Rojal

General

The usual stuff, yk?

• Studying the psychological effects of war on children (me)
• Linguistics
• Reading declassified documents for fun
• Collecting quotes that feel like emotional stab wounds
• Facts that hurt
• Sketching while dissociating (multitasking queen)
• Conspiracy Theories 
• Making strangers online feel uncomfortable then seen
• Maps
• The way grief colonizes the body
• Playing "guess the empire" when I see crumbling infrastructure
• Ants, they're better organizers than the governments
• Old ruins

Music

I like stuff that sounds like it's been through something.

• Old revolutionary anthems
• Arabic ballads 
• Violins that sound like guilt
• Electric guitars be crying
• Lyrics that feel like they were written by someone mid-breakdown
• Anything with happy melodies and devastating lyrics
• Chase atlantic and Abdul Halim Hafez (duality is essential)
• A mix of both would be Jadal (give it a listen TRUST ME)
• Random 2000s bangers (Not fucking Katy Perry, I'm talking Haifa Wahbi)

Movies

• Coming-of-age stories where no one comes of age and everything gets worse (relatable content)
• Foreign indie films where the subtitles are 6 seconds behind and the plot is mostly vibes and childhood trauma
• Psychological thrillers where the villain wins or disappears into the woods smiling
• Criminal Minds
• Movies where nothing happens except emotional devastation in beautiful lighting
• Black comedies. Not the genre—literally comedies about death and loss that make me laugh too hard
• Oh, and Studio Ghibli. Yes I cry at Spirited Away. No I will not explain myself. 
• Philosopical Theatres

Television

Pretty chaotic

• Criminal Minds 
• My Little Pony, don't ask
• I like shows where smart people talk fast and no one is okay
• Obsessed with weird animated series that were clearly not made for children but aired at 3 PM anyway
• Binge-watching psychological thrillers 
• Can't stand military propaganda disguised as “healing journeys” for American soldiers (I killed a baby I need therapy I'm so sad) 
• Dislike documentaries because they either lie or feel like homework
• Occasionally watch reality TV to study the downfall of the human psyche
• Watch cooking shows when dissociating—"I can’t feed myself, but I love watching Gordon yell at people who can"

Books

The average person reads 12 books a year. I read that in a month—accidentally.

• I read Arabic and English—sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes just to spite colonizers
• Obsessed with postcolonial theory—Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is basically my bedtime story
• Read Edward Said’s Orientalism when I was 13 and never knew peace again
• Currently rereading Discipline and Punish by Foucault because I like knowing how institutions surgically craft obedience
• I love Palestinian literature. Suheir Hammad, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani—people who write like every word costs blood
• Read all of Sylvia Plath, then moved on to the women no one quotes because they didn’t die pretty
• Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih changed how I see identity, READ IT!!
• Darwish isn’t just a poet, he’s a prophecy. “We suffer from an incurable disease called hope” is tattooed on my soul
• I annotate Arabic poetry like sacred scripture—Qabbani, Adonis, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.
• I own more than one edition of the Qur’an—not for religion, for language. 
• I’ve read Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah twice. He explained colonial cycles centuries before colonizers had a name
• I prefer stories passed down through grandmothers’ mouths—ya know, the kind that never got published because someone thought we weren’t “relatable”
• I study oral storytelling traditions in the Levant, especially pre-1948 Palestinian folktales—because memory is resistance
• I collect banned Palestinian novels and read them in cafes, just to make settlers uncomfortable
• I once read a 900-page book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire just to prove a point during an argument. I won.
• I believe every Arab girl should read Girls of Riyadh and Frankenstein in Baghdad back to back and then start a revolution

And I break my books spines. I love that.

Heroes

• Abu Obeida
• Yahya Al-Sinwar
• Ismael Haniyyah
• My ancestors who held more dignity in their silence than most world leaders in their speeches
• The children of Gaza
• The women who slap the soldiers
• Every martyr they try to reduce to a name. 
• Every fighter they call terrorist because they dared to want THEIR land, air, and water