The Providence Comics Consortium supports the Community Safety Act because we want all the kids and adults in our communities to be safe and treated with respect on the street.
Providence City Council votes on it tomorrow (Monday April 10th) show up to support: https://www.facebook.com/events/397737960612933/
- april 2017 - poetry month - Guillaume Apollinaire
Page from: Calligrammes: Poèmes de la paix et de la guerre. Publié par Mercure de Paris, 1918. Read more at Public Domain Review, and explore their tremendous offerings.
Below is a list of some highly recommended books written by people of color (in no particular order). They span across a wide variety of genres and target audiences. Thank you to everyone who submitted their favorites and helped make this list possible! Known triggers are in parentheses next to the books they apply to, but if there is something that has been missed or there’s a book you’d like me to add, please don’t hesitate to let me know! Happy reading!
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (rape, murder, child abuse, domestic violence)
The Namesake - Jhumpa Lahiri
Migritude - Shailija Patel (gore, violence, rape mentions, abuse)
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
The God of Small Things - Arundathi Roy (child abuse, sex)
Joys of Motherhood - Buchi Emecheta (starvation, poverty, gore, and suicide)
Distant View of a Minaret - Alifa Rifaat (castration and death)
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Emails from Scheherazade - Mohja Kahf (sexual violence)
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz (transphobic language/violence, homophobic violence)
Boy Snow Bird - Helen Oyeyemi
Sister of My Heart - Chitra Banerjee Divakurani
Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi
The Meursault Investigation - Kamel Daoud
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Summer Prince - Alaya Dawn Johnson
The Noughts and Crosses series - Malorie Blackman
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (rape, murder, child abuse, domestic violence)
And The Mountain Echoed - Khaled Hosseini (rape, child abuse)
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Sleepwalker’s Guide to Dancing - Mira Karoll
Born Confused - Tanuja Desai Hidier
The Queen of Water - Laura Resau and María Virginia Farinango (child abuse, sexual harassment/child sexual abuse, racism, internalized racism, internalized shadism)
Time to Dance - Padma Venkatraman
Interpreter of Maladies - Jhumpa Lahiri (implications of rape and sexual harassment)
Veronika Decides to Die - Paulo Coelho
Astonishing the Gods - Ben Okri
Kafka on the Shore - Haruki Murakami
Fasting Feasting - Anita Desai
The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi
Drown - Junot Diaz
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Bastard of Istanbul - Elif Shafak
Honor: A Novel - Elif Shafak
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Reservation Blues - Sherman Alexie
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian - Sherman Alexie
The Age of Shiva - Manil Suri
The Kitchen God’s Wife - Amy Tan
Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel - Sara Farizan
By the Light of My Father’s Smile - Alice Walker
A Case of Exploding Mangoes - Mohammed Hanif
No God but God - Reza Aslan
The Palace of Illusions - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
A Tale for the Time Being - Ruth Ozeki
Babji - Abha Dawesar
Unaccustomed Earth - Jhumpa Lahiri (implications of rape and sexual harassment)
Funny Boy - Shyam Selvadurai (violence, rape mention)
The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros (sexual assault)
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Brick Lane - Monica Ali
No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai
A Bad Character - Deepti Kapoor (death, abusive relationships)
Karma and Other Stories - Rishi Reddi
The Burning Sky - Sherry Thomas
Reading Lolita in Tehran - Azar Nafisi
Climbing the Stairs - Padma Venkatraman
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
Coin Locker Babies - Ryu Murakami
The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan
Please Look After Mom - Shin Kyung Sook
Bonsai Kitten - Lakshmi Narayan
Written in the Stars - Aisha Saeed
The Hero’s Walk - Anita Rau Badami
Crazy Rich Asians - Kevin Kwan
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Woman at Point Zero - Nawal El Saadawi
The Golden Age - Tahmima Anam
Season of Migration to the North - Tayib Saleh
Norwegian Wood - Haruki Murakami
Snow - Orhan Pamuk
Purple Hibiscus - Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
The President - Miguel Asturias (extreme violence, rape)
