As the dimensions drift, digital distance becomes palpable. In this narrowing gray area, I see my desiresâfor intimacy, imagination, self-actualizationâas states of being, and I seek to capture them as objects. This is a constantly-updating collection of poems. I mustn't lose my personal history.
Places That Inhabited Me
Tunis is where I spent my teenage years surrounded by antinomy. Tension and relief, love and solitude, violence and tenderness, which made me gravitate towards those kinds of contradictions because I had to accept them in order to accept myself.
Djerba is an island that whispered to me "come back home" even when I swore I was running in the opposite direction.
Paris was a pretty girl I had a crush on who kept rejecting me. But she was so beautiful that I could not help but create something in her presence. In the process of creation, I realized the girl was just me. I went to Paris expecting rejection. This was because for a long time, I felt like in Paris, I was an Arab while in New York I was simply Nour Assili. But then I looked closer and saw that the city resembled me more than I thought. Paris has changed, built by Africans and Arabs. We should have a share of it. We should not feel like strangers there. The moment I land in Paris, the first thing I do is get a Kebab, not a croissant. I found relative anonymity and space to develop as a writer away from New York's overstimulation and past mistakes. It was a crucial vantage point, allowing me to see America more clearly by stepping outside of it.
Mexico City made me wonder how is it that this country has had so much influence on the whole world in terms of art? The muralists, the writers, the filmmakers. A place that has been exploited and dismissed and still somehow shaped how everyone else sees. There is something defiant in that. Something that cannot be stolen.
Nesin Math Village is where I organized a research retreat with my friend YiÄit in the mountains of Western Turkey. A self-sustained, community-driven pocket of intellectual rebellion under authoritarianism. People thinking freely in a country that punishes free thought. Why do people leave places like this for a country like the US? Turkey is beautiful. My friend YiÄit showed me how the community was real, and the ideas were alive. Still, the pull westward, the brain drain.. It is a shame, and it is a theft.
In Colombia, I made a friend called Andrea who organizes extreme sports like mountain biking, climbing, that kind of thing. He told me he quit drugs for his mother and replaced them with the mountains. He was sad to see Colombia as sex tourism and crime. The real Colombia, he said, is freedom. He took me to Cocora Valley in the Colombian Andes where the longest palm trees on earth live in the mountains for 100-200 years. When they die, thee entire tree falls at once. It was surreal and poetic. He kept asking : if this looks so beautiful now, imagine how it looked back then when it was only indigenous people. He asked us to lay on our back and not talk. He was a free spirit with a particular look to him. Lying there in silence I understood that this moment was the American Dream. Not the one they sell you. And it was nowhere near America. And yet I returned to the place that sells it hardest.
New York City is where I come back anyway. This city is a legend and a myth. Myths are necessary for humans to keep going. People live poorly, but that never shakes the deeply-rooted belief that they are better than everyone else. They pay too much for too little. They sleep badly. They work too hard for things that don't love them back. And yet there is a faith hereâirrational, unshakeableâthat this is the place where it happens, whatever it is. That faith is what makes New York so cool and so terrifying. The city runs on myth, the way other cities run on industry. I am not here to judge. I love New York. I need myths to keep going. Every human does. That is the secret. Like New York, I never stop because I cannot afford to look back. I move in one direction onlyâforward. To pause would be to see clearly, and to see clearly might break the spell.
There is something so fantastic in the spectacle I now present to myself of having run away in my teenage years and early 20s, run so hard, across oceans, multiple times, only to find myself once more squinting at a computer. Right now, I am tired of traveling. I want to stay right here in my apartment in Brooklyn. As if all that motion was only ever about getting something out of my system. To exhaust myself into stillness. It worked.
Â
People I am Jealous Of
Â
My friend Maroun who has been drumming since he was born. His mom says he started banging on things since day one. He owns a Rik that was played alongside Melhem Barakat. He was taught by music icons in Lebanon. I know I shouldnât be but I am jealous of people who were always becoming what they are. No detours. No confusion. Just a straight line from birth to purpose. I am not like that.
Rick Owens because he built an entire world and refused to explain it.
Doctors for having the coolest, most noble job in the world.
Anybody who is close to their religion and did not have to suppress it to be themselves.
People with good posture.
CTOs.
Classes That Changed How I Think
Narrative Theory taught me that itâs possible to change the past by choosing the future and that everything is an interpretation.
Music theory reinforced that same idea. It taught me if you hit a wrong note, it is the next note you play that determines if it is good or bad.
Audio Engineering allowed me to play with sound and to see the world as a field of sonic possibilities I never thought were accessible to me.
C++ is a class that bullied me into becoming more rigorous.
Spanish gave me the joy and humility of being a beginner again. It allowed me to make friends in Latin America.
Japanese Sci-Fi cracked open my imagination and pushed me to read and write within a genre I once avoided.
I took these classes out of pure interest and none of them counted towards major requirements yet they were the most memorable part of college for me because they challenged the way I see the world..
Â
Most Romantic Moments in my Life
The heart-shaped sea fan my boyfriend and I found on the beach, like the ocean was in on our moment, the quiet anticipation when I cook and wait for him to take the first bite and tell me what he thinks, planning a big dinner together for a big group of friends, helping each other move apartments, early mornings at the airport, saving the last bite, conversations when we are so different yet found mutual understanding, moments where we are there for each other and it requires real effort and time. Love is cheap; commitment and discipline are precious.
Â
My Cooking Inspiration
Mima, my grandmother, measuring nothing and still perfecting everything. My jewish host father in Seattle, treating the kitchen like a laboratory, saving every bone and onion peel as if flavor were a moral duty - dashi simmering while he explained why nothing should ever go to waste; tamales teaching me what devotion tastes like. My college roommate, sautéing something unhinged at 3 a.m., she quit marketing to become a chef; we exchanged recipes like postcards. The sancocho and bonoria I had in Colombia showing me how Arab, African, and South American kitchens meet inside a single pot, like continents remembering they were once one. Noticing the difference between the paellas I had in Puerto Rico and in Madrid, the way each place insisted on its own definition. Mexico, where sauces became entire philosophies. Dominican restaurants in Brooklyn where I go with friends after a drunk night. Grocery stores that feel like entering a new dimension where you lose track of time. My favorites are Uwajimaya (Japanese grocery store in Seattle) and IFM (a turkish grocery in Rochester).
Retirement Ideas
A quiet house in Djerba, a plot of olive trees to tend, season after season, teaching writing to anyoneâchildren or adultsâwho wants to find their voice, making jewelry, making olive oil cold-pressed, the slowest and most honest craft, a small boat for fishing, mornings spent on open water, Arabic calligraphy, practiced patiently.
Â