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There’s a particular kind of conversation that finds you when you’re not expecting it. Not the ones you plan or the interviews you schedule, or the panels of pre-approved talking points. It’s the conversations that catch you off guard, usually in the simplest of moments – over dinner with friends, a musing one quiet afternoon, during an overdue catch-up with family –and stay with you long after.
A few weeks ago, my auntie asked me one of those questions: what anchors you? It came up amid the usual catching-up about life in the UK on her side, and mine in Dubai (and the rest of the world, from my travels). But it stuck with me nonetheless.
We were catching up over dinner in London, which is not my home, though it feels like one (of many). We covered an array of subjects, the way you do after too much time apart – conversations doubling back on themselves, picking up old threads midsentence. Amidst it all, we talked about people, places and home, which naturally led to the question of what anchors you to a place.
Take Dubai, for example, which is a place I’ve called home for the last six years and is a place which became more than a mere address and a reawakening of sorts. I arrived in this city, as I’ve written before, largely ignorant, shaped by a Western media landscape that had given me a story about this region rather than the truth of it.
What dismantled that story wasn’t a news cycle or a documentary. It was the women. The Emirati women who folded me into their lives without ceremony. The Lebanese women who spoke about conflict with a matter-of-fact resilience that quietly undid me. The Palestinian, Syrian and Iraqi women who shared their stories and, in doing so, expanded what I understand home to mean – and what it costs when home is precarious.
So when my auntie asked what anchors me, I think the truest answer is: people. Specifically, the people who have been generous enough to let me into their world, in city after city, culture after culture, and change me in the process.
We put this issue together in the midst of ongoing conflict in the region. Some days, the weight of that was difficult to hold alongside the work of making a magazine. It felt, at times, like a strange act of cognitive dissonance. And yet it’s become clear that culture and creativity are not separate from the hard things. They are how we process them. They are how we insist on life.
That specific phrase belongs to Eman Bare, whose piece inside these pages moved me more than almost anything I have commissioned. The Insistence on Living on page 14, gathers the voices of Palestinian and Lebanese women navigating diaspora, occupation and loss – and finds, in all of them, something that refuses to be extinguished. It is not resilience, as Eman writes, “because that word has been stretched so thin it no longer holds weight.” It is something older and more stubborn. It is the choice to remain fully human, fully alive, even at the threshold.
I have been thinking about that insistence in relation to my own, much smaller, questions about home. Because what the women of this region have taught me – across six years of being welcomed into their lives, their tables, their candour – is that home is not a fixed point. It is something you carry, and something that carries you. It is assembled from story and scent and the particular warmth of people who chose to show up for you.
So, for this issue, we explore a meditation on continuity and evolution. Aptly themed ‘Written in the Stars’, we explore the invisible structures that connect past, present and future. On legacy as something living, not archived. On the idea that beauty and grief are not opposites – that they are, as Eman writes, the same country.
We are all part of larger patterns. I arrived here not knowing mine. I am still learning them. And I remain grateful – more than I can properly say – to the people of this region who taught me how to read them.
“What anchors you?” IS PUBLISHED IN THE 18th EDITION OF GRAZIA middle east. ORDER YOUR COPY HERE.
