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.
A poem that delivers instant nostalgia. So beautifully written ❤️
Finally getting to catch up to all your newsletters and as always so proud 🥹