The Hungry Ghosts - Shyam Selvadurai
The Skin I’m In - Sharon G. Flake
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Cinnamon Gardens - Shyam Selvadurai
1Q84 - Haruki Murakami (domestic violence, horror, violence)
She of the Mountains - Vivek Shraya (explicit sex)
Island of a Thousand Mirrors - Nayomi Munaweera (rape, violence)
Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew - Shehan Karunatilaka
Broken Circle - Theodore Fontaine (child sexual abuse, alcoholism, anti-Native sentiment)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Moth Smoke - Mohsin Hamid
Burnt Shadows, Kratography, Salt and Saffron - Kamila Shamsie
Last Man in Tower - Aravind Adiga
Birds of Paradise Lost - Andrew Lam
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Bitter Melon - Cara Chow (child abuse)
Q&A - Vikas Swarup
Five Point Someone - Chetan Bhagat
Motorcycles and Sweetgrass - Drew Hayden Taylor
Lakota Woman - Mary Crow-Dog
Legend Trilogy - Marie Lu
The Young Elites - Marie Lu
The Wrath and the Dawn - Renee Ahdieh
An Ember in the Ashes - Sabaa Tahir (rape, abuse)
Where the Mountain Meets the Moon - Grace Lin
Half of A Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Children of The Jacaranda Tree - Sahar Delijani
The Twentieth Wife - Indu Sundaresan
Destiny’s Captive - Beverly Jenkins
Tiny Pretty Things - Sona Charaipotra and Dhonielle Clayton (eating disorders, bullying, family issues)
Lakota Woman - Mary Brave Bird (child abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse)
Flight - Sherman Alexie (child abuse, alcohol abuse, sexual abuse)
Nervous Conditions - Tsitsi Dangerembga (violence, eating disorders and mental illness)
Redefining Realness - Janet Mock (child sexual assault, child abuse, transphobia)
The Woman Warrior - Maxine Hong Kingston
Under the Udala Trees - Chinelo Okparanta (homophobia, violence against queer women)
The Ghost Bride - Yangsze Choo
The Shiva Trilogy - Amish Tripathi (rape)
The Krishna Key - Ashwin Sanghi
To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before - Jenny Han
The White Tiger - Aravind Adiga
Shatter Me Trilogy - Tahereh Mafi
The promise - Nikita Singh
When Only Love Remains - Durjoy Datta
Nectar in a Sieve - Kamala Markandaya
Chords of Strength - David Archuleta
This Bridge Called My Back - Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami (rape/suicide mentions)
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou (rape)
Draupadi: The Fire-Born Princess - Saraswati Nagpal
The Hybrid Chronicles - Kat Zhang (child abuse, violence)
Esperanza Rising - Pam Muñoz Ryan
Becoming Naomi Leon - Pam Muñoz Ryan
The Summer I Turned Pretty - Jenny Han
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan - Lisa See
Out of My Mind - Sharon Draper
Ghana Must Go - Taiye Selasi
Difficult Daughters - Manju Kapoor
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel García Márquez (violence, explicit sex, death)
Birdie - Tracy Lindberg
Burn For Burn - Jenny Han
Mãn - Kim Thúy
Huntress - Malinda Lo
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
From Heaven Lake - Vikram Seth
Two Lives - Vikram Seth
Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler (violence)
The Mango Bride - Marivi Soliven (abuse)
Between Two Worlds - Roxana Saberi
When the Elephants Dance - Tess Holthe (rape)
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - Haruki Murakami
A Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez (violence, explicit sex, death)
La Vie et Demie - Sony Labou Tansi - French (gore, sexual violence)
L'Enfant de Sable - Tahar Ben Jelloun - French (gender violence)
Girls of Riyadh - Rajaa Alsanea
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives - Lola Shoneyin
I Do Not Come to You by Chance - Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani
26a - Diana Evans
Cloth Girl - Marilyn Heward Mills
The Hidden Star - K. Sello Duiker
kemi’s journal - Abidemi Sanusi
Imagine This - Vickie M. Stringer
God’s Bits of Wood - Sembene Ousmane
Chronicle of a Death Foretold - Gabriel García Márquez (violence, explicit sex, death)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X (trigger warnings for rape, racism, death)
Roots - Alex Haley
Sultana’s Dream - Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
The Crossover - Kwame Alexander
I Am Malala - Malala Yousafzai
Death, Dickinson, and the Demented Life of Frenchie Garcia - Jenny Torres Sanchez
When Reason Breaks - Cindy Rodriguez
Los Perros - Lorea Canales - Spanish
The Secret Side of Empty - Maria E. Andreu
The Wake of the White Tiger - Diamond Shamsher Rana
Blue Mimosa - Parijat - best read in its original language of Nepali
The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison (child sexual abuse, racism, violence, animal abuse, body image)
