1/ I’m not writing this to elicit pity, especially from white folks, but I’m working though the meanings of the life of struggle, the struggling life, that I’m witnessing my community endure. It’s a life that diminishes world building.

2/ I want to affirm this life they live despite the apparatus of unworlding, unfreedom that limits their daily existence. My parents pay for biweekly water cisterns, get ten hours of electricity/day, self-medicate, have lost their savings, are deeply demoralized.

3/ Lebanon was a generative artistic & theoretical space for me. Not anymore. The frequencies of life here are abt daily survival, making it thru, getting by, not sinking. The liberatory enterprise, the project of freedom, is suspended. Worldmaking is inconceivable under duress.

4/ I’m trying to find meaning in the context of my own trajectory, the dissonance between my life in the US and my worlding in these communities before my immigration. Trying to locate my political awakening in the US and refract it unto the lessons of life I learned here.

5/ It’s messy. I’m moving forward & backward in time, across multiple spacialities. Te fear & despair I feel here is nothing like the fear of white supremacy that plagues me in the US. It is the knowledge that my parents, my communities are not privy to full lives.