Ajaltoun, Lebanon – Thursday June 25, 2026
Since 2024, I have been living in Saint-Denis, the Parisian suburb most people cringe at when mentioned by me. It has a bad reputation: all those “filthy poor foreign workers” supposedly coming to invade France and take advantage of the system— not that they were the largest and cheapest workforce sustaining the country’s ‘greatness’— typically found housing in the biggest Cité of the 93.
As a dirty Arab artist with a beautiful dimpled smile, a white-passing face, and this exotic accent people place as somewhere from Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland, rarely in Lebanon unless they have Lebanese friends, following the lead of the gentrifiers who enjoyed living in a multicultural, working-class neighborhood so close to central Paris by metro, I found an incredible housing opportunity there. A huge 94-square-meter Haussmanian shared apartment on the fourth floor with high ceilings and ornate plaster moldings, marbled fireplaces, large windows opening onto a vast horizon, and beautiful parquet floors that creaked in winter. The owner had renovated it before moving in herself; which explained the care that had gone into it. She had completely reconfigured the space, creating an enormous bathroom with a vanity mirror and wallpaper reminiscent of de Gournay, and a shower spacious enough for half a dozen asses.
My room was 30 square meters; it had once been a salon converted into a bedroom. I also used it as a studio. Double French wooden doors. An old poêle en fonte repurposed as a mausoleum, with a Virgin Mary at its center, dried flowers in feminine vases, a bleu pétrole sofa, my desk, a double bed with chocolate-colored cotton-silk sheets matching the bleu-gris walls. A Chinese silk robe with floral motifs hung from the wardrobe that divided the room from the studio space. Next to the bed, a Kurdish rug in matching shades of orange and bluish tones, and those black satin feather-trimmed pumps I had bought at the market in an attempt to finally live out a childhood pin-up fantasy.
Since 2019 or 2020, though, my pile à lire has grown larger and larger, turning my French bookshelf into a mix of books I’ve read, books I’ve made, and books I dream of reading one day, yet am perfectly content to keep by my side in the meantime.
I would wake up facing a sky that gradually changed color, always tinged with pink, with a quality of light that remained even in winter, when central Paris was gray.
Whenever I think about that room, I can’t help but think about the erotic charge it carried. I don’t know whether it was the room or me—which one the chicken and which one the egg—that encouraged the other to eroticize the space, and oneself within that space.
I will come back to the stories I lived at 7 rue du Jambon, which I later baptized rue de la Cochonne, but for my first piece in Al Rawiya’s Diary of a Naughty Arab Woman column, I’d rather begin with a stay in Lebanon during wartime.
Back to February 2026.
I had just returned from Saint-Denis with a suitcase full of artwork and dreams. I had a group exhibition at Janine Rubeiz in which I presented my first large-scale installation exploring the entanglement of fear, love, and desire.
I was happy to unfold, across three meters of wall space, a narrative and body of work exploring the questions that had, coincidentally, haunted me since moving to Saint-Denis. Due to the war, the exhibition got postponed, creating a lot of sadness and frustration.
Back to Ajaltoun, at my parents’ house. The doors to our bedrooms are separated by a corridor barely a meter wide. I never thought much about that as a child, when we first moved to our current home in Lebanon, and I was afraid at night. I chose the room closest to my parents so I would have the shortest distance to run if someone ever tried to break into the house or if my recurring nightmares came back.
I should have thought about it back in 2000, before I had even turned seven, that one day I would be what I then considered old: thirty-two.
At thirty-two, I would be an artist. I didn’t think I would still be unable to afford a homebase of my own in Lebanon—a secondary residence, with a huge atelier, a fully equipped kitchen to host friends around a heavy wooden table, a garden, and a pool—still unmarried, still childless. At thirty-two, I would return to Lebanon and sleep in my parents’ house, in my teenage bedroom. At thirty-two, I would need a little more space. A little more privacy. Not that I didn’t fight back then to be able to use the key and lock myself in my room for some privacy.
