STORYO: Do you consider yourself a romantic?ĪMAL: What case of 'r' are we talking here? That they gave me that idea of a poet instead of, I don't know, a slightly more British romantic, emo, sort of situation. And I was very excited by this and I feel really grateful for that. To be a poet was to speak for those who couldn't speak, and use your power for love and justice and stuff like that. When my parents saw the poem they were very quick to tell me that I came from a long lineage of poets and my grandfather had been a poet and this was an important calling. STORYO: I'm imagining you at 7 speaking this out a window. Art thou ill from the cold and dark of night? Or does your face turn pale, thinking of your plight? But whether you are golden or whether you are pale I think you are beautiful and not as harsh as hail. And so I had decided to take it upon myself to apostrophize the moon in this way so.ĪMAL: *reciting poem from memory* Oh moon, Oh moon, why art thou so pale? The sun is large and gold and you are as white as hail. STORYO: Do you remember what the poem was about?ĪMAL: It was about the moon and I had just recently read a sort of child's version of Midsummer Night's Dream but they had preserved all of the thees and the thou's in it. ![]() So many of the things in which I kind of root and center my identity happened there. And I methodically-quite methodically, for a six-and-a-half or seven-year-old by this point-made a list and took every other Encyclopedia Britannica that had those listings in it and just read the entries for each one of the things in mythology and acquired a not too terrible education at a tender age about mythology from that and learned in a very interesting kind of piecemeal way. ![]() And I was reading down and it was full of stories and at the end of the entry for mythology there was an alphabetical list of all the heroes, gods, all sorts of stuff. I liked anything with pages and I happened upon the entry for mythology, and it seemed really cool. And I was just flipping through it because I liked books. And down the hall from us there was this woman named Madame Beiruti, and she had a collection of Encyclopedia Britannica. I discovered how to do research in Lebanon, too, because we lived in an apartment building in Ras Beirut. I thought this up until the new reboot with Chris Eccleston where I genuinely said to actual other humans, “Oh I remember these books from my childhood I guess they're making them into a TV show.” And, I was very gently and lovingly corrected. I think they were the Terrance Dick's novels and one of them was Planet of the Daleks. I discovered Doctor Who, via novelisations, that my dad's cousin Michael had. That time in my life is actually where I discovered a lot of my current fandom's in as much as I read The Hobbit when I was in Lebanon, and fell in love with Tolkien there. ![]() And when I was six-six-and-a-half (because these distinctions matter when you're six)-when I was six-and-a-half, we moved to Lebanon for two years.Īnd I really feel like a big part of my childhood was there. ![]() AMAL EL-MOHTAR: Well, so I was born in Canada and my family is from Lebanon.
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