Haramacy: A Collection of Stories Prescribed by Voices from the Middle East, South Asia and the Diaspora

I’ve been absolutely terrible at keeping this blog updated. So here’s me updating it with a post about a book I’m very proud to be part of alongside these remarkable authors and editors.

In so many ways, this book hadn’t felt real until our launch event in London a week ago. When I first discussed the essay with Zahed, Dhruva and Tara two years ago, we were in the terror phase of the early pandemic. Everything I thought about writing felt both futile one day, essential the next. I am grateful to them as editors for shepherding me through that early confusion and helping me craft an essay I am proud of.

A lot of people asked me about that essay, entitled The Shallows, during the launch I told them it was my interpretation of the theme of fracture. How I had always thought my competing identities only meant I was confused about where I should live, until I found out they affected my sleep, my paranoia about Airbnbs and ultimately my breathing. This essay is about how I discovered I had never breathed properly my whole life. It’s about mental health and the superhuman efforts we all ultimately make just to function.

I am lucky to be featured in the anthology alongside so many brilliant young Middle Eastern and South Asian writers. I haven’t confirmed, but I might be the elder of the group as I barrel towards 40. They are the future, and I feel thankful to add my voice to theirs.

The idea for the anthology was that we are only asked for our voice in UK society and publishing when it is topical. When it is linked to current affairs. This book was a space to just take a moment to say what we wanted to say away from that manufactured urgency. A moment to breathe, really. I will forever be grateful for it.

HARAMACY is available wherever you get your books. Published by Unbound Books, 2022.

Order from Amazon | Foyles | WH Smith | Waterstones | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org | Book Depository

PRAISE FOR HARAMACY

“A beautiful love letter to the diaspora. Haramacy is an essential collection of essays that push the conversation forward on issues to do with visibility, mental health, race and class” - Nikesh Shukla

“A superbly crafted collection of essays. Often elegant, often visceral, always essential.” - Musa Okwonga

Last Floor Productions: New Identity

We get asked why we called our production company @lastfloorproductions. Sometimes we spin a tale about a writer sitting on the last floor of a building while the city sleeps. Burning the midnight oil. Doing everything they can to finish a draft. The reality is that in 2019, @dchabib @firasfiras__ & I came up with the idea for our own production house in DC’s apartment on the last floor of a building overlooking Beirut. A home that’s always filled me with its welcoming spirit & the ideas that swirl within it.

The years since we started have been what you might call, umm, challenging. A global pandemic hit just as we were about to start shooting our first series & shut down, well, everything. A few months later, the production office we moved into a few meters from the Beirut Port to run that same shoot, would meet a fate we’re all familiar with now. But we soldiered on. We created our first show for @shahid.vod from our homes in London, Beirut & Jeddah, at the peak of our anxiety over the first lockdown. We created our second show for Shahid on location around Beirut. It was joyous to be around talented people in person again. We created a combined 14 short films about incredible artists for @apple & @vamuseum that allowed us to look into different worlds in the US, UK, UAE, Saudi Arabia, India & Pakistan.

I am so incredibly proud of what we, and the 150+ people we have collaborated with these past two years, have achieved.

As we enter this new chapter, we have half a dozen projects at various stages of development & production (and varying levels of NDA 🤐) in North America, the UK, Lebanon & across the Gulf.

To mark this new chapter, we wanted a new identity. We reached out to the incredible team at @studiokawakeb They helped us interpret our mission as a production company rooted in the Middle East & its diasporas, based in London & Beirut - always in conversation with the whole world.

If this period in film and TV history has taught us anything, it’s that we can dream as big as we want. We can have global ambition. We just need to make good shit - great shit - and the rest will take care of itself eventually.

Looking forward to 2022.

Profile of Jason Seife for GQ Middle East

I had a great time chatting with Miami-based artist Jason Seife about the journey to becoming a celebrated contemporary artist working on monumental physical and digital pieces.

Read the full interview here.

PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photography by David Urbanke
Styling by Keanoush Zargham
Produced (ME) by Malaika Naik
Produced (US) by Emily Strange
Produced Manager by Kendall Nash
Grooming by Anastasiia Milyaeva
Set design by Izabelle Garcia
Photo assistance by Brian Mcguffog
Fashion assistance by Zeid Jaouni, Barnaba Fagioli, Nico Harder
Production Assistance by Sean Anglin

The GQ Profiles

I haven’t written anything here for a while, so the next couple of posts will just be a kind of update on what’s been up this past year. On the GQ Middle East front, I’ve been extremely luck to chat with some truly impressive, talented people. Back around the start 2020, I chatted with French-Algerian actor (and Thai boxing champ) Dali Benssalah about his role in the new Bond film. We didn’t know then that it wouldn’t come out till October 2021. In October I had a chat with luminous Italian pop star Mahmood about everything from the labels he avoids to Eurovision. By December, I was having chats with some of GQ’s People of the Year, including the brilliant Egyptian actor Ahmed Malek (Breakthrough Actor of the Year) and joint Artists of the Year Eli Rezkallah - the visionary founder of Plastik Magazine - and global pop culture satirist Saint Hoax. In March of 2021, I spoke to the wonderful Dana Hourani about her burgeoning pop career and in April I met with legendary Syrian actor Bassel Khaiat to figure out what it feels like to be at the top of the game.

In the middle of all that, I wrote something about the Beirut explosion in August. It was a very different kind of piece, but I’m thankful to GQ for giving me the space to process what happened that day on their pages.

I hope the coming year will be much more focused on meeting talented Arab creators around the world. It’s an exciting moment for the culture.

The Lockdown Diaries #4 | The Myth of America

Since I was a child, I loved everything about American culture. Mawkish romantic comedies about elegant East Coast intellectual-types. Monumental music productions and hair metal bands. Sitcoms about big families living in even bigger homes. All forms of arcane Americana. Diners. Drive-thru movie theatres. Roadside motels. Lone travelers. Misfits heading out West. Something like an Eggleston photo or a Hopper painting. Etc. Like many, I have been obsessed with America’s cultural contribution (domination?). I thought it was the most advanced place on Earth. But I had never been there.

In 2005 I saw Hurricane Katrina on TV. And I realized this mythologized place was a lie. This wasn't an advanced country. Who would leave people to drown? Or sitting on their roofs waiting for help?

Of course I witnessed American occupation and brutality in the Middle East. But as an Arab, you come to expect very little of foreign powers in your region anyway. Wherever they come from. What was shocking was to see they treated their own people the same way.

Then I went to the US for the first time in 2008, I think. I saw two homeless men fighting in wheelchairs by a bonfire outside a nightclub in Miami. No one thought it was weird or heartbreaking. No country rewards its rich better or  punishes its poor more fully that the United States.

The next day I was lost walking around town. I saw a police officer, and for the first time outside an authoritarian country, I decided initiating an unnecessary conversation with someone in uniform posed more problems than it solved. It held the potential for humiliation or worse. I realized the cop cars and uniforms that looked cool in films, looked terrifying in reality. They weren’t meant to comfort, they were designed to intimidate.

I had been to North America a lot in my teens. Just north of the border in Canada. And those months spent in Ottawa gave me the illusion of knowing America. Staying at my uncle’s place, we were close enough to the tristate area to catch it’s local television affiliates. The landscape contained what my imagination of America did - Ford F150s, the NHL, massive amounts of food, Dr Peppers, backyards. I was too young to realize that what felt familiar in Ottawa wasn’t its North Americanness, but its almost Nordic sense of justice, security and simplicity.

I still love America. I have been many more times since that first trip in 2008. But it's a more realistic version of that place. Filled with an understanding of what it was built on, who remains excluded from its story, and who will die because not enough people care.

This past week, watching its response to the global sickness that has challenged us all, I have been genuinely worried about my friends there. About their ability to get the care they need if something happens to them.

During my own anxiety-ridden confinment in London, I watched the documentary everyone watched. But in Tiger King’s cast of larger-than-life Harmony Korine characters I saw a portrait of a deeply broken country. I guess it has always been a place on the precipice of madness. You just have to look back at decades old Louis Theroux documentaries about its survivalist, UFO-seeing, cult worshipping fringes - which became its social media-fulled center. Or read this piece (How America Lost Its Mind) from 2017. Or listen to This Is America.

The myth of America started losing its luster a long time ago for those of us on the outside. Those without a stake in the realization of that myth. But the reality of America has been dangerous to half its population for a long time, and will be dangerous to many more now.

America is also a place of Second Acts. A place where everyone gets a chance to reimagine themselves, to emerge from a personal catastrophe, shed your skin and start anew. I wonder what Second Act awaits the country when it emerges from the chaos it is in now.

