Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings: Claiming the Hookah Lounge

Seated at one of the leather couches adjacent to the window, the familiar hookah lounge owner approached our table. Eyes locked on me, she began telling me about how one of her customers had scolded her for reposting an Instagram story that I tagged them in. Their disappointment in her for being affiliated with me, or endorsing me, was being used as gossip. My Instagram account had caused offense, likely because of my bio: “💄🍟✨ hard femme lebanese dyke princess, whiny brat, & indecisive pisces 💎🍒🍓⚡” 

I sat there, wondering why she was telling me this—why this information was being leveraged as a point of intimacy. The feeling of home that comes from the hookah lounge is already not an idealistic one, but my unbelonging had not been confirmed in this way before. Was I being watched at the hookah lounge while I was relaxing, eating, smoking, embracing? Was my queerness more blatant online and more palatable in person? Whose bodies and which identities are repostable? Was the owner vouching for me or was she using this story to inappropriately try to bond with me?

The Aladdin mural hovered over her shoulder from the other side of the room, peeking at our table, taunting me. The feeling of home at the hookah lounge is not unlike a biological family, where feelings of rootedness and belonging are weighted by differences of opinion, ethic, and aesthetic. Perhaps this is the reality for any identity-specific community or grouping. There is always a way to radicalize the spaces we occupy by virtue of being ourselves—but as a lover of PDA, forced cautiousness and self-monitoring is a familiar consequence of not being in a safe space. Despite the self-orientalizing art, mismatched furniture, and homophobic patrons, there is a lot to love and take comfort in. 

My ongoing project, “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings,” recreates the site of the hookah lounge through multi-media installation and placemaking. In a room in a gallery, I gesture towards the hookah lounge and labour to create a resting place for individual and relational pleasure. While celebrating hookah lounges and contemplating their internal and external tensions at play, my work considers what it might mean for hookah lounges to be transferable, transformable sites. What does the hookah lounge hold, heal, witness? I recreate the hookah lounge not only because actual, existing ones are somewhat inadequate, but because by creating place as an artistic endeavour, I am able to examine its philosophical and political dimensions through process. 

After two solo exhibitions, not one hookah has been smoked in the show. Partly this is due to the risks and difficulties related to COVID-19. The other part is that galleries generally do not want hookahs being used in the space. While I have considered smoking a solo session as a ceremonial ritual, or at least having physical hookahs in the space, I have refrained. The gesture of the hookah—albeit the central point of the show, in a way—seems beside the point. The LED hookah light that hangs on the wall and leans against the glass is an icon, becoming a stand-in—enough to signify what place the space is meant to represent.

Hookah lounges are culturally important places, not just as sites of social exchange but in the political implication of their operations. Many external forces threaten and impact them and their patron communities. In the fall of 2020, several months into the pandemic, when hookah lounges were still closed, the Lung Association of Manitoba advocated that a ban on smoking shisha in public spaces in Manitoba was long overdue. The proposal had the support of other health organizations, and the Winnipeg Free Press published an article on it, also conducting an online poll asking the public if there should be a shisha ban in Manitoba. I remember the “yes” and “no” statistics wavering, and the panic I felt, unsure of how much weight this kind of exercise could have. I circulated the poll through my social media networks, hopeful that I could make a positive impact towards the looming threat. In the end, the pandemic restrictions loosened, hookah lounges reopened, and I didn’t hear anything more about a potential ban. However, the threat remains present; shisha is already banned in many other cities.

