Maktabat el-Yasmin
مكتبة الياسمين
Maktabat el-Yasmin مكتبة الياسمين
Maktabat el-Yasmin (Jasmine Library in Arabic) has been a longstanding dream of mine, and after many months, emails, and nights spent scrolling on Facebook marketplace, that dream soon became a reality. Starting September 2023, we got serious and brought together a team of student organizers, supportive faculty, and community library leaders who were related to Middle East Studies at UBC, or who care for the ‘Middle East,’ or related causes.
Many people were generous with their time, knowledge, and advice. For example, we had folks from the phenomenal Vancouver Black Library (who personally were a big inspiration for the project) give us their time and resources when it came to curation and creating a library system. We had the lovely chance to meet with, onboard and befriend folks at UBC’s iSchool to make curation and cataloguing a reality. We had faculty sign on to grants with us, offer up ideas, donate furniture and even money out of their own pockets. And we were so privileged when the head of my department, heard us out on the necessity of the space and so generously let us maintain a constant ‘lease’ on an underused study lounge at the Geography Building, which we have transformed into a our super cozy space. And we couldn’t have furnished it without the help of my brother (driving us to pick up Facebook marketplace purchases), close friends, and even strangers who helped move things in, donate funds and send us trinkets to keep in the space.
Fast forward to February 2024, and we officially launch, eager now that we have a decent collection of books (at the time around 50, and now approaching 100!), a solid team, values, and a crowd of folks ready to use our space, volunteer with us and even carry it forward after some of us would graduate and leave. We celebrated with two little launch parties, one with faculty and one with friends, and although we didn’t get proper shelving until May, everyone was gawking over our books and excited to suggest more titles, which we meticulously added to our never-ending wish list.
Today, the space is exactly what I hoped it would become: a community library that provides an unneutral approach to knowledge-sharing, upholding equitable epistemologies, underrepresented stories, and justice-oriented ideation. The last couple months, our team and the community were really able to curate an enriching selection of multimedia resources, including books, zines, art, music, archival work and so much more. All those resources are now well fitted into our custom, nonconforming classification system and can be found and borrowed through our own Tiny Cat cataloguing website.
Although it took many hours out of our busy schedules, it was a truly humbling and rewarding project. I read somewhere recently that there is a key difference between organizing and mobilizing, in that the former is about this often-unseen community-building labor, where we create the foundations for life-making and for sustaining our work and activism. Mobilizing is what comes after such capacity and community building. And I couldn’t be more honored that this space has set its roots, and that amidst university bureaucracy, budget cuts, and billion dollar endowment funds being invested into genocide and war, we could create this space outside of those systems, and as a way to draw people together and towards collaboration, creativity, knowledge-sharing, joy, activism, strategy, and rejuvenation. And I’m so proud and excited for the team to continue the project after I’ve left!
To figure out the arrangement of the room, our ideal furniture plan and spacing with our future shelving, I created a SketchUp blueprint of the space to help us visualize how it would come to life
If you want to ask about future events, the story behind our library’s name, or any further details on how we came to be, you can reach out to me or the library!
Little clip from our launch party with our friends!
