If you want some insight into what it was like to follow me on Instagram in 2013, when I first joined this app, here’s a little peek. Not much has changed, I guess.
February 24, 2013: The windows overlooking Lena’s terrace, where I tasted oranges in a salad for the first time, thanks to Lena’s Sicilian cooking. I don’t remember what we talked about, but the conversation was probably peppered with names like Deleuze and Trotsky, because it often was. Hanging out with Lena was like stepping into a jittery scene on a 16mm reel.
March 21 is Mothers’ Day in much of the Arab World because it’s the beginning of Spring, but also, because an Egyptian journalist lobbied for it under Nasser and made it a thing in a time of nation-building and revolutionary fervor, which is often gendered — victory to the ummah, long life to our ummahat!
It’s impossible to divorce this day from the politics of the region.
This is a stencil I saw somewhere in Beirut on March 28, 2013. It says: “the woman’s revolt (intifada) in the Arab world,” with the red-lipped figure’s hair forming the map of the MENA/SWANA region. I always thought that she looks a little like my own mother in the 80s.
It’s impossible to divorce the politics of the region from our most cherished memories. Happy Mothers’ Day to every mother, every child, every orphan, every lover of life.
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I think that a lot of us are finally waking up to the abject horror of Zionist fascism in Palestine, and much of that is due to the blatant and unrepentant self-disclosure of its own foot soldiers through social media, which isn’t new.
Going through my old files on this memory stick, I find this photo-collage I made of a screenshot I took from an IOF sniper doing it for the ‘gram, way back when.
Look at those hashtags.
Blood.
Swag.
YOLO.
Gun.
Love.
It’s been happening. It’s still happening. It must end. We must end it. We must end this today, before tomorrow.