In her MA thesis, “‘Pass me the hookah’: an assessment of Toronto’s ‘shisha ban’ as related to Muslim placemaking, forced displacement, and racializing surveillance,” curator Mitra Fakhrashrafi draws from Black geography and Black placemaking to discuss how hookah lounges are sites of radical placemaking. “I use ‘radical placemaking’ to name the ways that Black, Indigenous, and racialized people’s placemaking practices ‘model different ways of inhabiting and sharing space’​​¹ […] and, in turn, contest and transform relationships to spatial agency; ‘the ability to be in, act on, or exert control over a desired part of the built-and-natural environment.’”​​² Written as a response to Toronto’s shisha ban in 2016, Fakhrashrafi notes that the ban forced nearly “70 predominantly Black and brown Muslim migrant-owned businesses to close or restructure their livelihoods.” Given the demographic of owners and patrons of hookah lounges, it is impossible not to see the ban as an anti-Black, anti-Arab, Islamophobic, racist act.

The hookah lounge is a physical space of gathering for Black, brown, Muslim, and SASWANA (South Asian, Southwest Asian, North African) communities. Its existence stands as a symbol for vitality. It is unsurprising that many people would rather hookah lounges not exist, because they fear our collective power, and that is why they target sites of sanctuary and sites of worship. Operating a hookah lounge in so-called Canada is a trendy entrepreneurial venture—but within the context of white supremacy and the precarious conditions it puts these businesses through, to choose it is a willful act—perhaps one of refusal. Despite the law, hookah lounges remain a fixture of Toronto—not as underground establishments, but as visible, frequented businesses, with big signs, open windows, and decorative storefronts. When I asked Fakhrashrafi about this, she said “the best thing we can do to keep things this way is keep the shisha lounges in business [through our patronage] and show up when there are attacks on them.”

In an article titled “Banning Shisha In Toronto Is About A Lot More Than Health Codes” published in The Fader,​​³ Huda Hassan discusses the importance of shisha lounges and how many people feel that targeting them has “a racist and xenophobic undertone.” “Shisha culture isn’t new,” says Hassan. “Persians introduced the custom to the Mughal Empire in India in the early 16th century, and shisha is now a cultural mainstay throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia. Immigrants from these pockets of the world have popularized the tradition in the West. For shisha smokers, many of whom are Muslim or raised in Islamic environments, these establishments offer a halal setting for recreational activity that doesn’t conflict with religious or cultural values.” Hassan concludes the article with a poignant quote from Ali, the Lebanese-Canadian owner of Habibiz hookah lounge in Scarborough and Montreal, who asks “Where else is there for us in this city?”

The question became a jumping-off point for Fakhrashrafi, who in 2019 co-curated a group exhibition called Habibiz with Jessica Kirk. The co-curators, who are a part of the collective, Way Past Kennedy Road, describe the shisha lounge as “a site of intergenerational gathering, a site of migrant ownership, and a site of placemaking for Black and/or Muslim people.” Their exhibition examined Toronto’s shisha ban and considered what it means to illegalize already hypersurveilled spaces. The artworks dealt with various topics within surveillance, rather than focusing on shisha culture itself, thereby extending the parallels of how racialized subjects navigate space and place. Fakhrashrafi and Kirk quote from an article by Marcus Anthony Hunter, Mary Pattillo, Zandria F. Robinson, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor titled “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry”​​⁴ to describe how in addition to being spaces of surveillance, hookah lounges are places where “otherwise oppressive geographies of a city can provide sites of play, pleasure, celebration [and life].” I aim to hold both of these realities in my project, “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings.” 

The title—translated from the Arabic phrase لا تنسى التسمية found on a mass-produced plastic tablecloth—suggests to me abundance, gratitude, pleasure, and love. Using the phrase as a foundation for my inquiry into the hookah lounge, it has been my intention to balance nostalgia with criticality, so that I might honour the hookah lounge while also calling it into question. I enjoy leaning into diasporic romanticism, conceptualizing Lebanon from afar; placemaking the hookah lounge through memory, language, and intergenerational knowledge. Sometimes, I become painfully aware of how focusing so much on diasporic artmaking is merely a consolation prize for what I have lost. At other times, I feel that art is indulgent. I return to the phrase and remember my purpose.

