On the impossibility of seeing ourselves
March 17, 2025 How to write and think about the self in a culture that is so self-centered? Or how to talk and write about the self without the nombrilistic hint? How do we, in 2025, talk about the self without the pitfalls of the overly individualistic bordering on narcissistic modality we have all gotten used to?
How do we talk and write about the feminine self without the clichés of white-washed feminism? How do we see ourselves in an era where we are drowning in other people’s images?
Can we actually see ourselves? What does it mean for how we understand our identity?
Why is it so difficult to write about oneself? Your cracks, your flaws, how you relate to the world, your place in it?
The questions exhaust me. I want to stop thinking.
Who is “I”? Not beautiful. Not thin enough. Not smart enough. Not rigorous. Not active enough. Only lacks. Not enough. Can do better. Must do better.
Overweight. Slow. Unfocused. Too much. The negatives spill over, insidiously filling the cracks left bare, like deep cuts on fragile skin.
How do you build an identity that is rooted and loving, with pieces of broken wood, made of cracks and negative whispers, in a skin that does not love you back, all in a world at war with itself and all of God’s children?
An I that is too elusive to fully inhabit the world. An I that is too familiar yet unable to materialize. The I in my head playing catch-me-if-you-can with my physical self. I have never seen myself: its physical representation has remained elusive. Representation? Shouldn’t it be embodiment?
I posit the following: You cannot know yourself if you cannot see yourself. The empirical experience of you with yourself is the prerequisite to any kind of self-knowledge.
At war with yourself in a world at war with itself. What chance did we ever have to create a sustained peace in our minds, homes, and cities? The bloodshed we see on our streets starts in our souls—a separative self being forced onto us, and the unending battle begins. At what age, you might ask? I do not have a clue. I wish I did. I wish I could see it to undo it in my mind.
I see myself and yet I do not see it. I have lived in a magma of wishful thinking about what I could or should be in both appearances and capabilities. Walking away from my own embodied reality has always been easier than confronting it. Sitting with it until absolute acceptance. The radicality in accepting oneself that so many wrote about with such beauty.
How could I exist in a world where I took up so much space?
For each of us, the entire enormity of life unfolds within the tiny locus of consciousness we experience as our very own self.
Sylvia Plath, in The Bell Jar, renders Esther’s depression so comprehensible, so close—others are always watching, and their gaze becomes the one we scour our minds and appearances with, chasing the flaws and inadequacies. The mean, critical gaze of a society that dislikes the margins and those who linger in them for too long. Be in the molds we have created for your kind, or we shall judge you eternally. The voice, the gaze, we have learned to embody. Self-policing and rejecting our truest self.
I need not become somebody else. Only to become myself. RightHiding from the world?
Have you ever felt like you hid your real self from the world under 500 layers of opaque rock? To not be seen is to not be judged. To be seen only by loving eyes, those of our closed ones, our chosen ones, who may well judge, as long as their love remains.
It starts with a feeling of inadequacy. Inadequacy stemming from a torn self, torn between the representation built to study, shine, find a job, operate in a society that loves to scolled anyone who is on “the margin.”
My mind is colonized. Its deepest layers reek of colonial shaming. So dies yours?
Remember when Pecola Breedlove, in Toni Morrison’ The Bluest Eyes, yearns for blue eyes, believing they will grant her visibility, worthiness, love? That is the level of internalized colonial standards we, people of the South, are still living with. Invevitably, we became fractured. How much of our hiding is rooted in this yearning—to be seen, but only in an acceptable form? To exist only if we meet the arbitrary, white, unattainable standards imposed on us?
bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, speaks of education as a practice of freedom, of unlearning the oppressive ways we have been conditioned to see ourselves. She writes about breaking free from these constraints, but what of those of us still in the process? What of those who have built a home in the in-between, half-hidden, half-reaching for the light?
We all build walls around our true selves, some thicker than others. The performance of the self becomes a necessity. We learn to present the version of ourselves that fits the occasion, the job interview, the dinner party, the romantic entanglement. We learn to fragment, to curate, to shield. And after years of this meticulous self-censorship, what remains underneath? Can we still find the original self, untouched, unbothered, whole?
