Seen, Heard, and Understood

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.