Empress Orchid - Anchee Min
Annihilation of Caste - B.R. Ambedkar
Palace Walk - Naguib Mahfouz
How to Be Drawn - Terrance Hayes
When My Brother Was an Aztec - Natalie Diaz (explicit sex, drug references)
Boy With Thorn - Rickey Laurentiis
Between The World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates (police brutality)
Breath, Eyes, Memory - Edwidge Danticat
I Too Had A Love Story - Ravinder Singh
Can Love Happen Twice? - Ravinder Singh
Boys Don’t Cry - Malorie Blackman
If You Could Be Mine - Sara Farizan
Ash - Malinda Lo
Pig Heart Boy - Malorie Blackman (death)
The Pearl that Broke Its Shell - Nadia Hashimi
Brown Girl Dreaming - Jacqueline Woodsen
Umrao Jaan Ada - Mirza Hadi Ruswa - Urdu
Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together In The Cafeteria? - Beverly Daniel Tatum
Citizen - Claudia Rankin
This is How You Lose Her - Junot Diaz
Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth - Warsan Shire
Whale Rider - Witi Ihimaera
Mohamed Bzeek knew that. But in his more than two decades as a foster father, he took them in anyway — the sickest of the sick in Los Angeles County’s sprawling foster care system.
He has buried about 10 children. Some died in his arms.
Now, Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for a bedridden 6-year-old foster girl with a rare brain defect. She’s blind and deaf. She has daily seizures. Her arms and legs are paralyzed.
Bzeek, a quiet, devout Libyan-born Muslim who lives in Azusa, just wants her to know she’s not alone in this life.
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” he said. “I’m always holding her, playing with her, touching her. … She has feelings. She has a soul. She’s a human being.”
Of the 35,000 children monitored by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services, there are about 600 children at any given time who fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs, said Rosella Yousef, an assistant regional administrator for the unit.
There is a dire need for foster parents to care for such children.
And there is only one person like Bzeek.
“If anyone ever calls us and says, ‘This kid needs to go home on hospice,’ there’s only one name we think of,” said Melissa Testerman, a DCFS intake coordinator who finds placements for sick children. “He’s the only one that would take a child who would possibly not make it.”
Typically, she said, children with complex conditions are placed in medical facilities or with nurses who have opted to become foster parents.
But Bzeek is the only foster parent in the county known to take in terminally ill children, Yousef said. Though she knows the single father is stretched thin caring for the girl, who requires around-the-clock care, Yousef still approached him at a department Christmas party in December and asked if he could possibly take in another sick child.
This time, Bzeek politely declined.
Bzeek is a quiet, religious man who wants his foster daughter to know she’s not alone in this life. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
:::
The girl sits propped up with pillows in the corner of Bzeek’s living room couch. She has long, thin brown hair pulled into a ponytail and perfectly arched eyebrows over unseeing gray eyes.
Because of confidentiality laws, the girl is not being identified. But a special court order allowed The Times to spend time at Bzeek’s home and to interview people involved in his foster daughter’s case.
The girl’s head is too small for her 34-pound body, which is too small for her age. She was born with an encephalocele, a rare malformation in which part of her brain protruded through an opening in her skull, according to Dr. Suzanne Roberts, the girl’s pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. Neurosurgeons removed the protruding brain tissue shortly after her birth, but much of her brain remains undeveloped.
She has been in Bzeek’s care since she was a month old. Before her, he cared for three other children with the same condition.
“These kids, it’s a life sentence for them,” he said.
Bzeek, 62, is a portly man with a long, dark beard and a soft voice. The oldest of 10 children, he came to this country from Libya as a college student in 1978.
Years later, through a mutual friend, he met a woman named Dawn, who would become his wife. She had become a foster parent in the early 1980s, before she met Bzeek. Her grandparents had been foster parents, and she was inspired by them, Bzeek said. Before she met Bzeek, she opened her home as an emergency shelter for foster children who needed immediate placement or who were placed in protective custody.
