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HomePosts Tagged "youthful-cities"

youthful-cities Tag

I am from within and without Beirut. I grew up between Riyadh and South Lebanon, with one foot struggling to fit in each land, then I moved to Beirut right before attending university for my undergraduate degree. In many ways, it was Beirut that nourished my artistic expression, political identity, and sense of self.  I sometimes find it awkward and difficult to answer what it is that I do. I find that defining someone by their labor (and money-making, inadvertently) is too limiting, and yet, saying I am a writer or artist is sometimes too abstract. I think that form, medium,

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I was 20-days-old when my Lebanese parents wrapped me in a basket and moved us back to Beirut having intelligently blessed me with a Canadian birth. I grew up around my dad's war-collected records and my mom's ethnic cooking.  My childhood was spent rollerblading, climbing trees, and playing Legos in a space that at the time hadn't registered to me as my city. The older and older I got, the more I observed Beirut grow from memory blocks classified as  this-is-where-my-grandma-lives and this-is-where-my-school-is to the intrinsically complex, polluted and unbecoming purgatory it is. But who I am is far from

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I grew up in Germany in between the Protestantism of my mom's family and the Shiism of my father, with Germanized customs picked up from Huguenots and Ashura at my father's preferred mosque. When we moved to Beirut three years after the 2006 war, it was the first time that I got a visceral understanding of what it means for politics to cross a life. A nauseating, never-ending line of lives crossed or crossed out. I am very attached to my family and to landscapes I inhabit or grew up with, but I feel detached from context. Apart from relating

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The effortless answer is to say I'm from Beirut. It's where I feel most intrinsic to the architecture, like a jar in a pantry. I am continuously being molded by the city's social and political landscape, its communities, the stretch of Mediterranean Sea and stuffy streets. But (my generation loves to complicate this question, doesn't it), I am also from other homes: my grandparents' in Talkalakh, my family's in Kumasi and Tripoli.  In the most primordial sense, of course, I am from my mother's womb. My mother is who and where and what I always return to. As for what I do-my

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I'm a Lebanese/Palestinian/Syrian writer based in Beirut. I graduated from the LAU Adnan Kassar School of Business in the spring of 2017 and just finished my masters in International Relations at the Queen Mary University of London. Professionally, I'm a jack-of-all-trades, but I mainly make my money from freelance writing. Recently, I worked on the most recent expansion of The Story Engine Deck of writing prompts which made over $600,000 on Kickstarter, and was chosen as the writing contest coordinator at Dream Foundry for this year and the next.   Like anything else in life, my desire to become a writer was

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I was born and raised in the outskirts of Boston, MA - Dedham, Massachusetts to be precise. Yet I first boarded a plane at eight weeks old to get baptized in my mother's home city, Brussels. I spent my childhood and adolescent summers there, joining the Belgian boy scouts at a young age. On my father's side, both his parents are American-Lebanese (born in the States, but their families immigrated from Lebanon). And in college, I propelled myself into a wonderful soul-searching journey towards reconnecting with my roots and gaining fluency (cultural and linguistic) in the Arabic language. It was

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