In the spring of 2015, as I was preparing to leave Lebanon and begin a new life in the United States, one of my closest friends offered me a piece of advice I have never forgotten. She warned me, half-seriously and half in jest, not to fall in love with an Arab man in the diaspora. Her warning, she explained, was born of years of disappointment with Eastern men.
“Don’t go all the way to America just to fall in love with an Arab,” she said. “Find yourself a John, or a Michael someone like that.” She continued reciting an endless list of foreign names as though they represented an entirely different destiny.
Before long, we found ourselves imagining a scene borrowed from the romantic films we had grown up watching. We pictured me meeting this imaginary John or perhaps Michael in the shared laundry room of my apartment building. A casual greeting would lead to a brief conversation, the conversation to unexpected affection, and before long we had invented an entire love story out of nothing more than coincidence and wishful thinking.
Then she interrupted our fantasy with the story of a friend who had emigrated to Canada, married a foreigner, divorced him years later, and eventually married an Arab man instead. The reason, she insisted, was surprisingly simple: language. The emotional distance created by speaking different mother tongues had gradually become impossible to ignore. She ended her story by blaming the language itself, while I burst into laughter at the absurdity of discussing such matters only days before my departure.
At the time, I dismissed her concerns. English had long ceased to feel like a foreign language to me. I had mastered it through years of study and daily use, and I was then working for an international newspaper in Lebanon. The possibility that language might one day become an obstacle in my most intimate relationships seemed so unlikely that I gave it almost no further thought.
More than a decade has passed since I left Lebanon though exile often feels like the more truthful word. Over those years, my relationship with language has unfolded in countless ways, far too many to capture in a single essay. One of the first changes I noticed was in the music I listened to. Almost instinctively, I found myself seeking out Arabic songs, from Egyptian mahraganat to the unmistakable voices of Abdel Basset Hamouda, Ahmed Adaweya, and countless others. Whenever homesickness quietly settled in, it was these songs that restored a sense of familiarity.
And whenever I found myself sitting across from a John or a Michael, my thoughts would inevitably wander back to Arabic, as though my mind were searching for a place it had always known. It gradually became clear to me that language is not merely a means of communication but one of the deepest layers of our identity. It is a set of roots that anchors us as much as we belong to it, ensuring that, no matter how far we travel, we can still recognize ourselves.
The Language of Dreams
My aunt, who has lived in the United States for many years, once confessed that whenever she loses her temper, she instinctively curses in Arabic. Only then, she said, does she feel that her anger has found its full expression. The words carry a force that no translation can reproduce.
My daughter, meanwhile, speaks English with an American accent. Yet she once told me that her friends had noticed something curious: whenever she speaks to me, her English suddenly acquires a Lebanese accent. Watching myself more closely, I realized I do something similar. Even within Arabic, my voice shifts. The cadence I use with my family in northern Lebanon is not quite the same as the one that emerges when I speak with friends in Beirut.
Not long ago, an American friend asked me, “What language do you dream in?” I told him that I rarely remember my dreams, but whenever I do, they are almost always in Arabic. I searched my memory for a dream spoken in English and, to my surprise, could not find a single one.
He then asked a more difficult question: “What language do you think in?” This time I had no answer. Years ago, the response would have been immediate Arabic. Today, however, my inner world feels less orderly, as though languages coexist within me, blending into one another until their boundaries become impossible to distinguish.
If I were to treat myself as a subject in a linguistic experiment, one pattern has become unmistakable. After an entire day spent navigating English, I instinctively return to Arabic. I look for television programs in my mother tongue. I search for familiar voices. As one Arab immigrant friend once told me, “By the end of the day, I need to speak to someone in Arabic. English exhausts me.”
The longer I live abroad, the more language reveals itself not simply as a tool but as a form of identity. It is as though two selves stand facing one another. One belongs to the language into which we were born the language of childhood, first words, games, classrooms, first love, and family memories. The other belongs to the language we acquired later, the one through which we learned to navigate the world and, in many ways, reinvent ourselves. Between these two selves, we spend our lives translating not only our words, but also who we are.
