Month: June 2023

What to write about This Arab Life this week, when I am far away from it if only for a little while?

Write in situ, my best friend Joye volunteered before she set out back to D.C.

And so I shall.

Vacations turn their temporary dwellers into the tightest of tribes. To them belongs the
the wonder of the time and the intensity. For a few days, life obtains a certain rhythm and its inhabitants find themselves reflexively dancing to it even as they bring to the scene their own peculiar habits or inevitably indulge in the occasional spar. By the end of the journey, they become the keepers of a mood, a laugh, conversations familiar only to them and inexplicable to others, however hard they try.

“Disorder remained the fate of many nations that had been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined,” wrote Pankaj Mishra in The Age of Anger.

And so, disorder has remained our fate in the Levant. That we have been insufficiently or too fervidly imagined is not the only source of our ceaseless pain, to be sure. But we would be unfair and disrespectful to our colonizers if we didn’t recognize the significance and durability of their handiwork.