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Beirut, Lebanon
My journey to the Middle East feels like it has been two years in the making. When the pandemic first hit the UK in March 2020, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared the nation was now in lockdown, my gut instinct was that I wanted to go back to Lebanon. But how and, more importantly, why?
I hadn’t been back to Beirut, let alone the region, since 2011, which was only for three days to watch my sister get married. I hadn’t spent longer than a week there since I graduated high school, which was only to bury my late mother, Muna, just as I had started college in London. I vowed I’d never return and, for 15 years, I didn’t.
British-born and of Lebanese and Sierra Leonean descent, I had spent my formative years living in Beirut and neighboring Aleppo, in Syria. I was someone who grew up rejecting my Arab identity (“Your name is Ahmad, not Kevin,” my family used to say), looking to the pages of Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Dazed to feed me instead.
Years of not embracing my roots all changed on August 4th, 2020, with the explosion at the Port of Beirut, as I watched the news unfold across my screen in London. I called my siblings, aunts, grandmothers, cousins – all who lived there – frantically, in tears. A day or so later, feeling utterly helpless, I happened upon Eli Rezkallah’s Instagram Stories showing the destruction of his Plastik offices. Seeing this super talented creative that had lived, and thrived, in Beirut reset something inside of me.
Seeing how Eli had been affected – along with many others in the region – actually planted the seed of what would become Creatives For Lebanon, a non-profit association I helped form in support of Beirut’s creative industry. Eli and I never met in person, but by August of that year, not a week went by that didn’t speak, share memes, or continue to inspire each other. Writing this, it’s wild to think that it was only nine months ago that I returned to Lebanon for the first time in a decade: July 2021. It was the worst of times for the country, but for me it’s where, in my early 30s, I finally found my sense of purpose, community and, if truth be told, self. I had grown up rejecting my own culture, but found myself reflected in a new version of it being defined by the people there right now. The irony of being 15 in Lebanon and looking towards the West, then at 30 flipping the whole thing around and being in the West and looking back to Lebanon, was my own personal renaissance.
From designers Salim Azzam, Sandra Mansour, and Eric Mathieu Ritter, to a new generation of photographers, creatives, and storytellers that you should all know: Melanie Dagher, Aly Saab, Yasmina Hilal, Hamza Mekdad, Hass Idriss, Charlie Haddad, and Cynthia Merhej – the first Arab woman to be nominated for the esteemed LVMH prize – there is so much new energy. Cynthia told me that social media had helped as fuel over the last few years. I understood that.
That summer, I met rock star Wassim Bou Malham, who invited me to listen to his new soon-to-be-released project, a solo album that was produced and entirely recorded in Arabic, his first. I reunited with a classmate of mine I had probably not seen since I was 12: Firas Abou Fakher, a member of Mashrou’ Leila. I also met artist and filmmaker Mo Abdouni, a kindred spirit. We spent countless hours in cars, bars and parties discussing our quasi-Western-infused Arab complexes – including one conversation that I’ll never forget on a starry night in Badaro, with French-Lebanese stylist Emilie Kareh. There we were, three Lebanese working in ‘culture’. He Muslim, her Christian, and me mixed, discussing what it meant to be Lebanese, Arab and Middle Eastern. Emilie said it best: we were in the Age of Aquarius. An era associated with hope, change, and the dawn of a new cultural movement.
What became increasingly apparent to me as I returned to London, following my Salinger-esque summer, was that this phenomenon was not unique or solely reserved for me. It was happening to Lebanese, Arabs and Middle Easterners everywhere (because we really are everywhere). Whether we’re living in the West or living in the region, we are constantly living in between two worlds, and two cultures – whether it’s surrounding you where you are, or simply on screen. So, to be given the reins of GQ Middle East after all that, felt kismet – or Maktoob as we say in Arabic.
I did finally meet Eli, by the way. And it wasn’t in Beirut, London or New York. It was on my very first day in Dubai, to take on this new role and start this new journey. I guess you can call that full circle.