My dear Aunt B, her voice saying, “How I hate this Gaussienne, the dictatorship of the Gaussian.” Anyone who ever did an introductory statistics class is somewhat familiar with the bell-shaped curve, showing what a “normal distribution” is. We know what is considered normal and what is not. And for the majority of us, we exist in the tails of the curve, trying desperately to slide back into the middle, to belong, to disappear into acceptability.
Pieces of me left all over. Iterations of my identity scattered between continents and time zones.
To exist fully, to step into our own bodies and take up space unapologetically, is an act of defiance. And yet, despite the theories, the literature, the resistance, I still falter. The self I present is still a reflection of expectation, of judgment, of the unrelenting gaze of a world that does not want us whole, but instead, in digestible parts.
Audre Lorde writes:
I am Black, Woman, and Poet — fact, and outside the realm of choice. I can choose only to be or not be, and in various combinations of myself. And as my breath is part of my breathing, my eyes of my seeing, all that I am is of who I am, is of what I do. The shortest statement of philosophy I have is my living, or the word “I.”
The task, then, is clear. To live. To claim the self in its entirety. Even when the world resists. Even when we resist ourselves.
On photography & Decoloniality
February 7, 2025
A poverty-stricken community. Unsanitary living conditions. Tin roofs and mud-covered streets. Nowhere for the water to drain. And in the midst of all this sadness: children smiling, staring straight into the camera.
As you read this, an image likely forms in your mind. Why? Because it’s one we have seen too often—on the covers of magazines, in the fundraising appeals of international organizations, or even displayed on the walls of galleries. These images have become a visual shorthand for suffering, a currency in the global economy of empathy.
There has never been any shame associated with “capturing” destitution. As long as there is a beautiful face, an innocent smile, or a longing gaze anchoring the frame, the world seems content to consume these images without question. Is this a critique or a reckoning on my part? I hope the former, but I know it is the latter.
Slums—disadvantaged areas where humans are forcefully stripped of dignity—are not theaters of curiosity for the privileged to gawk at and document. And yet, they have for a long time now become our favorite paradoxical places: of suffering and resilience, of despair and unyielding joy. There is a sacredness in being allowed to witness these lives, a gravity to these encounters. This humbling experience cannot be a passive one - it demands something of you.
These thoughts flood my mind as I spend the morning in Kibera, supposedly “Africa’s largest slum.” I am here, physically present, yet my mind is elsewhere. My senses are overwhelmed. Too many emotions to even name them. The air is thick with the scent of burning charcoal, the rhythm of life like a trance-inducing sound, all around me. I am trying to take it all in. My eyes take everything in, and my brain is ordering me to “capture it” - not with my eyes but with my camera.
I am a photographer, am I not? I am supposed to capture what I see, to bear witness, to document. The kindness, the vulnerability, the unimaginable strength before me creates a time warp—an almost out-of-body experience. But I am also aware of the weight of my lens. I know that, in the wrong hands, a photograph can strip a moment of its dignity just as easily as it can immortalize it.
Brian, the talented photographer behind the “Kibberastories” instragram page and wonderful human, told me “a camera is a weapon”. It is! Or at least that is how it is perceived by so many on our side of the planet: where cameras were the tools of the white settler/traveller who stripped our people of everything, including their dignity. It suffices to look up “colonial photographs of indigenous women” to fully grasp how cameras empowered the colonial gaze for as long as caneras existed.
“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own”, Susan Sontag wrote. I do not want to be a tourist here. I do not want to turn this reality into a spectacle, nor do I want to retreat into the convenient distance that photography can create. How do you tell the stories your eyes have witnessed without falling into the trap of the white colonizer?
James Baldwin once warned, “People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.” The history of photography in Africa is one of colonial documentation, of images taken to “other” people who were not white, to showcase the “exotic”, “the poor”, “the look of the babrbar” - and ultimately to justify oppression. Even today, many of the images that flood Western media perpetuate a singular narrative when speaking of certain places in Africa for instance: one of poverty, helplessness, and dependency. The full story is rarely told.
