Issue thirty-nine of The Attention Span Newsletter was published on 9 July 2025.
Every month, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.
Access all issues and subscribe on theattentionspan.com/subscribe.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
