Written Elsewhere

أنا ما خصني

I say this all the time when I’m in the Middle East - mostly as a survival tactic. It translates to “this doesn’t involve me", but really it’s just me asking: why me? 

I’m Palestinian, and I’m a woman. Both identities come with a heavy, unwritten rulebook. Everywhere I go, it feels like a giant, blinking eye is on me. Like a CCTV camera made of social pressure.

To be visible here is never neutral, you aren’t just looking at the city, the city is judging you back.

It’s the labor of representation. The exhaustion of having politics, gendered harassment, or certain expectations attached to your body without permission. You’re being monitored and labeled before you even open your mouth.

I placed that eye over Amman because that’s what it feels like to be a spectacle. The animation repeats because the scrutiny never stops - it’s a cycle. 

But this is the prophecy defied. I’m refusing the trope of the “suffering Palestinian woman” and I am burning the thread of what I’m supposed to be.

‎أنا ما خصني is me putting the weight back where it belongs. It was never mine to carry anyway.

- Afrah Asmar (@SkeptickleMe)

Afrah Asmar (SkeptickleMe) is a Palestinian artist and writer. She works across photography, collage, digital art, and poetry, using a creative filter to see what happens when image and language collide. Her work is a balance of the visual and the poetic, built on connections between things that don't usually meet.

Her work has been featured in HuffPost and Lonely Planet, and she is an exhibiting artist with New Road 2 Art.