But what does it mean to tell the full story? Does it mean turning the camera away altogether? (Which is what I did in Kibera - frozen by too many questions and a fear of doing things the wrong way. To do it the “white way”, the wrong way. Does it mean resisting the instinct to document and instead simply existing in the moment? Or does it mean finding a way to photograph without extracting, without reducing?
As I stand in Kibera, I realize that taking a photograph is not the same as telling a truth. My camera, my gaze through this camera, has the power to distort, to humanize or to exploit. I want my photographs to serve as testimony, not as trophies. I want them to honor, not to invade. I want them to speak with the people in my frame, not about them. I don’t want the “look how joyful they are despite living conditions that no human should ever have to experience”, but I want the joy, because the people in front of me have joy in their eyes.
The responsibility, then, is clear: to ensure that the camera is in the hands of the lions. To capture not just suffering, but survival. Not just poverty, but power. To resist the easy image, the one that the world already expects, and instead, to seek the ones that challenge, that complicate, that honor the dignity of those whose lives are being documented.
And maybe, in the end, to put the camera down altogether, and simply listen. My only photo of Kibera is one taken from the side of the road, before I walked in.
Ramblings on privilege
January 22, 2025
Who exactly is the uncivilized? What is underdeveloped? When we speak of a country, we are really speaking of its people. Who are the underdeveloped? What will develop them?
Who is best suited to help them "develop"?
Every time I used the words "developing countries"—and God knows I used them thousands of times in my work—I could feel an unease in my throat. A guilt chased by confusion. Developing based on whose criteria? Whose assessment? How long do we remain "developing" before reaching this elusive final tier? What else can I call them? It became "Low and Middle-Income Countries," as the IMF or World Bank would say. Sure, it’s more concrete, more sterile. But what does that really tell a layperson about a country? Absolutely nothing. So I form an idea instead, one reinforced ad nauseam by the media: They’re poor. Always experiencing some kind of catastrophe—man-made or natural. And, of course, they need our charity.
We are always someone else’s white person.
It may sound exaggerated, but this is the gist of what is taught in economics programs worldwide. Barring a few exceptions, we pity those who are poor while holding tightly to the belief that their plight is of their own making. They elect corrupt leaders. They don’t rebel. They don’t play by the rules the West has so tirelessly laid out for them. And when you give them aid, they mismanage or steal it.
Sure, I’ll concede that this happens. But are we ever really going to address the root of this evil? Or is the world content to keep moving forward with this madness, this inane cycle of half-measures, distractions, and performative concern?
I know inequality. I know what it looks like. I started crying in the back of my parents’ car quite early on, unable to make sense of why a child my age was handed such a radically different and unfair deck of cards in this life. So I knew inequality. Or so I thought.
I came face to face with a type of inequality any rational person would assume long gone. The kind you’d think had been eradicated after billions of dollars spent on "development" on this continent, after countless lofty goals and summits. Surely, abject living conditions were a thing of the past. Surely, progress had reached everyone.
But it hasn’t. Not even close.
I worked on these topics, spent years studying them, thinking about them, writing about them, analyzing them. And yet, somehow, I was not fully aware of just how dire things remain for so many. It’s one thing to discuss inequality as an abstract idea, as numbers on a page or a set of statistics. It’s another to see it, to feel its weight, to stand in its shadow and realize how deeply entrenched it is.
And yet, in parallel, I have been hearing a different story. The story of how Africa—under the reductive and laughable "Africa is a country" paradigm—is the future. The economies are growing at rates Europe and other "advanced" nations can only dream of. Africa is the future, and yet, many Africans don’t see it.
Opportunities, opportunities, opportunities. That’s the refrain.
Sure, progress has been made. But at what price? And are we really okay with the pace at which this progress is being made? I’m not talking about progress as Microsoft opening an office or a new public-private partnership to build a bridge. I’m talking about progress that secures a decent livelihood for fellow human beings. Progress that ensures people don’t just survive but thrive.
Colonialism is everywhere. The colons know it. The local populations know it, feel it. And yet, no one talks about it.
