Harvard Authors Profile: Youmna M. Chamieh ’21-’22 on How to Look at the World Sideways

“For there had been changes, changes, changes,” wrote Youmna M. Chamieh ’21-’22 in her short story “Transposition.” “But what I did not yet understand was that there had never been a change in the singular form, never the change, around which all future analyses would orbit, predictable as moons and yet believing themselves, each time, to be the sun.”

It is a theme that resonates throughout all of Chamieh’s work — a search for a truth in the face of incomprehensibility, finding a way to explicate the inexplicable. To do so, the editor-in-chief of Guernica — a magazine committed to world literature and platforming marginalized voices — wields language and words not as a sword, but as a looking glass, searching reflections for meaning, observing what refracts and condensing what she observes into stories.

For Chamieh, that fascination with language began with images. The writer, who grew up in Paris, was raised alongside France’s “Ninth Art” — comic books.

“When you’re reading comic books, because the spine is very fragile, you tend not to open them all the way out,” said Chamieh in an interview with The Crimson. “Even to this day, I read my books like this. I’m always being told, ‘Why are you reading your book as if you’re afraid someone’s gonna see you?’”

The most important lessons from those comic books were not the stories themselves, but rather how humor could help one stumble upon the truth. Chamieh’s parents, both of whom had left Lebanon for France in 1989, had told her stories of the violence that they fled from, stories which were reflected in the images that Chamieh watched on the news in their Parisian apartment.

“Even when we talked about such serious subjects as the war, you know, [my parents] would always answer in a sideways manner,” said Chamieh. “They would answer via a joke. They would say, ‘Well, if you understood anything about Lebanon, then it wasn’t explained to you properly.’ And that has always been a way of grappling with history, emotions, concepts.”

That comfortability with ambiguity bleeds into Chamieh’s writing; her empathy as she searches for reconciliation between diverging narratives is palpable. “I oscillated between two portraits of my home country,” Chamieh wrote of her visit to Baalbek in a story for Harper’s Magazine. “My mother’s jaundiced view of Lebanon as a serial abuser we should disentangle ourselves from, and my father’s dutifully optimistic one, which saw it as a sickly child in need of our help.” Somewhere between those two viewpoints, maybe, was some version of the truth.

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At Harvard, Chamieh had studied Government and English, taking creative writing classes with professors like Claire Messud and Jamaica Kincaid. The process of sharing her work for workshopping was often daunting.

“It is so jarring, the idea of just showing up to a class with 12 strangers and having them read a piece of writing,” said Chamieh. “To me, writing has always been something that is so deeply personal, because I think the impulse that drives people to write is often the sense that something needs to stand in the world instead of themselves.”

However, that experience of baring her writing to others taught her to view it as a collaborative process.

“There’s something universal about the experience of wanting to be heard and wanting to be seen,” said Chamieh. “And that kind of a spirit I feel like I’ve tried to carry forward at Guernica, in a sense that we meet the writers where they’re at.”

Prior to Guernica, Chamieh had spent some time exploring other mediums of storytelling, working with Emmy Award-winning teams at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

“I can’t tell you what it looked like, because it was blurry in my vision,” said Chamieh with a laugh. “I was always running.”

But the stint at Colbert reinforced the iteration of set up and punchline. The focus was always about pleasing the audience and delivering the most efficient set possible, no matter the frenzy that happened backstage to make it so.

“The goal [at The Late Show] is to do the thing that's already being done as well as possible, versus in those other contexts, to kind of reinvent the wheel altogether,” said Chamieh.

She followed this up with a stint at Stay Gold Features, working on the horror film “Nanny” and romantic comedy “Goodrich” — “Nanny” would go on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, becoming the first horror film to achieve this distinction. The exposure to the TV and film industries, mediums somewhat removed from the written word that Chamieh was more familiar with, provided her with more perspectives of art-making as she adapted genres to become her own.

“In each of those cases, I really tried to bring to the TV and film world a very readerly, writerly and more editorial sensibility that I feel is my sort of natural baseline, from which I then deviate,” said Chamieh.

One of her favourite writers is Kahlil Gibran, and in particular the prose poetry fables that comprised Gibran’s magnum opus. She quotes a line from “On Good and Evil,” a poem in the collection. In it, Gibran suggests that good is inherent in every individual — “For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?” It is an extraordinarily generous reading of human nature, animated by a deep belief in humanity.

“[That quote] has been the throughline to all my writing and editing projects,” said Chamieh. Nowhere is this more evident than in her profile of Samer Iskandar, her lifelong friend and mentor and an accomplished writer in his own right. Iskandar had asked her to document his journey as he battled brain cancer.

“It was the biggest responsibility, and a huge part of the feeling that I had throughout was the worry that I wouldn't be able to do it right,” said Chamieh. In many ways, the project required a departure from the literary instincts that she had spent years honing. How do you craft a narrative when a story has not finished unfolding? How do you finish a piece when its end is inevitably shaping up to be a devastating one?

For Chamieh, it was again a process of distilling the truth. Iskandar had directed her to Susan Sontag’s writings on illness, and Chamieh was wary of making a contrived metaphor of illness.

“In a lot of movies, and in narratives [of illness] we’re accustomed to, there’s somehow a happy ending,” said Chamieh. “And we knew this wouldn’t be our story from the beginning.” Even as she wrote, her and Iskandar were unsure if they were going anywhere, or if what they were recording could ever be turned into a publishable piece.

The essay came out in February last year, published in the Financial Times Magazine. Iskandar passed away six months later.

“I had never written a story whose shape I already knew I hated,” Chamieh writes in the essay’s opening section. “How might Samer and I open out the time he had left, move from the narrow meaning-making channel of the patient’s case history to that more nebulous material, the beautiful shapeless expanse of a life?”

The essay ends not with Iskandar, but with Chamieh’s description of a scene in Agnès Varda’s 1962 film “Cléo from 5 to 7”: “‘It seems to me that I am no longer afraid,’ Cléo tells Antoine after the bells strike six-thirty. We are a half-hour away from the film title’s promised seven, but there it is, the end.”

It is an ending fitting for a piece that resists a clean narrative, side-stepping a foregone conclusion and contenting itself instead with ambiguity. It also happens to be the state that Chamieh operates in as a baseline. To steep in complicated truths; to look things sideways, with astonishing compassion. Maybe that’s what the world needs now.

—Staff writer Angelina X. Ng can be reached at angelina.ng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @angelinaxng.