Lovers and Servants at the Gate of Dawn

Introduction: The Gate as Threshold and Trial

To be a Lebanese ceramic artist in an American MFA program is to stand perpetually at a threshold—what I named “The Gate of Dawn.” This was more than a metaphor; it was my lived condition: a site of arrival and uncertainty, hope and exhaustion, longing and duty.

At this gate, I encountered my archetypes' duality. The Lovers yearned for communion, creative intimacy, and sacred recognition. The Servants shouldered heavy expectations—the demands of tradition, institution, and a culture I was tasked to represent. My journey at SUNY New Paltz, as the only ceramic artist in my cohort and the sole graduate in my discipline between 2021 and 2023, was a passage carved by these opposing forces.

What follows is an account of what it means to create, endure, and seek healing at this liminal site.

Isolation and Self-Reliance: The Servants' Vigil in the Studio

From the beginning, isolation was both my environment and my test. With no peers in ceramics, I became my own teacher, critic, and confidant. The studio, for all its potential, was often a silent, echoing expanse where my own questions, doubts, and triumphs—small in the moment, immense in hindsight—were the only sounds. There were no shared rituals in unloading a kiln, no casual exchanges about clay bodies or glaze chemistry, no communal laughter over failed pots.

This solitude, while at times suffocating, became a crucible for a fierce self-reliance. I learned to trust my instincts, to build an intensely introverted relationship with my material. The Servants' vigil is a lonely one, but it is a space of profound discipline and devotion. I pushed the boundaries of glaze formulation, developing a palette that was unmistakably my own. Yet, the cost of this independence was a persistent sense of exile—a feeling that "The Gate" was always just out of reach, and true belonging, perpetually deferred.

There were days I relished the quiet, the freedom to work without interruption. There were just as many days when the silence felt accusatory, a constant reminder of a missing community and an institutional indifference. This was crystallized in the shock of being labeled a “dispositional failure” by a faculty member—a moment that laid bare the department’s inability to see or support me. My presence demanded constant tending, a stark reminder that the Servant's labor is often invisible, unrecognized, and undervalued.

Visibility and Representation: The Lover’s Burden and Advocacy

Paradoxically, my isolation rendered me hyper-visible. As the sole representative of ceramics, I was both ambassador and advocate, tasked with dignifying the medium in a context that often failed to recognize its worth. Every critique, every exhibition, every faculty interaction became a referendum on the legitimacy of my exploration and, by extension, on the validity of a Lebanese, Middle Eastern voice in a Western art world still obsessed with hegemony and arrogant individualism.

The Lovers' burden is the hope that one’s work might open the Gate for others, that an integrated and coherent presence might carve out space for new forms of recognition. Yet this hope is perpetually tempered by the knowledge that visibility is double-edged. My successes and failures were never just my own; they became symbols, interpreted as evidence for or against the value of my ceramic pursuits and the relevance of non-Western perspectives.

In critiques, I was often asked to “explain” my concepts, to justify my material choices, to translate the metaphysical and ritual dimensions of my work for an audience unfamiliar with its context. I was sometimes praised for my “unique perspective,” but just as often, I was pressured to dilute what made my work distinct. The Lovers at the gate long for sacred recognition; they resist the flattening of difference into mere novelty or tokenism.

There were moments of pride, when a piece resonated deeply with a viewer, when a faculty member acknowledged the technical mastery or conceptual depth. And there were many moments of sheer and mindless exhaustion, when the burden of representation felt ungrateful, when I questioned whether my efforts were truly seen or merely tolerated.

My head was cast in the Sculpture Department at SUNY New Paltz, reflecting my time while pursuing an MFA.

Interdisciplinary Influence: One-Sided Conversations

Without a ceramics cohort, my dialogue partners were artists from other disciplines. This interdisciplinary space was both a gift and a confinement. It forced me to articulate my work beyond the technical lexicon, to engage with broader conceptual frameworks of ritual, myth, and materiality. Yet, it also meant the soul of my practice—its technical nuance and cultural heartbeat—often dissolved in translation for an audience peripheral to its depths and skeptical of a culture they did not know.

Critiques would glide across surfaces, focusing on form and presentation, rarely plumbing the layered meanings or historical echoes embedded in the work. My references to Sufi metaphysics or the politics of clay were met with a polite, bewildered silence. I was speaking, but the words landed in a void—a one-sided conversation where my most deeply held truths became just aesthetic choices.

This absence of a shared language was both freeing and fracturing. It allowed a practice unmoored from the trends of any ceramic “scene,” fiercely my own. Yet, it also meant my work was often deemed too alien, its complexity mistaken for obscurity, its cultural integrity read as defiance. I wrestled with the temptation to simplify, to translate, to make the Arabic calligraphy of my soul more legible to a foreign eye. But each time, I returned to the camp at The Gate of Dawn, where the Lovers whispered of commitment to authenticity, and the Servants stood guard over the duty to tradition.

