Editorial Argument #1: The Only SWANA I Know Is Swan(a) Lake

It’s been almost two years of serving as the accidental editor of this publication. Accidental not to self-deprecate or dismiss skillset, but to illustrate context, and industry. I started as a writer out of urgency to express, not in love with words for their own sake. Not for pretty sentences “woven” together, but for angry sentences riddled with typos and, in retrospect, naive opinions and screams at the world.

Anyways, the argument is why I like writing. So being an editor has become a constant argument over what to publish, when, how, and why. How to land an argument, even if that argument is simply that an artist’s work is actually interesting.

In this column, I attempt to distil the editorial process into a series of arguments. Argument one: against the word SWANA.

SWANA stands for the Southwest Asia and North Africa region. The term emerged in the 1990s in North American activist and academic circles through decolonial discourse. It is the politically correct term the West has agreed to use - one that supposedly does not centre them, unlike the now presumably politically incorrect “Middle East,” also largely a Western conversation.

We do not use the word SWANA in this publication.

I’ve had arguments with colleagues and writers who, in good faith, ask what we should call the region: MENA, SWANA, WANA, the Middle East or the Arab world. I never pick SWANA, a term almost nobody in our region actually uses.

Why must we centre the West yet again when referring to territories that are vastly different, when local media in Egypt uses “Middle East” all the time, and people on the streets use “Middle East” all the time? We know what it is. We know its origins are problematic. We also know calling it SWANA will not magically remove the geopolitical implications around how our regions and borders are named, lumped together and identified.

I always think about Swan Lake when that term is used. A compound on Egypt’s outskirts in New Cairo.

And I always want to ask Western/diaspora activists to identify where Swan(a) Lake is on a Cairo map before telling us what to call the “region”. Not because it’s a landmark per se, but simply because the lack of locality and proximity make the SWANA conversation, especially now, feel so distant and irrelevant.

This liberal linguistic battle amounts to nothing. The urge to constantly define, dissect, and reflect on identity does not realistically exist here in the way Western discourse imagines it does. Think pieces on Arab identity are rarely born in the region itself.

It’s awkward to write in English about Egypt, or the wider Arab region. Automatically, the assumption becomes that you’re writing to or from the diaspora. Or at least that has increasingly become the case, and so identifying said “region” becomes the central narrative in every narrative.

Every story about an Arab has become about their Arabness and how they have only just now come to terms with it, reclaimed it, rediscovered it. Any visibility we receive in Western media is framed around this notion of a new creature finally discovering music or film. Saint Levant, Elyanna, Bayou - the voices of the diaspora are treated and headlined as pioneers, when really, they are pioneers of a particular era and context, of a globalised TikTok algorithm unintentionally pushing their music towards Western audiences.

I have almost never asked a local Egyptian artist how their Arabness plays into their work. Or what their roots or fruits symbolise. It is a diasporic narrative. It is completely irrelevant unless identity itself is the story. And it is usually the story when it’s being told to the West. While the Arab experience is inherently diasporic - we come from countries that are bombed, genocided, occupied, and threatened - the diasporic lens cannot be the only lens through which Arabs are discussed. It certainly cannot become the default language we use locally amongst ourselves because, most of the time, it simply does not apply. Even if the language we are using is English.

We don't use the word SWANA in this publication because the people we write about and for do not know what it means. And also because I always forget what it stands for, and I feel like a term used to label our supposed identity should not be so forgettable. We should probably know and remember who we are.