jiddu HagMusa, preparing his wudu pictured here, is my father's paternal grandfather, Hag Musa, may Allah have mercy on his soul. this is the first image i have seen of him, as he passed away the year that my parents were married, the same year my mother's paternal grandmother passed away, (a year of sorrow/ … Continue reading prose// a portrait of wudu (the story of my great grandfather)
islam
prose// for Mama Nafisah
the people i love are dying. my great-grandmother, a great-aunt, my father's eldest sister has too been tucked underneath the earth. i clench my jaw laying in my bed. it is all i can do to save myself from jumping out of my blankets and running to the airport to leap on the first flight to Khartoum that i can book. i wouldn't even know where to go looking for the right graveyards, for where to lay down on the earth and press my heart as close as I can to where theirs used to pulse. i want to be loved by the people in my family who knew Allah.
poetry// funeral after funeral After Funeral
To believe Allah is enough for you and to actualize it are very different things... I know one and sometimes cannot even conceive of the other. I know that people are people, but people can sometimes seem like mountains. Move! Move! Move! (But they only speak sedentarism) perhaps, to believe that wholeness can be felt … Continue reading poetry// funeral after funeral After Funeral
prose// ramadan, ya ramadan (please, be gentle, I am fragile)
Last year was the best Ramadan of my life. I am afraid of what is supposed to take place on Thursday, the birth of a month as old and as familiar to me as my own family. I keep thinking, was that the peak? Will I never experience a Ramadan like that again? When I … Continue reading prose// ramadan, ya ramadan (please, be gentle, I am fragile)
prose// time and its selfishness, death and its callousness
Today, I cried. Over many things (life is heavy, I am fragile, tears are easy to self produce), but one of them was seeing the faces and names of the elders in our Muslim community who have passed away over the past few weeks, days, and even hours. I am in shock I think, at … Continue reading prose// time and its selfishness, death and its callousness
prose// birth anniversaries and the witnessing of classrooms hallowing
I have felt it today, maybe for the first time in four years, maybe not, it is hard to recall. The texture of knowing, the feeling, “oh wow, this is what I have been doing for four years”. You know, the part of the Toni-Morrison-novel-reading-journey when you finally catch a glimpse of “it”: the arch, … Continue reading prose// birth anniversaries and the witnessing of classrooms hallowing
prose// seasonal produce
These days, winter comes angrily. Or maybe not. I project onto the weather sometimes, you know. Am I an onion? Strange question, I know. Obvious answers are evident, but who could possibly be that interested in the obvious?! I've thought about onions a lot. Vegetables that peel away, layer after layer, until there is nothing … Continue reading prose// seasonal produce
poetry// distance(d)
I want things I do not deserve. how awful to be choked by your own idle and uncertain hands? Maybe that is the punishment: longing with no reciprocity. it is impossible to know the dead the way I need to-- so take me to Medina! I just want to taste it for a moment, (what … Continue reading poetry// distance(d)
poetry// to know mortality in theory but to be in a body designed to reject it in actuality and why that always leads me back to God which I suppose *is* the entire point.
i wait for God here between the night and the rest of all things i know. i teach myself not to ever say my own name without folding in God does not arrive because that’s just not how it works. and i learned that. but still i struggle to teach my bones submission without fracturing. … Continue reading poetry// to know mortality in theory but to be in a body designed to reject it in actuality and why that always leads me back to God which I suppose *is* the entire point.
prose// volume
There are many things in life you cannot rehearse for. I know this, of course, at an intellectual level. But still yet, well, I rehearse nearly everything. The conversation before a meeting, the smile I will grace at the event that evening, the conversation I want to have with my father the next day. I … Continue reading prose// volume
