What started as an attempt to write a counter-discourse to the systemic dehumanization of Arab men in Western media—particularly following the events of October 7th, 2023, and its aftermath—turned into a journey of healing for my fragmented identity, and a deeper engagement with what has been withdrawn from my tradition. It also became a critical reflection on the external modernity/coloniality gaze, shaping how I dance and produce artistic work.

Over the course of two years, I went on dates with Arab men in the diaspora. Using love as both a discourse and a method in artistic research, I wrote about our encounters and recorded conversations. I traced the emotional and political tensions that emerged within these intimate spaces. Through this process, I asked how it might be possible to meet one another while carrying our colonial, patriarchal, and societal wounds as Arab speakers, and how I can portray these stories with grace, without representation, while keeping the right to opacity.

In this journey of healing and looking up other sources of knowledge coming from the global majority led me to question how Eurocentric knowledge systems and the colonial gaze have informed the aesthetics of my dance practice, particularly within Raqs Sharqi and its contemporary interpretations, and unfolded an urgency to reimagine my dance as a decolonial tool and come up with choreographic methods that I could use to turn the gaze inwards and create dances to coordinates on my map of belonging.