(mother)land

The sun has risen and the memory of your voice is getting harder to reach.
I start remembering how my mother never wanted to leave.
She knew the harshness of the diaspora.
Me and my sister have no land- no place we can call home.
We are daughters full of questions.
Loving me is a war of conflict and land- I make homes out of people to make up for the one I do not have.
The child of the coloniser asks me why I left home.
I tell him there was a drought- that his fathers hands drained everything until our parents had to choose between not betraying their land and feeding our empty bellies.
I’m seven years old and my classmate asks me why my skin is so dark- is it because I eat too much chocolate.
I’m 15 years old and the white boy ‘accidentally’ says nigga in my presence-laughs.
I’m 17 years old and I move to my mothers land- thinking it was my mother land.
I’m now twenty one and my Arabic is still broken- still unsure of where I’m from.
The man that I love leaves his home and now I pray for my unborn children.
They will be birthed to a mother who’s heart is an orphan.
I guess my heart will always be in a state of limbo.
And I guess my land is the ocean.
I hope my daughter doesn’t inherit my need to make homes out of people.
Because their absence leaves scents stained with bittersweet memories.
I hope I can raise my son in a world where he will never have to shorten his name to fit in their mouths.
And my undying wish is that my children have a place they can call home.
I tried to fall in love with the place I was born but I was met with nothing but temporary infatuation.
I don’t know how to cry in their language so I avoid all funerals.
My grandmother thinks I’m cold because I’m quiet, because my tongue replaces confusion with silence.
I fell in love with a man full of country and home enough to fill my emptiness but he couldn’t feel my emptiness.
My heart is a bottomless pit, always craving to be filled.
And I start quoting Nizar Qabbani so he can try to understand.
‘How difficult it is my son,
To love a woman
Who has neither land nor home’

House

My tongue is a house full of blood from all the times I had to keep the door shut.
The first sin I committed was being born.
The women in my culture, in my family are second class citizens.
We do not ask questions.
We do not shout.
We wear silence like metal armour because to speak is to be asking for a fight.
To speak about inequity, injustice and everything that is unfair deems me as ignorant.
They tell me I will struggle being a wife, I am too sensitive and I question everything.
My father was the first feminist I met.
In fact he never lets my mum enter the kitchen.
He can’t eat if he is not in the company of my mother.
But the men in my culture wear misogyny like a trophy.
Laugh when I tell them I want to marry a man who will never let me enter the kitchen.
Who can only eat in my company.
Apparently I’m unrealistic, paralysed in a mythical land.
My university professor told me that a man can rape his wife because she is his property.
I choked on the blood in my mouth, swallowed it and unbolted the door.
Grabbed the closest thing to me and killed him.
Is what I wanted to do…
Instead, I coughed and winced my face, cried at my silence when I got home, cried from frustration, cried for my blessings.

trophy

I don’t think you should ever have to apologise for putting blood on paper.
The ancestors called blood on white sheets a trophy.
Their son a winner.

I won’t apologise for publicising my pain.
For showing these scars.
Pain and discomfort were the trophies your sons left behind.

I opened a time capsule once,
saw pictures of the women, light dresses and heavy gold.
Called beautiful, called wives/trophies.

Our hymens were the finish line, our blood was their medals.
Our clean sheets were second place.
Our blood was a trophy.

‘Freedom of Expression’

Freedom of expression,

Definition: the unrestrained right to voice ideas, opinions

See my voice has been tamed, restrained, mouth bolted because of the lack of this noun

But the accumulation of my silenced opinions has made me feel uncomfortable

But apparently it’s surmountable

All I have to do is express them freely without worrying about being accountable

First of all, I’m annoyed with;

Women being blinded by the medias indirect oppression, they call them music videos and I call them objectifying sessions.

Or maybe it’s the stigma behind mental health, humans sympathizing with physical diseases but dismissing cases of depression.

Possibly what’s hurting me is seeing young girls falling into horrific obsessions

Like how slitting wrists has become beautified

They see it as a means to feel dignified

Because everywhere they look their flaws are magnified

And they seek comfort in feeling victimized

& I hate how having a philosophical mind can be an inconvenience, falling into infinite regression being the biggest nuisance.

Looking up to figures like Socrates,
when everyone around you is idolizing dumb, deaf and blind celebrities.

I loathe how honor is prioritized over humanity,

Men killing their flesh and blood for the sake of narrow cultural morality.

I hate how I’m judged by the pieces of garments against my skin and because my tongue carries a heavy accent that is different to my kin.

I am simply exhausted by the lack of freedom in my nation,

And how it’s only lead to the deformation of our civilization.

Beautiful

This poem is for us,
Black women
This poem is a feeble attempt to stop our self degradation
For my sisters, peeling their skin, looking like a cheap white imitation
For cursing our hair with post-colonial beauty and calling it relaxation
Burning our flesh, succumbing to this indirect oppression
But oppression nonetheless
This idealistic image of beauty was created in the west
Not in favour of wide hips, broad noses and full lips
Please
Ignore our distorted society
That does not judge a woman by her self dignity
But by transparent, artificial, not her, fair and lovely, dark and lovely but not dark at all, beauty
Please
Forget the posters, the magazines, the limited ideas of perfection , that are subliminal messages to hate your black
To hate your kinks
That blind the colour of your complexion
That paralyse your curls from dancing
That disable your beauty
Let the melanocytes in your skin shine bright, like the stars of the night they are
And your curls and kinks dance to the rhythm of self love
Let your intellect rise above all
Let your skin be the ink and your hair be the pen that rewrites the definition of the word…beautiful

Hide & Seek

I feel like I’m playing hide and seek
Where I’m hiding behind a mask that’s covered in glitter and worthless gems trying to seek this definition of beauty that just has too many boundaries
That limits me to mascara, lipstick and shallow conversations
Where I have to bite my tongue, force a smile with all these crazy limitations
Where every time I speak my mind I just end up in these sticky situations
Where I live in a country where freedom has just too many complications
Where the society has manipulated the definition of liberation
Where the girls bleach their skin to look a little more Caucasian
and boys think they’re men, roll their spliffs and blow away their aspirations
In a World where revolutionaries lack determination
And where extremists brainwash kids in the name of a Muslim nation
Where people’s hearts bleed like havisham, with no great expectations
Where Romeo and Juliet is considered a love story and not a tragedy
And rapists blame girls for dressing too suggestively
Where the new generation has amnesia to the meaning of family
And feminists are more concerned about women who can’t wear mini skirts than women who are abused domestically
Where demons disguise themselves in suits and preach about change
As their eyes glow with gluttony
In a world where people no longer make love
Just f*ck
And if she’s been touched she’s damaged goods
Treated like worn underwear in a lingerie shop
I live in a world where boys wear living in the hood as a medal around their neck
Not trying to escape it but chase it
And I’m tired of playing hide and seek
I’m tired of hiding behind this mask pretending it’s all okay
But it seems my seeker got lost in a maze
Stuck in a trance, stuck in a daze
Can you tell him to snap out of it cause this glitter is starting to wear off
And these gems are starting to fall off
And I think it’s time to be found

Cadaver

As the pungent smell of the formalin danced its way into my nose, my eyes began to swell.
Burning but not disgusted or emotional.
Intrigued but ignorant.
Trying to look for an objective heart, compare it with the ones we see in our atlases.
Not realizing this is a human who wore a soul inside of him.
Whose ‘objective’ heart beated strong and loudly for his lover.
Who bled red blood just like me.
As the teacher picked up his heart, as if it was a shirt he was interested in buying but couldn’t afford.
Examining it to see if it was worthy and undamaged enough to use as a prop for his class like this ‘cadavers’ past lovers.
My eyes began to examine the ‘cadaver’ – still objectively.
Until they landed on his fingertips, until I could see the prominent lines of his fingerprints.
Then it hit me.
He was just like me, he was just like us, he was not ‘an it’ anymore.
He was a human, just like I.
His fingertips caressed peoples souls, his hands were used in prayer to submit to his lord.
His eyes fell in love with the beauty of the world, they were once the tunnels to his heart but now they were shut as if he never existed, as if he was just a prop, an interactive tool for us ‘to learn’.
As I look at his abnormally large liver, I begin to wonder about how many scars in his heart lead him to drown his soul, in drunken nights.
How many tears did he shed, how many lovers used his heart just like a prop.

Maybe he lost someone, not a lover but a child.
Maybe the depression lead him to illegal bars that filled his cup with whiskey, that catalyzed his death.
Maybe he was just a mess that did it for the adrenaline.
Maybe he had a family waiting for him at home but the spine that once made him a man got broken on his journeys and he couldn’t face reality anymore.

Or maybe he died from unnatural causes
but he died alone,
and now he’s here- laying on a table like an object,
soulless and heavy,
like a prop.

Black Panther

I wrote this poem for you to remind you how beautiful you are because it seems you have forgotten.

Maybe it slipped your mind.

I just wanted to let you know, that the moment you decided to plagiarize the white girls idea of beauty in the form of hydrogen peroxide- you killed me.

The Sun’s stomach turned the second you destroyed your beautiful complexion.
The complexion it envied from the day you were born.

It always dreamt of having sunsets that plagiarized YOUR skin- not hers.

It wrote you love letters and sent through its rays, the melanin in your skin accepted them gracefully.

But your soul rejected it.

And the rejection killed me.

You always talk about how ‘beauty only comes in one shade but rejection comes in many.’

The day you let the devil touch your skin thinking this way you would be more accepted cause apparently ‘light skinned girls were less rejected’.

Did you forget that you are a black panther?
And this world is your jungle.
Did you forget about the prophetic blood running through your veins and that your African heritage lead you to back to Cleopatra and Nefertiti.

Did you forget that beauty is more than skin deep?
And that your soul was craving knowledge and love.
To make it strong enough to break free from the shackles of society.

Did you forget about the hearts that were illuminated by the brightness of your skin?
Did you forget about the eyes that were mesmerized by its tone and how they longingly wished they could dance the tango with its pigments?

Did you forget that you are a black panther and this world is YOUR jungle?