Sometimes we patch up our wounds
and so the only place we can bleed
Is from our mouths with our words
But what we forget is that with the blood
Comes fragments of the razors we were cut with

-Toxic

Dear Muslim Women

Dear Muslim women:

can we love & accept each other without tearing each other apart? Is it possible to appreciate women for being hijabi fashionistas, or wearing hella thick eyeliner without judging the content of their character? Without questioning their devotion to modesty or God? When we make these underhanded remarks under the guise of reminders I wonder how much benefit comes from it. Sometimes "reminders" can be more harmful. I have always found that reminders that are rooted in shaming people have never been productive. There are millions of muslim women on this planet and to expect that they they will all interpret and act upon things in the same manner as you is a disservice to this faith. Understanding religion differently than someone else does not make you wrong, it does not weaken your faith, it does not take away your commitment to this community or God. So can we allow for women to express themselves while we hold them gently and cheer for them along the way? Is this possible?

To my beloved Muslims

Hi Muslims,

Make sure you're properly hydrated and eating well. Try to make time to pray regularly. And make Dua for everyone. If you, by Gods grace, wake up tomorrow say alhamdulilah. If you're feeling a little scared walking outside recite ayat ul Kursi iA its a source of protection. The weather is supposed to be a little chilly in the next few days so dress warmly. If you can, call/msg/text those who you have wronged or have wronged you and try to mend relations - it will make you feel better. Take a few minutes tomorrow and completely unplug from social media and just sit by yourself, you might gain some new perspective.

Our prophet pbuh said that our community is like one body and if one part of the body is in pain, then the whole body is affected. So what I'm saying is that I care about your well being because it is intrinsically linked to my own. Please take care of yourself and each other.

Ok goodnight. Salaams

If I could tell you all the words I really want to say. 
    
       Spell out all the feelings and emotions, rising, brimming, spilling.

If I could tell you all the words I really want to say instead of the vile poisonous jibberish that topples out,


                                                          If I could 'remove message' every meanly modulated word that came out of my mouth like I can on Skype, 

    If there were a drop-down language option to transliterate emotion to word.  From mind to pen. 

Put pen to paper.

If I could know that you really heard me the same way you R'd a bbm message, 

If I could courier you my thoughts running free and wild in my mind, have you sign off when you receive it.  

Three  Ten business days later.

If I could source code all the anger.

Show you the bits that matter.

I would.     Without question. 

Without pause.

Without wax.

do not call on my strength.

do not reflect the steely hardness in my eyes.

do not reward the roughness of my hold as we chafe against each other.

do not drink in the firmness of my inflection.

do not lap up the bitter taste of my words.

do not sing praise to my withering stare.

do not applaud my clenched fists.

instead,

instead.

appeal to my softness,

draw out the saltine tears that refuse to well up,

run your hands along my skin; go on, 

discover the dimples of my flesh,

hear the tremble in my modulation,

taste the vulnerability on my lips,

open my palms and sand down the calluses,

to be hard is effortless.

it takes everything, 

everything.

to remain soft,

let me be soft.

-I cry when I'm angry

How often we forget
That all the evil he has
Created is within us
When we ask him
To protect us from
All the evil he has created

Isn't it strange that
People can leave and
Live inside us simultaneously

I'm good at
Detailed empty
Conversations
That make me
Feel empty
In detail

-At least they are comfortable

So tell me
Do you drink
Because you're empty
Or are you empty
Because you drink

-numb alcoholic

Don't be alarmed when

Introverted polite 

Strangers 

Acquaintances 

Tell you their deepest secrets 

Don't hate them

Maybe they held onto darkness 

Alone

For six years 

Lend them your heart 

Lend them your heart 

Lend them your heart 

Lend them your full heart 

For they might not remember tenderness 

-Lonely

They were empty
So first they ate us
(and we let them)
Then they decided
They were still hungry
So they ate themselves too
And now there's nothing left
Just the words they use
To fill the emptiness
"Mountains of liberation"

[and we believe them]

-Power

To Imagine an Undefined Liberation.

