Eid Mubarak to my Joe Jonas poster

I’m back in my childhood bedroom…

Eid Mubarak. I’m in my childhood bedroom and all the magazine clippings I taped to the wall at 12 — Joe Jonas with a chemically straightened perm, thigh gaps from a denim ad in Seventeen, Taylor Swift and Miley Cyrus in hippie headbands — are staring back at me. Remnants of who I was, who I wanted to be, who I was desperate to become.

A new body, a new face, new hair, a new home, the promise of social salvation. I wished I could squeeze my body into a different shape, eat cabbage soup and yogurt cups and will into existence thighs that didn’t touch, that some girl in my class wouldn’t call fat, and cheeks my aunties wouldn’t pinch. I wished I could shrug it all off, the weight, the worry. I wished I could wipe the brown off of me back then too. And sometimes, in the summers, I did try — with a wet wipe and wet skin, I’d scrub my knees, my shoulders, the parts of me that resigned themselves gladly and willingly to the sun. Sometimes, I’d ask my mom for help.

She was paler than me, her skin white against my tan hands when she held them across a street. Her name an Arabic one all the Americans could easily pronounce and hair straightened at the salon biannually (probably the Joe Jonas special). Only her accent gave her away, let the store clerks know we weren’t from here like they were from here, gave them free reign to follow us around the bedding department at Macy’s until my mother bared her teeth and unfurled her claws. HOW DARE YOU? I AM A PHYSICIAN IN THE COMMUNITY! YOU THINK I’D EVEN THINK TO STEAL SOMETHING SO UGLY? She was, sometimes still is, shy of the way some English comes out of her mouth, but never so when she’s been wronged. Never so when her children have been wronged. The words, in those moments, spill out loudly, freely, sharply. Anyway, you’ve heard this all before in the lines of someone else’s shitty diaspora poetry by now.

Every Eid, at around 8:15 a.m., I’d wake up and try to make it to the 9:15 a.m. morning prayer with my family. I’d fry my hair with a flatiron until it was mostly straight, apart from a few crumpled pieces in the back I couldn’t quite reach and decided were bearable. Downstairs, yelling and agitated shuffling would, like clockwork, take place about 10 minutes before we were set to leave. My dad was taking too long in the shower, my brother didn’t want to wake up, my mom was annoyed because why not? It was never a holiday without someone getting into an argument, without a silent car ride to the convention center where prayer was held, without the drive to breakfast right after like nothing had ever happened.

As a teen, I’d meet up with my cousins, with our friends, and swish around in our glimmering dresses, in the outfits we’d been planning all month. We’d wander around the hundreds of people in the center, pointing out cute boys from across the room, devising plans to coyly get their attention. Our methods often proved successful. After I moved to New York, we mostly gave up the ruse — we were not, are not, a family unit capable of being on time together. Eid prayer would have to, unless a miracle occurred, be done at home. I miss my cousins, I miss my friends, I miss the adhan, I miss feeling tethered to something bigger on those mornings. But our holidays have been far happier ones since.

I’ve had a long, arduous, two-fisted fight with religion for as long as I can remember — religion as an entity and, also, specifically my religion. (Growing up post-9/11 blah blah blah). All it took for me to come to terms with how I wanted Islam to look in my life was realizing MANY of our fellow citizens are small-brained bigots who’ve never known the juicy loving of a shawarma wrap (I’m a vegetarian now but idc, I know that shit slaps) and that many of the sisters at the mosque who scolded me growing up were ALSO small-brained (one of them told me my dad was going to hell because I didn’t know the meaning of some Arabic word??? My mom and I have an undying grudge against her). I just needed about two decades of mulling over to understand that I loved parts of religion and didn’t love others and that’s literally fine!

Aminatou Sow

wrote a really lovely post on just that this week. I don’t care if the Imams tell me I’m going to hell! I actually think my soul is going to be sucked into some glob, some singular power source we all come from in some astral plane, and exist blissfully and it’ll smell like fresh strawberries and vanilla and I’ll be reunited with everyone I’ve ever loved all at once and infinitely until my life force gets briskly ejected and sucked back onto earth and into some baby giraffe’s new, warm and wet body or something. I only believe in hell when I meet/am made aware of someone who really deserves it! That said, just know if I ever see any of you being remotely Islamophobic in my presence, I will channel the power of my mother and her triple fire sign chart and unleash it willingly, gladly, unto you.

Now that I’ve got everyone loosened up and in a good mood from talking about racism and religion, let’s do a roundup!!!!

Consumption Junction:

Objects, thoughts and media rattling around in my mind.

1. I recently (three days ago) learned how to embroider, and it has somehow reconnected my body to my brain. It’s like the heavenly, celestial body controlling me and my fate decided to plug me back into a power source, as a treat. When I first learned, I literally texted my friends from across the room “I’m fucked,” but lo and behold, I have steadily improved and REALLY ENJOY stitching!!!!! A friend and I have been sending photos of our little creations back and forth. If you need yarn in Kansas City, highly recommend going to Yarn Social. I just popped in because I forgot my kit in New York and also bought my mom an embroidery kit. She used to stitch Palestinian tatreez when she was younger, and she’s been having so much fun with it today. I’m going to ask her to tatreez one of my plain white t-shirts.

   

   it’s not perfect but I’m LEARNING and that’s what COUNTS

   

   Ali and I loooooove knitting!!!!!!

   

   mama doing her tatreez while Teddy (a cat I got for secret santa junior year of high school) supervises

2. I visited the New York Public Library to get a preview of their recently-acquired Joan Didion (and John Gregory Dunne) collection — a birth certificate, a high school essay, scrapped work, planners, recipes, party planning documents with bigwig names (would’ve killed to see Joyce Carol Oates maneuver a party). I think the collection warrants a longer post, but having a curator walk me through Didion’s belongings did for me what a kibble-forward enrichment puzzle does for a dog. I don’t really care if it’s basic to like Didion’s work and approach to it. I do.

   

   Didion’s birth certificate (a Sag queen like me) and Girl Scout certification card.

3. I hate AI.

4. Unfortunately, the IOF’s bombardment of Gaza (and Lebanon) has resumed. Children died today in their Eid outfits. Watching footage come out of the strip (and the West Bank as settlers target Palestinians there under the protection of the IOF) throttles me into a very specific kind of distress — the kind that makes me want to crawl out of my skin, maybe rip it off, step out of the humanity we claim to share, go elsewhere, be elsewhere, away from this earth. How can an entire international “community” watch babies be pulled from rubble, lifeless or barely clinging on, and shrug their shoulders? Continue to sell weapons? Continue on supporting what’s objectively and outright a genocide? If you’d like to buy me an Eid present (or if you have a conscience, idk) consider donating to Healing Our Homeland. They’re a grassroots org who does amazing work across Palestine.

Eid Mubarak angels. Free Palestine. Xx