Home is Not a Place

Every single person featured across three seasons of Forward_Moves lives between two places. Some between two countries. Some between a homeland they can access and one they cannot. Some between the person they were expected to be and the person they turned out to be.

What Raja expected to find in the archive was pain around that in-between state: a longing for resolution, for belonging to one place or another. 

What he found instead was almost exactly the opposite. The between is not where the problem lives. It's where the work comes from.

This episode explores what happens when you stop fighting the in-between and start creating from it — and what that has produced for five very different people, across five very different disciplines.

Voices in This Episode

Bady Dalloul  —  French-Syrian multimedia artist. Has been unable to visit Syria since 2009. His matchbox drawings — hundreds of tiny scenes, entire narratives compressed into the size of your palm — carry the weight of a homeland transformed into imagination.

 Salma Mousfi  —  Lebanese singer and creator of Salma Nova. Lives between Paris and Beirut, belonging fully to both. Her album Salma Nova was written from the frustration of wanting to return to Lebanon during the 2006 war — and being unable to.

 Sumayya Dabbagh  —  Saudi architect. Moved from Saudi Arabia to England at 13 — a jolt that became the most important question of her life. Her buildings, including the Gargash Mosque in Dubai, give others the sense of belonging she had to work hard to find for herself.

 Ahmad Halawa  —  Palestinian chef and founder of supper clubs in Dubai. Has never been to Palestine, yet carries it in every dish. He makes maqlubeh from memory — reconstructed by feel in a Cairo kitchen when he was a student abroad.

 Yousef Anastas  —  Co-founder of Radio Alhara, the Palestinian online radio station founded during COVID lockdown. Named Alhara — the neighborhood — because the neighborhood is not a location. It is a feeling of gathering.

 Ricardo Karam  —  Lebanese broadcaster and founder of TAKREEM. Runs every morning on the Beirut Corniche, greeting the same faces, buying kaak from the same vendor. Chooses to remain in a city that gives him every reason to leave.

 Key Moments

 00:00:35  Raja introduces the episode's central discovery: that the in-between is not the problem — it's the studio.

00:02:52  Bady Dalloul on what happens when you can't go home: grief, and then imagination. The phase that comes after loss.

00:04:47  Salma Mousfi on landing in both Paris and Beirut and feeling, both times, that she is home. 'I'm lucky.'

00:06:52  Sumayya Dabbagh on the jolt of moving to England at 13: 'It really jolted me into thinking — who am I?'

00:08:26  Ahmad Halawa on carrying a homeland he has never seen: 'Palestine was engraved in us since we were kids.'

00:10:10  Yousef Anastas on Radio Alhara: the whole world as part of the same neighborhood.

00:12:03  Ricardo Karam on why he stays in Beirut: the same faces every morning, the same kaak vendor, the same beautiful smiles.

00:13:39  Raja's closing thought: 'Home is not a place. Home is the clarity about who you are that makes every place a little bit possible.'