further and further into what is at the center of this work—while it does include a connection to so many stories of separation from family, from land, from culture—is myself.

As a choreographer, I love making work for and with groups. I love the ability to carve space, to create formations, to be able to step back and have a third-person perspective as I’m creating. But I feel I can’t do that here. This piece has become too personal for anyone else to dance it right now. So I’ve been embarking in the difficult task of making dance for myself.

During my residency at AANM, I have created several sections of choreography. Right now they are modules. I am not 100% certain of what order they will appear in the piece, but I am getting closer to figuring that out. One larger idea that will continue to be developed after I leave is that I am working with a musical collaborator to create a score based on parts of my DNA sequence.

A seemingly obvious discovery we found early in the process is that most humans have a very similar DNA sequence because it simply codes us as human. But we do have unique parts that tie us to parts of our ancestry, and for me, we’re looking specifically at my maternal haplogroup. (I also have two X chromosomes, so we can’t see my paternal line in my DNA.)

Jesse suggested we introduce a camera to track my movements and correspond with some different sections of my DNA, to make the music a bit more dynamic. The early sketch of this we have right now is just using midi instruments, so it sounds a bit like a video game. But these will be re-recorded with some more traditional Arab instrumentation. In the video below, you can perhaps imagine the cursor is my body moving around the space.

When I return to Brooklyn, we will mount a camera on the ceiling, and it will trigger the music for this section of the piece.

While some of the choreography modules I created will be used in conjunction with this DNA music, I also have been working on creating some improvisational scores. I have a lot of themes and motifs I’ve been playing with, but there is not set choreography that remains the exact same each time. For this, I created a set of rules to guide my movement research (the page on the right) and a score that helps guide the movements. This score will likely be danced with this DNA music as well.

Side note for my creative readers: I started this residency with a brand new notebook and set it up in this method, and it’s been such a good way of keeping my thoughts organized.

Stay tuned for a few more entries here as I enter my final full week in residence at the museum. I’ll be talking a bit about some of the projections/visuals I’m creating for this performance as well as a side quest into DJing and dance music and how it made its way into this piece.

I have been an Arab American my entire life, yet this is my first time really being recognized for it as an artist.

As you can see, I don’t carry an Arab family name. I wasn’t raised around Arab people, culture or language. I was adopted and separated from the people and places from which I originate. As a result, I’ve always been Arab—when people ask the infuriating “where are you from?”, on forms where you have to check a box (there is never one for us, but I always check “other)— but I haven’t loudly claimed Arab-ness because I didn’t have anything to show for it besides my brown skin and curly hair. The number of times someone has tried to speak Arabic to me then grown frustrated when I cannot respond … it’s as if I’ve let down an entire village just by existing.

Reading through the archives of this substack, I see a common theme among my fellow Arab American artists who have come to the museum before me. There is a common feeling of fracture, of missing pieces big and small. Some are putting those pieces back together through their work or using their residency time to learn a little bit more about “how” to be Arab. I feel a kinship to each of these artists, having arrived in Dearborn with a secret mission to also learn what it means to be Arab. I will never regain what I lost, but the more I can witness Arab Americans in the diaspora living full and interesting and creative lives, the more I can let go of any idea that there is a “right” way to be an Arab American.

The project I am working on while in residence is a performance titled “Blood Memory.” It is rooted in ancestral memory and is an attempt to connect me back to, what my biological father refers to as, “the root.” I am using dance to understand what came before me, and the many generations of my ancestors who I am connected to by blood but not by familial relationship. I am acknowledging the fractures and the clouds of shame that have been carried and passed down to me by people I never met. I’m also attempting to celebrate the amalgamation of all of the stories the cells in my body hold.

I have a couple of weeks left at the museum and will be documenting pieces of my project on this Substack. Expect to see some dance research, some archival research, some pieces of videos I’ve created to accompany performance, and some music compositional experiments in progress. I’ve been engaged in all of the above as I piece together the different elements that will be woven together to make a final product.

There are many forms of artistic process. For me, I think of my process like a large circle. At the center of that circle is the thing I will actually show an audience. The perimeter is where I begin. I move around the perimeter, creating different pieces/studies. This helps me to understand what it is I am really making, what threads I want to follow and what I want to leave out. As I move closer and closer to the center, the final piece comes more into focus. A sketch from my notebook shows this like:

Maybe this makes sense to some of you, and maybe others are more linear in your thinking and assume we must first envision “I’m going to draw a house,” then we put pencil to paper and draw the house. But for me, process has been where I make the discovery of what it is I am metaphorically drawing. If I already had the answers to my questions, I wouldn’t need to create anything at all.

Being so disconnected from my Arab roots, I have not felt brave enough to make work that intersects with them for a long time. “Blood Memory” is one of two projects I began in the past year that really reflect my personal experience and unique story, and it feels like I have finally come home.

could I do or say, anyway?

Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that

paid

for the bombs and the planes and the tanks

that they used to massacre your family

But I am not an evil person

The people of my country aren't so bad

You can expect but so much

from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch

American TV

You see my point;

I’m sorry.

I really am sorry.”

And somehow this brings me to my current project. These repeated cycles. These inherited histories and feelings. One day, I’m visiting my family in Zalka and we are all exiting the car, my khalto Nina, my mama, my sister, and me. When we hear a loud clap, my sister, my mom, and I slam the doors of the car instinctively and close ourselves in, as though this meager car could save us. Nina laughs at us and says, hayateh, it’s not a bomb, and though we weren’t sure what it was, not bomb, but something loud, firework, a car backfiring, she laughed at us, her door open, her nerves hardened to this sound, this everyday boom. My mom laughs and wonders how her instincts have changed, how 18 years away means her reactions differ now. I wonder how she became more like me and my sister than like her own sister and how much that removal might hurt her. I am trying to write about these legacies in my novel-in-progress, currently titled Leila and the Oud. I wanted to start the novel light, tp try to think about inheritences that feel easier. Leila becomes obsessed with the oud one day, thinking they might have inherited this skill from their ancestors, their jido, some distant cousins, some great-great-great uncle. But inheritance is never easy and so Leila will have to come to terms with the fact that no, they are not magically able to play the oud without practise or hard work. But more importantly, what other darker, deeper seeded things have they inherited from their family, a family grown complicite after the aftermath of the Civil war, of the colonial division of Greater Syria, after the creation of Israhell. Have our people forgotten our histories to pretend in an attempt to forget, to try to move forward through the pain of the past that won’t be shed so lightly? One truth that has always struck me as important is admitting what’s actually going on. Avoidance has never led us to revolution.

I’m reading others to help me write, and will be sharing my reading lists as the residency continues. I’m currently halfway through Rabih Alameddine I, the Divine, a novel told in first chapters. Alameddine has been guiding my writing ever since I discovered his word, ever since reading Koolaids (extremely recommend you read it) and I will continue reading his work as a guide.

Here are some others I’m perusing to see if they’ll help:

- A Billingual Anthology of Arabic Poetry, Victimes of A Map: Samih Al Qasim, Adonis, and Mahmud Darwish
- Master of the Eclipse, Etel Adnan
- The Teeth of the Comb and Other Stories, Osama Alomar
- A book with a hole in it, Kamelya Omayma Youssef
- Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance, Fady Joudah

*****

We are a mosaic made of ancient empires, lost and forgotten.
Broken up and re-arranged at random.
Some of us care, some don’t.

But the clump we are now?

Leyya said: there’s safety in conflation. Take the safety of an “us”, find your place and be as you are. It doesn’t really matter, we will be seen as we will be seen.

At a talk at the Detroit Institute of Arts, Artist Sadik Kwaish Alfaraji said that, our identity is our memory. He was talking about his work “A Thread of Light Between My Mother’s Fingers and Heaven” and about his memories back in his native home of Iraq. About how it felt to sit together at a table and share a meal, about the smells and all these little details that make a memory so vivid, it becomes a part of who you are.

I am personally still not sure what determines my identity in a way that goes beyond my own personal experiences. Maybe I will never know.

Is there a way out of the identity trap?

I guess I leave with more questions,
I guess there will always be unanswerable questions.

So now excuse me while I go back to taking pictures of windows and chairs and light bulbs.

Bye.

Hi, I am Ebti and I am a female artist who was born and raised in Egypt, hence I am seen as an artist of color, a BIPOC artist, a part of an underrepresented (often times oppressed) group of people.

I looked up the word identity in the Oxford English Dictionary:

1.a. The quality or condition of being the same in substance, composition, nature, properties, or in particular qualities under consideration; absolute or essential sameness; oneness.

My first big art show I got in I had submitted a photographic installation that thinks about mourning and grounding. The curatorial label next to my work, used the words diasporic communities and also the word liminal. In the writing that I submitted for this show and up to this day I never use the word diaspora in reference to me or my work. It’s my choice not to use this word. First of all this word has a very specific history and second of all it does have a certain weight to it, a weight I choose not engage with, a weight I don’t want to carry.

I was hanging out with two dear artist friends one day and we were talking exactly about how art work created by artists of color/BIPOC artists will always be considered art about being different. Even abstract work? So the question came up: Can brown people make abstract art? We then joked around and talked about creating a show that includes only abstract/geometric brown shapes made by brown artists. We laughed a lot. We never put that show together

There are a lot of BIPOC artists who make abstract art, of course there are. Many of the names I can think of are well established, famous artists, I wonder how their journey looked like. I am talking about myself and most artists of color around me. This is a conversation we have all the time.

Is my work Arab-American because I am? Is it Egyptian? Is it female? What do we do with poetic work that may not necessarily subscribe to either of these categories? Can we just see it as it is?

The weight of representation is unbearable.

My work is personal and is informed by how I grew up. And though I grew up in Egypt, my upbringing is just one of many versions of ways to raise kids in Egypt. I am my identity, I am informed by my own family and memories, which were shaped by our socio economic situation, the political climate of that time, my education etc… My work and my thoughts are in no shape or form representative of a whole country let alone more than one. But it seems like there’s no “I” in identity. It’s only a big “We”.

So now that I addressed the elephant in the room, I am ready to going back to ignoring it. I won’t be able to force people to see me or my work one way or the other. The artist is dead anyway.

Yalla Bye.*

*changed after Kathy said it would be funnier than just Bye and she is totally right.

For many reasons this is a source of sadness and bitterness for me. I have a mother tongue, it’s Egyptian, but it’s not recognized as a language I can work with as a translator. And my standard Arabic has big holes in it- which is why I am here now.

I always thought grammar rules in Arabic were there to annoy us. What I learned in today’s lesson is that grammar helps us understand. I know we all know this, but do we? I suddenly felt softness towards Arabic grammar, ok, you are trying to help me, thank you. I realize how ridiculous this sounds, but this is genuinely how I felt and it made me receive the lesson from a totally new perspective.

I never felt ease around Standard Arabic and with these lessons I am starting to feel an ease I am liking a lot.

A highlight: During the lesson the word نسخ came up and it turns out that this word both means copy and change. Language is magic.

When I decided to write about these lessons, I thought I will have more things to talk about. But it seems like for now, these posts are more like check ins about progress. I know that I will keep writing about this, even after my residency here in done.

In the mean time and for you Arabic speakers remember:

• إن في البحر سمكةً

• كانت في البحر سمكةٌ

If you are not sure why the تشكيل is the way it is, please reach out, I am actually capable of explaining why. It’s easy and life changing.

Thank you Hameed!

What is the best way to patch holes?

1. Sand the wall around the hole and wipe off any dust.

2. Apply the self-adhesive mesh patch on the damaged area.

3. Cover the patch with joint compound or Spackle, depending on what comes in your kit. ...

4. Let dry and apply a second coat of joint compound if necessary.

Similar, un-similar to patching a hole in a wall, my secret mission during my residency at AANM is to patch up the holes in my knowledge of Standard Arabic (and other aspects of my “identity” potentially). I may have stopped translating professionally but it doesn’t mean I need to stop trying mastering this language that is considered my mother tongue.

A while ago I had an Arabic grammar question and as usual I texted one of my trusted friends who I know have a wonderful mastery over Standard Arabic. I know two people who I would trust with the most complicated questions. One of them is my dear friend Hameed, who also lives in the Bay Area. I texted Hameed my grammar question. He replied and checked in with me -not for the first time- about him helping me refresh and refurbish my grammar knowledge.

Knowing that I was coming to Dearborn in September I told him we should meet when I am at the AANM and work on my grammar. We had a check in a few weeks ago and he seemed to be excited about this.

Last Monday we had the first out of 4 sessions we will have during my residency. What better time to do it! I felt anxious going into this meeting, after all I didn’t even try to study Arabic grammar since I left high school.

It was actually much better than I expected. I actually enjoyed the session a lot. I realized I know more than I think and understanding just a few rules helped me put two and two together for many common cases.

Hameed’s simplified way was very helpful, on top of him being a good teacher. (he should quit his job and become a teacher instead- only if teaching paid enough).  The book he is using as a reference النحو الوظيفي is also perfect for what I needed to patch up the holes in my knowledge

The most fun I had during our session is talking about questions like: how do we standardize a language. How do we get to a rule being the norm etc…

This is short check in about that part, more soon.

Stay tuned.

I grew up in Egypt. My parents sent me and my sister to a German school because of its proximity to our house, the fact that I had two uncles who migrated to Germany and got married to German women and that fact that it was an all girls, catholic school and as a missionary school the school fees got less the more students continued with their education.

From Kindergarten up to 12th grade I had all subjects in German and Arabic was taught as a subject. Back then we didn’t think Arabic was “cool” so we didn’t really pay attention or really respect our teachers. I grew up religious so I had Quran lessons every week. This is where most my knowledge about Standard Arabic comes from.

As we graduated from high school, the running joke was: We will never meet other people who would speak four languages in the same sentence (We had English starting 4th grade and French starting 6th grade).

I then went to Cairo University to study German literature and later I did a master’s degree in translation in Germany. It was only then that I realized how bad my Arabic is. As a professional translator you always translate into your mother tongue. My mother tongue is Egyptian and Egyptian is not a language, at least not officially. My official mother tongue is Standard Arabic.

I learned and grew and worked as a translator for about 10 years. With every translation I would be feeling the dread of not being sure of my grammar, not being good enough to play around with the sentences and their structure. I had one assignment where I got to translate a play from German into Egyptian and I got a taste of how it feels like to know your language inside out, to be comfortable in it.

After moving to the US because of family obligations I continued to translate for a few years but between losing my network and my struggles with Standard Arabic I eventually retired from being a professional translator.

If for a moment speaking 4 different languages in one sentences seemed to be a lot of fun for me or for you dear reader, let me tell you that it makes communication really hard. It makes expressing yourself very hard. Bilingual speakers know how that feels like.

Not being fully grounded in one language is one of the biggest departure point for my art practice.

Check this writing I used as my artist statement while in grad school.
If you want to get an idea about how my brain works. Listen here.

Now that you know the background of my relationship to my own mother tongue. Stay tuned for updates about that during my residency at AANM.

…I am a poet without a mother tongue, driven by Sehnsucht, a longing so deep,
it has no beginning and no end. I see the world through the languages I speak,
of which I master none…

The Ramadan Fawazeer* started in 1960 on Egyptian Radio. It was simple, every day the creators of the show asked the listeners a question, who then mailed their answers in. A winner was announced (I couldn’t find information on wether the winner was announced daily of after the month of Ramadan had passed as it was the case in later years.) The year after that the Fawazeer* were broadcast on TV and a few years after, it turned from a simple riddle/question to a production that contained drama and performance.

Growing up in the 80s in Egypt, the daily Fawazeer* were the highlight during the holy month of Ramadan. My whole family sat in front of the TV after breaking our fast to watch the Fawazeer*. Every year was different, a theme song/dance at the beginning and the end (we all memorized it by heart) and every day there was a new “riddle” to solve.

A long way to say: In 1993 the topic of the Fawazeer* was “حاجات ومحتاجات”. For the purposes of my residency at the Arab American National Museum my translation is “Things and stuff”. The Fawazeer* series was about inventions. Every episode Sherihan* invited us to guess the invention she was talking about in her singing and dancing.

I was thinking about the word حاجة in Arabic, which in Egypt we use for a thing or an object, but looking at the root of the word, it contains the word “need”. I guess it makes sense, we need things/objects.

In 2008 when I left Egypt for the first time to go to study in Germany, I went to buy little objects to decorate my new space. The first thing I did the moment I moved in, is to tack pictures of my friends and loved ones to the wall, get the little objects out and put them on the shelves. I am here now.

Since then I have moved about 5 times into spaces where I lived in anywhere between 3 months or now the longest space I have been in, nine years. Some of the objects I bought in 2008 are still with me: 2 ceramic pigeons I got in a souvenir shop I like downtown Cairo.

When I had to come up with the theme for my time at AANM I looked at the website and saw that a big part of the collection consists of everyday objects people brought with them as they migrated to the US or objects donated to the archive. Objects that hold stories and document a history of a person/of a people.

On Friday the 13th from 6-8pm, I will be on the rooftop of the AANM for the “rooftop rendevouz” series, hosting an event, where people can come and talk to me about things and stuff they have been carrying around or moving with them and what it means to them. A way to get a look into how we create comfort for ourselves and how we make our own little homes.

My dad ran an antique shop in Cairo for about 40 years until he passed away. Every year I would go visit him and every year I brought little objects with me. Now I am in the process of cleaning up his shop and every time I go, I come back with some broken pieces of what used to be a watch, a coat rack, a frame…

I am making my own little home. Piece by Piece with things and stuff and at the end, I think it’s about carrying love around with us.

*Fawazeer a daily show of riddles presented by a actors and dancers over the years during the month of Ramadan. Typically produced in Egypt and aired around the Arab world.

*Sherihan Egyptian performer, actor and dancer, who was one of the most known artists to present the Fawazeer for many years.

Yesterday I arrived in Dearborn, Michigan to start my residency at the Arab American National Museum for the month of September. When I am traveling, even when I am visiting home in Egypt I don’t unpack, I usually live out of my suitcase.

What does it mean to be Arab?
What does it mean to be Arab and not master my official mother tongue which is standard/classical Arabic?

I struggle with short term residencies as my work usually is born out of time passing and in accumulation.

I struggle with what we call in the arts “identity based work” because I am not sure what that is.

If I make work about my father who lived and died in Egypt, is my work about Egypt? About being Arab?

I come to this residency with more questions than I have answers. My main goal during my time here is to engage with the community in Dearborn and to learn.

My official mission while here is to look into home making through little objects.
My secret mission is to inquire about what it means for me to be Arab or Arab American, a question I never really sat with before.

Maybe to get there, I need to remedy what I think is “missing” in my knowledge. More about that later.

They said: you have to address the elephant in the room.

But first and for the first time ever. I made a home here by unpacking my suitcase into a closet where I can actually see how many tops and bottoms I brought with me and how, as always, I didn’t bring enough clothes with me and all the ways I will regret my wardrobe choices.

As the months drew closer to my time in Michigan, I grew increasingly anxious about leaving my family behind to fend for themselves. I’m the primary caretaker of our toddler, implementing routine and structure in our daily life. My husband is legally blind, and his disability makes it difficult to get around Los Angeles, especially without a driver’s license. Not to mention his extremely demanding job in broadcast, which has unpredictable hours and makes his ability to solo parent an unreliable solution. Without me, how would my family survive??

Thankfully, my mother-in-law was able to move in with my family while I was away, providing the support my husband and son needed and easing much of my anxiety. So, I took the redeye from LAX to Detroit and landed in my new home early in the morning on a Friday. Reaching the furnished studio apartment the museum provided, I finally felt the cumulative months of exhaustion that piled up since my son was born.

Being someone’s everything, especially for a tiny human baby, is an impossible reality that every parent faces. And being that little someone’s main caretaker—making sure they are healthy and want for nothing, being their main source of life—is insurmountable.

I had brought a series I was working on that addresses parenthood and the legacies we pass along; abstract tapestries that depict childhood stories I want to share with my son (pictured above, Bedtime Stories for Yuri). Thankfully, this work rolls up and fits nicely into a suitcase, an easy travel companion when my studio for the month is halfway across the country. I also brought a small altered book I began last year, my “sketchbook” of abstract paper collage and drawings. This became my visual journal for my trip, and I worked on several pages every few days, using ephemera from my outings in Dearborn and Detroit and a small road trip to Lansing. I also started writing daily morning pages, chronicling my solo adventure away from home.

It had been years since I’d lived alone, and I delighted in the ability to eat a cookie for dinner or work on my sketchbook at midnight, not needing to cook for anyone or wake up early to meet someone else’s needs. My creativity was able to flow freely, not limited to preschool hours or naptimes or my husband’s schedule. For the first time in years, I could binge-watch trashy TV or listen to the new Taylor Swift album while endlessly stitching and drinking coffee after noon.

And what a delight, to explore a new place and lose myself while walking around a new city. My father always tells me walking is the best way to learn about your surroundings, so I walked reasonable distances and took the bus elsewhere, trying different restaurants and coffee shops.

It was a respite from reality, from my own daily grind and the world at large. As a mother, I try to hide my fear and desperation from my son, shielding him so he can enjoy childhood innocence and stay oblivious to the atrocities pouring out of Gaza, out of Palestine; a place my grandparents were forced from, like so many others. Every time I look at my son, at my own family, I am overcome by the emotional duality so intrinsic to diaspora: immense gratitude for our circumstances while simultaneously grieving ongoing devastation.

But while living in this fantasyland, Dearborn, I felt safe in my environment for the first time. So much was familiar: the architecture, climate, and food reminded me of Kansas City, where I grew up, the English-Arabic signage and halal restaurants similar to pockets of L.A., where I now live. And so much was new—I was invited to one of Dearborn’s public high schools for culture day, celebrating their diverse student body. Seeing so many kids dressed in thobes and keffiyehs, dancing dabke, truly embodying and embracing their family’s culture in the Midwest brought me to tears. It healed the small, hidden part of me that had felt pressured to suppress my Arab ancestry as a child living in a red state, post-9/11.

Upon coming home, I can feel a difference in my mood and overall wellbeing; I am calmer and more present, more patient with myself and others. Even my husband and son changed, more resilient in their independence instead of relying on me to provide daily structure. I did not realize how much I needed this residency, this time away from reality, but I also did not realize how much my family needed it, too. Having this month to myself was an immeasurable gift, helping me to become a better person, mother, and artist. I can only hope that others will continue to benefit from this truly special experience.

To stay tuned for updates on the piece, check out @lubdubtheatreco on Instagram or visit the project website. 

LAYLA FEGHALI, THE LAND IN OUR BONES (Penguin Random House, 2025)

“Belonging is a Practice: Village life itself has taught me there is nothing automatic about ‘home.’ Whether Indigenous, traditional, or diasporic—ancestral, displaced, or continuous across time, belonging is a practice. A cultivated relationship that deepens with presence and repetition, illuminates with the culmination of eras and efforts.”

From the publisher: 

A profound and searching exploration of the herbs and land-based medicines of Lebanon and Cana’an—a vital invitation to re-member our roots and deepen relationship with the lands where we live in diaspora.

Tying cultural survival to earth-based knowledge, Lebanese ethnobotanist, sovereignty steward, and cultural worker Layla K. Feghali offers a layered history of the healing plants of Cana’an (the Levant) and the Crossroads (“Middle East”) and asks into the ways we become free from the wounds of colonization and displacement.

Feghali remaps Cana’an and its crossroads, exploring the complexities, systemic impacts, and yearnings of diaspora. She shows how ancestral healing practices connect land and kin—calling back and forth across geographies and generations and providing an embodied lifeline for regenerative healing and repair.

PETER LAMONT & JIM STEINMEYER, THE SECRET HISTORY OF MAGIC (Penguin Random House, 2018)

"History, in general, is a form of definition. We tell stories about the past in order to understand the present. The stories we tell, and the ones we prefer, define us in particular ways. They provide us with traditions that we can embrace, which shape how we see ourselves. And when we begin a history of something at a particular point, we are saying this is when it began. Whatever happened earlier was something else; if not, then we would have begun at an earlier point. So choosing a beginning is important, because it should tell us something about the subject at hand."

From the publisher:

If you read a standard history of magic, you learn that it begins in ancient Egypt, with the resurrection of a goose in front of the Pharaoh. You discover how magicians were tortured and killed during the age of witchcraft. You are told how conjuring tricks were used to quell rebellious colonial natives. The history of magic is full of such stories, which turn out not to be true. Behind the smoke and mirrors, however, lies the real story of magic. 

It is a history of people from humble roots, who made and lost fortunes, and who deceived kings and queens. In order to survive, they concealed many secrets, yet they revealed some and they stole others. They engaged in deception, exposure, and betrayal, in a quest to make the impossible happen. They managed to survive in a world in which a series of technological wonders appeared, which previous generations would have considered magical. Even today, when we now take the most sophisticated technology for granted, we can still be astonished by tricks that were performed hundreds of years ago. 

  The Secret History of Magic reveals how this was done. It is about why magic matters in a world that no longer seems to have a place for it, but which desperately needs a sense of wonder.

ABDELMAJID HANNOUM, VIOLENT MODERNITY: FRANCE IN ALGERIA (Harvard University Press, 2010)

“Violence … has been central in the building of many nations, including France itself. The horrific violence and terror of the French revolution did not spare its own architects and makers and has been crucially important in the shaping and defining of modern France. ‘La Marseillaise,’ the national hymn of France, evokes ‘the fight’ and ‘war’ and cannot be called a hymn for peace.”

From the publisher:

In Violent Modernity: France in Algeria, Abdelmajid Hannoum examines the advent of political modernity in Algeria and shows how colonial modernity was not only a project imposed by violence but also a violent project in and of itself, involving massive destruction and significant transformation of the population of Algeria. The author analyzes the relation between culture and events and demonstrates how the culture of colonial modernity was generative of violent events, the most notorious and tragic of which were the spectacular mass killings of the 1990s, usually referred to as “the Algerian civil war.” This, the author argues, cannot be explained without an understanding of colonial modernity.

SARA RAZA, PUNK ORIENTALISM: THE ART OF REBELLION (Black Dog Press, 2022)

"The use of fragmentation and collage [is] an ideological tool for rethinking and navigating anti-imperialist artistic tactics is achieved through the poetic reodering and remixing of histories… Imagine an actual rhizome—the stem of a plan that defies gravity by shooting its roots both sideways and upwards"

To borrow from Cyrus Shahan, Punk Orientalism is ‘not a story of the oppressed, marginalized or persecuted minorities’; a punk narrative reveals instead an unwritten history of the middle. This middle space signals an affirmative gesture against the polarized representation of non-Western art, which has an unfortunate tendency to be presented within the frames of colonial ranking, where East and West are pitted against one another. Thus, emancipating art and artists from the burden of set representational ideals and principles is an important component of this book, which allows for a transcultural account to unravel.”

From the publisher:

Inspired by the titular concepts, punk and orientalism, the text functions as a form of bricolage, uniting punk movements and strategies, which can be traced in popular visual culture from the 1970s onwards. The idea of punk is coupled with a critical study of orientalism and its historical association with imperialist assumptions of knowledge concerning the East. Punk Orientalism expands its association with this territory to explore former Soviet possessions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, as well as looking at the USSR’s complex relationship with the Arab world, Iran and Turkey.

The Magic Bullet Ensemble. Photography by Bjorn Bolinder.

The Magic Bullet is a transdisciplinary performance about an ensemble of seven contemporary artists trying to tell the story of a French colonial magic show that took place at Algiers’ Bab-Azoun Theatre in 1856. As the ensemble attempts to confront the legacy of this historical performance, an overlapping, intersecting sea of stories unfolds across space and time, defying a global legacy of colonization and reclaiming the liberatory potential of magic. 

The Magic Bullet is created by LubDub Theatre Co with the following ensemble of artists: Caitlin Nasema Cassidy, Noelle Ghoussaini, Pierre Jampy, Ismail Khalidi, Mohamed Yabdri, Geoff Kanick, and Robert Duffley. The Magic Bullet is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project co-commissioned by Pangea World Theatre in partnership with the Arab American National Museum, Noor Theatre, and NPN.

During their residency at AANM, The Magic Bullet ensemble conducted research and translated devising work into performance text. Community members were invited to attend a work-in-progress sharing of The Magic Bullet at AANM on February 23, 2024. The Magic Bullet ensemble will return to Michigan in 2025 for production.

LubDub Theatre Co is an NYC-based company of artists that animates stories of science, magic, and myth. LubDubTheatre.com

How fast the half-way point of my residency has arrived. The time has felt deep and rich. Nourishing and revealing.

