When I watched the movies I watched and listened to the music I listened to, I felt like Rapunzel, looking through a window at people living their lives and desperately trying to emulate it up in my own little tower. I didn’t like looking at the white world through a window and not being able to experience that life in my peripheral country, but I couldn’t help it.
Read MoreThere was no colloquial equivalent for the word “lesbian” in my mother tongue, and that may have contributed to my feelings of shame and solitude for a large part of my childhood.
Read MoreWritten with hindsight, Wasif seems to long for times, when the three religions lived together. This nostalgia sounds less like a tribute to the Ottoman rule and more of a yearning for a unified Jerusalem.
Read MoreThis type of reckoning with the past is a familiar experience for millennials from peripheral countries. We grew up watching the same cartoons, nagging our parents to buy the same toys and observing the world around us shrink at the same pace. Most importantly, we all had a moment when we thought this new and exciting shared global culture would make us all equal. When it didn't, we ended up experiencing the same sense of disappointment. All the cultural capital we acquired to fit in just made us look more suspicious. Whitey gawped at our ability to speak his language as if we were an entirely different species that miraculously learned to communicate through speech.
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