A conversation with Maya Moumne, designer and cofounder, Journal Safar and founder, Al Hayya

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THIS EPISODE IS MADE POSSIBLE BY OUR FRIENDS AT MOUNTAIN GAZETTE.

Most magazines are not political. Unless, that is, you create a bilingual Arabic-English language magazine about design out of Beirut. Or another bilingual magazine about women and gender—also out of Beirut. Then, perhaps, your intentions are a bit less opaque.

Maya Moumne is a Lebanese designer by training who now divides her time between Beirut and Montréal. She is the editor and co-creator of Journal Safar and Al Hayya, two magazines that attempt to capture the breadth and diversity of what we inaccurately—monolithically—call “the Arab World.” Both magazines are also examples of tremendous design and, frankly, bravery.

The subject-matter on display here means the magazines have limited distribution in the very region they cover—which is both ironic and the exact reason the magazines exist. That both have also been noticed and fêted by magazine insiders in the West is perhaps also something worth celebrating.

Maya Moumne is a designer. Of the possibilities for a better and more inclusive future for everyone, everywhere.

[Production note: This conversation was recorded last month prior to the violence in Lebanon. We send our best wishes to the staff of Journal Safar and Al Hayya and hope they are safe. And mostly we wish for a peaceful future for all.]

Arjun Basu: So you’re one of the rare people where we’re going to talk about two magazines, Journal Safar and Al Hayya. But before we talk about them, let’s talk a bit about yourself and about what you did before the magazines and a little bit about your background.

Maya Moumne: I grew up between Beirut and Montreal. The first seven years of my life were spent in Montréal, and then the rest of it was in Beirut, where I’m from, where my family’s from. I studied graphic design at the American University of Beirut, and then I worked at a couple of design agencies. And then I started a furniture business, a mid-century furniture business. And then I decided to start the design studio with three other partners. And two years into the design studio, we decided to launch the Design and Visual Culture Journal.

Arjun Basu: And that would be Journal Safar.

Maya Moumne: Correct, yeah.

Arjun Basu: So why did you guys create it?

Maya Moumne: There was a big—I mean there still is—a big lack of publications that address design and visual culture, whether it’s contemporary or a little more historic. And to begin with, there are very few publications that offer a little bit of critical history on design and visual culture.

Most of the output of magazines were on and around contemporary art or art history, but nothing that really addressed design and visual culture. And though there was a really big production of visual culture in the region, very little of it was written about and documented. And this kind of occurred to us when we discovered a series of publications from the late seventies, I believe, or the early eighties, by an Egyptian designer, an artist, and political activist called Mohiedden al-Labbad who had published a series of magazines, or periodicals let me say, on visual culture in Arabic. He produced, three or four, and then it stopped. But it was called Nazar, which means ‘vision.’

And it was the first time that I had come across a publication like that. I had no idea publications like this existed. And you can tell that the magazine was written and designed by an illustrator and a designer. It was very heavy on graphics, it was really beautifully designed, very thoughtfully put together. The language used and the texts written were incredibly smart.

Arjun Basu: Without generalizing, Arabic society is a very literate society. It reads a lot. And the Arabic language just visually is, I think it’s the most beautiful-looking alphabet and language anywhere. And it’s a very visual culture for many reasons. So why do you think there was a lack of magazines, or anything really, discussing visual culture and design?

Maya Moumne: First of all, I agree it is the most beautiful script. Just to break it down very simply. All of the publications that were presented to us in design school were all based on Swiss books and publications and American and European design books and magazines.

Arjun Basu: I can’t think of a culture that is more diametrically opposed to the Middle East or Arabic design than the Swiss.

Maya Moumne: Absolutely. And Lebanon is a post-colonial country, so a lot of our North Star is definitely going to be there. And there just wasn’t any effort in documenting any of this, any of these publications, any of these writings, any of these illustrations, any of these posters.

I would say in the last decade, there’s been a lot of effort in doing that, and a lot of publications have come out on design and visual culture. There’s even a book that was produced a few years ago called History of Arab Graphic Design, and that’s an academic book, and that’s a lot, that’s saying something really big.

But there just never was any documentation of it. There was no circulation of that kind of content. That wasn’t what people were looking for. And that definitely wasn’t something people were going to use to teach Lebanese people about design or Egyptian people about design or Tunisian people about design. We were going to study Milton Glaser and Paul Rand. That’s for sure.

Arjun Basu: Yeah. So Journal Safar comes into the world and how was it received?

Maya Moumne: The first few issues were received really well by our friends, but didn’t really circulate well around the world. And when we launched issue four, I changed the format. I made it fit more within the conventions of a magazine. And obviously, since I’m a designer, I’m going to experiment a lot with the issues. I’m going to see, If I change this design element, will it impact how it’s received?

And so the second and the third issue were pretty big formats. They were printed on newsprint. They were stapled on the side. The images were all printed on the big pages and then the text pages were printed on colored paper that was half the size of the large text. So you open it and you’d have different lengths of paper inside.

And with issue four, I decided to try out a conventional magazine format: border, masthead, issue number on the title. And then the subject on the cover. And we did that and we launched issue four with Maurizio Cattelan. We went to Milan and shot him. That issue did really well. It was insane how the way that you present content can affect how people consume that material.

And that is essentially why we started publishing a magazine. Designers, graphic designers in general, are given such little agency in cultural production. And we were like, “How about we start a magazine on design and visual culture and have designers write?” And this isn’t novel, but there are lots of examples of magazines in the past that do that, but there were none in the region.

And of course there’s a big scarcity in writing on design and visual culture in the global south to begin with. It was really interesting to see that. It was really interesting to see a design decision that impacted sales and impacted consuming content and all of a sudden made it look like, “Oh, this is a cool magazine and it’s from Beirut!”

And people were all of a sudden interested. And then I think it was with issue five, if I’m not mistaken, or issue four, actually, where we reached out to our distributor in London.

Arjun Basu: They are printed in England, correct?

Maya Moumne: We printed it in Beirut up until we got a distributor in London and then it didn’t make sense with shipping. So we moved our printing to London, but we were printing in Beirut and we reached out to our distributor and our distributor said, “Well send me copies of the magazine.” And we sent copies of the magazine.

And all of our magazines are bilingual. So they open from both sides. We essentially have no back cover. We have two front covers because in Arabic you read from right to left. And the magazine isn’t divided in half, so it’s not like the end of the magazine is Arabic and the beginning is English. It’s all intermixed. It’s designed in a way where you can read it seamlessly from front to back or back to front.

And the distributor was like, “Oh, we can’t. This isn’t going to sell well, we can’t distribute this. Half of this content is in a language that people probably won’t understand and it doesn’t make sense financially for people to buy it like this.”

And we argued against that. We said, “There’s a reason why we publish the magazine in Arabic. We don’t have all of that money to throw on translation and it costs us so much to translate all of this content. And then double the number of pages.”

But there’s a reason why we publish it in Arabic. And, we’re not stupid. We know that, like, 70 percent of our readership, if not more, read the magazine in English only, and don’t even look at the Arabic.

But because this content doesn’t exist in Arabic or at least there is a lack of this material existing in that language, a lot of words also don’t exist in Arabic. There’s a language that is missing in Arabic. And us taking the time to translate this and cultivate that language, or make it a language that is used, is a political decision.

Arjun Basu: And is that language mostly design related or are you talking broader than that?

Maya Moumne: All of the content we publish is related to design and visual culture. A lot of it also has a political angle. And so not all of the text is about design, per se, or visual culture per se. We may have an article about migrant domestic workers. We may have an article about queer culture.

Interior pages from Journal Safar

“Graphic designers in general, are given such little agency in cultural production. And we were like, ‘How about we start a magazine on design and visual culture and have designers write?’”

Arjun Basu: Let’s just step back a bit. We should talk a bit more about Beirut. It’s a vibrant cultural place, but I think a lot of our listeners at least probably have an image of the city based on the news and news is never good. Like what they always tell you in journalism school, “You never write a story about the plane landing. You only write about it when it crashes.” So give us a picture of Beirut and the cultural community there that you and your partners came out of.

Maya Moumne: My problem with questions like this is that the answers to it are often simplified. It’s either, “There’s, there’s been so much chaos in this country—the political situation, the economic situation, war, exile, immigration.” Or it’s, “We have the best food, we have the best nightlife, it’s so vibrant, Beirut is a city that never sleeps, it’s like the center of the Middle East, everyone wants to come to Beirut, there’s so much art and culture production there.”

And I feel like a question like this requires a much, much longer answer going a little bit more into depth of where it is, who surrounds it, and what was going on there before the civil war?

I don’t know how I would answer your question, other than to say that I left Beirut four years ago. I left it so that I can live comfortably every day. But I visit four or five times a year, the studio is still running in Beirut and the magazine is still published out of there and I still have a team there. So I go and I come four or five times a year.

Arjun Basu: I was going to ask about. How it comes together because you are in Montréal and they are in Beirut. And as someone who has worked with teams in different time zones, I know that can be a challenge, but it’s also, they hand off work to you and then you hand it off back to them. How does that work for you guys?

Maya Moumne: It’s almost like we operate 24 hours. It’s cool, actually. The first issue we published after I moved here and set up a studio here. It was interesting because the Montréal studio would work all day and then hand over the files to the Beirut studio.

They’d be waking up like a few hours after we shut down and they’ll spend all day working on it and they’ll hand over the files and we’ll continue working on it and we just put a magazine together in two weeks. The production of the magazine in two weeks.

Arjun Basu: And it seems to be working. For those who haven’t seen it—and you can see some of the images on our website—it’s gorgeous. It really is. It’s a gorgeous publication. Let’s talk about Al Hayya a little bit. Tell people what that’s about and your role in that.

Maya Moumne: So my journey with Al Hayya came from my background in graphic design and, my background with Safar. When we started publishing the magazine, Safar, I’m going to pronounce it in Arabic. I’m going to say Safar.

Arjun Basu: Great. I should pronounce it the same way.

Maya Moumne: That’s totally cool. Sometimes I just catch onto the way that people pronounce it and I start calling it Safar, but it’s Safar. When we got to issue five of Safar, it started doing really well. Safar is doing pretty well. It’s definitely got a niche audience. It’s not doing as well as somebody who’s working on a full time magazine would. We don’t do this full time.

We publish one issue a year. We still follow the self-publishing model. We don’t really think about the business aspect of it very much. It’s really a project by the design studio. But it’s doing pretty well in cultivating a niche audience and people ask for it a lot and it circulates well. And when we got to that point where I realized. “Wow this publication we put together is like getting places. It’s like reaching people. People can hear us. People can read us.” It was a really incredible feeling.

And at that time, I was running the design studio with my business partner, who’s a man. And there was just a lot about my experience with that, that had to do with a lot of frustration that had to do with myself being a woman.

And here we were operating from a city like Beirut, where, sometimes you’ve just got to shut up. You’ve just got to shut up and take it. And then I realized that if I can publish a magazine on design and visual culture and I have a background in graphic design, and I’m a practicing graphic designer, then I can probably publish anything that I want to publish.

I can put together the team that I want, and I can put out anything that I want. And that’s where that idea of designer as an active agent of cultural production comes back in. I’m like. “Actually, I can do it.” Safar was satisfying an itch for me. It was definitely addressing something that I’ve always been wanting to address.

But then there was a lot that was going on with me then, wanting to address a lot of things about women. There was no magazine that was coming out from the Arab world, or created by Arab women, that I resonated with. And I read a lot of magazines. A lot of magazines.

Most of the magazines about women were all, girl boss culture. Diaspora Arab women. That kind of thing. And I thought, I’m going to start a magazine about women. I’m going to start a feminist women’s magazine. And so I did. And unlike Safar, I started this with an investor.

So I put together a deck. I reached out to five women, five partners. Each of us come from a different background. I knew I couldn’t do this by myself, and I also wanted to keep the studio and Safar running. I needed a team that would put this together and run it with me.

And I reached out to an investor and it was really important for me that the investor for the magazine was also a woman. And I found her. And she invested in the magazine and that’s how we started. And a lot of people confuse Safar and Al Hayya together, but they’re two very different magazines.

Arjun Basu: Very different.

Maya Moumne: Al Hayya is a platform and publisher. We started this in 2020, just a few months before the explosion. And we—

Arjun Basu: —I think we should just tell people that the explosion happened four years ago. And that’s also when you moved.

Maya Moumne: I moved a month after—the explosion happened in August, 2020, and I left in September, 2020. It was such a quick decision for me to also leave because our studio, which was the same studio we started in, and had been in up until 2020, was pretty close to the explosion site and got hit pretty bad. So we lost, like, a lot.

And a few months before, I think it was in June, we met and we started Al Hayya and then the explosion hit. And I left. And some of us dispersed around the world, but came back. And slowly people are coming back to Beirut.

Al Hayya creates and publishes literary visual and sonic content and the platform is basically dedicated to challenging issues of representation and diversity, exploring feminist culture and action, and highlighting anti-racist, transnational, and queer perspectives.

Arjun Basu: In Arabic.

Maya Moumne: It’s in Arabic and in English.

Arjun Basu: And it’s bilingual for the same reasons that Safar is bilingual.

Maya Moumne: Absolutely. Even more, yeah. There’s a lot of language in the feminist world and queer world that don’t actually exist in Arabic. Or do exist, but aren’t used.

Al+Hayya_Levant+Won%27t+Your+Rise%3F.jpg

Interior spreads from Al Hayya

“And I thought, ‘I’m going to start a magazine about women. I’m going to start a feminist women’s magazine.’ And so I did.”

Arjun Basu: What are the challenges of distributing both of the magazines in places like Lebanon or Egypt? Or just that region, that area?

Maya Moumne: Al Hayya can’t enter quite a few Arab cities, I would say. And not just because the bookstores aren’t allowed to sell that kind of content in bookstores, but also because a lot of the articles that we commission could be critiquing the government or speaking of a past incident that the government had to do with. And for the safety of the contributors that live there or travel there, we can’t send it there.

A big question mark is a place like the UAE, for example, where we know that—I don’t know if we should include this or not because I do travel for work there, but fuck it—the UAE’s government has a very tight rein on the population, and we all know that. But nobody’s allowed to talk about it.

Nobody is allowed to talk about what happens, what the government does. And how much surveillance goes on there. Everyone’s allowed to talk about how safe it is in the UAE. People very proudly say, “Oh, you can leave your phone in Abu Dhabi on a bench in a park and come back the next day and it’ll still be there.” As if that’s something to be proud of. And that just means that the country has so much control over what goes on there that you literally can’t publish or say anything that critiques the government.

And a lot of my collaborators and my partners work and have projects in the Gulf and come and go and I’ve been getting, for example—put the UAE aside—but Saudi Arabia, I’ve been trying to get a contributor to write something about what it’s like for women after MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] came to power because supposedly MBS is the person that came into power that allowed women to drive their own cars, right? And that’s like a big feat for Saudi Arabia.

But this guy's crazy. This guy’s, like, crazy! And I thought, You know what? There’s also laws changing about women and women owning property there. And I thought, I’ve got to find a woman to talk about her experience about buying property there because you can on paper, but there’s a loophole. And I got so close to finding somebody that would write the piece, and at the very last minute she pulled out. Even though I was going to publish the piece anonymously, she pulled out.

Arjun Basu: She was too nervous.

Maya Moumne: She was too nervous. She was too nervous. Kidnappings in Saudi Arabia are very common things. People don’t talk about it, but I have personal experience with people whose husbands have been kidnapped and haven’t been returned or have been returned with bracelets on their legs. It’s crazy.

Arjun Basu: And so most of your readership is in the West, I would imagine.

Maya Moumne: Yeah, unfortunately.

Arjun Basu: And it’s a large diaspora readership.

Maya Moumne: It’s a very large diaspora readership. I think also because the diaspora has, if not the same number of Arabs living in the diaspora as in the Arab region, more. And I think there’s just a need for a publication like this.

But I have been working on a solution for getting that reach done in the Arab region because that’s really important for me. Yeah, with digital magazines, launching a podcast in Arabic, like that content can’t be censored.

Arjun Basu: Al Hayya is, where is that produced?

Maya Moumne: Registered in the US for our safety.

Arjun Basu: Is it produced by the same team or is that a separate team?

Maya Moumne: No, it’s a completely separate team. I’m the only link between Safar and Al Hayya. Plus, to do Safar—the design agency designs Al Hayya—but the editors, the founders of Al Hayya, they all have nothing to do with Safar.

Arjun Basu: In an interview you gave, I think, last year, maybe two years ago you spoke of Arab identities being a bit of a double edged sword for you, or that it gives a false sense of nationalism that we don’t particularly have, because, of course, the Arabic culture is not a monolith. We’re talking about a wide region and many different people that are united perhaps by language, but culturally they’re quite diverse. That’s an especially interesting quote. Lebanon is a multicultural society. So what do you really mean when you say ‘double edged’?

Maya Moumne: What do you mean when you say ‘multicultural’?

Arjun Basu: Lebanon is, religiously, contains multitudes as a society contains different peoples. It’s always been a bit of a hodgepodge place that is united under a flag, that’s, I guess that’s what I meant.

Maya Moumne: I would say I don’t know if it’s multicultural. There’s definitely an assemblage of different religions in the country, but so is there in Iraq. So is there in Syria. So is there in Palestine and in Jordan. And there’s also this—not a misconception, but there’s also this generalization that all of the countries in the Arab world are united by language. But we actually don’t understand each other’s Arabic.

And I’ll give an example. When I went to Morocco, it was easier for me to speak French there than it was for me to speak Arabic and understand them. A lot of my Lebanese friends don’t understand Egyptian Arabic. And those that do only understand Egyptian Arabic because we grew up watching Egyptian TV. But the friends I have that grew up in French-speaking families, and there are a lot. there was a period in time where a lot of parents prefer to speak to their children in French in Lebanon than to speak to them in Arabic.

Again, it’s post-colonial, it’s, maybe not even post. And those friends don’t understand Egyptian Arabic, and especially not, North African Arabic in general. There is this idea of Arab identity on the one hand—there’s a very exciting assemblage of culture—but on the other hand, there’s this false sense of nationalism, this pan-Arab identity that doesn’t exist.

Arjun Basu: Yeah, it always felt like it was something that would come up from time-to-time as an imposition, but that it never took for the obvious reason that it didn’t exist. So you talked about a podcast. I know you’ve done especially with Safar, you’ve done video. What would you like Safar and Al Hayya to become?

Maya Moumne: Publishers. I’d love to publish books. Safar is already starting a series of books. We are working on our first book. And it’s going to be a series with four volumes. We’re working with an archive studio. They’re Palestinian, based in Dubai. And they have an insanely large collection of printed ephemera, about Palestine and from Palestine, from the 1940s up until the 1980s or mid-1980s.

These are also going to be literary books on graphic design. And we’re using this archive to talk about this archival material. And the first volume is going to be about the political magazines that were produced then. Another one is going to be about illustrations and symbols. The third one is going to be about children’s books—there’s a lot of political children’s books that were produced in the seventies and eighties. And those are really incredibly important. And then the final one will be about posters.

Arjun Basu: Okay. What are three magazines or media that really excite you these days?

Maya Moumne: I would say The Funambulist, for sure, is one. This is going to sound very strange and probably unexpected, but Sight and Sound magazine. I read almost all of their issues.

Arjun Basu: Is that historic? Sight and Sound would be something that you would say because you’ve loved it for a long time. It’s been around forever, so is that like an old love of yours or did you just come upon it?

Maya Moumne: Yeah I recently came upon it. I had seen it a lot as we were working on the design of Al Hayya. I just went to the magazine store and I picked up a bunch of magazines that I wanted Al Hayya to feel like, or look like, or read like.

Because the way that Safar looks is very different from the way Al Hayya looks. Al Hayya is meant to be consumed far wider than Safar is meant to be consumed. And so I just looked up a bunch of magazines as references.

And then I bought Sight and Sound and I looked through it and I was like, “Oh wow, this is a great magazine.” The content is great. The design is really well done. So yeah, it’s just been a few years, actually, that I’ve read it.

Arjun Basu: And what about the third one?

Maya Moumne: I’m going to go with a more expected one. I’m going to go with Apartamento, I have to say. That’s an old one. That’s an old one. And it just never disappoints. It’s such a great magazine.