Another decision governed by fear that I would have preferred to avoid. Anyway, I’m not here to rewrite the past. I would’ve dismantled the imperialist country project before its implantation down South; might as well…
I know that at my parents’ house, that proximity tends to drain my libido. I often imagine most of us, now adults living abroad, returning to our teenage bedrooms. Sometimes too big for our beds. Too close to our parents. Too close to who we were before leaving, and to who we might have become had we stayed.
All these confusions that sometimes fuel our desires and sometimes extinguish them, making our libidos—perfectly healthy in our adopted homes—suddenly fragile.
My room still has a beautiful wooden desk that I had sacrilegiously decorated with permanent markers, nail polish, and a box cutter. I carved my friends’ nicknames, random words, and cool expressions I don’t get anymore, and the lyrics of love songs by the rock bands whose words would later make their way into our MSN statuses, sending subliminal messages to the people we had crushes on.
Those messages are still there, etched into the wood. Sometimes it hurts to read them. They remind me of how vulnerable and naïve I was as a tween.
The room used to be covered in posters, all collected from Star Club magazines, but I took them all down. When I finished high school, I repainted the walls, drew plans for a bigger, more adult bed with built-in drawers, and painted part of the room chlorophyll green, replacing the pale, morose yellow my parents had chosen years earlier.
I am, however, still very proud of my bibliothèque—and my wardrobe, which still contains a few gems. At least I had the peace of mind, growing up during those years of geopolitical faux-calme, to actually read the books I owned. I devoured ninety percent of them.
How did we do it as teenagers, discovering ourselves in such close proximity to our families? What a vanished carelessness.
Whenever I try to reclaim it, something I didn’t anticipate happens. Last trip it was the war, and this time it’s the cleaning man finding my sex toy tangled in the sheets because I forgot to put it away.
It’s strange to tell yourself: I want to remain a desiring being, without being affected by context.
I find the fight for desire one of the greatest forms of resistance. It’s a way to say to the oppressors, you won’t win over my body.
While fighting to keep the flame lit, trying to go out, on dates, when people’s priorities are shaken by survival mode is hard.
It’s strange to go out and feel that everything is either too heavy or too libidinous. Extremes creating discomfort. Making it even stranger to go out and remember that there was a time when we met each other so easily in the same bars we found refuge in, flirted in cars, in public spaces, or in the bedrooms of those lucky enough to have independence—or simply a private space of their own.
I think about my friend G., a Syrian writer whom I met in Bordeaux in 2019. During the early days of the uprising in Halab, he wrote a text about a man desperately looking for a prostitute. The city echoed with revolutionary chants, the threat of the repressive state was beginning to make itself felt, and yet this man was determined to satisfy his desire.
Throughout his search, people call him crazy. Those he encounters struggle to understand him, but he persists.
The symbolism of that text, which I was fortunate enough to read before it disappeared forever, has stayed with me. Isn’t desire a refusal of death? Why, then, is it so often mistaken for madness?
Noémie Naoumi
Noemie Honein (b. 1993, Lebanon) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer based in France. She holds a M.A. in Illustration and Comics from ALBA (2017). Her work explores the intimate as a field of political, societal, and personal stakes, developing the notion of transcatheticism as a process toward a Universal Intimate rather than an identity-based one. Her first graphic novel "De l’importance du poil de nez" was published in 2020 by Éditions Sarbacane. The project received grants and residencies from the Institut Français in partnership with La Cité Internationale de la BD d’Angoulême and the Festival BD de Colomiers. It was shortlisted for comics prizes in France and was a finalist for the Mahmoud Kahil Award.
Working primarily on paper, her practice brings together color, free drawing, improvisation, collage, assemblage, and narrative construction as interconnected processes. Her work has been exhibited in Lebanon at CUB Gallery and Beirut Art Residency, as well as in several Institutions across France. She held her first solo exhibition in 2024 at Lynn Modallal Gallery in Beirut. She self-published her first Zine "I want to Desire the Desire"in 2025 in which she talks about the entanglements of Love, Fear and Desire through her personal experiences in multiple dating. She will present it as an installation at Galerie Janine Rubeiz in a collective exhibition postponed to 2027.