There were two white women. One questioning my Bangladeshi friend about why she wears the hijab, wondering if Kolkatta and Bangladesh are two separate countries. Told her to use the Google machine. Upon one of my classmate's insistence, another hijabi, I explained the Partition of '47, the War of '71. Tired, I thought, if I did not make the deliberate decision to educate myself on my country’s history, I would be spouting out the accounts that my family has put together over the years – an invaluable inheritance, but a limited one all the same. Although I am looked to as a reference for Indian history, no one, no education system, equips me with the knowledge I need to educate myself and others. This is how the system inflicts violence on third world and colored bodies. We are brought in, in times of fascination, as points of reference and just as quickly, we are ignored, shoved back into the shadows. We are left trapped in a maze, like mice, looking at only what is in front of us and nothing more. Lost. Education allows us to rise above the tricky alleyways and illusionary dead ends—it gives us the words we need to articulate and understand how history has betrayed us and how we continue to betray history. Though I am still working to escape the confines of this trap, to know that white prodding is also a form of injustice and a tentacle of the overarching system for the Otherized student means my hands have discovered and are slowly unraveling one dimension of this artificial maze.

The other white woman’s laptop brandished a laptop sticker, “Well behaved women rarely make history,” but in reality, it is only ever well-behaved cunning white women who make history, because history is written by them and their white associates. Everyone else is treated as accessories, as condiments, to be put in or to be left out when stirring the white history soup. When and if we are included, we melt into whiteness, like salt in water, we become invisible, disappear, look just like them. You can taste us, but only to the degree that the white scholar wants to taste us. Anything beyond that, we are trashed, dumped out, offered to the vultures. The same ones circling over our hearts and minds. Watching our actions and our words. Any swift movements. Waiting to pick apart anything worth eating, so that we are forced to keep secret anything we believe is worth knowing. We cannot brandish it or speak on it, with the fear that if we are found out, our vulture friends and colleagues will surely consume us. Without warning.

I am struggling to understand the idea of a safe space, when even when we rip out our hearts and offer them to our kinfolk, we still risk the possibility of being trampled over for the sake of white validation. This trauma and this vulnerability indicate that we must look beyond skin politics. Though whiteness is stripping us and though our home is with our racial community, oftentimes, we find these lines violate one another – and we find that even in the arms of our Brown sisters and brothers, there are traps and cages set up to clamp down on our skin. To leave us exposed. It leaves me wondering, where can I go? To be understood and to be the authentic me. To move beyond my skin, but to also be liberated by it. Where I can find a mazeless land, untroubled by vultures.

Sometimes we forget that
Raising wolves to be gentle
Makes them gentle wolves
Its raising wolves to be accountable
That makes them men

-Your softness is not enough

He thinks he’s wooed me. He thinks he is a gentleman. Dashing,charming, courting. The flowers. The impromptu tickets to no where and everywhere. He thought his days of effort and work had plateaued when she helped unzip his pants, car windows fogging up, breath speeding up.

He pulls out of a kiss, whispers, "I love you." There’s pride in his voice-not the kind of pride that carries arrogance-but the kind of pride the little five year old neighbour holds in his voice after his first bike ride without falling. I smile, eyes crinkled, laugh lines deepening. There is a desperate yearning to hear the words like my lungs are finally filling with oxygen. Quite literally-it isn’t a great feeling-it burns through you like a good scotch and oh, oh, ohhh, it is so painfully good. What is it about a complete stranger’s love that we crave so much? How do we grow up being loved unconditionally and yet are willing to throw away everything and everyone we love for a nobody-for somebody else’s somebody?

In the ever dark and twisted place that is my mind one would presume I’d be more skeptical in my response; at the very least in the way I respond. But I reply with the eagerness of a puppy-the inner me flinches. The overpowering need to be touched from inside is too strong-that void that’s chronically starving to be filled; that is why I say, "I love you too" with conviction.

