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).
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: ….