Why are there so many white people? We cannot ask, right?
But asking why there are so many Arabs, Africans, or Indians in Amsterdam, Brussels, or Stockholm is perfectly acceptable. Entire political parties and policies are built around reducing the number of racialized individuals in any given country. Because, by default, these people are framed as plunderers of the national economy.
And yet, the white man or woman in Africa is perceived as something entirely different. They are here to help you develop. Or they are here to invest. Either way, they are here to help. They aren’t taking anything, we’re told—they’re simply giving.
Arabs and Asians—from the subcontinent and East Asia—are also here. They’ve come to take their share of the "developing" pie. The opportunities are too good to pass up.
I find myself consumed by waves of anger. It comes and goes, usually in moments of reflection. One moment, I’m filled with immense joy, sharing genuine belly laughs with strangers. The next, an angry, bitter fire burns inside me.
It took me days to fully understand this. I wasn’t just under the weight of constant new realizations, each one hitting me in the face. I was also shedding layers of ignorance I didn’t even know I carried.
This isn’t a sob story about seeing barefoot children living on the street. No. This is about something deeper. It’s about being reminded, everywhere I look, of my privilege. Of my whiteness.
Here, I am one of the colons. I belong to their team because of how I’m perceived—white-passing, moneyed, and educated.
It’s a strange and painful thing to realize: I cannot truly experience a place because I am seen as part of the colonizer’s team. Even those who know who I am try to shield me, recommending only places where they think a white person would go.
I thought I understood privilege. I thought years of grappling with guilt and discomfort were enough. But nothing prepared me for the confrontation I’ve experienced here.
I am angry because I do not belong to the place I so desperately wish to melt into.
Wherever we go, we inevitably reproduce the patterns of our social class. I behave like a white person because I am perceived as one.
Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote of Black Americans wanting to "go back" to their homeland. But they weren’t going back; they were planning a colonization. Big difference.
Hordes of white people occupy the nicest corners of this city, corners they’ve built for themselves, replicating systems and spaces from elsewhere. They live in compounds and cafes that scream "Western comfort." They are the colons of today, and the rest of us are implicated, whether we like it or not.
Why I had to leave where
I landed
January 9, 2025In another life, I worked in public policy and economic development. I say another life. It wasn't that long ago, but it feels like forever ago. So much has changed. So many things were clarified. I gained a clarity and a courage I could have only dreamed of for years. The clarity and courage I had actually wished for, for years and years.
For over a decade, my work in policy and economic development gave a meaning to my life. There was not only genuine passion for the work but above all, I held the profound belief in the possibility for systemic change. In my career, this isn’t the first time I have to walk away. I experienced a first disillusion a few years into working in economic development - that’s a whole other rant that will probably be coming soon. I walked away and because I had to be “doing”, I jumped head first in the messy world of public policy and governance. I wasn’t naive, just hopeful. I saw the inexactitudes, the messiness, the standardized approaches, the neo-liberal agenda all aimed at “creating a better world”. Because I saw through it all and never bought into the brainwashing, I really thought if I just stuck to my ideals and got on with doing the work, it will lead me to a place of impact and meaning. I knew I needed to remain as free as possible while doing this work, and that meant among other things to be contractually free. During my 12 years working in this realm, I was an employee for a total of 14 months. I was always the external contractor brought on board. Why? So as to always be ready to walk away. No strings attached. One more fallacy I lived with, unknowingly I guess, because there are always strings attached.
The sense of distance to the work inevitably started creeping in. The solutions I wanted to create were nowhere to be found on the pages I was scribbling.
I had worked as a researcher in academia, as an advisor in the not for profit sector and took on policy projects for governments. Up until the first bitter taste of despair led me to founding my first organization, one that would allow me to say fuck it and impose my own rules, on my court. KNowPolicy was born and I had never been more convinced of anything in my life: I was going to blow up the system from the inside, by doing incredible work and convincing people, one project at a time. Convince them of what? That we should start using actual robust research tools to actually craft public policies across the Global South (last time I use this term), to actually improve the lives of people.
