Who Are You?

What if the identity question isn't something to resolve before you start creating, but the creative material itself?

In this first episode of the Forward Moves recap series, Raja revisits 38 episodes across 3 seasons and surfaces the thread that runs through nearly every conversation: identity. The guests who've done the most original, durable work aren't the ones who figured themselves out early. They're the ones who learned to live inside the uncertainty and made it productive.

Voices from the archive:

Bady Dalloul (French-Syrian multimedia artist) says answering the identity question will take a lifetime and means it without frustration. That open-endedness is what keeps driving him back to the studio, and into the fictional nations, invented archives, and miniature worlds that define his practice.

Nada Debs (designer) spent years treating her Japanese upbringing and Arab heritage as 2 separate things she had to keep apart. The breakthrough was realising she didn't have to. East and East, she calls it.

Amad Mian (founder, Dastaangoi) started from a place of shame about his Pakistani identity and built an entire fragrance and storytelling house in order to change that. He didn't wait to feel proud. He created in order to get there.

Nadine Kanso (founder, Bil Arabi) was galvanised by September 11th, watching people around her become afraid of their own Arabic names. Her response was to make the Arabic language the most visible, celebrated thing she could. The brand name itself is the statement.

Ricardo Karam (media personality, founder of the Takreem Foundation) has spent 3 decades arguing, through thousands of hours of conversation, that the Arab world is richer and more extraordinary than the prevailing narrative allows. What we need, he says, isn't a new identity but a return to what we already have.

Nez Gebreel (co-founder, Dubai Design Week) stopped seeing her layered British, Arab, Italian, Greek and Turkish influences as a conflict to manage and started treating them as a creative advantage. Why can't I be all of them? she asks, and means it as a creative position, not just a personal one.

Meshary Al Nassar (Kuwaiti interior designer) offers the most freeing take of all: no one knows what they're doing. We're all figuring it out. We're all humans for the first time.

00:00:00:00 – Cold Open

00:03:29:08 – Intro

00:05:56:18 – Bady Dalloul

00:07:59:23 – Nada Debs

00:09:52:04 – Amad Mian

00:11:29:02 – Nadine Kanso

00:13:30:15 – Ricardo Karam

00:14:42:13 – Nez Gebreel

00:16:02:05 – Meshary AlNassar

00:17:11:24 - Outro

Transcript

Ep39

Raja:

Here we go. Three seasons, 38 episodes, and somewhere along the way, I realized that I went through something spectacular, that I had been sitting with something extraordinary. And this is what I want to tell you about here.

Before I get into that, you may have noticed that we still didn't transition into chapter four of Forward Moves. The situation here in Dubai, the uncertainty in the region, made it challenging to plan, to tape, to ask people to sit down and talk about their creative journeys. It didn't feel right to carry on the conversation when everything was foggy around, even if this would have been the right thing to do so that we don't give way to those wanting to kill the pulse of this place.

This however requires a certain kind of stillness, a certain trust that tomorrow will resemble today enough to make the conversation worth having. And while going through all this, here's what I kept coming back to. The conversations we've already had are full of people who built extraordinary things precisely in the absence of that stillness.

People who created in lockdowns, in exile, chosen or imposed, in countries that were rebuilding themselves, and sometimes in mob shelters. People for whom uncertainty was not the exception, but the constant. And what they made in these conditions is some of the most beautiful and durable work I've ever encountered.

So I went back to the archive and I found something I may have highlighted in individual episodes, but never as a whole. The same questions kept surfacing across every discipline, every nationality, every generation.

Who am I, really? What does it take to walk away from what you know, what you're comfortable with, and into the unknown? How do you honor where you come from without being trapped in it? What does it mean to make something from this region at this particular moment in history, and every moment in history? Six themes came up, and an argument, not planned, not designed, but emerging from all of them together, an argument for what it means to keep moving forward when the ground isn't stable. That's what this miniseries is. Six recap episodes, each one a different angle on the same essential question.

I'll be talking directly to you, and I'll bring in voices from the archive, people who have answered these questions in their own ways, across art, design, food, music, architecture, photography, and many disciplines. If you're new to Forward Moves, welcome. Start here.

This is the conversation underneath all the conversations. If you've been with us since the beginning, thank you for staying. What you're about to hear is the show seen from a different altitude.

The same people, the same moments, but arranged so that the larger pattern becomes visible. And if you're someone who is navigating uncertainty right now, in your creative work, in your career, in your city, in your life, I think these six episodes are special for you, because every person in this archive found a way to keep moving forward. None of them had a map.

They all had something better, a clear sense of what mattered, and the determination to make it happen. Let's get to it. Welcome to Forward Moves.

I'm your host, Raja Haddad. We're taking a pause. We're sharing with you a mini-series of six episodes that outline the key themes that kept coming back across the past 38 episodes.