Dawn Bzeek fell in love with every child she took in. She took them to professional holiday photo sessions, and she organized Christmas gift donation drives for foster children.
She was funny, Bzeek said during a recent drive home from the hospital. She was absolutely terrified of spiders and bugs, so much that even Halloween decorations creeped her out — but she was never scared by the children’s illnesses or the possibility that she would die, Bzeek said.
The Bzeeks opened their Azusa home to dozens of children. They taught classes on foster parenting — and how to handle a child’s illness and death — at community colleges. Dawn Bzeek was such a highly regarded foster mother that her name appeared on statewide task forces for improving foster care alongside doctors and policymakers.
Bzeek started caring for foster children with Dawn in 1989, he said. Often, the children were ill.
Mohamed Bzeek first experienced the death of a foster child in 1991. She was the child of a farm worker who was pregnant when she breathed in toxic pesticides sprayed by crop dusters. She was born with a spinal disorder, wore a full body cast and wasn’t yet a year old when she died on July 4, 1991, as the Bzeeks prepared dinner.
“This one hurt me so badly when she died,” Bzeek said, glancing at a photograph of a tiny girl in a frilly white dress, lying in a coffin surrounded by yellow flowers.
By the mid-1990s, the Bzeeks decided to specifically care for terminally ill children who had do-not-resuscitate orders because no one else would take them in.
There was the boy with short-gut syndrome who was admitted to the hospital 167 times in his eight-year life. He could never eat solid food, but the Bzeeks would sit him at the dinner table, with his own empty plate and spoon, so he could sit with them as a family.
There was the girl with the same brain condition as Bzeek’s current foster daughter, who lived for eight days after they brought her home. She was so tiny that when she died a doll maker made an outfit for her funeral. Bzeek carried her coffin in his hands like a shoe box.
“The key is, you have to love them like your own,” Bzeek said recently. “I know they are sick. I know they are going to die. I do my best as a human being and leave the rest to God.”
“I know she can’t hear, can’t see, but I always talk to her,” Mohamed Bzeek says. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Bzeek’s only biological son, Adam, was born in 1997 — with brittle bone disease and dwarfism. He was a child so fragile that changing his diaper or his socks could break his bones.
Bzeek said he was never angry about his own son’s disabilities. He loved him all the same.
“That’s the way God created him,” Bzeek said.
Now 19, Adam weighs about 65 pounds and has big brown eyes and a shy grin. When at home, he gets around the house on a body skateboard that his father made for him out of a miniature ironing board, zooming across the wood floor, steering with his hands.
Adam studies computer science at Citrus College, driving his electric wheelchair to class. He’s the smallest student in class, Bzeek said, “but he’s a fighter.”
Adam’s parents never glossed over how sick his foster siblings were, and they told him the children were going to eventually die, Bzeek said. They accepted death as part of life — something that made the small joys of living all the more meaningful.
“I love my sister,” the shy teenager said of the foster girl. “Nobody should have to go through so much pain.”
About 2000, Dawn Bzeek, once such an active advocate for foster children, became ill. She suffered from powerful seizures that would leave her weak for days. She could hardly leave the house because she didn’t want to collapse in public.
The frustrations of her illness wore on her, Bzeek said. There was stress in the marriage, and she and Bzeek split in 2013. She died a little over a year later.
Bzeek chokes up when he talks about her. When it came to facing the difficulties of the children’s illnesses, the knowledge that they would die, she was always the stronger one, he said.
:::
On a chilly November morning, Bzeek pushed the girl’s wheelchair and the IV pole that carries her feeding formula into Children’s Hospital on Sunset Boulevard. She was wrapped in a soft pink blanket, her head resting on a pillow with the stitched words: “Dad is like duct tape holding our home together.”
The temperatures had been bouncing up and down that week, and the girl had a cold. Her brain cannot fully regulate her body temperature, so one leg was hot while the other was cold.
On the elevator, her face glowed bright red as she coughed, her throat filled with phlegm, screaming for air. People in the elevator looked away.
Bzeek rubbed her cheek playfully and held her hand, waving it playfully. “Heeeey, mama,” he cooed in her ear, calming her down.
For Bzeek, the hospital has become a second home. When he’s not here, he’s often on the phone with her many doctors, the insurers who fight over who’s paying for it all, the lawyers who represent her and her social workers. Any time they leave the house together, he carries a thick black binder filled with her medical records and pages of medications.
