From a young age, names preoccupied me. As a child I didn’t like my name and I would often daydream about changing it. Na’ama (in Hebrew, נעמה) was too heavy for me.

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‘Oh, you’re going to have an advantage over me,’ the white woman says with a wide smile. We’re the first two to arrive for Arabic 101. I make a sound and the sound dies between us. I would describe it but I don’t know what it was, having never made it before nor since. If I were to imagine what it was most like sonically, I would say shame. I am the 29-year-old son of Lebanese and Turkish migrants, my father and mother were born in Turkey and Lebanon respectively, so they learned English in addition to their own languages, […]

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‘Shut up and drive’—Rihanna ‘Who’s gonna drive you home tonight?’—The Cars ‘Let’s drive’—Shannon Noll ‘Little red corvette’—Prince ‘White mustang’—Lana Del Rey ‘Get out of my dreams, get into my car’—Billy Ocean Recently my partner Jackie and I road-tripped around Aotearoa. But really I drove the whole way round the North Island, 2000 kilometres with stiff legs and neck, eating ginger kisses with one hand on the wheel, traversing roads choked by excessive works. We were waiting to cross a one-way bridge and I let the hatchback on the other side go first. I heard a crisp knock on my window—was […]

The image of Australia is of a man in an open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying an ice cream. His kiddy is beside him. —Donald Horne. Have we done with the man in the open-necked shirt solemnly enjoying his ice cream? It would appear not. For a long time he was there in the flesh, as real as you or me.