I would like to extend an invitation for the final event of my residency to all the women who have participated in the becoming-Fluid workshops, AND this invitation is extended to a woman in your life who has not participated but you would like to invite to share this journey with, to join me in re-creating aspects of the hammam through performance ritual on Sunday June 11th from 11am-1:30pm.

Ephemeral shadows of the hammam will be present through video and audio I recorded through creative rituals with women and female refugees from the SWANA inside ancient hammams in Northern Greece this past year. Resonating, breathing and moving in relation to their energy, I will facilitate participants in Dearborn through creative collaborations with water, finding fluidity in the body and voice. The event will culminate in a meditative story-telling ritual re-imagining the origins of eros and honoring women who have taught us lessons in love in order to write new mythologies of collective care.

Together through exchange, creative collaboration and attunement, we will bring to life a fluid space to counter narratives of division. Connecting through body and voice with our sisters overseas and relics of the past, participants will be invited to collectively imagine a future without shame that honors female sexual energy as a restorative healing force ecologically, politically and personally.

Artifacts of our performance ritual as a living archive of love will migrate back overseas with me to the women in refugee camps and female circles I work with there to respond to, attune with, develop on and integrate into their own rituals of collective care together inside the hammams.

Aspects of this bi-national research and evolving archive of love are informing the development of a new dance performance I am creating through support from National Performance Network’s Creation Fund.

If you have not had a chance to participate yet, there is one more workshop 11-1:30pm on Sunday June 4th at the Museum. AND I am recording interviews with women living in Dearborn. If you are interested to talking to me about your experiences of being woman and relationship to water I’d love to meet you! To schedule an interview please get in touch with me through the museum!

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Thank you for welcoming me into your community. In this dynamic season of springtime I have spent long hours attuning my body to your rhythms. I arrived on May 1st and there was a light sprinkle of snow and a vicious wind. Today the sun is bursting in companionship with a gentle breeze, and the park is full of women and children gathering in the lush green grass. In between was the time of the rain, the time of the canopy of lacy white flowering tree, the time of the humidity (which correlated so fluidly with my first workshop, becoming-Fluid), and the time of the falling petals from the trees. 

I look forward to moving more with your cycles as spring transitions to summer. 

Who am I?

Well, this seemingly simple question I have come to realize in just ten days here remains one of the central and complex points of interrogation in the creative work I am developing. 

There are the standard identity practices of our times -

My name is

My gender is

My heritage is

My profession is 

My race is 

My pronouns are 

My nationality is 

etc etc…

And these, as markers of identity that carry significant value in terms of mobility, safety, belonging, etc  change with each era. What side you fall on of feeling safe or not safe, mobile or not mobile, belonging or not belonging of that identity marker varies depending on geography, politics and power in any given time or place.

How I answer that question is shaped in response to the political landscape, time and place I find myself in, and in turn when I answer these questions I participate in shaping the political landscape.

I have already swallowed two books from AANMs generous library reflecting on identity and belonging written decades apart and from different vantage points; each in their own way advocating for a reevaluation in how we identify with and approach identity, each in distinct ways favoring multiplicity, flux, and various over fixed, static and monolithic.

(also shout out to Rima for sharing with me the origins of the Dewey decimal system and pointing out how the established choreography for people to search for and access knowledge is shaped by the thinking of a certain demographic of people in a certain period of time, yet effects the way we still move toward and encounter knowledge today, regardless of how the myriad of cultures that shaped us inherently encounter pathways of knowing that might be radically different) 

So in honor of this time of spring, transition, and rebirth, and the feminine cycles of nature that shape my practice I will instead choose to introduce myself to you through what I am becoming …

I am becoming more attuned to how I am a body of water

I am becoming more aware of how the processes inside my body are entangled with the natural processes of the world around me

I am becoming eager to seek the sun as it shines longer hours of the day

I am becoming slower in my movements and softer in my thoughts in this new place that has afforded me the time and space to focus 

I am becoming porous soaking up new words, ideas, and works of art 

I am becoming reacquainted with my own resonance with the creative impulses of these words, ideas and works of art

I am becoming a student of my own questions and curiosities

I am becoming a dreamer, slowly opening to the possibilities of where and how this research can take shape through the intimate encounters possible in creative process and performance

I am becoming familiar again to the sound of English after spending the last couple of years abroad and working in multi-lingual settings

I am becoming tenderly attached to the local baristas and the two young girls who run the first checkout line in the grocery store. With each daily encounter we become more wholly visible to each other through words and more than words and I will miss them when I leave and remember them always 

I am becoming sensitive to my own grief 

and I am becoming more chatty with my ancestors who have passed while being in this community that cherishes Arab American heritage past and present so much

I am becoming more comfortable with my borderlessness during this residency, paradoxically even as I focus inward on my body and outward on books debating identity politics 

I am becoming an ally to my humor 

and I am becoming a friend to my erotic self, which has been marginalized, shamed and denigrated across centuries of androcentric civilizations 

I am becoming tender tears for my aging parents - being in Dearborn and walking past families sprawled between their porches and the trunks of their minivans carrying tupperwares of food fills me with longing

I am becoming vibrations of sound waves washing over myself, meeting and merging with the women who shared practice with me last Sunday and the voices of various bodies of water 

I am becoming spiritual in a way that is detached tho not antagonistic toward monotheism 

I am becoming devoted to showing up for collective care and the pathways of communing with other women towards healing and repair - not just for the self, but for each other and the natural world, that are a legacy passed down across time and space despite marginalization and criminalization 

I am becoming less timid of falling

I am becoming more familiar with my levity

I am becoming..

and I hope to meet, encounter and share a smile, a tear, a song, a dance, a breath, a story with you in my time here. 