KnowPolicy was designed to be a unicorn, somewhere between a think-tank, a not-for-profit, a research institution, and a design-thinking collective. Ambitious, I know. The goal was change, the path was rebellion. To go to war with the big consultancies and convince partners that our people deserved better. I talked and talked and talked. I preached. I put my money where my mouth was and worked for free to rally people to my cause. One day, I realized that I had ran away only to land in the exact same place: my existence was one of churning out reports. Sometimes worse: PowerPoints. I knew the language of the consultancies and was asked to use it, repeatedly. Not losing sight of my goal, I accepted, because ultimately my work, although it was just a bunch of words on paper that were to end up in someone’s dusty electronic drawer, it was meaningful and would lead to change. Second fallacy I was living with.
You can only hide for so long and mislead yourself for so long before the inner voice rebels and throws a tantrum like a bratty 2 year-old. I had to face up to the realization of just how utterly useless my work was. I mean, when I say useless, I was better off going to some far-flung countryside, digging holes with my hands and petting cows, that would have made me more useful.
Three years later, I set up a second organization with two partners.
To rebel against the system in place was still the main aim, but this time around it wasn't in public policy work, but in the world of “development”. We wanted to bring to life really unconventional, out-of-the-box development projects that didn’t follow the rulebook of international organizations, oversized NGOs or international cooperation agencies, Set fire to the whole thing and sledge hammer the walls of the black box. It felt just as useless if you don’t have the kind of starting capital to accompany the ambition. I could see just how quickly we were going to end in a situation that was all too familiar: agreeing to projects that don’t meet your ambition, nor play by rules because you need a check to come in to keep the organization running.
From the confines of my work, from the crux of an identity I had built over a decade and more, I was trying to be a rebel, a revolutionary. I had so many things to say, unbound faith in a different way of doing things and I knew I could do things differently. It wasn’t just talk. I wanted to roll-up my sleeves and be part of the solution.
So, I stopped. All of it. Stepping away.
It seems quite straight forward when I write it this way, but the path to stopping was an arduous one. My work was my purpose on this planet: to create change and leave a positive mark, at whatever scale I can operate at. My identity as a young woman in this world was inextricable from my work. I was a researcher. One trying to make sense of the world and solve its problems. A useful researcher, you know, not the kind cooped up in the ivory tower. Stopping meant being met with the daunting question of “who are you”? Because “what do you do?” was really “who are you?”.
In my past life, I was a researcher who thought that somehow revolutionary work but within the confines of what was deemed feasible and acceptable was a real possibility. I attempted it, many times over, while remaining true to the fire inside me. When I write that this was an attempt at being a rebel from the inside, I am not joking nor exaggerating. It souds ridiculous in hindsight. Everything was stacked against me. The domain I was operating in was defined by others. The contours of what was possible and what wasn’t were also defined by others. It never was my game let alone my court. I just got to borrow the ball for a little while, but then someone would come smack it from my hands and tell me “enough wishful thinking, the rules are the rules”.
Now I decided to go far into the ocean, where I lose sight of the shore, and start throwing bottles, for the currents to take in every possible direction. Messages of hope and rebellion, crafted with many tools and in many mediums. This is the territory of pirates.
I tried. So that now I can walk away. I am layered with regrets. One of them being not having been vocal enough about my radical take on things. Not having pushed their buttons enough. Compromise compromise compromise.
Le compromis sans compromission.
The state of the world radicalized me a long time ago. Before that, understanding my privilege had put me on the path of radicalization. Now onto the real work.
I don’t want my own court anymore. I want the collective court, with my people.
Time at Home
November 22, 2024To simmer in a feeling. I have yet to share it, not with the world, but with those closest to me. To rebel against the “cultural bomb”, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o calls it, as the “biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism”. Why? Because “the effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves”. I want to find my footing and an identity someone else stole from me.
It’s 6AM, I wake up in my bed, one of the beds I call mine and recall what is there to do: go to battle. I’m so familiar with the feeling of picking up arms against my own self. I grew tired of it. My innate and nurtured rebellion found its place, finally, in a chaotic life.
