TinyLetter of the Month: Nour Naas, “Absence”

“to hear the arabic phrases i haven’t heard since mama died, and to remember so much from them. to feel loved because i feel seen.”

Each month, Catapult Community features a new TinyLetter writer and republishes one of their recent issues. This month we’re featuring Nour Naas, whose newsletter is رحمة مع الحزن.

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“Absence”

to hear the adhaan five times a day and to always have a mosque in walking distance, no matter where you are. to walk into shops and slide into the backseat of taxis and greet the clerks and drivers with as sallamu ‘alaykum. to have umm kulthum’s and abdul haleem hafiz’s voices pour through the open windows on the third floor of the complex. to spend dusk on the rooftop watching the moon cradle the stars against a black sky. to indulge in those libyan peaches that taste like honey, sitting barefoot on the veranda, hearing the bustle of city life. to listen to your name being called in the softness and affection it’s supposed to have whenever it is spoken. to have the men call you bint baladi//daughter of my country. to have the women offer you their sons and, although you’d never consider, it makes you feel embraced as a libyan, like there is nothing america could ever do to make you less than who you are. to invoke god in conversations with people in all the ways you want to when you are in america. to find the construction workers in their bright orange with their foreheads against the earth in the heat of midday, sending praises to god. to fall in love each morning because love comes easy over there in a way it just cannot happen here. to stand in prayer at masjid al sharif because even as there is a war raging like fire outside, it is the only way for you to feel absolute, to feel whole. to look forward to hugging your uncle just to smell his cologne again. to wake up early each morning and open the windows in the room and watch the dust swim through the sunlight as you listen to the neighbors chatting, preparing shakshouka over the wall. to write each morning about every single thing you are feeling so you can look back on it and remember this moment, and remember that this moment is a part of your history, that libya was good to you once. to begin each morning kissing hnena and jdeda’s foreheads and hands and not being able to remember a time when you loved someone this much. to feel like everyone’s daughter. to be claimed by tunisians as one of their own until libya can provide a home for me again. to have the taxi driver tell me, mahlahom el klam lema yju min fomek//how beautiful the words are when they come from your mouth, when i tell him i’m too shy to speak arabic. where everything is poetry. where home is everywhere. to rejoin missing pieces. to hear the arabic phrases i haven’t heard since mama died, and to remember so much from them. ya satir. to feel comfortable in my own skin. to feel like i am enough. to feel loved because i feel seen.

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What’s the name of your TinyLetter? Why did you choose it?

Nour Naas: I named my TinyLetter رحمة مع الحزن (rahma ma’ al hazn) which translates to “mercy with the sadness” in English. Before my TinyLetter, I had been keeping a WordPress blog, which I updated each day for about six or seven weeks. I started it after attending a VONA/Voices writing workshop in Philadelphia, which had inspired me to work on my craft and consistency around writing. Eventually it got to be too overwhelming because I was pushing myself to publish each day even as each piece was taking so much out of me, but I still felt a strong obligation to write. I started my TinyLetter with the intention of being more merciful with myself, and writing on my own terms and at my own pace. I’m actually really bad at coming up with titles, and everything sounds so much more beautiful to me in Arabic, so this title fit well.

When did you start writing a TinyLetter, and why?

NN: I created my TinyLetter in August at the suggestion of my friend, Jamila. When I was keeping a WordPress blog, literally everything I wrote circled around my mother’s death and the turmoil back home in Libya. I decided that I want to be able to write about my mother and country from a different perspective. Rather than writing about this person and this place in terms of the grief I inherited through their loss, I wanted to also write about the love and beauty that they gave to me. After signing up and exploring the site, I decided that this space was going to be more about what’s good for me and less about pressuring myself to provide content to my readers.

How do you think writing a regular newsletter helps your writing — or does it?

NN: I don’t know what it is about TinyLetter, but I feel a lot less pressure to update it than I did with other sites that I’ve used for writing. And I think that helps. The writing I publish doesn’t feel labored, and I like that. TinyLetter also feels a lot more intimate, like I love getting replies from my subscribers in my email.

About how long do you spend thinking about and writing each issue?

NN: Not that long. I don’t keep TinyLetter constantly updated. Something usually happens or I feel something very particular that gets me writing for an hour or two straight and I’ll just send that piece out. There’s one issue I sent out that I wrote in two hours. I think I had read an recent news article about Libya that night and I was feeling particularly homesick and I started thinking about the last time I returned in 2012 and I sat at the desk and wrote it all out. So I don’t obsess over it. If I feel okay about it, if I feel like I want other people to read my piece, I send out the issue.

Please recommend some of your favorite TinyLetters.

Jamila Osman’s blood songs and Sadia Hassan’s letters from home{land}girl.

Finally: Have you made any new friends or connections because of your newsletter?

NN: Yes, actually! I remember sending out the piece I’m still most proud of in my TinyLetter archive. I got an email from Nicole, an editor here at Catapult, on the same day. She was interested in getting my piece published for this TinyLetter of the Month issue. I remember I was in the library when I read the email and I was stifling my laughter. It was the first time I felt proud about my writing in a really long time.

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Previously in this series: Carrie Frye, Maud Newton, Jamila Osman, Rohin Guha, Laura Goode, Teri Vlassopoulos, Brandon Taylor, Sarah Mirk, Alvin Park. Know of a TinyLetter author we should feature? Please let us know in the comments!