Reading Bolaño with Fairuz in Khobar.
“Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically.
“Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.”
“But exile,” said Pelletier, “is full of inconveniences, of skips and breaks that essentially keep recurring and interfere with anything you try to do that’s important.”
“That’s what I mean by abolishing fate,” said Amalfitano. “But again, I beg your pardon.”
blogging live from the kingdom
reading tayib salih, watching madrasat il moshaghibin, drinking turkish coffee, eating dates, listening to fairuz on vinyl, gazing at the fig tree outside the window
ya3ny, I can’t blame you for romanticizing this shit. I know I do. fucking diasporic arabs.
I often draw friends to keep me company/provide moral support while I work. (The bird says “CONCENTRATE” and the fishie says “Yallah!”)
Fuck memories. I feel like if I’m going to leave my exes with anything, it should be a rigorous anti-colonial analysis.
Ramadan Kareem my friends
This Ramadan, pray for the end of capitalism.
And don’t give iftar to oppressors kidding kidding not kidding.
I dreamt that I made a multimedia graphic novel film item
and have unconsciously started making it
what ish appenin g
hum hum dee dee dum to the soundtrack of my mum’s turkish soap opera
I am a shameless flirt apparently
I am just awful
but it’s a way of life, a state of mind, flirting.
I’ll flirt with my orchid plant, not because I want to sleep with it
but because it’s my most genuine way of interacting with it
non-flirting is so much more intentional
non-flirting is frontin
everyone is always frontin
My flirting is not flirting, it’s just me genuinely being enthusiastic being misinterpreted.
So it’s everyone else’s fault.
I will flirt with my orchid plant all I want.
and kiss it too, because it makes it grow.
The story of my nude self-portrait
In my first year of art school, my final drawing class assignment was drawing a life-size nude self-portrait. At the end of the year, my mom came back to town, and seeing as I come from a semi-conservative Muslim family, no way in hell could she know that I showed an entire class my nude self-portrait. So I threw it away. But it was so big and I was in a rush so I just impulsively threw it in the garbage room of my building and that was that.
In all likelihood it just got recycled, but I sometimes wonder if anyone found this giant blue portrait of this anonymous sad-looking girl and kept it for themselves. I wonder if my naked self is in someone’s living room right now. I wonder if they ever recognized me in the street. What if one day I stumbled into that living room and found myself having tea in front of an 18 year old naked me.
