But I have normality in Camden. This isn’t my fight. I only wanted to go to further solve my own crisis, to fit more neatly into one of my boxes. Maybe if I took part in this revolution, I could finally be fully Lebanese. I wanted to take a photo in Martyrs Square draped in a flag. What a lie that would have been. I stayed in London and went to protests outside the Lebanese embassy instead. I chanted. I saw dozens of people I know, people I have known. ‘We want the politicians to leave so we can go back!’ shouted a woman next to me. But I don’t want to go back. I don’t dream of being there. I couldn’t tell anyone except my wife. Again, I am an imposter performing belonging, draped in a flag.
In the contemporary world, culture is mobile. It has become detached from its relationship to physical space. I wrote an aggressively mediocre masters’ thesis about this deterritorialisation in 2003 while I was at SOAS. It has virtually no academic merit, but it was the first time I thought through this. How consuming Arab culture while being in London allowed me to disassociate the space from the identity. Learn to enjoy one without the other. I feel at my lowest when I diverge from that principle. When I start to crave the physical space, when I think the city – whether Beirut or London – will solve the confusion.
In his TV series Ramy, creator and actor Ramy Yousef grapples with a lot of these kinds of themes around second generation Arabs in New Jersey. He navigates sex, partying, religion and adulthood as he coats his Arabness and Muslimness in a sort of constant nostalgia, longing and performance. In North New Jersey, he is surrounded by peers who understand his search for meaning. I felt uncomfortable as I watched the first episodes, finding myself torn between the joy of seeing people who look like me on screen and being annoyed at the narrative. Because I knew this line of introspection was leading nowhere. I felt like warning him through the screen. But further into the season, Ramy goes to Cairo. He is chastised by an exuberant cousin for his idealisation and essentialisation of his ‘home’ culture. He is told to stop romanticising the things that make their life hard and appreciate what he has back home. This is where I felt the show was at its best. In Cairo he could finally understand he didn’t belong there, he could dismantle his longing for it. But going home would also be difficult, because there would be more of an answer tomorrow than there had been yesterday.
I thought I would have figured out who I was by thirty-seven. There are no answers when you were born in a country that regularly wants you to ‘go home’, and you are from a country you barely understand most of the time. You accept the liminal space of constant construction and hyper self-awareness. I’ve come to understand identity as something closer to depression or anxiety, as something you manage rather than something you solve. I’ve come to accept identity as something you experience in living rooms full of laughter, whatever country they may be in.
