REORIENT:

Samir is a hip, young twenty-something with bushy eyebrows and thick-rimmed spectacles who spends his time dabbling in leftist politics, working with typography and film, and soaking in the sonic madness of the political American garage rock group The MC5. Though his mother is Swiss, Samir has never truly felt he belongs in a land of snow-capped mountains, cheese, and escalating fascism, and, come to think of it, he and his family have never had any Swiss friends despite having lived there for so long; their friends have always been from somewhere else. Perhaps it’s the eyebrows that give him away so easily, and betray the suave European appearance he may have wished he possessed. Samir, like countless other Iraqis, is a déraciné, uprooted and displaced by an ominous chain of events in his native Baghdad which left little hope for his family, who decided to seek their futures and fortunes elsewhere.

Go to link