Still, Bzeek — who had to be licensed through the county to care for medically fragile children and receives about $1,700 a month for her care — is not able to make medical decisions for her.
Roberts entered the exam room, smiling at the girl’s frilly socks and brown dress with fall-colored leaves.
“There’s our princess,” the doctor said. “She’s in her pretty dress, as always.”
Roberts has known Bzeek for years and has seen many of his foster children. By the time this girl was age 2, Roberts said, doctors said there were no more interventions to improve her condition.
“Nobody ever wants to give up,” she said. “But we had run through the options.”
But the girl, who is hooked to feeding and medication tubes at least 22 hours a day, has lived as long as she has because of Bzeek, the doctor said.
“When she’s not sick and in a good mood, she’ll cry to be held,” Roberts said. “She’s not verbal, but she can make her needs known. … Her life is not complete suffering. She has moments where she’s enjoying herself and she’s pretty content, and it’s all because of Mohamed.”
Mohamed Bzeek spends long days and sleepless nights caring for the bedridden child. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
Other than trips to the hospital and Friday prayers at the mosque — when the day nurse watches her — Bzeek rarely leaves the house.
To avoid choking, the girl sleeps sitting up. Bzeek sleeps on a second couch next to hers. He doesn’t sleep much.
:::
On a Saturday in early December, Bzeek, Adam and the girl’s nurse, Marilou Terry, had a celebratory lunch for the child’s sixth birthday. He invited her biological parents. They didn’t come.
Bzeek crouched in front of the girl — wearing a long, red-and-white dress and matching socks — and held her hands, clapping them together.
“Yay!” he said, cheerfully. “You are 6! 6! 6!”
Bzeek lit six birthday candles in a cheesecake and sat the girl on the kitchen table, holding the cake near her face so she could feel the warmth of the flames.
As they sang “Happy Birthday,” Bzeek leaned over her left shoulder, his beard gently brushing the side of her face. She smelled the smoke, and a small smile crossed her face.
Please consider donating to the GoFundMe set up in his name!!
For a growing number of American kids, porn is their sex ed. Now Pornhub is hoping to offer their audience some more formal lessons in how to be a healthy and happy sexual being.
On Wednesday, the massive adult entertainment destination took the somewhat surprising step of launching the “Pornhub Sexual Health Center.” They’re hoping the free sub-site will become a go-to resource for some of their 70 million daily users on all manner of topics, including STIs, sexual safety and how to manage relationships.
They’ve chosen Dr. Laurie Betito, a renowned sex therapist, to direct the site and they’ll also be working with a number of doctors, therapists and other experts to offer advice and answer questions. Corey Price, Pornhub’s Vice President, told Mashable, “Our goal is to provide our visitors with a site that has credible and insightful information, rather than have them scouring the internet.”
While it’s a database they’ll build up over time, a first look reveals they’ve started with the fundamentals — with answers to things like “Babies. Where do they come from?” and “Are there really three holes?” These might seems almost laughably basic to adult consumers of hardcore porn, but there are a lot of young people for whom these are very real questions.
Price told Mashable they weren’t aiming the content specifically at beginners. He said they simply want to appeal to “those who are looking for trustworthy sex tips and health advice provided by experts.” But it seems like they realize this could prove to be an especially valuable resource for their younger audience, who most likely isn’t getting comprehensive (much less sex-positive) sex ed in schools.
There are, of course, plenty of online sexual health and education resources, but for many kids, landing on sites like Pornhub is already their way into learning about sex. Porn can obviously teach you plenty about the basics and mechanics of intercourse, but there’s a whole range of other things — biology, health, consent, relating to intimate partners, just to name a few — that you won’t pick up from watching videos like “Big tits round asses” or “Sloppy throat games.”
So if they can slide their curious audience over to the PSHC while they’re already on the site, it could function as pretty useful one-stop shop for filling in the blanks left by spotty sex ed classes and the birds and bees talks given by often bewildered parents.
Holy shit their section on trans people was actually really good and not what I expected from something hosted by a porn site! If they had a containing various sexualities and whatnot as well, they’ll definitely have a good resource on their hands!
dededos
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
stormborns
origamiaround
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