I lay in bed and nothing is clear. Most of us have had to mourn clarity a long time ago. We got used to the haziness. From dawn to dusk. Hazy sleep, you’re not sure if you’re in fact sleeping or not.
You see, you must teach yourself to operate in hazy conditions, or else? Or else you perish, slowly, not having summoned the courage to even leave your bed. We have to live life while traversing a deafening black cloud, holding our breaths and praying for our lives. You know the feeling all too well.
Life cannot be negated. La pulsion de vie must always win.
Upon opening my eyes, I see horror. It’s nothing new, horror lives behind my eyelids. It haunts me at night and yet, I almost cannot name it, as if, by not uttering its name, I can make it less real, not for me, but for others. The others’ whose heart is bleeding but who must continue on living. On making a living. Because we are all taking part in the never-ending chimeric dance with capitalist overlords, in one way or another.
I re-root myself, the daily exercice in attempting to feel home. An elusive home I am still searching for and convincing myself the temporary is something I make due with. No land and no tribe to call my own. Maybe to go back cleansed of the original sin of seeking for something better in the West? To go back to my ancestors’ land, apreciative of what rootedness in one’s land means.
Meditation in times of multiple genocides is, I now understand, why meditation exists. Why prayer exists also: to ground oneself in something larger and more magnificient than the earthly chaos our hearts fail to navigate. Work work work. You know it is urgent to get to work but resist the urge to willingly fall into the trappings of a system you wish dead every single day. So instead of that I read how can an alternative be brought to life. How do I, how do we as a collective, bring about the dreamscape: the intersectional collective liberation.
My mornings are a fine balancing act between the necessity of calm and the urgency of frenzy. I have to look in every nook and cranny of my mind to access a little bits of stillness, so I can think.
I write not only from the margins but from the land of anomaly: landless by choice, wandering a dying world in which I am determined to find beauty. The heartbeat of my day. It’s noon and I remind myself of the call to joy.
Collective pain, I posit, creates joyous moments. We find levity not despite of our burdened minds and mourning hearts, but because of them.
In the desperate search for meaning, I had to throw away the ship I had spent a decade building. Destroy in order to survive, to keep my head out of the water. As a sign of things to come, a familiar feeling would re-emerge, every afternoon when the sun gleaned through my living room window, that of being haunted by my anger and rebellion. They couldn’t be bottled up anymore, too ample to fit into the well curated life I had installed them in. Read and read and read. Make and create beauty from the mayhem. Write. But above all breathe. Reminders to self.
It’s 6PM and I am contemplating where did my day go. Have I had any human contact today? Did I move my body? Did I feel alive today? And was I grateful enough? The topography of my day is a map for survival, which so many of us have developed. Palestine pushed us to redefine our lives, to give them meaning. Those marginalised by force or by choice, have, in sorrow and mourning, found a galvanising force. Our lives are finally existing in the dichotomy they were always tethered to but never fully embraced. We have now chosen the terms and conditions ourselves.
It’s 9PM. Speaking to a loved one. Toying around with my piano. Going for a walk. Do a second meditation. Shower and go to bed. Stare at the ceiling. Read the fiction book on my bedside table that always gets passed over for essays and poetry these days. Pick one of the vinyls and lay on the crammed floor of my apartment and remember why I am here. I get to choose. I have the luxury of choosing how I end my day. In the safe space of my small home, I get to have agency over my actions.
To dream while awake became a part-time job I take very seriously. There is no future if we can’t dream it, right? I create the utopia, in all its details, with colours I have never seen in my life, so bright and alive. In recent months, I have been choosing to dream while awake, maintaining control and being the conductor of the images I conjure up. The dreams I used to look forward to, at night, have been taken over by grief, bathing in grief, they have become my daily purge so I can make space for more sadness the next day.
When I awake, I chase the horror that still sleeps behind my eyelids and choose hope and beauty. I’ll tell you how it starts by borrowing words from Mary Oliver: “It is six A.M., and I am working. I am absentminded, reckless, heedless of social obligations, etc. It is as it must be”. It is in fact as it must be, in all its madness and glory, grief and understanding.