Language and Power
I often think about those who change their names after becoming American citizens, transforming almost overnight from Mohammed to Matthew, Hassan to Dan, or Ahmed to Alex. I still remember my surprise when a woman I knew became Scarlett the moment she received her citizenship. I have often wondered whether it is the names themselves that become burdensome, or the identities they inevitably carry.
I cannot presume to know the experiences that lead someone to make such a choice. Perhaps they have grown weary of correcting pronunciations, enduring suspicion, or carrying the invisible weight of assumptions attached to an Arab name in a world where Arab identity is so often marginalized. It may even be that, after years of navigating such realities, one begins to internalize them, believing that belonging requires not only a new passport but a new name. I do not know.
Language, too, is a space in which identity is negotiated, but it is also an instrument of power. Throughout history, whenever a people has been threatened with erasure, its language has often faced the same fate. A language is never merely a collection of sounds or grammatical rules; it is the living archive of a community’s memory. Within it reside stories, systems of knowledge, rituals, customs, values, symbols, and ways of seeing the world that cannot be fully transplanted into another tongue.
For this reason, language is never a neutral possession. To preserve it is, in many respects, to preserve a way of being. Yet the opposite impulse exists as well. There are those who, after years of displacement, exclusion, or quiet exhaustion, begin to long for distance from the very identity they once sought to protect. Sometimes the desire to let go is not born of rejection, but of fatigue. And perhaps that, too, is one of exile’s least visible burdens.
The World’s Narrative
I return to these stories because they have become inseparable from a question that has occupied me for some time: What does it mean to write a novel in English? It is no longer an abstract idea but a persistent desire. My life already unfolds between two languages. I read in both, write in both, work in both, and move daily between worlds shaped by each. Sometimes the two languages even meet within the same sentence, and I find myself inhabiting a space that belongs fully to neither, yet somehow to both.
What I continue to ask myself, however, is where this desire truly comes from. If I am completely honest, I believe it stems from a longing to reach beyond the geographical and cultural boundaries that have long defined my readership boundaries that even the English translations of my Arabic books have not entirely dissolved. I want my work to travel further than the place from which it originated because I believe that human experience is, at its core, profoundly shared. Circumstances differ, histories diverge, and cultures shape us in distinct ways, yet beneath those differences lie the same fears, desires, losses, and hopes. Perhaps writing directly in English would allow others to recognize that common humanity more immediately.
At times, I ask myself a more uncomfortable question. Is this desire rooted in an unspoken sense of inferiority? Am I trying to escape my Arab identity by adopting the world’s dominant language? Each time I confront that possibility, my answer remains the same: no. I know myself well enough to recognize that this impulse comes from somewhere else. It feels less like an act of abandonment than an attempt to recover a voice that has too often been confined by the boundaries of language itself.
Living abroad has taught me that language is never simply something we speak; it is something we inhabit. It shapes the way we remember, imagine, grieve, and belong. It is not merely the vocabulary of a people but the medium through which their existence becomes audible. This realization leaves me with an unsettling question: must I borrow another language in order for my own story to be heard?
There is another reality that cannot be ignored. The language with the widest global reach often carries the greatest narrative authority. Arabic literature, despite its richness and intellectual depth, frequently remains at the margins of international literary conversation, while works originally written in English circulate with remarkable ease across borders. I want my writing to participate in that larger conversation. I want it to reach distant readers, to shape perspectives, and to leave a lasting impression. Perhaps that, more than anything else, explains my attraction to writing in English.
Yet another question remains unresolved. Do I feel freer in English? Does it allow me to speak with fewer inhibitions, to reveal parts of myself that Arabic keeps carefully guarded? I still do not know. Arabic draws me back to the person I have always been; it carries the intimacy of memory, family, and the emotional landscape in which I first learned to understand the world. English, by contrast, knows nothing of my past. Precisely because it carries none of that history, it sometimes offers the distance necessary for confession. Within it, I can step outside myself and observe the person I have become.
Perhaps this is the quiet paradox of migration. We do not simply acquire another language; we acquire another self. And after years of living between them, I am no longer certain which one offers greater peace the self I inherited, or the self I gradually created. In the end, I still find myself asking the same question: to whom do I truly belong to John and Michael, or to Hassan Shakoush?