Motivation and Output: An Overproductive Furnace

In this environment, my survival instinct was to produce. I generated two distinct bodies of work each semester—a strategy born of both inspiration and desperation. It was a way to assert my value through sheer volume, to demonstrate commitment, and to fill the echoing silence left by absent peers. This drive to overproduce was both rational and visceral: more work meant more chances for feedback, more evidence of my seriousness.

From this furnace, the work emerged cleaner, more coherent, more deeply rooted in my own affinities. It was here that the archetypes of my thesis—the Wanderer, Intruder, Beggar, Guard, and Technician—were born from a profound psychological need to befriend the disparate roles I was forced to inhabit. The Lovers and Servants at the Gate are the forces that integrate these fragments; their chapters are testaments that love and discipline are the twin engines of a whole self.

But this overproduction exacted a price. The relentless pace was a slow burn, and the joy of making was often replaced by the anxiety of proving. The Servant’s sense of duty curdled into a burden so heavy it ultimately banned me from my own studio in my second year. I had to learn the difficult art of forgiving myself for not meeting the impossible standards I had set.

Power Struggles, Implicit Bias, and the Mark of Institutional Trauma

The department’s climate was charged with unspoken conflicts, favoritism, and implicit bias. I found myself navigating a labyrinth of faculty alliances that had little to do with my growth. The promised “independence” was, in practice, a necessity born of neglect; the “self-reliance” a defense against hostility.

The most searing example was the moment a professor branded me a “dispositional failure” in a meeting with the vice provost. The phrase was not just a personal insult; it was a diagnosis of the department’s failure to see me—to comprehend the complexities of my identity, my trauma, my cultural difference. It crystallized their inability, or unwillingness, to provide safety.

Smaller cuts came constantly: my work was dismissed as “too foreign,” my technical skill acknowledged, while my conceptual contributions were ignored. These encounters forced me to confront the brutal limits of institutional support. The trauma lingered, a ghost in the studio. I found myself spiraling: Was I truly a failure? Did my Israeli professor see only my Middle Easternness? Did I somehow invite this? Or was I simply invisible to an institution that could not, or would not, see me?

Professional Growth and Post-Traumatic Healing: The Compass of the Heart

Like the Lovers at the Gate, I discovered moments of hope not in spite of the pain, but within it. My healing is not a straight line; it is a spiral. It involves confronting memories now as intimate as my relationship with clay, forgiving myself for perceived failures, and seeking connection beyond the institution’s walls. I drew on the metaphysical traditions of Sufism and Gnosis not as escape, but as methodologies for inquiry—a compass to find my way home.

Healing meant reclaiming the studio as a site of life, not just labor. The clay itself, with its newfound historical and spiritual weight, became a source of strength, a counter-narrative to the devaluation I had endured. My work became a form of correspondence—with my past, with Lebanon, with future viewers who might yet engage its complexity.

I sought lifelines, desperately connecting with networks like "The Color Network" and finding profound solidarity with another artist of color. This relationship was an anchor, a source of affirmation in an environment that was fundamentally unsafe. The scars of institutional trauma remain; now, they are woven into the fabric of my practice, reminders of both vulnerability and the victory of enduring.

The Lovers taught me that hope is not naivete but a committed practice—a way of remaining open to connection against all odds. The Servants taught me that wisdom is earned through endurance, that listening often reveals more than speaking, and that there is power in the stubborn willingness to remain at the threshold, even when the path ahead is shrouded in mist.

Legacy and the Ongoing Conversation: The Gate Remains Ajar

I do not see my MFA as a closed chapter, but as an ongoing conversation—an initiation into the practice of holding tension. The Gate of Dawn was always open, always demanding. It is the place where I negotiate my own becoming, where I make peace with the ghosts of my past to clear a space for the future.

My advice to other artists from the Middle East considering this path: guard your voice fiercely, even when it is not understood. Seek community beyond the institution’s walls. And know that the work of healing upon graduation is as vital as the work of making. After all, you are the most interesting thing about your art.

In the end, my practice is not about resolving tensions, but about holding them. It is an insistence on the legitimacy of an authentic voice, even when it trembles. It is a commitment to my material and my heritage, even when the audience is unprepared to listen.

Epilogue: I Entered the Gate

The Gate of Dawn is a place of arrival and perpetual return, a threshold where exit and entry blur into one. Every time I create, I sit again at its edge. As an artist and technician, love compels me to return to the Servants at the Gate: the watchful witnesses to my own becoming.

My MFA journey was nothing like I had envisioned, and perhaps it could never have been. It was a crucible, a site of wounding and repair. I carry with me the lessons of isolation, the burdens of in/visibility, the sorrow of speaking into silence, and the hard-won wisdom of post-traumatic growth.

I entered the Gate. In the palm of my hand rests a compass, its mirrored surface reflecting all of creation, guiding me. In our physical realm, in my left hand, I hold a sphere glazed in a deep, lustrous indigo, its surface shimmering with violet undertones. It is the finest example of its kind I have ever seen, a testament to what emerges when technical precision meets an unyielding vision.