We were lucky to catch up with Lydia Yousief recently and have shared our conversation below.

Lydia , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

I think that there is a stereotype about Arab parents and their strictness and their “my child is going to be a doctor.” While I did feel pressure to be excellent not only from my parents, but also from their own histories of excellence (i.e. my dad coming to the US alone at the age of 23 after working factory jobs in Egypt or my mother leaving her discriminatory government job in Egypt to work as a nanny in the US), I never felt that if I failed, there would be less love. I never felt that if I didn’t fulfill their own dreams of where I should be, that there would be distance or erupting silence between us. I also knew that despite their own difficult relationships with their own parents, my parents were not going to continue that cycle. So, for me, what my parents did right was that they let me grow, and they let me explore, while also communicating what they felt and what they expected. They came out to my writers’ nights to hear me recite my short stories. They read my short stories in English, their second language. They told people about my art with pride, even though I had other accomplishments. Knowing that your parents have your back is something no one can rob you of, and it changes you as a person. I have seen others who don’t have that love shrivel up and not pursue their talents lest they lose a (false) love. I’m grateful for never having to crawl, become small, and stay in a corner.

Lydia , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I love writing. I’m no poet, nor a novelist, but I love the form and art of the short story—what it can reveal in just a few words without a long plot. I love focusing on character and motive as opposed to a long-winded plot with multiple worlds or years between dramas. Nevertheless, in college, I started working on a novel based on three Egyptian characters and their interactions with each other through time and space, examining migration, trauma, and colonialism. While this novel remains unfinished, but something I hope to publish one day, I have taken in my older years to write the story of my family and ancestry. I share those stories because, as second generation, there’s a lot of anti-first generation vibes—for multiple reasons. Whether it’s because second generation blame the first generation for migrating in the first place to a God-forsaken country like the US, or they resent the first generation for making them grow up early (when it was really white supremacists who made us as five year olds translators in a doctor’s office), or because of that internalized racism against our own culture, there is so much tension and lack of appreciation (i.e. a power dynamic). I want to shift that through the writing of my ancestry, which I share on my instagram publicly with folks to learn which questions they should ask, how they should listen, how to record and process. I hope to teach classes on this one day when my schedule is free.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think the mission of art is connection. I think in Western culture art has been bastardized to be a gaze—think of Orientalist paintings. Western culture loves to see and enforce hierarchies and power structures, and they do this even with art. When one views the nature of art as just spectacle, a lot of issues happen. First, the focus is being “original” instead of in conversation. It blows my mind when I read Arabic poetry from the 6th century and listen to Oum Kalthoum, and they both are personifying the night, which is typical in Arabic poetry, but we don’t see that as boring. We view it as respect and in conversation with other elder-artists from generation to generation. This insatiable drive for originality in the West actually crushes diversity and creativity, and that’s why you see Western museums with our art—that is, the art of the colonized peoples. The search for the original merely is a theft instead of a promotion of creativity. The second issue with viewing art as spectacle is the very creations of museums. I once heard a story of Egyptian farmers using a pot from the BCE era to crush fruits into a jam; when a British person saw this, he said it was unbelievable that Egyptians in the 20th century are using something 3,000 years old to crush fruits, and he took it from them to put it in a museum. Art is the air we breathe; it is a symbol of the everyday for us, but when it is a spectacle in the white world, art is not everyday; art is a luxury. This brings us to the third issue with Western cultural practices and values of art: the theft of art itself from the working class, and the classist classification of art as something for the rich. So my return to making art about connection is so important to me. I write stories that are meant to bring you in and also share with my elders their writing practices and stories; I am not singular nor special. I am a part of the tapestry.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Several books have impacted my philosophy. I am an anti-capitalist, so books like Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde on the intersections of race, gender, and class, and Feminism and Class by Angela Davis have shaped me. James Baldwin, for sure, is one of my biggest influencers when it comes to writing in the memoir style while also commenting on society. I strongly recommend No Name on the Street and I am Not Your Negro (film). He elevates art to connection as well. I strongly appreciate the working class writings of Naguib Mahfouz in Egypt and the great Khalil Gibran in the US. One of my favorite books is The Prophet and the social commentary it entails. There are just so many books, but in essence, I am driven by connection to my community, not by money for my art. Not everything has to be capitalized.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @lydiayousief
• Twitter: @yousiefly