The phrase “don’t forget to count your blessings” reminds me of my mom and immigrant mothers everywhere who assert that their children will have a better life here in Canada. The tensions between assimilation and diasporic romanticism are provoked through the immigrant, who embraces the concept of the Canadian Dream, and the child of the immigrant who envies the distant homeland as a site of ultimate authenticity and aspirational connection. Both archetypes are grieving and in search of wholeness. Maybe being wilfully unsettled is a way to push against a settler mentality, and while my mom anguishes at seeing my perpetual discontent—because she sacrificed for me to avoid unhappiness and have access to freedom—I remain empowered through a troubling position.

Although I resent the generalizing assumption that it is safe here, in the land of possibilities, and dangerous there, where no future exists for anyone (let alone a queer girl), I must also be realistic about the tangible privileges that have come with my generational displacement. For example, my poem “Libnan” that appears on a sky-blue print in “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings” reflects on witnessing the Beirut Blast (2020) from afar, rather than having experienced it myself. My research gathers information about the Lebanese Civil War (1975 to 1990) through my own family’s and historical accounts, rather than having had to live through it myself. How did I—we—end up here? These questions remain essential in contextualizing the hookah lounge and its artistic recreations.

For me, smoking shisha has meditative, spiritual, and medicinal qualities. Being closer to my Arab identity means practicing and sharing culture. It means doing that with my partner by consuming each others’ foods, films, and music, relating our first-gen experiences and feelings, and learning words and expressions in each others’ languages. Before we met, she was already a hookah regular, and this cultural familiarity and intimacy excited me. There are many reasons why hookah lounges are mostly filled by young people—transcultural groups of friends who arguably share more in common than with their families. There is a trauma to being an immigrant or child of an immigrant that can only be healed in community. At the hookah lounge, all of this is possible.

Considering hookah lounges as a site of radical placemaking, I think of how my endeavour to practice placemaking through a fictionalized hookah lounge installation falls short of radical, since its existence has so far relied on institutional hosting and funding, and the pandemic has limited opportunities for collaboration and collective gathering. I believe in art’s potential to transform individual and collective lives, but I am skeptical of the traditional role of galleries and dream of something more. My iterations of “Don’t Forget to Count Your Blessings” pose the challenge of representing the hookah lounge through aesthetics and narratives, the results of which subvert the minimalist, white-washed tendencies of the white cube.

My ideal hookah lounge is bright, with high ceilings, big windows, and comfortable furniture. There is colour. There is smoking and socializing. There are cushions and nice art, with impeccable lighting and ambiance. This hookah lounge is also a club, a bookstore, and a theatre, in addition to being a cafe, a lounge, a tasseography service, and a community fixture for social justice organizing, readings, talks, performance art, karaoke, and open mic nights. There are pay-what-you-can options, gender-neutral bathrooms, and wheelchair accessibility. There are posters for a Free Palestine and for upcoming events, and everyone is safe. There is a patio and abundant plants, inside and out. There are healers on-site. There is a queer agenda. 

Utopic wishlists are essential for any artist, but I can’t help but wonder if a queer hookah lounge is even viable: Would it be more frequented by queers or by the typical hookah crowd? How would these crowds mesh? Would I sell alcohol at my hookah lounge? If I did, would I be disregarding a chance for solidarity with the Muslims who only seek out Halal spots? Would everything be sliding-scale prices, or just some things? Would it be economically viable? Would I become a capitalist, a sellout? Would zionists, white supremacists, homophobes, and transphobes harass patrons, vandalize the space, or incite violence? Do I want big, open windows, or privacy? Should it be loud-and-proud-queer or more stealth-queer? Would closeted people be afraid of getting caught at the queer hookah lounge? Would suspecting family members drive down the street to peer through the windows looking for them?

