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I wanted to stop looking, but when I saw the video, it was hard to scroll past. A bison, heavy and dignified, collapses into the Grand Prismatic Spring, a hydrothermal lake that pulses with the heat of the earth’s interior. A marvel of Yellowstone National Park, it reaches 89 °C (192 °F), near the boiling point at that altitude. Steam rises like a ghost as the body of the bison disappears into the water. The iridescent rainbow of minerals that gives the lake its name reflects off its fur for a moment before it sinks. It’s a deathly sight that can’t be unseen.
The bison slipped into its fate as dissolved bones with no way of interpreting the danger ahead. “There should be signs,” I thought. Countless park rangers have thought the same. They note that while such incidents are rare, they still occur. An elk calf suffered a similar fate not long before. There isn’t, so far, a trans-species code. Our symbols remain obsolete to creatures of the wild.
Somewhere along the arc of human evolution, we began to mark danger with shape and sign: skulls for poison, red for stop. These glyphs bought us time to warn, to prepare, to protect, to run. But they didn’t stop there. Once survival was momentarily secured, we began to layer these shapes with narratives. We drew meaning around colour and fruit, tree, and textile, until symbols no longer pointed only to threat, but to story. They became the scaffolding of culture. Something far beyond instinct, but never without it. Now, symbols help us navigate both beauty and violence.
However, today’s internet’s meme-core economy feeds off precisely this process: extract the recognisable, detach it from nuance, remix it endlessly. Symbols once heavy with history and emotion risk flattening into contextless pixels; endlessly shared, barely understood. What does it mean to honour the histories that elevated a local phenomenon into a shared cultural symbol? How do we trace, and dignify, that passage? How do we guard against the flattening that follows virality?
Mango Controversy
There is a peculiar intimacy in the way diasporic communities clutch at the symbols of home. Visual fragments of culture that promise connection across distance, often organic emblems representing indigeneity. It’s touched on with the delicate analysis it deserves in the essay In Defence of The ‘Mango Diaspora’: Why Diasporic Writers Succumb To South Asian Clichés. Across South Asian literature, the mango has become shorthand for lush, homeland nostalgia, and the fragrant excess of cultural memory. Author Pari Pradhan writes, “this trope rears its ugly head in diasporic poetry, repeating itself so often that it has become somewhat of a meme in the literary world.” In other words, certain symbols become containers not of specificity, but of an expected exoticism. “Other stereotypical symbols of the South Asian experience, like chai, sarees, or peacocks, also fall under this overarching ‘mango diaspora’ umbrella.”
From a similar essay, On the Complexity of Using the Mango as a Symbol in Diasporic Literature, author Urvi Kumbhat adds that “the mango as a symbol elides its historical entanglement with imperialism, as well as the exploitative conditions of its production. It also smooths over an increasingly violent and fascistic India that many of us, including me, don’t claim in a purely celebratory way. One might say that all commodities flatten out the violent conditions of their production.”
As my friend, writer and ecologist Dee put it: “The mango here is the false prophet… it builds a South Asian narrative still rooted in tropes of tribal culture.” They call it the “mango-lassification” of text; a tactic that quickly becomes a trap. To be legible to a “global” (Western) audience, diasporic artists sometimes lean into imagery that already has cultural currency: emblems of otherness, rehearsals of exoticity. Capitalism, which thrives off circulation and recognition, eagerly juices these mangoes into merchandise.
“I personally worked on a photobook called The Stereotype,” they tell me. “I staged images of children riding an elephant to go to school, or people using walkie-talkies to evoke a satirical technological backwardness the West assumes of us.” Reflecting on diasporic loops of self-orientalism, Dee insists that we “must liberate ourselves from symbols so commodified that their evocation feels perverted. No more Rupi Kaurs.”
In the “Garden of MENA Diaspora” art, many fruits, flora, and fabric grow wild. Pomegranates, olive trees, jasmine, saffron, watermelon, kuffiyah pattern… each rooted in a soil of their own historic and cultural narrative. Their repetition is, of course, a testament to the relevance of their cultural inheritance. Yet, the brain-rot internet epoch we find ourselves in means they also carry the danger of becoming so worn that they border on cliché, blunting the edge of the stories they are meant to tell.
Symbolism, Flattening, Meme-Core
Sometimes, the relentless recycling of cultural symbols within diasporic communities becomes so codified, so rhythmically familiar, that it invites a knowing wink, and even satire, from within the very platforms that perpetuate it. I stumbled upon a TikTok poking fun at this idea of a cultural flattening via semiotics, captioned: “Babe you’re so ‘loves pomegranate imagery, reads Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, smells like jasmine, listens to Fairuz in the mornings, kohl on deep brown eyes, gold name necklace…” I’ve seen countless variations of this meme format, core-ing an idealised Middle Easternness while also adapting to different diasporic contexts worldwide. I never scroll too quickly, keen to observe the ironic, viral commentary on the commodification of cultural identity that has taken over.
Though meme culture has also helped archive cultural affect, it accelerates the aesthetic abbreviation of identity into a kind of semiotic loop because of the sheer rate at which content is metabolised. A similar anxiety is articulated in Palestinian author Isabella Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost, which subtly interrogates the limits of resistance symbolism. In the novel, Mariam, a theatre director who refers to herself as living in the Ramallah Bubble, frets over how “art might deaden resistance, by softening suffering’s blows through representing it.” It speaks to her innermost fears about staging a theatre production under brutal occupation. The tension is made evident in her self-flagellating rants on the ‘art as resistance’ discourse—she understands how powerful art can be as an actress and director, but she resents its futility in the face of bulldozers and drones.
Hammad slips in wry jabs at the overuse of olive tree imagery, capturing a fatigue with motifs. The thing is, the olive tree’s symbolic gravity is hard to dismiss. Its deep roots and regenerative nature have long embodied sumud, the Palestinian philosophy of steadfastness. Rooted deeply in the soil, and indigenous to the regional ecology, the olive tree endures harsh conditions, and so, sadly, the poem writes itself. “If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, their oil would become tears,” Mahmoud Darwish said, and aeons later, the olive tree snuck into the algorithm and the metaphor-emoji axis now holds more internet currency than he or any poet would have expected.
This reflects a broader frustration in the Palestinian and Arab cultural landscape: that when symbols are extracted from the urgency of lived experience, they also somehow neuter their connection to their own history. It must, at once, be anchored in its semantic origins while accessible to the now. That is the bane of the symbol—it must connect me to ancestor and descendant at once, or else it becomes void on our cosmic timeline.
As visual artist and independent scholar Noura Tafeche reminds us, symbols like the watermelon also carry specific political genealogies that risk being diluted in their journey through digital and commercial aesthetics. “The watermelon was, first and foremost, born as a highly aware and intentional act of subversion,” she says, referencing the 1967 Israeli ban on the Palestinian flag that led artists and demonstrators to adopt the fruit’s red, black, green, and white as a visual proxy.
However, in contexts free from censorship, such as her country of residence, Italy, where no such flag ban exists, the watermelon remains ubiquitous. “It has been used online and offline as a form of simulacrum and reified object: something made palatable, aesthetic, and displayable as emojis, knitted earrings, pins, papier mache on demonstration carts, tote bags.” As Tafeche astutely observes, a thousand flags at a protest won’t trend, but a watermelon emoji—cute, abstract, and algorithm-friendly—slips through filters with ease. It’s a symbol that performs well online, conveniently avoiding shadowbans and platform censorship. This adaptation is, on the surface, understandable. But it begs a deeper question: why is virality our end goal? What does it reveal about our political instincts when a symbol’s capacity to circulate outweighs its capacity to confront? Virality and raising awareness can’t bring back our martyrs, and even worse, it hasn’t put a dent in the horrific conditions that create them.
Tafeche references the viral “All Eyes on Rafah” AI image as emblematic of our digital contradictions: “This image encapsulated the many contradictions of digital societies and its ethic: the problem of slacktivism; the scepticism toward those whose awareness seems to begin (or end) only at the peak of visibility, the guilt-easing comfort of resharing.” Tafeche reminds us that if we fail to ask what untranslatable grief lies behind these images, then the spectacle has eclipsed the substance. “If we embrace virality not out of strategy, but from political exhaustion,” she says, “we’re not choosing, we’re surrendering to the platform, letting it fill a vacuum we refuse to confront.”
I discovered her work through her incisive analysis: Ecosystem of an Arab Meme, where she challenges English as the imperial lingua franca of memes, movements, and marketing, and gestures instead toward a decolonial internet vocabulary. To decentre the Western gaze, we must first decentre its vocabulary. That means new codes, new audiences, new intimacies. “I believe that Palestinian, Arab, and diasporic online communities are not only searching, but actively laying the groundwork for something radically disruptive, perhaps because we sense that the historical moment is finally ripe”, exposing that we’ve been waiting for the moment, not the mango the whole time.
Pomegranate and Watermelon Life Cycle
Syrian-Jordanian painter Jude Samman’s reflections offer a profound meditation on symbols and how they breathe, shift, and sometimes expire. For her, a symbol isn’t legible by default; it must also be activated through intimacy. The pomegranate, for instance, holds personal resonance through her grandmother’s kitchen and its Qur’anic associations, rather than through nationalist or regional heritage, rightfully noting that its origins are more Persian than Levantine. In this, Samman subtly resists the idea of fixed cultural ownership, distinguishing between inherited symbols and personally inhabited ones. “I believe that a symbol stays alive by ensuring it is constantly in conversation with me and what I’m sharing with the audience,” she tells me. “Symbols are always changing. So they have to be fixed in my personal memories, in my context.”
Her choice to forgo the keffiyeh in later works speaks to a deeper belief in ambiguity as a political and aesthetic tool. Rather than providing the audience with answers, Samman prefers to offer openings, what she calls “indirect symbols”, allowing viewers to engage through contemplation rather than recognition. This gesture refuses the algorithmic clarity demanded by digital visibility, and pushes for slowness and interiority.
Samman’s stance on the watermelon is particularly striking, and I had to ask because of its prevalence in her work. Samman painted watermelons long before their popular emojification, as a symbol she hoped would eventually vanish. In her painting, Waves of Gold, the moment of liberation is captured through the depiction of a shattered watermelon. The end of its symbolic labour and the death of its visual necessity. “In that moment, it turns from a symbol of resistance to a symbol of liberation, because we no longer have use for it.” Certainly, it is a radical hope, that it might one day become obsolete by way of the victory we ache for.
New Symbolic Territories in Diaspora: The Monobloc Chair
Some symbols are so cheap and mundane that it’s impossible they could arrive as sacred. They become that way over time through touch and repetition. Bad Bunny’s Debí Tirar Más Fotos album cover featuring two empty Monobloc chairs erupted into a global visual flashpoint for a reason, bringing this humble plastic seat into the spotlight. No explanation was needed from the singer or his team. Children of immigrants recognised what it symbolised instantly. Online, a viral chorus of memories emerged: plastic chairs at family gatherings, dominoes slapped onto tabletops, ghost and jinn stories told in childhood summers back home. The Monobloc was a seat and a vessel at once, uncanny in its recognisability, collapsing borders and timelines into a single mould. Across cultures, people found their pasts archived in its fragile frame.
This moment reveals the potent materiality of symbols. The Monobloc is not aesthetically refined, and certainly not what you’re after if you’re looking for class signifiers in terms of furniture. It’s cheap, disposable, and built to be everywhere. Precisely for those reasons, it is inevitably imbued with meaning from memory. It has even moved artists to centre it in their study and practice.
“What drew me to the Monobloc chair was not just its ubiquity, but its quiet centrality in the Arab social landscape,” says Lebanese architect and digital artist Chafic Mekawi, “Mass-produced and globally overlooked, it has become embedded in everyday life here. From weddings to family gatherings to street corners, it’s the unspoken backdrop of communal experience.” I think about the ways that, across my own life, the chair condenses domestic, generational, and communal intimacy into a single, recognisable object. It is the seat I was too small for when I’d play cards with my adult relatives in Syria, that I can now carry out to the garden with ease as an adult myself.
Chafik’s prototype takes this reading further by intentionally remixing that universal object in an artist’s hand. Like the Monobloc before it, it is a symbol born from collective usage; reworked into something that asks us to pause and interpret. “In the Zellige Monobloc series, I wanted to reframe that familiarity. This act of recontextualisation turns the generic into the local, inviting viewers to see memory, place, and cultural continuity in an object we’ve always known but rarely seen.” Its beauty lies in the art of reconsideration; of remembering what we forgot to notice. This is the alchemy of artistic intent: transforming a mundane form into a multi-layered portal that both holds and reshapes communal memory.
The Moon as our Ancient Cliché
“The first thing that struck me was the cliché of the moon,” says Lebanese poet and cross-disciplinary artist Riwa Saab in our interview. “It’s not regionally specific, and it’s actually one of the most ancient and consistent interactions we have in the arts. I thought about its use in poems–how each time it still feels new. So many poems make you feel like you’re hearing about the moon for the first time.” It’s true, from Nizar Qabbani to Sylvia Plath, the moon has been allegorised and storied across the map and every age of it.
She references one of her favourite poems, I Asked God for the Moon by Natasha Oladokun, adding, “Poetry is most interesting when it does something it’s not supposed to do. How can a poet still make an encounter feel new?”
She also points to African American poet Danez Smith’s my president, which invokes the image of the moon in a technopoetic loop: “We’d all marvel / at the sun & moon looping the sky like a gif as the cars learned / to fly.”
This contrast between celestial permanence and the fleeting nature of a GIF echoes Riwa’s interest in symbols with legacy becoming reimagined through the granularity of their context or characteristics of zeitgeist.
Riwa continues: “I think the thing about diasporic clichés, it’s the same case in all poetry. It’s about specificity, placedness, movement.” Her reflections illuminate the tension between symbolic universality and emotional specificity. The power of a symbol isn’t exhausted by repetition, but by how it’s encountered. A poem can reanimate even the most overused image when it is filtered through qualia that the algorithm cannot process.
The idea itself is poetic; that the rebellion of poetry lies in transformation, its ability to save a symbol from exhaustion and offer it a second life. To make the moon feel new again is to dignify not just the symbol, but the act of meaning-making itself.
Symbols will always mutate. That is their nature. But our task is not to fossilise them. It is to stay attentive to the lives they live. Who do they speak for? Who do they exclude? Is capitalism flirting with this symbol? When you make money off it, does its name change to logo? What futures do they make possible?
As humans, in a world saturated with signs and symbols we created, the danger isn’t stepping into a hydrothermal lake. It’s mistaking a symbol for the thing itself.
Words: Yasmin Alrabiei
