Book Project

Tagged as: books, depression, friends, memories

Sam­sam scans a mock­up of my book Télé­phone Cassé.

As chil­dren grow­ing up in Beirut, our par­ents kept us indoors. So my father taught me Télé­phone Cassé (lit­er­al­ly “Bro­ken Tele­phone”), a game where one kid whis­pered a secret word to anoth­er, who then whis­pered it to the next kid, and so on until the cir­cle was com­plete. The last kid yelled out the secret word and we all had a laugh. Some­times the word was unchanged, but more often than not, it was absurd­ly different.

Last sum­mer, more than twen­ty years lat­er, I had grown into an adult: bored, tired, and depressed. I locked up my cam­era, my books, and my pen­cils, and took a break. And that’s when the world around me sud­den­ly became inter­est­ing, fas­ci­nat­ing even. I pulled out my phone and began doc­u­ment­ing my life in all its curi­ous lit­tle details. Since it was with me all the time, my phone cap­tured every­thing indis­crim­i­nate­ly. The beau­ti­ful, the ugly, the life-chang­ing, and the banal were all strung togeth­er into a game of Télé­phone Cassé: each pho­to led to the one after it, with very lit­tle con­trol or thought.

The secret word I start­ed with was “depressed.” And yes, in the end it turned out absurd­ly different.

Télé­phone Cassé: A Very Per­son­al Port­fo­lio is pub­lished and dis­trib­uted by Blurb. Please con­tact us for more details.