The personal integration my parents wished for me was a process that ignored my Georgian heritage. I never claimed it and I never learned to claim it either, because I feared the social downfall my parents warned me about.
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When it comes to the construction of race in today’s discourse, is it merely based on phenotype without considerations to cultural and/or genetic heritage? What if one’s “look” does not match their “race”? Is “Blackness” or “Whiteness” merely on the basis of skin tone or do socio-cultural aspects also exist?
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My mother threw away all the toys I had once held dear. She told me it was because they had gone dark, blackened, covered in soot from a fire in the apartment, a fire she said that had been the work of a warlock who wanted to destroy her.
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The position of the photographer and the gaze it dictates, reveal a hunger to capitalize on all forms of labour. In this case, the time workers spend posing for, hence creating the core content of the book - for free.
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I had begun considering Pakistan nothing greater than, and I quote an actual sentence I once said, “a lifeless soulless husk; just a place on the world map next to giants like China.” So as this kid silently bops his head to AJJ, I think back to the first time I found life in Pakistan when I visited Sehwan Sharif.
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Pleasure is a form of freedom. When we fight for freedom, we can also attain it on a mundane, cellular, day to day way. When we honour our desires and daily pleasures, we carve out pathways to liberation.
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The seekh kebab roll exists somewhat synchronously to the way I do. What did somebody call a food they ate so often that it almost didn’t taste like anything anymore, except memory and instinct?
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Beirut never healed. It just learned to accept its predicament. Beirut, like our parents, is not resilient. It is broken.
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The fact that the burden of proof is on us who oppose the whitewashing of Moses speaks volumes about the conditions of our seeing today. That is, whiteness is seen as neutral. I sense this in the very need to dig into these sources and linguistics to prove that Moses was not white when such a notion should be obvious. And the shady discourse of racism makes us ask: Just how Black was he? Is “ādam” Black enough?
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The 7th-century Najdi Bedouin poet Qays ibn al-Mullawah or more popularly known as Majnun (مجنون) crossed the Arabian desert, travelled through Persian literature, Hindi cinema and ended up on the door of my childhood home.
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Discovering new music is always very exciting, but discovering emo music as a little brown girl over a cup of chai and a bowl of Maggi noodles is truly something else.
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The monstrous Nazi experimentation on Romani children was not the work of ‘mad scientists’ but something even more frightening: scientists who were quite sane.
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