Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings: The Summer of 2020

Intimate conversations. Sharing food. Passing the hookah. Caressing. Holding hands. Gestures of affection are expressed and exchanged at hookah lounges in clusters of seated guests. Here, I taste the flavours of home, kiss my girlfriend, talk about current events, and cherish every moment of relaxation. Adorned in gold nameplates and Doc Martens, I smoke and think of Beirut; Beqaa Valley; Lebanon; the Levant; the SWANA¹ region. These affinities drip from my tongue as I confirm who I am, and it is not just that we are gathering in public, but that our collective experience hinges on fruity shisha and endless garlic sauce on rice. It’s one of the things I miss most during the pandemic. 

On August 4, 2020, and the days that followed, the explosions in Beirut overwhelmed me. Despite the horror of the event, I could not look away. The steady stream of news and social media updates seemed to amplify familiar feelings of disconnection and distance within me. The Beirut Blast weighed on my anxiety, as it added to a list of recent and ongoing hardships faced by Lebanon that would keep me further from my dream of visiting for the first time. I remember the sunny skies in Winnipeg that week—a refuge from the seductively painful glare of my cellphone—and the heat that enabled me to spend time with friends at a hookah patio. I felt held. I felt the fantasy of the hookah light glowing from the storefront, my chin tilted towards the sky in quiet awe, and it was here— under the light of the hookah sign and the starry midsummer night—that a new project would emerge. 

لا تنسى التسمية. —it was the Arabic phrase printed on a plastic tablecloth roll at a new Middle Eastern grocery store a few months back. The roll was in another layer of plastic and only fragments of the pattern were visible—nostalgic red rose clusters and cut-off text—enough to know I had to have it. If I knew Arabic, would I have recognized the phrase with the few letters that were visible, like “thank you” on grocery bags or “live laugh love” on barnboard homewares? 

After my purchase, I sent my mom a photo of the tablecloth asking for a translation, to which she quickly replied, “It depends on the context. It says…don’t forget to count your blessings.” Soon after, a friend showed me Google Translate’s instant camera feature, and I was impressed by what it could do, even though it failed to provide a clear translation of the tablecloth’s text. While the phrase has religious connotations and prompts a reminder to pray before eating, I regard it as a reminder to practice humility and gratitude—for the relationships closest to me and for the privilege of food and art.  

Bringing objects and food into my practice involves many conversations with my mom, extending outward in my research process to better understand their social and political associations. Through embodied inquiry and creative expression, the knowledge and stories passed down to me from my mother become transformed into my own body memory, influencing my sense of self and aspirations. 

That trip to the grocery store sustained me. Aside from the tablecloth, I had purchased snacks and sweets, and my partner bought us a set of coffee cups that I was happy to finally have for my home. Processing grief related to Lebanon and family happened simultaneously with becoming acquainted with the tablecloth and coffee cups; they each integrated themselves into my life. As I developed rituals with these objects, I knew I wanted to incorporate them into my first solo exhibition, which was scheduled for the following spring.² 

For the exhibition, I would work with the specific aesthetics of hookah lounges, while also remixing it in a way, in order to queer and complicate that which I aim to celebrate. I turned to methods of repetition, recontextualization, and glitch, to speak to my emotional world and to move through diasporic longing, absence, and grief. While I was conceptualizing the project, Dr. Gayatri Gopinath’s book Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, influenced how I thought about place and nostalgia—how art process is important for queer diasporic subjects to resist oppressive ideologies and come into being—and how affiliation and connection with others comes from a consideration of difference within a common frame. I reflected on how hookah lounges could be a catalyst for this, as they are transnational spaces of bonding and coming of age. 

Preparing for the exhibition through a focus on placemaking encouraged me to engage with and also move beyond concepts of belonging and deep-rootedness, which my experience of generational displacement consistently yearns for. Placemaking is not a practice of replication and ease, but rather a ceremonial untethering. This was a process of centering questions rather than answers, and embracing a sense of liminality.

I invited my sister to join me for an outdoor photoshoot. I prompted her to hold the ends of the tablecloth and throw it into the air to catch wind. These improvisational gestures began with a feeling of unfamiliarity and chaos for her, as she struggled to do it “right.” The creeping coldness of the clear September sky added a sense of urgency, but within that, she discovered resiliency and flow as we embraced messiness and natural movement. This exercise was a way for me to consider how I might visualize Lebanon as someone who has never been there—pivoting away from the romantic landscape imagery of the homeland that is so often featured on hookah lounge and restaurant walls. Situated at a deserted beach in early fall, I let the peculiarity settle in, as I pointed my lens upward toward the absence of landscape. 

Reflecting on my approach to photographing my sister, I think of Gopinath’s theorizing on states of suspension, which emphasizes the ways in which queer diasporic aesthetics “disorient and reorient us; they unsettle normative temporalities by pointing to alternative pathways and routes through the past and to the future that bypass the familiar touchstones of hetero and homonormative life histories. In so doing, they emplace us in a state of productive suspension.”³ This power to reorient the field of vision as an artist partly inspired the work in the exhibition, which was named after the tablecloth. Thinking through other fixtures of hookah lounges, I moved on from the photographs to filmmaking. 

