ya 3ayni

[shaytaani]

to cure or to cook.

Conservatives are terrible at keeping secrets, that’s their real poison. The two most conservative people I know like to swallow their pain until it chars their throats. Until they regurgitate every thought in a stream of conscious anger and regret. Until it burns the ears of every receiver before them, the heat penetrating through to their brains, setting alight their nervous systems and shaking them in their sleep hours later. Conservatives use censorship as their safe-haven, but the conservatives I know bottle their pain up, feeding them salt and vinegar as if to clean the wound but rather feeding the process. Until it’s removed as an entirely new pain now sweeter and stickier to swallow. Jars line the walls like a proud display – “this is what we’ve endured”. No, this is what we suffer from, daily. I’ve felt the sourness lick over the cracks in my oesophagus, left raw from overexposure and never able to heal. Constant exposure to the fragmented monologues performed in my direction when the wrong buttons were pushed. See all I’ve known is how not to keep a secret, and all it taught me was how to swallow my words better – chew first, and go slow. Small bites create less lumps in your throat. I wanna know how the two most conservative people I know never thought to change the channel when I saw women with my face tied to trees, tied to lampposts, dragged into long corridors while onlookers stood complacent, when children with my name became posters and target practice, I wanna know what I gained from knowing that life was somewhat sound when all I had was cracks in my throat caused by the razor edges of my guilt. How many times do I have to hear that I’m not enough? How many times do I have to chew my words until the bitter taste becomes commonplace, how long until the acidity destroys any shred of stomach lining left? The heat is setting my nerves on fire, and my hands are covered in strain marks from this constant tug of war between “tell me everything” and “your words keep me up at night”. Maybe someday this sound structure will crumble like your past, and I too will be nothing but rubble and ash.

[shaytaani]

On the eve of the rebel’s eclipse, the balancer teaches me how to resist.

[shaytaani]

you used to lock yourself out just to see if you could break in. don't kid yourself, girl – you always secretly had a key.

[shaytaani]

18-12-16 

break it down

[shaytaani]

Write, and write, and keep writing – but don’t you dare write me back into existence.

[shaytaani]

The English language is startling in that it allows a single word to refer, specifically, to so many different people and things. In an instance, three letters shift from representing one human in a particular time and context, to another while maintaining possession to a single speaker. In weeks, months, three letters once sacred no longer encompass the same mind and thoughts and memories they once did. The English language, much like the world from which it originates, uses words like lines on map to divide groups and individuals. During a specific period she is She, and after that she is a name and a distant memory.

[shaytaani]

A nation founded by white terrorism, asks brown people to dissolve into a framework built on the bodies of black people, persecutes them when they do, then silences them when they protest. You ask us to wave the flag of genocide in honour of your ancestors, while simultaneously forgetting our own, and those of the land we inhabit.

[shaytaani]

There's so much that frustrates me and I can't put it into words a lot of the time without feeling like an actual sociopath. I want to let go of the past and stop thinking about all those centuries of persecution. It's so hard to when it's all reflected in the reality we face today. Faith has always been so fluid with me, but identity - this connection to a community whether by name or involvement - has always been so strong. I look to the mountains, where my people live, and I read articles where their names are left out and I think about how this little space of freedom has erased them from the discussion because nobody can see them. Does anybody know that this is all a facade? That they are suffering? That they've been in the shadows for all of civilisation and have been hijacked by an absolute monster? Why is the media saturated with either hate speech or singular anti-Islamophobic 'reasoning' that fails to address the evils of sectarianism that have left minorities gasping for air for centuries upon centuries? I can't relate to 99% of it anymore. I want Muslims to feel safe and to express themselves freely, but I want those in the majority to also stop driving my family into the dirt. Stop talking over us. Stop vilifying us. Why isn't there any historic texts for the little people? Who is researching, listening, reaching out? Nobody. Literally nobody. I want representation, I want another girl to tell me she understands. I'm sick of feeling like an alien. I hate that I cling to identification so much to help me understand everything, and at the same time, I hate that I really don't know what I'm clinging to because the hope I had to tracing it back is completely gone. Nobody wrote it down. Nobody knows, because, again, nobody is listening.

[shaytaani]

Part daughter of Yasmeen, part daughter of Zahra, pressed between the pages of a verbal history and frozen in time, now in a land where the waters do not revive her. A descendent of battle boots and dancing shoes, rejected from glory, and deprived of pride, with legs that won’t carry her across ancestral fault lines. A wholewheat woman, ground to dust, folded flat then burst apart, served fresh from the furnace, her flesh is torn, she’ll glisten with oil for the mouths of lonely pioneers.

[shaytaani]

There isn’t anything poetic about watching your ancestry burn on the news. Or about wanting to peel parts of your skin off because they remind you of ideologies that tortured the hands that fed the hands that fed you. It’s not about the right string of words to describe how existing so remotely means you’re constantly yearning for a place that rejects you.

There is nothing poetic about a father who lost his mind in 1975, who looks at pictures of himself posing with his comrades and his rifle and smiles. Nothing poetic about wanting to knock the sense back in or back out of every mid century brain you encounter, or every young bloomer who reeks of his father’s poison.

There’s absolutely nothing poetic about mourning the deaths of those you could’ve easily have killed by existing. Lives lost that would’ve killed you in your sleep days prior. When you cross those enemy lines, in your head or on the maps, do you commit to their rules or do you invade with your own? When you’re being pushed either way, do you sit on their borders and drive a stake in the ground? When the one man who will let you live has pushed the whole world onto its knees, do you thank him? Or do you sit in silence and let the guilt kill you itself? There’s nothing poetic about cities burning in your name, or wars being fought in your home, or mothers warning you of outdated beliefs because of outdated reasons, or when you silently agree with her because a part of you knows that she’s dead right. Or when you take away the sensationalism and hold the pieces you actually possess and realise that beyond headlines and television screens and think-pieces and revolutionary art, that your tiny home in 2016 is a time capsule hosting the sins of those who came decades before.

[shaytaani]

To the Great Powers,

How can you condemn those who arrive on your shores when it was you who tore them from their land, made a hell out of their skies, and forced them into the sea?

[shaytaani]

More and more, I think about how I got to this point. More and more, I think about who’s standing next to me while I’m here.

[shaytaani]

Tartus.

All hope diminishes when the peaceful front can no longer see the light of day. Just like all centuries that came before this, we'll cling to false hope and maybe someday we'll be able to live side-by-side. But for now, only the lost will know peace. Ya Allah, please save us all; preserve what is precious, and let flourish all that is yet to grow.

[shaytaani]

Reflecting on potential opportunities, recent projects, beautiful friendships, support units, dreams and all the things that go in between.

[shaytaani]

Oranges trigger so many nostalgic memories for me, I absolutely love them. They remind me of: • freshly squeezed juice when I was a child • the best part of the fruit salad my mum would pack me for lunch • 9pm after dinner dishes have long been washed, my mum peeling oranges into a wooden bowl and walking around the house, feeding us all one-by-one • this perfume my mum use to wear that smelt like orange blossom, imbedded in every single one of her cardigans. • orange blossom water, one of my absolute favourite scents, infused into every single traditional dessert we make for celebrations and Eid. • the healing powers of citrus fruit, how all we ever wanted was rows and rows of tress filled with oranges, lemons, limes and mandarines. • how even to this day I hold the orange in one hand, the wooden handled knife in the other and peel it just like my mum taught me, to feed myself when my body feels weak. Sometimes I'm really as simple as a girl who used to wear her mother's cardigans to feel safe again. Sometimes a dose of Vitamin C is really enough.

[shaytaani]

Trip to Sinai and Petra, A bedouin woman's head-dress, 1938.

Bedouin girl (Egyptian type) bringing in the oranges, 1938. 

Source [x].

[shaytaani]

when you moodboard over the moodboard someone moodboarded for your moodboard