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If you are a woman or femme-identifying person I am facilitating two more becoming-Fluid workshops that will be exploring some of the creative research I have developed with women and femme-identifying refugees from the SWANA in Northern Greece over the past year. Together, we have been reclaiming the historic sites of the ancient hammams as sites of pleasure, care and love to counter narratives of division through public art and performance ritual. 

These workshops here at AANM in Dearborn are free and will include somatic movement and vocal sound healing explorations, creative collaborations with water, myth and poetry, and circular conversations reflecting on the health, agency and safety of women. 

The next one is Sunday May 21st 11am-1pm and will focus on feminine erotic energy as a source of ecological repair and restoration, tracing this thread from Paleolithic art through some of the myths and rituals of the earliest ancient civilizations in the SWANA through to female erotic Arabic poetry and modern artistic expressions. 

We will explore these mythologies and their medicines through our bodies, our voices and our humor!

Finally, during my time at AANM I am furthering this research towards the development of a dance performance and interactive installation that will premier at some future date with support through the National Performance Network Creation and Development Grant. 

While here I would really like to connect with women and femme-identifying who might be interested in participating in re-imagining the hammam with me as part of this journey and process! If you are interested in being involved please get in touch! 

Specifically and especially, if you are interested in story telling, sharing and attuning with other women, finding creative pathways with water, reflecting on the origins of love, and re-imagining new eros origin stories for the future. 

No performance experience is necessary. Just a desire to connect, ponder, and create. 

Sincerely,

M

Syria and Turkey are still dealing with the effects of the earthquakes from a few weeks ago. Please consider supporting and donating to the organizations that need it, if you can. Some organizations to consider: Syrian American Medical Society, The White Helmets, and/or the Turkish Red Crescent (Türk Kızılay), to name a few.

about the residency

This month is one I’ve been looking forward to, and it exceeded my expectations! Everything was better than I could have dreamed. I’ve had such a lovely time getting to know the staff and working and living in Dearborn/Detroit. I haven’t dreamt of “being a poet” for a long time, if that makes sense. It was always a thing I did for myself. But my time as a resident at the AANM has shown me a life where I can prioritize poetry and art. I’m grateful I was given the time and space to work on my poetry, make mistakes, and develop a clearer understanding of who I want to be and how I want to live in this world. This project has also reignited my love for nature, to respect it and help support those who can best protect it and care for it. I also really want to plan a trip to Lebanon now.

teaching

I’ve also had the pleasure of teaching a few poetry writing workshops to students who visited AANM. I was a little trepidatious going into it, as I had never taught a workshop before, but it went better than I expected. It was great fun to introduce younger students to poetry. We talked about poems, nature, and symbolism, among other things. I loved seeing their creativity as they wrote their own poems. I thought I would share some of the poems I selected for the workshops.

• Olive Tree by Lisa Suhair Majaj

• Every day as a wide field, every page by Naomi Shihab Nye

• A Memory of Us by Safia Elhillo

the food scene

Amanda Ekhry, the resident before me, shared a huge (and very helpful list!) of places she enjoyed eating at. I would like to do the same, albeit on a much smaller scale. Here’s my top 10 places I visited, in no particular order.

1. Nizam Pastry - My favorite Lebanese dessert is maamoul, so that’s mostly what I got from here and it was so good I nearly cried.

2. Qahwah House - I visited both locations and had Turkish coffees, Yemeni lattes, and the best chocolate cake I’ve ever tasted. The East Dearborn location was so cozy!

3. Romantica Cafe - I tried Yemeni coffee (jubani) here for the first time my second day in Dearborn, and it was such a lovely experience.

4. Haraz - It was dangerous having this coffee shop close to the museum. I spent a lot of money here and do not regret it. Although I don’t usually go for lattes, I loved the pistachio latte (lightly sweetened). The za’atar croissant was also really good.

5. Al Chabab - The best falafel sandwich I had during my stay here — it tasted super fresh and had mint, which really elevated it. My sister and I shared a HUGE bowl of fattoush, courtesy of the owner, who was so kind!

6. Al Tayeb - We ordered a TON of food here — all of the breakfast classics and then some. I’ll be dreaming about this meal for awhile.

7. Al-Saada Bakery - This quickly became my happy place. There is no better feeling than walking home on a sunny day with steaming hot za’atar man’ouche and spinach fatayer. They also had kaak, which I haven’t had since my baba visited Lebanon a few years ago.

8. Galata Sweets - I took friends here twice, and it was such a great experience! We drank Turkish coffee and ate way too many sweets!

9. Dearborn Fresh - I basically lived off the deli items during my time here. So good; so convenient, something I’ll miss when I’m back in Oklahoma.

10. Sheeba - I tried a veggie Yemeni stew here for the first time, and it was so warming and tasty. The fries and tandoor bread here were also very good.

where to find me + a BIG thank you!

The AANM is always going to be a special place for me, and I plan on returning to see everything the museum is doing this coming year. No matter what path my life takes, I’ll always be a writer, whether of poetry or other forms. I’ve had such a fun, productive time here, and want to extend a huge thank you to the entire staff for all their help with research, workshops, and writing, and for just being really cool people to talk to.

If you’re interested in staying connected and seeing what I’m up to, give me a follow on Instagram, where I’m most active! You can also take a look at my website at hanasaad.weebly.com.

Poetry has always been about catharsis for me. It was an outlet, and still is, for me to express complicated emotions, thoughts, and experiences. But now I’m also seeing the pleasure of craft; of using poetry to craft a larger narrative.

I’m digging deep into the bones of this story. I’m experimenting with different speakers and settings. I’m exploring the themes that have always interested me, yes, but this time, I’m incorporating more nuance into my work, brought forth by my time in Dearborn researching Lebanese flowers, the ins-and-outs of Arab-American history, and lots of uninterrupted writing time.