I love that a common aesthetic between hookah lounges is the music videos playing on the TVs. Whether they are playing Arabic music or the newest Drake album, it creates a warm ambiance of hedonism. The representation of lavish culture is intoxicating, and I wanted to recreate it. 

I couldn’t stop thinking about the grocery store tablecloth and mistranslations. I had a screenshot video recording of the app glitching over لا تنسى التسمية that I kept revisiting. Some of my favourite mistranslations were “Don’t forget about nurturing,” “Don’t forget to breathe,” and “Don’t forget about the water.” I felt sentimental towards these reminders that were embedded within the concept of the original phrase—as if the mistranslations were a roadmap to understanding the inherent richness and potential I already carry. 

I projected the screenshot video onto a table draped with the tablecloth, to merge and activate the physical tablecloth with the digital one. In the initial screenshot recording, I repeatedly extended my hand out to smooth the wrinkled plastic in an attempt to aid the failing technology, so I could get what I wanted—a clear translation. When I projected the video onto the table, my hand became warped and enlarged, exaggerating my intervention. The projection of the digital tablecloth illuminated the physical table and, at times, my body, as I sparsely entered the frame. Reflecting on these layers now, I consider this a part of a poetic praxis, whereby the projection of an image onto itself creates a second skin that mimics the ways in which queer diasporic subjects process failure. 

Having just recently learned about Legacy Russell’s concept of glitch feminism, I’m increasingly inspired by the possibility of failure as a tool for resistance. Russell explains that “glitch creates a fissure within which new possibilities of being and becoming manifest. This failure to function within the confines of a society that fails us is a pointed and necessary refusal…The glitch is a passage through which the body traverses toward liberation.” My affinity towards embracing failure in my practice as a queer diasporic methodology is affirmed through glitch, which has much potential for visualizing refusal, disruption, and error as a productive happening. 

Earlier in my art practice, I started thinking through failure as it related to intergenerational inheritance. Learning about my mom’s story of the Lebanese Civil War and immigration went hand in hand with an ongoing food project, involving cooking with my mom and recording her recipes. One of the first lessons I encountered in my practice was the boundaries of our experiences as individuals. No matter the attempts at mimicry, it was impossible for me to replicate her recipes perfectly or embody the visceral memories she recounted.  

This discrepancy is experienced for both of us and is subtly reflected in the moments where I’m trying to learn something from her. I recently recorded a phone conversation between us. She instructed me on how to make ahwah Arabi (Arabic coffee). I could tell she thought I was overcomplicating things, but I always worry she is leaving “obvious” things out. That turned out to be true because I received further directions via text before and after my first attempt. 

Before I started filming the final version, I boiled the coffee on the stove exactly as she told me, and this time with more confidence. Before this project, I had never made it in my own home and I felt particular about wanting to learn it exactly my mom’s way. Although most of the coffee-making process is not visible, part of my body is seen pouring the coffee, allowing it to settle, removing the cup to drink it out of the frame, then swirling the cup before turning it upside down to dry out for a fortune reading. After watching the footage, a friend expressed to me that the expectation of mess and leakiness set her on edge. The anticipation for a reveal at the end left her in a state of suspension, as the filming ended before the cup was fully dried out. 

After I stopped the recording, I took a photo of the grounds for someone else to interpret. Growing up, my late godmother would read my cup and provide embellished fortunes of a promising future. Sometimes I envision what my own queer hookah lounge would be like, and I imagine a sliding-scale coffee cup reading service, available to the public, like in Arab films where women visit their neighbourhood expert elder for guidance. 

Thinking of hookah lounges, I wonder what kind of alternative futurisms can be enabled through these spaces. How does publicness orient intimacy, and how else can memory and identity be nurtured in these spaces? Reflecting back on the summer of 2020, I am reminded of the vitality of cultural objects, foods, and spaces, which enable ritual during difficult times. I am reminded of the transformative potential of the mundane, and of the inherent collectivity that lies therein. In a symphony of bubbling hookahs and diasporic thought—I inhale to the deepest part of me; face tilted back in a sweet surrender of fragrant smoke—I exhale and watch the cloud that spills from my mouth, hovering just long enough for me to observe it and move on. 

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Thank you to Noor Bhangu, Crystal Le, and BlackFlash for their editorial support on this essay. I would also like to acknowledge Canada Council for the Arts and Manitoba Arts Council for their generous support of my exhibition. 

Christina Hajjar is a Lebanese artist, writer, and cultural worker based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada on Treaty 1 Territory. Her practice considers intergenerational inheritance, domesticity, and place through diaspora, body archives, and cultural iconography. As a queer femme and first-generation subject, she is invested in the poetics of process, translation, and collaborative labour. https://christinahajjar.com

1. The SWANA region refers to Southwest Asia and North Africa. It is otherwise known as MENA (Middle East and North Africa). “SWANA” is understood to be less colonial and Eurocentric than “MENA,” but both are questioned and embraced to varying degrees.
2. As a recipient of the 2020 PLATFORM Photography Award, I was awarded a solo exhibition at PLATFORM Centre for Photographic + Digital Arts. Being awarded exhibition space before actually pinning down a project was beneficial for me as a process-based artist.
3. Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 16. 

This article is published in issue 39.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue