Nadia Wardeh: Writing the In-Between, Listening to Absence

Dr. Nadia Wardeh’s work unfolds in the delicate space between scholarship, memory, displacement, and poetic expression. A university professor, scholar, consultant, author, certified life coach, former Director of the Middle Eastern Studies programme, and founder of the MEST Forum at the American University in Dubai, she brings more than twenty-two years of multidisciplinary and international experience across higher education in Jordan, Canada, and the UAE. Her academic journey includes an MA and PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies from McGill University, a higher diploma in Tourism and Hospitality from Lasalle College in Canada, and a BA in History and Philosophy from the University of Jordan.

Her intellectual and creative path is shaped by many converging worlds: Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, interreligious and intercultural dialogue, gender studies, youth studies, media, cultural studies, philosophy, mysticism, literature, and the lived experience of diaspora. Yet beyond the breadth of her academic and professional work, Nadia Wardeh’s writing reveals another register of presence: intimate, fragmented, contemplative, and deeply attuned to what is often left unsaid.

At Kulturnest, we perceive Nadia’s work as a writing of thresholds. Her free prose and poetry do not move in a straight line; they gather around memory, absence, longing, silence, love, illness, and the invisible layers of belonging. Her texts often feel less like statements than inner landscapes, where personal history, inherited displacement, and spiritual perception meet. Palestine appears not only as a geography of origin, but as an unreachable presence carried within the self. Home, in her writing, is not fixed; it shifts, disappears, returns in dreams, and survives as an inner archive.

What is particularly moving in Nadia’s literary voice is the way she allows fragility to remain open. She does not force memory into closure, nor does she turn loss into explanation. Instead, her writing listens. It listens to images, to silences, to songs, to the body, to the dead, to the places that have been lost and the homes that continue to exist inwardly. In this sense, her work becomes a space where thought and emotion do not compete; they deepen one another.

Her collaborations with visual artists, including texts written in response to painted faces, also reveal a rare sensitivity to the dialogue between image and word. She does not describe what she sees from the outside; she allows the image to speak from within. Her writing becomes a companion presence, opening another layer of meaning without exhausting the mystery of the artwork.

Through this conversation, Kulturnest invites readers to enter Nadia Wardeh’s world of fragments, silences, inherited memories, and unfinished becoming.

Interview

Kulturnest: Can you introduce yourself through your artistic journey rather than your biography? What key moments or shifts have shaped your practice?

Nadia Wardeh: To start with, I would not describe myself as an artist in a formal sense. But art has always been my way of being in the world. I tend to see meaning through different forms of expression: music, melody, painting, dance, and especially writing. For me, these are ways of understanding life, the universe, and people in all their states and emotions.

Since childhood, I found myself drawn to words. I used writing to express feelings, fears, love, and passion. I was also drawn to poetry and narrative forms. One of my earliest memories is reading Don Quixote while I was hospitalised when I was in grade five or six. My mother brought me books in Arabic translation from world literature. In that hospital room, the world of Don Quixote and the windmills opened something in me. It was my first experience of escaping into language and imagination.

Since then, I have always moved between reading poetry and novels and writing my own words. I do not write to publish. I write to be with myself. Writing is the only space where I can fully express what I feel inwardly, in a private notebook that feels like a carefully chosen secret space.

Many key moments shaped me, even before my birth. The displacement of my parents during the Nakba and their forced departure from their towns in Palestine marked something deep in my inner world. These stories were not abstract historical facts. They were lived memories passed down to me, and they shaped my subconscious sense of belonging and loss.

Other moments are tied to continuous forms of loss: the loss of homeland as an inherited narrative that lives in the body. The loss of places that briefly feel like home and then disappear again. The loss of people who were deeply loved, beginning with my father, where writing became a way to search for what could not be expressed otherwise.

Kulturnest: How would you describe your artistic language? What draws you to these forms of expression?

Nadia Wardeh: My language is shaped by many layers of study and lived experience. I come from philosophy and history, and I have undertaken a long academic journey across interdisciplinary fields, including history, philosophy, and Islamic studies, with a strong interest in the mystical path and psychology.

At the heart of this journey is my deep love for the Arabic language itself—the language in which I write and continually rediscover meaning.

I also studied tourism at a younger age in Montreal, where life unfolded into another layer of diaspora, becoming, in time, a different kind of home, pieced together like a mosaic.

Writing becomes the place where all of this converges. It is where philosophical thought, inner experience, memory, and perception of the invisible meet without needing to be separated.

Kulturnest: What themes, questions, or inner tensions are currently driving your work? Are there ideas you find yourself returning to?

Nadia Wardeh: What returns in my writing are states more than themes, states that move into one another without clear separation.

There is a constant sense of in-between, between places, times, and forms of presence that are always touched by absence. Displacement is not a topic in the writing. It is the condition through which everything is seen.

Life and death appear in proximity rather than opposition. They are not separate ideas but overlapping presences that shape perception itself.

Silence is another recurring state. Not absence of sound, but a dense form of presence where meaning is carried without speech.

There is also fracture, where memory does not remain whole but returns in fragments, images, and sensations that do not settle into fixed form.

Loss is present both as rupture and continuity. People, places, and moments continue to live in memory even when they are no longer present in time.

Love also appears in this space, not as a fixed emotion but as something that persists through absence. It is not separate from loss. Sometimes it is the form loss takes when it remains alive inside memory.

Certain images carry these states. Coffee is one of them. It is tied to morning, memory, and presence. In my writing, it often becomes a quiet return to my father, not as narrative but as sensory memory that briefly interrupts absence.

Illness appears as another state where the body becomes both limit and passage, and writing becomes closer to breath than structure.

Underneath all of this is a shifting sense of self that is never fixed but continuously formed and unformed through these movements.

Kulturnest: Can you walk us through your creative process?

Nadia Wardeh: My writing does not follow a structured process. It begins like a pressure that stays until it must be written. It can come from memory, an old song, a word spoken by someone, something in nature, a moment of sadness, loss, longing for what is not there, or a dream. Sometimes it comes from very small things that open unexpectedly into deeper inner spaces.

It can also begin from an image, a face, or a painting that feels silent but full of unspoken presence. I sometimes feel that images are asking to be heard in another way. In a collaboration with the artist Pamela Chrabieh, I wrote short texts in response to painted faces. I was not describing them. I was letting them speak from within. This became an exhibition where image and text created a shared space where each completed the other without explanation.

I do not sit down to write a piece. I sit because something is already moving inside. I find things playing in my soul, and I leave my pen to inscribe them. The beginning is always fragmented: sentences, images, traces, sometimes only rhythm.

What often triggers writing are unresolved states, absence, loss, longing, or something that has not settled internally. I do not force it into form. I stay close to it as it is.

Sometimes what I feel gathers into a word or two, and that is enough. Other times, if I do not stop, the writing continues without end. I move between these states without control.

I do not believe a text is ever fully finished. It only reaches a point where it stops or lets me go. What remains unwritten is always part of it.

Most of my writing stays in private notebooks. When it leaves, it is usually through an invitation from a very small circle that knows my work. It may accompany an image or a painting, or appear in an artistic or literary context. Even then, it never feels like something finished, only something temporarily placed in another space.

The most essential part of the process is staying close to the first moment before control enters, before explanation begins, before form hardens.

Once that is lost, the writing becomes something else.

Kulturnest: How does your context as part of a diaspora impact your work?

Nadia Wardeh: My relationship to place has never been stable. I was born in Kuwait and lived there until I was seven, then moved to Amman. After that came periods in the United States, back to Jordan, then Canada, then the UAE. Now I move between the UAE and Canada, where Canada functions as a home in practical terms.

But home has never been a fixed point.

Palestine exists in my inner world as something both deeply rooted and unreachable. It is not only a place of origin but a presence that cannot be fully arrived at. It remains a forbidden home.

Even when I know return may not happen in this life, the idea of return does not disappear. It shifts inward and continues in writing.

I often dream of a house surrounded by very large trees, so large that it feels as if we have always lived there. But every time I begin to feel settled, I am moved again. Over time, this creates a sense that home is not a location. It is something carried.

We carry home wherever we go. Displacement becomes a state of being rather than an external condition. It is what I describe in my writing as a kind of inner hymn where presence and absence coexist.

This condition creates instability but also awareness. Places become layered. Memory becomes a form of belonging. What is lost does not disappear but transforms into another kind of presence.

Writing becomes one of the few spaces where these fragments can exist together without resolution.

Kulturnest: Looking ahead, what directions are you exploring or questioning in your practice?

Nadia Wardeh: Looking ahead, I do not experience my work as moving toward a fixed direction. It continues to open rather than conclude.

I am increasingly drawn to writing as something that can move beyond the page without losing its intimacy. I am interested in how text can exist beside image, silence, voice, and space. My collaboration with Pamela Chrabieh showed me how writing can accompany painting without explaining it and instead open another layer within it. I feel this remains an ongoing possibility.

At the same time, I am not interested in completion or linear progression. What matters to me is what remains unfinished, what resists closure, what continues in fragments rather than fixed forms.

In my inner world, there is also a much larger narrative that has never taken full shape in writing. It feels like an epic unfolding across generations, filled with characters, movements, and shifting times.

It carries the journey of my ancestors from Palestine to the present moment I speak from. Within it, I see my mother at the centre of many transitions, her early life in Palestine and her passage through multiple layers of diaspora. I also see my father, who passed away while still holding the dream of returning.

This inner archive is so dense that at times it feels impossible to fully write. It is not an absence of language but an excess of it. A kind of writer’s block that comes from too much rather than too little.

So what I am exploring is not direction but openness. A way of keeping writing unstable, moving between silence, image, voice, and page without forcing it into one form.

In that sense, I am not trying to complete a practice. I am trying to remain inside what is still becoming.

And perhaps that is the only place where it stays true.