My love, my hope, my faithful patriots
Are slowly dying to stay alive
Presented with only two

Undignified choices to survive:
The fisherman’s bread
Or
The sashimi of corruption

I am the son of a mother who loves me.
I am the son of a mother with a smoldering gaze, bloodied lips, and blackened eyes.

Arab is not just an ethnicity. It is a way of being situated in the world and a lens to be seen with. Being Arab, I feel a lack of sovereignty over my life. As an adult, I am, by the virtue of reason, able and supposed to have an independent character. But this is not the case.

Stepped on by feet, covered in dust
Screaming out for peace and liberty,
Agonizing lust.
And so I offered my cold soul a blanket
And gave my lost life a glass

Do we not turn our energy and frustration into solemn verses of dedication that change the subject once it loses its guiding torch? Do we not repress and thus oppress? Does our soul not shrink so it can crawl into that little nook in which it is told it will dwell forevermore?

Finally, Miss Sarah faced him and proclaimed, “I’m sorry Wissam, but sovereignty is not related to you deciding what you’ll have for lunch at school. It’s a little more complicated than that. You’re getting there. I’ll tell you what: rewrite it for tomorrow, and I’ll consider giving you a better grade.”

We are stripping Beirut of its skin

peeling dried walls

pestering the edges to rip another layer off.

We are out on the concrete

our running shoes are back home

our feet are burning

By framing all the female actors in war into gender stereotypes and presenting US sovereignty in a narrative of masculinity, the Bush Administration was able to construct a fantasy in which the US takes on the role of the masculine hero – justifying the Iraq war as a fight to protect feminine fragility.

As someone who was born at the dawn of the “Great Lebanese War,” a term I coined to contrast with the plethora of ongoing smaller ones, I was repeatedly subjected to the trifecta of fake patriotism that oozed from all the radio and TV stations for almost half a century:
“Freedom…Sovereignty…Independence…

Sovereignty is a complex theme that paves the way to multidirectional probing. My relationship with my country is more sentimental, while others might venture into the subject culturally or politically.