57.1%
Araz Kojayan
When I visited warsinlebanon.com to calculate how much of my life had been consumed by war, the number stunned me: 57.1 percent. More than half of my existence has been spent navigating an ocean of violence. But numbers alone cannot convey the true weight of that reality. They cannot explain how my grandparents and parents survived the 1915 and the 1975, or how any of us continue to wake each morning in a country where survival has become an art form.
Colonial Order: The Time of Patriarchy and Whiteness
Talin Suciyan
What is the connection between Frantz Fanon and Zaven Biberyan?
A War Diary from Lebanon
Araz Kojayan
During a war, bodies and souls are transformed, willingly or not, and the passage of time seeps into them more quickly than is natural. Uncertainty, fear, and loss transform the individual from within, and the survival instinct comes to dominate all values. This latter has a sharper manifestation on the individual's daily life in countries composed of diverse and multi-layered communities, such as Lebanon.
Where Did We Learn Not to See? Gaze, Power, and the Politics of the Body
Aylin Vartanyan
And perhaps one of the most striking symbols of this blindness is the aircraft that came to be known as the ‘Lolita Express.’ How could so many powerful adults, from business figures to politicians, from academics to scientists, board an aircraft carrying this name without question? A plane named after a young girl became a chilling symbol of how normalized this regime of gaze had become.
The Colonial Order: Growing Up with Epsteins
Talin Suciyan
To express shock at such crimes requires ignoring the colonial violence accumulated over centuries by humanity’s blindingly white half. As the colonial knowledge of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was obscured by nationalist theories, empires transformed into nation-states, and that knowledge became a founding pillar of white supremacy. The foundational knowledge that nourished Epstein and allowed that smile to settle on his face is precisely this accumulated knowledge.