Italian Decisions

"Je veux faire ce que je veux." - Colette

Etel Adnan, Untitled, 2010.

When we moved to Italy in 2023, I noticed that every window had the same shutters. They are called louvered shutters, or persiane in Italian, and what makes them particular is their ability to prop open awning-style even when the panels are closed. When employed, this feature shades the window while still letting in the air of a fully open one. It is almost like having both a standard colonial shutter and a Bahama shutter (yes, I went into a rabbit hole of shutters, and yes, it was fun). When I flagged them to my husband, he offered his very personal theory of Italian material culture. It was a shrewd observation, one he’d arrived at over four years of studying and living in Italy before we moved. (This wasn’t his first trip to the land of never-ending biscuit aisles, aka Italy). He said: “Nothing in Italy is just one thing; everything is one thing and another thing at the same time.” Exhibit A: the persiane. They are blinds but they are also a ventilation system. They allow you to shade the window but they also still offer the benefits of a fully open window. I laughed. It was probably the first thing I learnt about Italy, in Italy, accurate or not. It doesn’t matter; it is 2026 and I haven’t lived in Italy since the summer of 2024.

It is arguably winter in Los Angeles when I realize that most of the decisions I took over the course of my life were, for want of a better way of putting it, Italian. I expected them to serve their core purpose while also serving ten other purposes I had assigned them. It must be exhausting being an italian object — or a decision of mine — having to constantly be told that whatever you were meant to do is not enough.

Beirut, Lebanon | March 2014

I wake up. I make a case to mention waking up because the story has to begin somewhere and I don’t see why it wouldn’t begin there. Before waking up, I slept. And before I slept, I made a promise to myself: go to class. I am enrolled in law school, second academic year, and I haven’t attended a class in twelve days. Attendance is not mandatory, but absence is frowned upon.

Today is the day I keep my promise. I get out of bed. In the short distance that separates my bedroom from the kitchen in the six-bedroom apartment I share with six other young women in Hamra, I question whether I should just go back to bed. I don’t. I scold myself. I manage to get out of bed early enough to attend the 8:00 AM class. There is no going back. I make myself a cup of instant coffee, a 3-in-1 Nescafé of some sort, then I take my self and sit her down on one of the couches in the living room. The girls are excited to see me up that early. I hear one of them say: “So, today is the day?” They seem genuinely happy to see me one step closer to keeping my promise. I nod. I sip my drink, then I go back to my room to get ready for the day. I put on my jeans and I ask myself whether I should just take them off, slip back into my nightgown and go back to sleep. Instead, I button the jeans and pull up the zipper. I put on a long-sleeve t-shirt and a pair of olive-green Converse sneakers. I grab my keys, my phone and my purse. I call the elevator and, in the seconds it takes for it to arrive, I flirt with the idea of going back to the apartment. I flirt with the idea, but nothing happens. I am in the hall of the building. The exposure to direct sunlight almost makes me nauseous. I don’t want my eyes to meet anyone else’s, and I want to go back to the apartment. I climb the hill leading up to the main street, where I stand on the edge of the sidewalk and wait for a taxi to stop. I see a taxi driver pulling up and I hope hope hope he won’t want to drive me to campus. (In Lebanon, multiple passengers share the same cab; you negotiate destination and fare with the driver before getting in.) He agrees. I knew he would. It is a short ride, and I live in a fairly strategic spot. My ride to campus almost never gets denied. In the back seat, I summon myself and muster my courage: “Offer to pay him a lot more and ask him to make a U-turn to drive you back home. Not where he found me on the main street, but back home, all the way to my building.” I don’t say a word. He drops me on the main street, not at the campus entrance. I’ll have to walk for a good five to six minutes before I’m there. I walk. I keep walking until I am in front of the campus, which consists of a residential building turned into a faculty of law. No other subjects are taught in the building, and no other buildings surround this one. I don’t want to go in, but I’ve made it this far. I climb the stairs. I stand in front of the classroom door. It is 8:02. The class has barely started. Students are still allowed to come in. I stand in front of the classroom door and I don’t knock.

I will be back in my apartment by 8:30 AM, tops.

I sit on the edge of my bed. I press my phone against my ear with an unusual force. When the line is picked up, I say: “I’m not doing this anymore. I’m never going back there.” To my surprise, the voice on the other side of the line isn’t surprised. I am asked what I want to do instead. I say the first thing that comes to my mind: French literature.

Los Angeles, CA | April 2026

The first thing that comes to mind? The first? I am behind my desk writing this essay and I want to laugh. French literature, and literature in general, is the thing constantly on my mind. Literature was the only thing that got me through five taxing semesters of law in two different law schools. I once brought two novels with me because I was afraid I would finish the first mid-class, leaving myself with nothing to read for the remaining twenty minutes.

Jounieh, Lebanon | Winter 2011

I am in the passenger seat. My uncle is driving me back from the airport. I am 17, just back from a fully paid trip to Paris — an award ceremony, having won an international poetry prize. My luggage is in the back, and in my carry-on is my poem, published in an anthology. My uncle parks under his apartment in Jounieh, and judging by his unbothered attitude, it seems like this is our final destination. I am confused. Is he not driving me all the way back home in the north? It’s a school night. I ask him, and he answers: “I’ll drive you back home tomorrow, ya khalo. So what if you miss a day, it’s not like they’re teaching you how to bring back the dead.” He is right.

