AF: ... This triggers the triple Aries in me by the way! Haha

SAM: In answer to your question, I think I have always needed a place to escape to. And from a very young age I began practicing fantasy and I guess that was a kind of world building which felt like art. I think it’s a pretty common reaction to stressful surroundings. Being stuck inside most of the time, drawings and storytelling and music and film and daydreaming were the pillars of life. So I think that’s really my art origins story. Then I became friends with a lot of artists in Egypt and although I wasn’t in any art program (I’d gone to study journalism which is what I thought I wanted to be and maybe still do), I ended up learning by osmosis the conversations, the structures, the world. 

In my view, it had led to the extreme isolation of individuals from each other and that leading in turn to a sort of cultural desertification and silencing of something that felt quite apocalyptic to me. Especially as my family are Bedouin and their way of life was destroyed when oil was discovered. They don’t have the label of Indigenous but they/we are.

I was lucky enough to be able to see the way things were before (through the living memory of my grandmothers) or going out into the desert, into the wilderness as they call it ‘al barr’ (the outside), versus what it was like when most of the year we were stuck in the city and had to deal with cramped, impoverished conditions and the imposition of social mores of being sedentary. I had witnessed the advent of mobile phone use and this very brief window where it was unheard of to have a phone in particular unheard of for young women to have a phone. To it being ubiquitous. It's crazy to think how when I was finishing high school, to have a mobile phone was a huge taboo. I was hugely inspired by the cruising culture of using Bluetooth to meet strangers. 

In the gulf, all hook-ups are clandestine so it really did feel adjacent to the history of gay public cruising. As a teenager, I would leave my Bluetooth on and receive missives from people I wouldn't know where it was coming from in the mall or wherever. And that was really thrilling because it felt like another invisible world alongside the one we were physically in. So I suspect that while yes Afrofuturist works were and are inspiring to me, I think this was more a sort of reading of the runes that were already there rather than a creating of futures.  

The other thing that I understand and feel has been a set up all along is the way that, especially those who have been raised Muslim but who have grown up here, are almost prodded to see Islam as somehow diametrically opposed to ‘the west’. And I think in some ways, it’s true.

There are things in Islamic jurisprudence that are explicitly anti-capitalist, that protect women in custody and divorce courts and in theory at least are anti-racist. But the practice is often hard to see – take the concept of ‘riba’ or usury or interest on a loan. That is forbidden in Islamic banks. Imagine if the US had Islamic banks, no one in my generational cohort would be struggling right now with the crippling debt of unfair student loans.

I know these conversations and battles are being had in very precarious circumstances with front line consequences so I do wonder if perhaps my reticence to identify underneath that particular moniker is not helpful. I'm still figuring out my own position on that. I like the way that Legacy Russell uses the word ‘glitch’, because that is more in line with the way that I experience my gender and sexuality.

Like a switch ***** and as I get older, I think that resistance to identifying comes from a desire to protect the safe anarchic ur-space of change. That’s where creation and recreation and rebirth happens when no one is watching. And I think that comes from constant code switching and identification document swapping, and costume changes in cars, moving from being ‘covered’ in a 3abaya, to wearing a bathing suit for the swim team on the daily in Doha. I think that that formative experience of having to not ‘role play’ but actually play two discrete roles, not out of choice but necessity, is what ‘queered’ me forever.   

I'm not sure I will ever identify as anything in relation to what I view as my interior life. I have a difficult time even writing an artist bio because I have nothing to say. There are no facts really. Because I'm changing all the time. 

My dad told me the other day about how some cousin went to New York City and was looking around Times Square in awe at the sheer numbers of humans. And he said, “Mashaa’ Allah! So many Arabs!” And in that way, ya I am an Arab. Everybody is. Also I'm very conflicted about identifying culturally these days because it feels irrelevant and even suspect when it’s for the colonist’s gaze. You know?  

This was really loaded for me wearing abaya in Qatar when I worked there. Because a lot of Arabs would think ‘oh you’re just wearing that because you benefit from the exoticism’ and I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that microaggression. 

Anyway, I have been living away from that context for close to 10 years. Arabic is one of those languages that tends to wither unless you are exercising it regularly. I have had the waxing and waning of that language in my mouth since I was a child. Arabic is a language that can be studied for your whole life.