If I tell you to imagine a doctor, you will directly picture a man, whereas if I tell you to think of a nurse, your mind will immediately perceive a woman.

In fact, mothering, teaching, and nursing are just a few examples of care work that societies cannot persist without. However, just like most kinds of care work, they are gendered and feminized and thus highly undervalued and underappreciated.

I buy flowers every Saturday and bake a few cakes; I even adopted a cat. Something is still missing. A carpet, maybe? Maybe, if it were the flying type that can take me back to Makhoul Street. But what if it were? What if I went back?

When your world keeps getting harder and harder, where do you run to? When the future looks uncertain, is it still worth anticipating? When you live in an era where your children have no chance, what do you do?

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.

I have never been to Palestine before and I’m not physically allowed to go there because I don’t have a paper that grants me the opportunity to experience my homeland and what it’s like to feel rooted… to maybe, for once in my lifetime, feel at home, at peace: stable. This truth makes me feel less Palestinian, but I try to layer it with the fact that I live in Lebanon and have friends and memories here.

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…