I was, after all, outrageously known for skipping school during my senior year. Of five days, I would show up for two or three. My mother encouraged my behaviour. My uncle must have told her that they were not teaching us how to bring back the dead. Every morning, she would gently open the door to my room and ask me if I was planning on going to school that day. Some days, she would find me awake at 6:30 in the morning, still reading my book. If the answer was no, she would give me a kiss, shut the blinds, and tell me she would squeeze fresh oranges and buy me croissants for breakfast.

Los Angeles, CA | April 2026

My aunt used to tell my mother that this is no way to raise a child. Oh, well…

Ehden, Lebanon | Summer 2011

I run into an acquaintance outside the venue. We are both here for a literary event. She is a couple of years older than me, studying in France. We walk in together. It is the summer before college. Naturally, she asks “So, what are you going to major in?” I say: “Law.” She says that she was almost certain I would major in literature, or the humanities, or theatre. Anything creative, at least.

I open my mouth and words start escaping: “You know, I thought about this a lot and while you are right, in the sense that I have always pictured myself in one faculty, the faculty of humanities and social sciences and you know, I’m equally interested in literature, all three of ‘em, French, English and Arabic, and I could just as well major in sociology or geography or history, I also see myself in the department of psychology, I have an interest in all of those but I also think that all of those would lead exclusively to teaching jobs, in high school, and that’s not what I want to do with my life, you know how I started writing for As-Safir newspaper and I was thinking I want a discipline that would be a strong background for my journalism while also offering me a plethora of choices when it’s time to pick a pathway, I mean I see myself as a lawyer but also working as a legal advisor or perhaps as a legal consultant, I could also go into diplo…” My mouth is still open, shaped like an O, but I’m muted. I turn to my left and she’s not listening anymore. She finds a seat and sits. I do the same. The event starts and I am a little offended, I have to say. I am very persuasive and I have made very strong and tight-knit arguments, each stemming smoothly from the previous and leading naturally to the next. Why isn’t she persuaded?

Balamand, Lebanon | September 2014

I sit at the round table. I take out an A4 notebook from my purse. It is a lay-flat, non-spiral-bound Clairefontaine notebook. Its thick cover features a whimsical illustration of a little girl in an enchanted forest under an indigo-cobalt blue sky with subtle fireflies. The paper was thick and silky, so much so that when my hand lay on it, it wasn’t clear which of us was stroking the other.

I write in my notebook: “Tout texte est fiction”. Holding one of Colette’s novels in his frail trembling hand as though a proof-of-concept, the professor suggests that all writing, even autobiographical or with autobiographical traits, is a reconstruction, a shaping that transforms raw reality into a constructed narrative, which means that all text is, inherently, fictional.

I wonder if he can tell I am staring at him. My eyes must have two hearts in lieu of pupil and cornea. He gives a lecture so eloquently you think he’s reading from a book, except he’s not. He is sitting across the table from us, a cohort of only three young women (myself included) studying French literature at the University of Balamand, a predominantly English speaking university in the north of Lebanon.

The question of the line separating, or feigning to separate, fiction from non-fiction is one that never ceases to fascinate me: what is reality? The question brings me back to my own reality: Is this how I’ll spend the coming two and a half years of my life? Is this what it’s like to do exactly what you want, and not the next best thing? Is this what it’s like to crave a chocolate bar and reach for the chocolate bar, instead of the chalky protein bar next to it? This is all too good to be true.

The class ends. I thank him with a smile, hoping the smile says it all. My mother drives me back home. I am on a cloud. I go to bed but I sleep on a cloud. The next morning, I wake up to an email from the university. Professor Abdel Samad had died.

It is too good to be true. Three days later, I go to the class he was supposed to be giving. A new professor has been assigned, someone we haven’t met yet. The bar is set very high — how good can she really be?

She walks into the same room, carrying a purse and a white plastic bag that she lays on the floor beside her. The plastic bag leans against the leg of her chair. The professor leans toward the plastic bag, taking one book at a time and placing it on the table. Bunnies out of a hat. She introduces herself to the beat of the books hitting the surface of the table, with every new book comes something new about her: she just got back from abroad; she just defended her thesis; this is the very first class she has ever taught; she specializes in intertextuality. I look at her. She is young. When I grow up, I will be like her.

Zgharta/Ehden, Lebanon | Some time in the 1990s

My grandmother looks at me and asks, “leish?” [Why?] I must have done something. Good or bad, I don’t know. I look at her, shrugging my shoulders then dropping them down instantly, and I say “heik” [Just like that].

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Accord mets-vin:

My husband, Elias Kammoun, chooses a song each week to accompany the essay. We both feel that the art of listening to music the way we read or watch a film is becoming a lost art; music is usually the backdrop to something else, never the thing itself. This is an invitation to give it the same courtesy. Play the music, sit down, and just listen for the length of one song.

You can find and follow the playlist on Spotify here.