Image - Eggleston Artistic Trust. - William Eggleston: Untitled from The Democratic Forest, 1983-1986

The Lockdown Diaries #3 | Culinary Quarantine

I am pleased to announce that I am now an Instagram influencer. In the past week I have posted photos of food prep, dish photos, and the aftermath of a morning jog. It is shocking to myself from two weeks ago that I have reached this stage so quickly. A friend DMed me saying “I have unfollowed everyone posting their daily food regimen, but I’ll give you a pass”. I know where he’s coming from. This kind of oversharing is something I’ve tried to stay away from on social media in the past year or so. But I suddenly find myself far more lenient in times of crisis. A bit like that meme going around which says if you want to pronounce the L in salmon, now’s your time to shine because we’ve got bigger fish to fry (sorry, not sorry). 

Allow me to transport you briefly to what I now call “The Before Times” when corona was a beer you shoved a wedge of lime into. Up until about a year ago I had never cooked anything voluntarily. And when I did it was never particularly healthy or flavourful. I saw cooking as a bit of a tedious chore, and I’d grill something or pop a frozen pizza in the oven if there were no opportunities to go out/order in or have a meal cooked by family and friends. I didn’t see this as any kind of personal failing because I did lots of other stuff normally considered domestic. I have a long and public history of loving ironing. I have meticulous rituals around cleaning my iron, and consider settling in to make some shirts nice and crisp a therapeutic experience. I clean almost compulsively, to the point of making dinner guests uncomfortable as I plump up and fluff pillows on the sofa while they're sitting on it trying to have a nice evening. 

But it became clear that my inactivity in the kitchen, beyond rummaging from Creme Eggs in the cupboard, was starting to create an imbalance in household task distribution (ie my wife told me I should cook more). I graduated from line cook to sous chef, while still staying at the stage where I couldn’t fuck anything up. Of course, I still managed to fuck up the intricacies of dicing up an aubergine. Then on a trip to Brussels about a year and a half ago, I was staying with a former colleague. He and his partner cooked up something wonderful out of a box with a green logo down the side. I jotted down the name and ordered my first HelloFresh box as soon as I got back to London.

I’d heard about services like it in between cute MailChimp (mailkimp?) and Squarespace ads on my favourite podcasts. This kind of recipe box (like BlueApron, Mindful Chef, etc) does a couple of things that help the novice cook. You make meal decisions a week ahead, you get a box with exactly the right amount of ingredients, and you get step-by-step instructions with photography. It is - and I cannot stress this enough - incredibly difficult to fuck up a recipe in a food box like this. The dishes aren’t necessarily simple, and at first I was filled with terror at getting through the steps on time. I’d often stand there in a cloud of smoke wafting up from the stove top wondering why I couldn’t figure out something billions of people do easily.  

But over the course of the various dishes I settled into a more easygoing kitchen persona. Less Gordon Ramsay mid-breakdown, more Nigella delicately peeling a garlic clove. I had techniques for dicing now. I knew what to expect when I added ginger to a dish. I knew how to tell it was doing the right things. I figured out I needed to see what I was making - which means I hate recipes that involve the oven. I even got cocky, improvising away from recipes. And that’s the main thing actually starting to make dishes you enjoy gives you: confidence. 

These past weeks, as our homes have become the stage to the totality of our lives, people have shared recipes, home workout and yoga routines, snippets from video calls, live instagram feeds. I’ve seen people mock this sudden outpouring of expressiveness, as if it is some kind of exercise in narcissism. But I think that’s misreading the situation. On an average day, maybe these forms of communication could be seen as a bit annoying. Or even a lot annoying, one of the symptoms of our broken age. But in our current context, all disconnected from each other physically, they’re like living in a shared house. Much like living in a shared house, maybe some of our habits are getting on each other’s nerves. 

I have loved everyone’s food stories, because they feed into my barely-one-year-old ability to actually do something with that information. I’ll see a tip in a friend's feed and incorporate it into something I’m doing. I even know for a fact that my cooking stories have pushed a couple of friends who don’t see themselves as the kind of people who enjoy cooking to try something out because they thought I wasn’t the kind of person who enjoys cooking. 

