on swelling and other things

April 17, 2019April 18, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / 2 Comments

I am in this funny phase of life where time moves quickly and so do I with it. The amount of growth that takes place in even a week astounds me sometimes. I don't know if I were to meet the woman I was even six months ago if she would be able to recognize … Continue reading prose// on swelling and other things

prose// the night of ancestral longing

April 2, 2019April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / Leave a comment

On this night, 1400 years ago, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) was taken from Makkah to Jerusalem in one night. Space shrank in an unprecedented way. Distance dissolved, the barriers between life and death grew blurry and soft. Prophets who had long been dead rise to pray, Adam and Abraham and Jesus and … Continue reading prose// the night of ancestral longing

prose// on mediocrity and ordinariness and letting myself down

March 21, 2019April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / Leave a comment

Often, when I force myself, while biting my teeth and clenching my joints, to peer inside me, I all I can see is a deep, dark tunnel stacked neck high in old failures, missed opportunities, a recorded snapshots of moments when I just couldn't jump high enough, or didn't, or forgot to try at all … Continue reading prose// on mediocrity and ordinariness and letting myself down

prose// the length of love

August 13, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / 2 Comments

I think about the ways I want to gather up the sounds of my family, pile on as much as my hands and hard drives can carry when we expend ourselves to the very maximum. What lengths for lineage I would leap in a heartbeat! Memorize the laughter, the inflections, the accents, the words they speak in a dialect that is crisp and yet silky in my ear. There are few things as beautiful to my ears as Sudanese Arabic, shuffling its way across the tongues of women who smell like heaven. Everything flows effortlessly from my father's people and the place they proudly represent: the drape of the toub, the bright and blooming karkade that tinkers in glasses, the cold water of the Nile, the long tresses of a laughing girl who flounce her way past me in the masjid foyer.

prose// facing Failure

March 18, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / Leave a comment

I am grappling with just so many things this semester. I think the biggest one, right now, the biggest mountain I am staring at and trying to figure out how to cross is Failure. There. I have named it and now I am one step closer to conquering it, which seems paradoxical, and perhaps, it … Continue reading prose// facing Failure

prose// transit, travel, & The Next Big Thing

March 10, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / Leave a comment

Here I am, riding on the train back to school from my parents’ home. I realize I spend an awful lot of time in transit. One city to the other, one building to the other, one class to the other. From the room to the laundry room back up the stairs again. I walk. Often. … Continue reading prose// transit, travel, & The Next Big Thing

prose// arabic-less

February 15, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / 2 Comments

I was flipping through my class notebook from last year and found this written a midst my philosophy notes: "My arabic is the beginning of my shame. It is emptiness." I do not speak Arabic. My father does and my grandmother does and so do my aunts and uncles and cousins whom I have not … Continue reading prose// arabic-less

prose// jiddu

February 6, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / 3 Comments

We all have our own motivations for seeking Heaven: life without pain, wealth, bounty, good food, the Prophet’s home, your home, eternal bliss. I think about and remember those things too when I pray, when I fast, when I pin my hijab into place in the morning. But I also crave Heaven for another reason. … Continue reading prose// jiddu

prose// i want to be beautiful

January 29, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / 1 Comment

I have been reflecting on what it means to be beautiful a lot recently. For most of my life, I have wanted to be beautiful. I have often stood in front of the mirror and started at my body and wished away every part of it and prayed over it and begged God to give … Continue reading prose// i want to be beautiful

prose// approaching nineteen

January 22, 2018April 6, 2019 / Mona Hagmagid / Leave a comment

I moved away from home for college in the fall of 2016. I was seventeen years old at the time, and I had never done anything so courageous in my life (I have gone on to do more courageous things, but the world was smaller then and I couldn’t see into the future far enough). I … Continue reading prose// approaching nineteen