Jean Hatoum - Author

There are poems we write intentionally. We know what they are about before the first word reaches the page. Then there are the other poems. The ones that seem to arrive from somewhere deeper. You write them. You read them. You put them away. And only much later do you realize: I was writing about myself. I have a few of those. Perhaps more than a few. When I wrote them, I thought I was writing about a person. A feeling. A memory. A fictional voice. Sometimes I thought I was simply trying to make something beautiful. I didn't always recognize the person hiding inside the poem. It took distance. It took time. It took becoming someone slightly different from the person who had written the words. Then I would return to the page and suddenly see myself staring back. That is one of the strange things about writing. The page can know things before we do. We think we are describing someone else, but our own fingerprints are everywhere. In the choice of a word. In the sadness we give a char...

I didn't write only about what hurt. I wrote about what I missed. For a long time, I didn't understand the difference. I thought writing about the past meant being trapped inside it. I thought that if I wanted to move forward, I had to stop looking backward. But memory doesn't work that way. Neither does grief. Neither does love. There are things we miss precisely because they mattered to us. People. Places. Possibilities. Versions of ourselves. Sometimes we miss a life we never even got to live. I wrote about those things because pretending I didn't miss them would have been another kind of dishonesty. There were things I wished had happened differently. Childhoods that should have felt safer. Moments that should have been ordinary. People who should have stayed. Versions of myself that I wonder about sometimes. I think about the person I might have become if I had not spent so much of my life learning how to survive. I don't know who that person would be. Maybe no...

 There are things I have never known how to say out loud. Not because I didn't know what they were. Because saying them aloud would have made them real in a way I wasn't always ready to face. So I wrote them down. That became my language. Before I knew how to call myself a writer, I was simply someone trying to find somewhere for his thoughts to go. The page never interrupted me. It never asked me to explain why I felt the way I did. It never looked at me with confusion when my sentences stopped making sense. It never told me that I was thinking too much. The page simply waited. And sometimes, waiting was exactly what I needed. There are things I could only say on paper because paper did not require me to be brave before I began. I could write while trembling. I could write while angry. I could write while exhausted. I could write things that I wasn't ready to say to another human being. I could admit that I was afraid. That I missed things. That I was angry about things I ...

One of the quietest lines in my book says: "Ruined rooms can still contain music." I wrote that line without realizing how much of my life was already hidden inside it. When people hear the word ruins , they often imagine abandoned buildings. Cracked walls. Broken windows. Places that once held life but have long since been forgotten. Trauma feels like that sometimes. Not because it destroys everything. Because it changes the way you walk through the rooms inside yourself. There are memories I still enter carefully. Conversations I still replay. Doors that, even years later, I still hesitate to open. For a long time, I believed healing meant rebuilding those rooms until they looked untouched. Until no one could tell they had ever been broken. I don't believe that anymore. Life has taught me something gentler. Perhaps healing is not the disappearance of the cracks. Perhaps it is learning that light still knows how to find them. When I was writing I Wrote So I Would Not Fad...

There is something about August that changes the way I listen. The air feels quieter. The light arrives more softly. Even grief seems to slow down enough for us to hear it breathing. For many people, August belongs to folklore . Not because of charts or awards. Because it became a place. A forest people entered carrying versions of themselves they rarely showed the world. Every year, when August returns, so do the memories attached to that album. The people we lost. The versions of ourselves we no longer recognize. The conversations we replay long after everyone else has forgotten them. I think that is why folklore has never felt like an album to me. It feels like remembering. When I first listened to my tears ricochet , I wasn't listening to a story about someone else. I was listening to what grief sounds like after it stops asking for permission. The song understands something that is difficult to explain. Sometimes what haunts us is not only what happened. It is what continues ...

There are two versions of me. The one people met. And the one who learned, very early in life, that survival sometimes means becoming someone else. No child should have to learn how to disappear while remaining visible. Yet that was the lesson I carried for years. I became quiet because speaking felt dangerous. I became observant because noticing every change in a room sometimes meant protecting myself before anyone else realized something was wrong. I learned how to smile when I wanted to cry, how to answer "I'm fine" without believing it, and how to continue moving through ordinary days while carrying extraordinary pain. People often call these strengths. Resilience. Composure. Maturity beyond one's years. I understand why they say those things. From the outside, survival can look admirable. From the inside, it often feels exhausting. There is a difference between living and surviving. Living allows you to imagine tomorrow. Survivin...