I’ve also been thinking about environmental justice and what our role is in all of it as we navigate climate change. I don’t have a clear answer yet, even for myself, but I do encourage you to get involved on a local level when it comes to issues of environment. Vote and communicate with your elected officials — if they’re receptive to listening to you — and join climate advocacy and environmental justice groups in your community. This is something I plan on doing more once I’m back in Tulsa, OK.

As I’ve been here, I’ve had the chance to be immersed in Arab-American culture and it’s been wonderful. Conversations with staff members about our experiences being Arab-American have been so cathartic. Everyone has their own story and relationship with their identity as Arab-Americans and people living in this country.

I always felt like I needed to fit in somewhere within mainstream expectations of what it means to be Arab or American, but doing this residency has showed me you can fit in without subscribing to a single mold or way of being. To some sense, I already knew that, but now, I believe it.

I could have worked on this project without being in Dearborn, but being here has had an invaluable effect on my personal and creative growth. It’s given me a lot of energy to dive into this new project, and I’ve had the chance to learn so much from the AANM staff, exploring Dearborn/Detroit, and running a few workshops at the museum. Although my time in Dearborn is nearing it’s end, I know that Beqaa Valley Violet isn’t.

sneak peaks! at poems!

I thought I’d share a couple of the poems I’ve been working on (something I never, ever do, so consider yourself lucky [please read that knowing I have a dose of sarcasm in my voice. Anyways.] ). They are definitely still a work-in-progress, but are representative of the direction in which my project is going. The first one is a response to two lines I wrote over the summer that inspired this entire project: beqaa valley violet/you burned in the back of my eyes.

beqaa valley violet

You were behind my irises,
a violet surprise.
With no one around to see
I plucked your 
sun softened petals,
all my vitreous fluid oozing
around your
green leaves,
seemingly delicate
right in front of me,
for everyone to
see.

Surprisingly, the Lebanese Violet was not the only flower that took hold of me. The Iris Sofarana, or Iris of Sawfar, also has become the subject of several poems. Here’s the first stanza.

Ode to the Iris that grows in Anjar

Maybe I’m an imposter, 
a grifter
scattered	somewhere
impossibly found after 
being thought to be lost. 

If you like how these are shaping up, then make sure to come to AANM’s Open Mic night THIS Friday, where I will be hosting and reading the other poems I’ve been working on! And even if you don’t like it, still come! You may fancy someone else’s work, or read something of your own. Sign up if you want to read. Find more details here.

P.S. I’ve been inspired by V.E. Schwab’s latest newsletter, where she mentioned that having a specific set of songs you listen to before working on a creative project can help you get in the mindset to work on it. For Beqaa Valley Violet, I’ve been playing Narrative by Felukah non-stop (shout out to Zaza for introducing me to this artist!).

One more thing

There’s a lot going on in the world, and dozens of causes to support and be invested in. The earthquakes in Turkey and Syria have been devastating, with the situation only worsening after another earthquake a few days ago. Please donate if you can. This article has a list of legitimate organizations to contribute to, and tips on how to avoid scams.

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Researching

Starting a new creative project can be daunting, but if there’s one thing that I can do, it’s research. My Media Studies degree prepared me for that, and I can just hear my professors in my head, nudging me onwards and pointing out when I’ve bitten off a bigger question than I have time to chew on.

At first, I wanted to do an in-depth study of the relationship each Arab/SWANA country has to nature. But that’s the kind of project that you spend YEARS on. The idea is still very much a part of the undercurrent of my project, but it’s not my main focus right now, especially with just a month to really dig into my research and writing.

Beqaa Valley Violet is in the early stages. I think it may eventually become a chapbook or collection of poems featuring a variety of speakers, or narrators, as they navigate a metaphorical journey through Beqaa Valley, wrestling with modes of movement as well as perceptions of duality, stability, and wholeness. (Full disclosure: there probably aren’t Lebanese Violets in Beqaa, but the symbolism of the violet is a pretty strong feature for this project, so it had to make it in the title).

Although I have fond memories of from a visit to Lebanon in 2006, I never fully realized the incredible biodiversity present in Beqaa Valley and Lebanon as whole. In fact, it’s considered a “hotspot” for biodiversity, as it is a part of the Mediterranean Basin.

From Lebanon Flora, a database I’ve been heavily relying on for my research.

“According to the latest assessment of Lebanese flora (Tohmé and Tohmé 2006); more than 2600 plant species are recorded, of which 103 species are endemic to Lebanon (Leb), 336 endemic to Lebanon and other regional countries (Syria, Palestine and/or Turkey) and 745 endemic to the east Mediterranean region (EMR). Unfortunately, as in other circum-Mediterranean countries, the plant biodiversity is weakened by the strong impact of human activities.”

2600! And that’s just from the latest assessment.

Writing

Since I began my residency, I’ve been diving pretty deep into this database, along with other resources, such as the incredible work of Dr. Nisrine Machaka and Dr. Ahmad Houri, who have made it their mission to document hundreds of flowers across Lebanon.

Sometimes, my research serves as a direct prompt for a poem. Other times, I let it swirl around in my head, blending with the other half of my research, which stems from cultural studies, the Lebanese diaspora, Arab-American activism, and stories of Arab-Americans navigating our existence in a globalized world.

Some of the poems I’ve written are more confessional in nature; others are inspired by my research — such as a poem about the Iris sofarana, which is endemic to Lebanon and thought to be extinct until a few were found in someone’s backyard in Baalbek a few years ago.

Anyways, I’m feeling grateful to be in Dearborn and for all the connections I’ve made in the short time I’ve been here. I am full of joy and excitement for all of the ways this narrative is forming. Stay tuned for more updates + thoughts as I explore Dearborn/Detroit and work on my project.

P.S. If you’re in Dearborn next Friday, come to AANM’s Open Mic night, which I will be hosting! And even if you’re not in Dearborn, you can view a livestream of the event. I might even read you a few poems…