Fakhrashrafi writes that “while resisting the ‘white gaze’ and unbelonging” draws people to the hookah lounge, another motivation for hookah lounge patrons is to resist “the auntie gaze.” Muslim women seek the hookah lounge to escape gendered Islamophobia and interpersonal surveillance. Their family members often remain unaware of where they’re going. However, the hookah lounge itself is also a space where relational dynamics reinforce oppression. In a section of Fakhrashrafi’s thesis titled “No safe spaces,” she refers to “the limits of ethnic enclaves in providing safe spaces for as long as transphobia, homophobia, racism, sexism, as well as classism, ableism, and other hegemonic power structures remain under-addressed in Muslim placemaking spaces.” Further, a queer hookah lounge would not be a safe space by virtue of existing. My concept of the queer hookah lounge relies on an ideal of political solidarity between movements, across race, sexuality, and gender, centering anti-oppression.

In Winnipeg, I face a typical experience of fragmentation, where I am scrutinized and under-nourished as a queer femme in hookah lounges and as an Arab femme in the queer community. I fantasize about starting my own business that could merge these worlds. Perhaps a queer hookah lounge could exist as a transferable site, such as through pop-up, online, or art initiatives. In the earlier pandemic days, artists Nedda Babba and Dema Talib formed Dead Projects to “provide alternative viewing conditions and opportunities for emerging, minoritized artists in digital space through virtual exhibitions.” They created ShishaTime, an online artist talk series that live streamed Zoom chats between Dead Projects and their favourite artists on YouTube and Twitch. Facilitating five talks in 2021, Dead Projects archived the project by having the videos available to watch on YouTube. Finding these videos after the fact felt like I was being let in on a secret queer SWANA vlog. More than that, their format enabled me to see an example of an alternative hookah lounge in action.

With their pronouns visible beside their names, Dead Projects and their interviewees smoked shisha while having an informal conversation that felt far more interesting than a standard Q&A. Discussing topics like astrology, dating, and the art world, Dead Projects created an ephemeral experience for the audience via engaged chat comments, and then crystallized the video into a permanent archive for the public. Like other COVID-response programming, ShishaTime inspires me to consider ways that marginalized, isolated, or niche communities can gather online in an accessible way, though not without its own threat of surveillance. 

We need more online and in-person spaces of communal gathering for queer SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) people. No more stigmatization and projected shame! No more white belly dancers! No more zionist DJs! No more appropriated Middle Eastern nights! Hookah lounges and gay bars are both guilty. When the hookah lounge owner told me about what that person said about my Instagram, but not about how she responded or what she was going to do, I knew that she didn’t have my interest at heart. 

The subjective challenges of the hookah lounge—that imperfect family-feeling, the sometimes questionable art, the interpersonal surveillance—are important, even with the systemic problems at hand. The law has and never will be the standard of ethics we should live by. Aside from advocating against shisha bans and systemic oppression, there is a lot more we can do to care for one another and to make the hookah lounge a more inclusive space. Shisha culture will persist, no matter the law, or public opinion—and queer and trans people will be there, soaking in their leisure, and dreaming up new ways to change the world.

Thank you to Noor Bhangu, Crystal Le, and BlackFlash for their editorial support on this essay. I would also like to acknowledge the 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. Ghaida Moussa, Syrus Marcus Ware, Río Rodríguez, Jinthana Haritaworn, “Introduction: Queering Urban Justice,” in Queering Urban Justice: Queer of Colour Formations in Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 3-26.
2. Alesia Montgomery, “Reappearance of the Public: Placemaking, Minoritization and Resistance in Detroit,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 4 (2016): 776-799.
3. Huda Hussan, “Banning Shisha In Toronto Is About A Lot More Than Health Codes,” Fader, April 28, 2016. Last accessed: December 9, 2022. https://www.thefader.com/2016/04/28/banning-shisha-in-toronto-is-about-a-lot-more-than-health-codes.
4. Hunter, M. A., Pattillo, M., Robinson, Z. F., and Taylor, K.-Y. “Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry.” Theory, Culture & Society, 33, 7–8 (2016): 31–56.

This article is published in issue 39.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue