Can queerness be free from being an identity? What else could it be? Could I un-identify myself from queerness, not in some kind of un-queering, but to free my queerness from its pre-determination as an identity, to be able to determine myself in a more amorphous sense? Could that be queering in the absolute hardest?
Read MoreThe question—can refugees be spiteful and remain acceptable as refugees—spoke to the core of my Bosnian origin, all my experiences of the aggression on Bosnia in the period of 1992–1995
Read MorePerhaps he's all I'll ever be—alone, shutting out the world, stubborn. With a packet of cigarettes that my child shares in silence. Perhaps it's all I can be.
Read MoreI lost my mother when she was finally turning a new page for both of us. I can't describe the feeling of disappointment, of chagrin that she left me with. Cancer stole that opportunity from me.
Read MoreMaybe my immense dislike of cooking and food has everything to do with the gendered aspect of it, the way I have seen my mother spend days and nights in the kitchen. Maybe I did not want to confine myself to it like her, which affected my ways with the food everyone else loves.
Read MorePerhaps it was through my mother’s meals that we were able to enter their community with our Kurdish language and identity. Perhaps this was how we managed to feel as safe as any other family in the neighbourhood.
Read MoreI and most of the women close to me lived there and I didn’t recall us ceding the city to the men. Here in Ethos, as if to vindicate me, is the unmitigated identification of Istanbul with its women.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreMy 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.
Read MoreThe 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?
Read MoreThe 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?
Read MoreThe 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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