Letters Between Beirut and New York: Love, Resistance, and Perpetual Uncertainty

The following is a series of letters between Nur and Nawal-two friends, writers, and researchers. Nur is a qualitative researcher in Beirut, Lebanon, whose ethnographic projects focus on gender, social capital, mutual aid, climate, and mental health. She studied comparative politics at the American University of Beirut and the London School of Economics. She is currently pursuing an MSt in creative writing at the University of Oxford. Nawal, who was raised in Beirut, is a clinical psychology PhD candidate in New York. Her dissertation is focused on understanding the impact of intergenerational, chronic collective violence on the psychological experiences of communities living in Lebanon. The two met in Beirut in 2018. Nawal overheard Nur talking circuitously about "the complexities of the feminist movement" and leaned in. Their connection felt immediate and electric. After Nawal returned to New York at the end of the summer, they continued to build on each other's ideas and thoughts through letters, as they witnessed, across different continents, their country move from the height of revolution to the free-fall of collapse. In this excerpt of their letters, they explore their own understanding and interpretations of the psychological realities they inhabit, not simply as researchers and academics trained to speak a eurocentric tongue, but as feeling women who are learning that maybe the wisdom that both liberates and grounds them lies in notes of tarab, dancing and movement, and the vastness of the Mediterranean Sea. Public Significance Statement This letter series explores fragmented, virtual, and physical forms of community and connection. Two Lebanese friends-as well as writers and researchers-write to each other across continents hoping to unpack their shared histories, research, and everyday experiences of violence and uncertainty. Through sharing their intimate and often vulnerable correspondence in a journal setting, they hope to show how creative outputs, in the form of writing and movement, have helped them better grasp their positionalities within the perpetually uncertain spaces they inhabit.