In Littérature et Révolution, writer Joseph Andras and writer and sociologist Kaoutar Harchi invite us into a nuanced and caring 240-page conversation on the role of political engagement in literature. The exchange starts with the premise that all writers are engagés, only some writers’ political engagement is to the world as it is, while others’ lies in changing it, with varying degrees of success. It fascinates me that the English translation of the French word “engagé” requires the addition of the word “politically” to convey the same meaning. In engagé, the political dimension is inherent. Yet, as the writers highlight, political engagement isn’t always directed toward social justice and equality.

A new year will begin in a few days, and in this passage of time that we all experience in our own ways, I am taking you with me from Amsterdam to Brussels, from home to home (what both cities are to me, in different ways).

In this short escapade, I will attempt to translate a few words by Marguerite Yourcenar from her novel L’oeuvre au noir (translated to English by Grace Frick as The Abyss) which I have recently come across to as I was flaneusing in Brussels, finding myself in a quiet, cold and sunny Parc d’Egmont: 

I wanted to capture the diamonds.

On the water, in the air, between the waves and the leaves, behind the flowers and the pomegranate trees. There is magic within that moment when the light touches the surface of something as strong and indestructible as the sky or the sea — how the ephemeral meets the eternal.

That’s probably why I wanted to capture the diamonds before they disappeared. Every instant you see in these memories I have archived existed only for a few seconds.

A blink of an eye.

I often reflect on the meaning of photographing such transient instants, questioning the urgency I feel to archive my own experience of light — no matter how imperfect the result.

I had been working for more than a year on this collage.

I made it meticulously with beautiful materials: Pink and gold Japanese paper. A pressed flower I had gathered years ago from a poet’s garden.  Fragile materials. I used special glue to bring them together. Archival, naturally, promising to last a lifetime.

I had also applied gold leaf, forming little islands across the layers of paper. A process that demands care and patience. Care, I do have a lot of. Patience, not so much.

My piece was spectacular. Ready to be framed. Perfection.

I destroyed it. That one morning, I felt the need to undo it.

I have always loved the ocean; wide, wild, an endless dreamscape of possible escape. Filled with beauty, violence and mystery, the ocean has been carrying humanity’s fears and hopes for millennia. Yet, we know so little about it. Scientists still make discoveries about its habitat. Our Western societies have yet to truly face their own history of crossings in the name of God and Gold. There is always the greater narrative and the personal stories. Both are entwined. …

I wanted to write a lengthy essay about the recent SAIL event in Amsterdam—[…] about the wounds woven into all our histories, and about how we search for beauty in a broken world—how violence and beauty coexist in that fragile space.

But then summertime sadness arrived, carried by shifting winds: warmth fading into chill. We’ve reached that moment when you wrap a scarf around your neck yet still insist on one last ice cream of the season, holding onto the hope of one more outdoor swim before it all disappears. For me, it always brings a deep melancholy. The essay on decolonising SAIL will have to wait…

Our obsession with impact exhausts me.

Everything must be measured, analysed, optimized—our choices now data-driven. As if it weren’t enough that arts and culture got caught in this trap, imprisoning imagination inside charts and PowerPoint presentations, we’ve also adopted the vocabulary of capitalism to define our friendships and love stories: we invest emotions, calculate risks before opening our hearts, swipe, like, and treat one another like commodities. The space for genuine discourse has been swallowed by the clickability of headlines and reels.

I have always dreamed of seeing the world. From an early age, I yearned for movement —physically, emotionally and intellectually. Travel was never simply a holiday; it was where I found myself. It was also always an invitation for humility: a reminder that there is more to this world than the environment we find ourselves in. Seeing new landscapes, feeling unknown languages, dancing through the unfamiliar rhythms of new cities and streets always mirrors something within me. The simple act of moving from one place to another, even for short distances, would awaken my imagination. Movement has shaped me and my work, and has deeply influenced the way I practice translation. 

It is in California that Etel Adnan started to write and paint in leporellos. In the early sixties, the poet and painter left Lebanon “by running all the way to California. An exile, which lasted for years,” she writes in In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country (City Lights Books, 2005), a haunting exploration of identity, history, displacement, and war from an Arab American perspective. California, for Adnan, was not just a destination, but a space where thoughts could unfold like a leporello—accordion-like, nonlinear, alive.

LOVE OUR PEOPLE LIKE YOU LOVE OUR FOOD the mural says, listing the elements needed in the manner of ingredients in a recipe: accountability, respect, understanding, love, empathy and listening. Produced by the Mandarin Institute and artist Vida Kuang in 2021, this mural in Chinatown San Francisco is a call to action for people to examine how they’ve consumed Asian food and culture, and actively acknowledge the labour, history and colonization of Asian peoples. “Love our people like you love our food” is a recipe for solidarity. It also includes all the ingredients for translation.

“[T]he majestic expanse of the Pacific seacoast has imperceptibly worked its way into my dreams, remaking me, stripping me down, and perhaps thereby liberating me.” Czesław Miłosz writes in “Facing Too Large an Expanse”, one of the many short essays I’ve been devouring from Visions from San Francisco Bay (translated by Richard Lourie).

“6 7 3 9”, she said from behind the counter to the man who shyly stepped inside the coffee shop as a Radiohead song was playing. He was one of the thousands of unhoused people living in the city. I hadn't been in San Francisco twenty-four hours yet, and…

If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you know I lost my grandmother back in September 2022. The grief I have experienced has been like no other, an immense loss not just of a person I love deeply, but of my refuge, the existence rooting me even as I have always been finding myself in movement…

On Sunday night, as the two slow weeks between Christmas and the New Year drew to a close, I felt sad and frustrated. It was time to leave my bubble and return to reality, I thought. This bubble had been a space of freedom—an empty calendar where each day unfolded in the moment. It was filled with culture: ….

que notre vie soit vibrations is a wish I have encountered this past summer in one of the art installations spread across a beautiful estate […]of organic winery, architecture and art, where artists from around the world are commissioned to create artworks in conversation with the location where they will settle their vision in.

Artists include Ai Weiwei, Louise Bourgeois, Yoko Ono, Richard Serra, Bob Dylan, Tracey Emin, Siobhán Hapaska, Michael Stipe, Prune Nourry, Sophie Calle, Tadao Ando and many more. Whether they’re a building, like the galleries imagined by Oscar Niemeyer, Renzo Piano or Richard Rogers, or sculptures and installations, the works are monumental and an invitation to root oneself in the space. The connection with nature transforms an artistic journey into a spiritual one. The wish, may our life be vibrations, accompanies me throughout my own exploration of this extraordinary place. 

READ ON

What a world have we been building, since I sent the last issue of this newsletter last summer. It was issue 30, on Humility and Imagination. I feel none of these two words are part of our mainstream discourses, and it worries me. So here I am. Trying to do my part, attempting to contribute to a narrative of connection and most importantly, trying not to get distracted by voices carrying nothing else but void —from news headlines, algorithms to incompetent politicians.

I promised I would return with new thoughts, reflections, spaces for imagination…

READ ON

Read issue thirty of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 3 July 2024,

Read issue twenty-nine of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 19 June 2024,

Read to issue twenty-eight of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 5 June 2024,

Read and listen to issue twenty-seven of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 22 May 2024,

Read and listen to issue twenty-six of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 8 May 2024,

Read and listen to issue twenty-five of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 24 April 2024.

Read and listen to issue twenty-four of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 10 April 2024.

Read and listen to issue twenty-three of the Attention Span Newsletter, published on 27 March 2024.