Within and Without

Making art to go beyond what we're otherwise able to express.

Hi there. I’d planned on taking this week off as I work on the next few installments of Undone. Then Tuesday happened. Below is a piece I had written last year (2019) to coincide with both the Met’s exhibit “The World Between Empires” and a new album released by Kinan Azmeh. The piece never went to print, but I had saved the draft and have been thinking about it a lot in the last few days. For the first time, and with slight edits, here it is.

At what point do our narratives become our identity? And what determines which of our manifold narratives becomes the one to which we pin that identity? 

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade obsessed with these questions. I asked them in 2011 while watching my ancestral home of Syria erupt from Arab Spring to civil war. I asked them again when the United States stopped brushing its white nationalism under the rug. I’ve been asking them again this week in the aftermath of Beirut, as Twitter punditry became dominated by armchair political …