I want to start with a question I mentioned in my intro, one that every single guest on this show has answered, even when I didn't directly ask, who are you? Not your job title, not your nationality, not the city you're based in. Who are you, actually? And what does that have to do with what you create? I've been reviewing the 38 episodes of this show and the different conversations I'm grateful I had, listening to them carefully, looking for the threads that run across very different people in very different disciplines. And the one thing that appears in almost every single transcript, whether we're talking to a street artist from Tunisia, a Lebanese jewelry designer in Dubai, a Palestinian chef from Amman, or a Syrian multimedia artist in Paris, it's this, the question of identity.

Not the answer, the question. Now, I want to be clear about something, because I think it truly matters. There's a popular idea, widely accepted, that the most successful people are the ones who figured out who they are early on and moved forward from there.

That clarity of identity is a prerequisite for achievement, that you need to know yourself before you can build anything lasting. What I found across my review of the archive is almost the exact opposite. The most prolific, original, and generative creative people I have spoken to are not the ones who resolved their identity early.

They're the ones who learned to live inside the question, who made the uncertainty itself productive, who discovered that not having a fixed answer is not a weakness. It's a kind of freedom. Think about what a fixed, identified identity actually does.

It tells you what you are and, by implication, what you are not. It draws borders, and borders in creativity are more often limiting than useful. The people who do the most interesting work tend to be the ones whose identity doesn't fit neatly into one single category, which means they're always reaching across categories, making unexpected connections, bringing things together that don't normally meet.

That's not a disadvantage. That's the engine. 

Bady:

I think it's asked so many times, but I think it will take me a lifetime to answer it as well.

What I realized over the years was that things are really mixed and matched. Even languages, if I remember, I was speaking Arabic with my parents because it was the natural things to do as I grew up, and French outside of homes. I remember in my early years at school, I was mixing and matching Arabic and French with my schoolmates without even thinking about it.

But then it created other challenges because the other schoolmates were not understanding what I was saying. 

Raja:

Bady Dalloul, French serial multimedia artist, trained at the Sorbonne, having lived and worked in Paris, the UAE, and Japan, says that answering the identity question will take a lifetime. What a beautiful realization.

And what strikes me about the way he says it is a complete absence of frustration. He's not resigned to the uncertainty. He's embracing it.

He's energized by it. The question is what keeps him going back to the studio. His work bears this out beautifully.

He creates fictional nations, invents archives that look like historical documents, draws hundreds of tiny scenes on matchboxes, entire worlds in miniature. All of it comes from the same place, a childhood game with his brother, creating imaginary countries in their grandparents' books in Damascus. The game never ended.

It just became serious. And I think that's worth pausing on. The most original creative practices often start as games, as play, as things you do because you didn't plan it, not because you've decided it's the right path.

The identity, the sense of what you're for and what you're doing comes later. It comes from looking back at the game you were already playing. 

Nada Debs shared one of the most remarkable identity stories with us.

She grew up in Japan, the daughter of Levantine parents. She trained in London. She ended up building her practice in Beirut and Dubai.

And for a long time, she treated her Japanese upbringing and her Arab heritage as two separate things she had to hold apart because she couldn't see how they went together. 

Nada:

I thought I had to choose between being an Arab or a Japanese. But actually, I can be both.

And this was like my, oh, my God, it was like, oh, my God, I could actually be both. And it just relieved me. How liberating.

That was it. Like, that was like, you know, the solution to my identity crisis. Yes.

Raja:

I love that she says it relieved her. Not that it solved anything. Not that it resolved the tension.

It relieved her, which is different. The tension is still there. The duality is still real.

But she stopped fighting it and started working with it. And the result is a body of work and a line of furniture that genuinely feel like nothing else. Pieces that carry both the minimalism she absorbed in Japan and the warmth and geometry of Islamic decorative art.

East and east, she calls it. Not east and west. East and east.

What she discovered is something that I think is one of the most useful insights in creative practice. That apparent contradictions are often not contradictions at all. They're just two things you haven't found the right container for yet.

The container for Nada turned out to be a piece of furniture, the mother of pearl technique, stripped back to its purest geometry, placed in ultra contemporary forms, ancient and new, Japanese and Arab, both and both fully. 

Amad Mian built something even more remarkable from his identity question, because he started from a place of genuine discomfort with who he was and turned that discomfort into the founding idea of an entire business. 

Amad:

The reason that we founded Dasdangui, my wife and myself, was because I wasn't aware and I was, to a certain extent, ashamed of calling myself Pakistani and I wanted to change that narrative for myself.

Raja:

The honesty of that is amazing. He's describing the moment before the transformation, the shame that preceded the pride. And what I find so inspiring about his trajectory is that he didn't wait until he felt proud to start building.

He built in order to feel proud. Dasdangui, the fragrance house, the storytelling platform, the artist residency program is the mechanism through which he changed his own relationship to his own identity. There's something very important in that sequence.

He didn't resolve the identity question first and then create it. He created in order to answer the question. The making was the method and what he made, a brand rooted in the jasmine outside his grandmother's house in Pakistan, in the orange blossoms of Damascus his father describes, in the sense of a region the global fragrance industry was appropriating from the outside.

What he made is genuinely beautiful and genuinely original, precisely because it comes from that personal journey. 

Nadeem Kansal's relationship to her identity was catalyzed by a moment in history, September 11th. She watched people she knew become afraid of their own Arabic names, afraid of claiming who they were.

And her response was the opposite, to take the Arabic language and make it the most visible, most celebrated thing she could. 

Nadeem:

Identity was very important and looking around and seeing what's happening in the world and all of that, that's the kind of thing that my voice is towards that kind of, I wouldn't say a mission, but towards a purpose, identity, heritage. It was never about creating a business, it's about a statement, expressing myself.

So whether it's photography or jewellery, where everything translated to jewellery from photography, makes me who I am, makes me want to say what I want to say. Always very important for people to know where they come from, who they are, what what's their purpose in life and what they can, you know, give to their entourage or society or whatever it is, a part of shedding the light on something that's that important. 

Raja:

The brand name Bil'Arabi, which in Arabic means in Arabic, is itself the statement.

And what she built became something that people across the Arab world describe as making them proud, not just proud of the jewellery, proud of themselves, of their language, of the culture that the language carries. That's a remarkable thing for a creative practice to do. And it's only possible because she didn't intellectualise the question of what she was trying to achieve.

She felt it first as a refusal, as an insistence, as something that had to be said. And then she found the form to say it in. 

Ricardo Karam has spent three decades in media, building something similar at a different scale, a body of work that argues through thousands of hours of conversation that the Arab world is more interesting, more complex and more full of amazing people than the prevailing narrative allows.

Ricardo:

I think most of us sold our soul to the devil and we forgot who we are, where we're coming from and what our history is. 

Raja:

He says this not to be pessimistic, but to name a starting point. Because if you know what the problem is, you can work on it.

And his entire life's work, the interviews, the Takreem Foundation, the daily conversations on the Corniche in Beirut with the men who sell skaak and the old people on the bench. All this is a sustained, joyful argument that we haven't forgotten for good. That the memory is still there.

That what we need is not to acquire a new identity, but to return to the richness of what we already have. 

Naz Gabriel, who built Dubai Design Week and has spent years at the intersection of fashion design and creative strategy, puts the identity question in its most liberating frame. 

Naz:

I used to struggle a lot with identity, not because I was ashamed in any way, but I was brought up, I felt very British, at the same time, I felt very Arab.

And then I realized there's also this Italian influence, Greek, Turkish influence from our family. And then, you know what? I decided to pick the best from all of them. Why shouldn't I? Why can't I be all of them? 

Raja:

Why can't I be all of them? I think that question deserves to be taken seriously as a creative position, not just as a personal statement.

The creative person who draws from the widest range of genuine influences is capable of making connections that no one else can make. Naz is British, and Libyan, and Arab, and deeply knowledgeable about global luxury and fashion. That combination doesn't cancel itself out.

It multiplies. Each identity adds a lens. Each lens reveals something that the others don't.

And finally, and I keep coming back to this one, Meshary Al Nassar, the Kuwaiti interior designer, who said something in our conversation that I think is genuinely freeing. Let's listen to it. 

Meshary:

For me, it's because we're all trying to find ourselves, everyone.

And one thing I learned recently that I kept in my mind that really helps me a lot is like, no one knows what they're doing. We're all trying to figure it out. We're all winging it.

We're all humans for the first time. 

Raja:

We are all humans for the first time. No one has answered this exact version of the identity question before this way.

With this particular combination of roots, migrations, languages, contradictions, and creative pressures, the people who graced me with their shared lived experiences and are doing the most interesting work are not the ones who figured it out. They're the ones who stayed curious about figuring it out, who kept the question alive, who made the not knowing into a workspace rather than a waiting room. That's the invitation of this first episode of our recap series.

Your identity question is not a problem to solve before you can start. It's the creative material itself. Start with what you have.

The answers will come from the making. On the next episode of the recap series, The Leap, we're going to talk about what happens when you decide to act on that, when you walk away from what you know and into something completely uncertain. Thank you for tuning in on this first episode of the recap series of Forward Moves.

If you like this episode, download it and share it with your friends. Give us a five stars rating and better yet, subscribe to wherever you watch or listen to your podcast. You can also write to us with feedback or thoughts and we'll make sure we air them on our next episodes.

Until then, keep moving forward.