If I had stopped to think about it, I might have been too embarrassed or outraged, given the often-radical artsy queer communal collectives and thinkers I circulate in, with and amongst, to advocate for any form of “self” portrait making or taking.

Who, me? What “me”? I might have asked.

Instead, the first thing I did when asked to contribute a shelf portrait was ask my real-life sisters to contribute theirs. And, thus, I solved my own problem from the outset before I even realized I was doing so.

The subject of my email solicitation was:

My shelf portrait is comprised of you?

and then I went on to articulate my hopefully experimental feminist multidynamic idea of constructing a psychic, analytic, and organizational method of defining myself by conversations and solidarities in book sharing. Just like my literary icons and cultural theorists and brainy activists would and do.

My sister, Erin Perry, Artist and Educator at the International School of Aruba, sent her photo which here includes a poetry book, Ocean Vuong’s Time is a Mother, (which I’d recently sent her—cheeky full circle sharing!) and The Anatomical Venus, both on her night stand reading canon.

Photo by Erin Perry.

My sister, Maya Moumne, Editor-in-chief of Al Hayya magazine and Creative Director and Co-founder of the Beirut design agency Studio Safar, sent her photo with the line: Been using this dictionary extensively while working on an Arabic alphabet poster for Journal Safar’s 8th issue!

Photo by Maya Moumne.

So, my self-shelves are curated by my connections, the recommendations that have been given to me by family members, colleagues, students, strangers in hospital waiting rooms, on planes, other writers. And I don’t think that’s unique to me. I’m sure your shelves, dear reader (because you must be one if you’re here!), have come about largely in the same ways.

I knew I could tell you about the collections and their (lack of) organization. The connections of collections for my personal “organization” of research-style rabbit-holing and that I could probably make you think I’m occasionally smart or clever enough to seem well-read or funny enough not to care whether I’m really conscious and conscientious…

But that’s not me right now.

There’s no nutshell me. I hope. Socially politically ideologically spiritually or otherwise.

I knew I could choose to be evasive: I could tell you about the curios on my shelves instead. The CBD arousal oil by the bedside next to sex tips. The recipe books collected from across the globe or my kids’ books or special art monographs or rare editions that I’ve been gifted (never purchased!) or my inherited texts and tomes.

But you are—maybe—like me. And I thought I’d share how nice that feels.

Maybe you, like me, know that the first thing we, as readers do when we enter other peoples’ homes is to scan the shelves to find ourselves in them.

So, here, I scan me to find my others in me.

I do this a lot in my work, too. We are citational beings, us writer people. I have been fairly and unfairly criticized for my oversights and over citation equally but I like to name my research partners even if it sounds like I’m name-dropping. They matter to me more than well “me” matters to me.

So, I could tell you who is on my shelves and why but you’d have to have a bottle of wine and a lot time to share with me to talk about Singh or Gumbs or Lispector or Ahmed or Adnan. I could focus on just “The Research”—like just the very current research happening right now. Or the heart aches. The frayed and dog-eared babies. My homes. The beauty and the bloodshed, as Nan Goldin would title it from her processes of discovering through her own archives in her recent documentary of the same name. I could tell you about the nooks and the missing books. The things stolen from storage units or set on fire. The friends. The enemies. The books I worry about. The books I’m ashamed of for their implications. Whose company exactly do I keep? Eek!

My shelf-portrait is as many as the conversations I have in a day.

Which are many.

Every day.

It’s my line of work and my mode of being.

With friends, with students.

These conversations shape me so wholly that I am a collaboration.

My shelf-portrait is only one thing: growing. Not a collage, not an archive, not a curation, not an adventure and certainly never a sojourn but also all those things.

You co-author me.

So, thanks, actually, for asking me for this. And thanks for the opportunity to share my shelves without having to reveal too much of my “self”—because she isn’t any. Just the multi-verses of a versifier. One who can now recommend you a good Arabic dictionary for designing an Alphabet and an 18th Century Anatomy teaching tool with some erotic reclining figures in life-size wax simulacra.

You know you’ll need both eventually. Just give your “self” a chance.