Nabil > Recent Status Updates

even dust is beautiful when the light hits

All love lies in the distance between translation and interpretation, a distance that is always expanding. Selflessness is the word of a poet; off the page love has its ultimatums.

Colonisation begins in the imagination, so it matters what people see. It depends on who is making the image, who the image is for.

Architecture is politics slowing into form. An incident is architecture, erupting into politics

Culture is like a tree, it exists above and below the surface. External culture—food, clothing, music—was visible like branches. But a culture's unconscious, unspoken rules operated out of sight, like the roots.

We know we cannot live in the past but the past lives in us.

I am seeking a truth here, but not necessarily accuracy.

True words are not beautiful.
Beautiful words are not true.
- Lao-tzu

"Note to self: John is not a journalist. Also not a non-fiction writer. He is, however, a writer of journalistic-ish texts that are not necessarily fiction. Got it."

Who will write the history of tears?

That was the meaning of assimilation: it trained us not to show that we minded. It trained us to pass. It trained us to disappear.

The great mystery of people lies in the many ways in which they'll deceive themselves.

All we are is memory and myth, and memory fades.

Our bodies heal because they are temporary, made to break. Our spirits are eternal, they don't tear or heal - they change. The question never should be, how do I heal from this, it should be: what am I changing into?

His mother died giving birth to him. He thought this was why he was gay, because she gave her life for him and no other woman could live up to that.

"Can you really love someone if you're able to leave them?"

History, myth, memory and forgetting: these are the things of identity. For now, as I trace the footprints on the shoreline of my past, the marks of those who have come and suffered before, it is clear that I and hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people have emerged from the storm, washed up on our own uncharted island of black success.