No se niega, I am my mother’s daughter
Posted: November 29, 2012 Filed under: Your voices | Tags: becoming a writer, blood bonds, creativity, inheritance, Love InshAllah, Mother-daughter, Muslim love, Muslim relationships, Muslim women, storytelling, Vanessa Mártir, VONA Leave a comment »
I’ve been so afraid of being like her, terrified really, that I’ve tried to ignore, deny the many ways that I am like my mother. From my hands, small and stubby, heavy, with a thick palm that can do (and have done) much damage to those who dared to challenge me…like my mother did to me with her hands.
To how I eat, my right leg tucked under me, the left propped up so my knee is under my chin.
How for so long any emotion that shook me I changed to anger, because anger I could deal with, anger I could process. Pain? No. Confusion? No. Sadness? No. Isolation? Please, no.
When I told my mother I was a writer, she shared a stack of papers where she’d started recounting the stories of her life. I’d heard many of them when I was growing up. The ones she told when she was calling us ungrateful. The one about her one pair of shoes. The story of her choking while she was in the latrine: When she pushed the splintered door open with her scrawny leg, my great-grandmother, Tinita, ran over and pulled a two-foot tape worm out of her mouth. Imaginate eso!
An honest man
Posted: June 7, 2012 Filed under: The Male Gaze, Your voices | Tags: honesty, Hussein Rashid, Love InshAllah, manhood, manliness, masculinity, Muslim love, Muslim men, Muslim relationships, Muslim women, stories, storytelling, truth 5 Comments »
Many moons ago, Love InshAllah co-editor Ayesha Mattu asked me to be an advance reader for the anthology. I used the word “honest,” and structured my thoughts around that idea.
Ayesha engaged me as to why I thought being “honest” was so important. It’s because honesty is hard, and no matter how much we practice it – and it is something we practice, because it’s not natural for us – it’s still a radical thing.
We never want to present ourselves in a way that makes us seem less than we think we are. That means we obfuscate, divert, and weave tales of who want to be, both to ourselves and to others. We craft these narratives, and in the telling, there are omissions and commissions. We are not lying or being dishonest, but we are not being honest. We want to be well-thought of by other people.
Love is a hard topic. Along with money, it’s probably the one place no one likes to think of themselves as being less than successful. To talk about sex in a way that intersects with religious sensibilities adds another layer of complexity. Unless these women were all malamati, seeking opprobrium to detach themselves from this world, their stories were radical because they were honest.
When Ayesha came to me and asked me to contribute to the blog, I readily agreed.
Then, I panicked.
I realized that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to be that honest.
Your voices