I think it’s a very odd time to be condescending to people about the habits that keep them sane. Maybe we can go back to that in a month, but in the meantime why don’t we support each other in trying to be healthy at home. That being said, don’t expect a pilates routine from me any time soon.


The Lockdown Diaries #2 | The Things We Have Yet to Lose

For the past 18 months I have been in therapy. This is not particularly brave, or noteworthy. In the UK, 25% of the population will experience some mental health problem in any given year, about 6% will have generalized anxiety and about 8% will have mixed anxiety and depression. I was somewhere between those two categories. When I started therapy, I was looking to rebuild a sense of self. I had recently left a job that had been a big part of how I defined myself. The departure hadn’t been smooth or particularly professional. I was falling apart regularly, and unable to function with my new precarious financial reality. At first, the therapy allowed me to get my life under control. To do the most basic things again. After that, therapy turned into an almost intellectual exercise. A way to decode what I was feeling into something resembling a coherent thesis of the self. 

For example, I have discovered that the way I show love to my friends and family is by attempting to solve their problems for them. I have discovered that the reason I have an aversion towards Airbnb - and the ridiculously named “sharing economy” in general - is because I spent my teenage years growing up in a surveillance state - where I’d regularly hear the clicks of the intelligence services latching onto our phone line - and still believe that every room I enter that isn’t in my house in London could be bugged or have secret cameras. When I had to ask for help from my parents aged 35, I felt enormous inner conflict because the British side of me couldn’t tolerate the regression, whereas the Lebanese part of me thought it was normal to fall back on family in a difficult moment. And I learned that last week, when I cried at an email from my local independent bookstore asking for help to keep going, then cried again at the sight of shut down pubs in Chalk Farm and the empty streets of Soho on the news, what I was feeling wasn’t fear over the sickness taking hold across the world - it was grief.  I am grieving the social spaces that offer joy and randomness. I am grieving the fact that when they come back, they will not be the same. Whatever happens, we will have lost something. Grief is a difficult emotion to sit with. It makes me think of all the other griefs I have coming my way. Even though my rational brain knows that in a few months, some semblance of limited normality will return to some parts of the world and maybe I’ll be able to get on a plane, another part of me is terrified I will never see my parents again. (Yesterday I saw a HBR article echoing my therapist’s words, entitled That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief. But I haven’t brought myself to reading it yet. Maybe I will after I watch a bit more feel-good Brooklyn Nine-Nine.)

The weekly therapy appointment became a cornerstone of my life, holding everything else together around it. In my first session I was told that that hour on Wednesday was mine, and that if I ever needed to cancel I would still be charged. It’s a way of creating respect for that time slot and forcing regularity. When we moved it from 4pm to 1.30pm, it felt uncomfortable. Two weeks ago, we moved from in-person sessions to phone sessions. It was understandable, but I still wanted to cling on to my habit. So I decided I would do my calls in the park nearby, a safe distance from everyone. On this week’s call, my therapist told me she was shutting down her practice. By design, the therapist-patient information flow is lopsided, which means that it is not my place to ask why. I just asked if she was OK. And we moved on. I told her that when I was managing a team, I never took a professional departure personally. I had colleagues who took every resignation as a personal affront, but I always understood people had lives to live, careers to explore, themselves or others to take care of. 

I feel some freedom - seeing if I can make it through this pandemic and the anxiety it has created - without the structure that has made the last 18 months liveable. Regardless, I recognize that is another layer of grief. Something has ended and I am entering this uncertain time without professional help. But there is something in the commonality of our anxieties at the moment that means I’m not worried. We all share similar fears right now, our ambitions are on hold as we clean ourselves and our houses compulsively. Although everyone is convinced that staying at home means they’ll finally write that novel (spoiler: you won’t, trust me), what it actually means is we’re all in a form of stasis. We want to stay safe for those we care about and we want them to get through this. Somehow because we’re all in this equalized moment, I don't feel I have any individual need for therapy. It is being done collectively. Through the knowledge of the things we have already lost and the fear of losing more. 

Every video call is a message we’re sending out to the person(s) we are talking to, to ourselves and to everyone we share the screenshot with afterwards on an Instagram story - it says that even as we shut down our social spaces, we will remain a social species. And we will be here for each other, through both the certain grief and the unimaginable joy that will come when we emerge from this moment. 

For advice and support if you’re facing mental health problems in the UK, reach out to Mind at www.mind.org.uk