Love for the Cameras

romanticism for the Gulf Kids

Hello,

I come with another poem that comes with a thought : a theme that often comes up when I think of the Gulf is surveillance. Surveillance is a theme that is often discussed in academia and official conversations about the Gulf but there is no concern about the surveilled and what happens to their psyche. However that is a topic I plan to explore more extensively for another newsletter essay.

A theme that does not come up, is young love, infatuation, crushes and romance. I wrote the poem “Love for the Cameras” a while ago when reminiscing old crushes and stories friends have told me of sneaking around to meet their dates at spots with no cameras and no parents. Midway the poem, I thought of the long term effects of this surveillance–does one unlearn it after leaving or does one still look around for the cameras and people watching?

I will leave you with this: In the conversations about the Gulf, they forget the people living in them, us, have experienced love and made ways to experience it if they wanted to. I like to think we value love and our connections because we are hyper aware of its temporarily since people leave; and its fragility when all of it is being watched. However, it’s not like camera lens ever stopped our journeys to find the love we watched on screens.

from a gulf kid that is also a hopeless romantic,

Aathma

now here’s the poem

Love for the Cameras
Aathma Nirmala Dious 

Grey lens met my post-second-kiss eyes– 
it's school camera attached to wall to stop 
students jumping out of taught confines. 
In bus backseat, I overthink how I would be
thrown out. I am here. still. Where could 
the video be now? I want to rewind my rebellion,
youth colliding fast on-screen as my lost first kiss
was sloppy and hastily thrown into dustbin 
before the garbage man saw love alone
in young city, monitored by many brothers 
of school camera as it grows–a small world 
so easy to fit in your heart but not big enough
to hold you too–to stay, fit your love in 
shadows in between staircase lights flickers
& learn to kiss in the seconds before elevator
hits ground. We love through silent fingers to lips 
between friends, corniche dusk cold-stone sundaes,
sidewalk talk with shawarma after tuitions & 
parallel greying school bus seats, hands 
close enough to touch, while teacher politely ignores,
only to mention it during lunch-break gossip. It lives, 
written in white lies to parents, who insist love
is risky, unstable–as if we do not call a young city 
that see us as accidental byproduct, that
has yet to learn to love us , home? Our 
internal alarms switched on always–our jokes 
are about cameras, walls listening, hearing hearts.
our fear is losing that flicker of free so we search 
for hidden, abandoned nooks like ourselves
to escape into before we fly, paper planes ejected 
over the edge of our city & then when you meet
 new lover in lands borrowed through papers 
with heartbreak authored by our young city 
slowly packed into our every nerve, don’t joke 
big brother’s watching when they ask why 
you always look for the lenses before their eyes.