I know with utmost certainty that he does not love me. Absolutely. Does. Not. I’m a force to be reckoned with. I say that with no pride. Rather it is with shame and disgust-the appropriate word here would be overwhelming. I am positively, unceremoniously overwhelming. Take it how you may.

It has always been a choice of being in or out. There is no dipping your toes at the edge of the water to see if you’ll adjust to my temperature. You dive into the unknown, whether that’s the coldest chambers of my heart or the hottest flames of my amygdala (the region of the brain responsible for love, angsts and other fucks).

How do I tell him he only likes me? Without sounding condescending? Pretentious, haughty. I am after all undoubtedly condescending, pretentious and haughty on the best of days. He likes sex with me. He likes the idea of me. He is flirting with the idea of loving the idea of me. But me? No no no, he does not love me. Most people like or even love the idea of me. But the reality is so much uglier. Not the ugly-beautiful kind of ugly. The kind of ugly that makes you feel guilty. The kind you can’t make eye contact with. And no one likes to feel guilty like they’re tip-toeing on egg shells in the crevices and cracks of life where they want to feel most comfortable.

What he wants is sex. And love. But without the love. But my love, it’s conjoined twin is intensity. It hits you hard; so painful you may even like it if you like to get spanked. Joke. My humour is warped-part of that dark and twistiness.

I am all consuming. Fire. And I want a love that is all consuming. Anything short of that is a friend with benefits. Not even a good friend with benefits; it’s the kind of benefits where you’re actually getting more ripped off being in the union-your dues get you nothing.

Why has emotional intimacy become the hardest hurdle to surpass? I feel like a common whore pushed to the streets after you fucked me. See. Intense. Over whelming. I know. But tell me, what is the difference between me and the whore if you are able to show me shamelessly and effortlessly every inch of your carcass, able to exchange unknown bodily fluid with me without question but spit me out when I want to exchange feelings? Oh right, the whore gets paid. Dark and twisty. Dark and twisty. Dark and twisty.

I am admittedly arrogant. Vain. My demeanour is arrogant even when my intentions are not. And with that, let me tell you I am perspicacious. I hate it. It is a curse and a double-edged sword. How do you see the bigger picture and then sit around waiting for everyone else to catch up? (She said so humbly).


-while we're on the subject can we change the subject now

8 Reasons Drake is a more palatable candidate than all the existing candidates:

1. He’s a person of colour

2. Related to 1 above, he wears his beard in solidarity with the plight of Muslims. In fact rumour has it that is name is actually Drake Mohammed Drizzy but he keeps his half Muslim identity under wraps to win the election.

3. He has shown considerable on the ground work for lower and lower-middle class Muslims in important political initiatives like subsidizing Habibiz Sheesha Lounge, proving that he does not believe that Muslim Middle Eastern practices are barbaric and is open to supporting the larger multiculti agenda

4. He is aware of the plight of people with disabilities given that he was shot in Degrassi and has been stuck in a wheelchair until the drop of his first album

5. Related to this, Drake does not show stigma to people with mental health issues and has stated publicly that he was “running through the six with his woes” and “you know how that [stuff] goes”, illustrating that he is not only able to work with the rest of us in federal policies that will mediate the degenerative mental health effects of capitalism, but that he has experienced them

6. He performed in Ryerson as a show of solidarity with students because he started from the bottom now he’s here [and he knows that #osap #struggle]

7. He bases his stances and initiatives that relate to women, specifically women of colour on recommendations that his partner, Serena Williams has made. Serena Williams does not acknowledge shrieking white fans but she does acknowledge fans of colour based on years of racial antagonism on the field

8. I’m just saying he can do better

How is the manspread 

Any different from any act of violence 

If it makes you stay still

And hold your breath 

Until the end of the ordeal

-Harmless Masculinity

When they ask 
Tell them I miss home 
Like I miss a love gone bad 
I don’t miss you 
I miss the love 
I miss who you were 
We decayed and flourished 
We had to leave for us to grow 
Just caught glimpses of each other 
I had to be gone 
But nothing will ever taste 
Like your first love

-For Kenya 

Long hours and
Low compensation
and Low levels of
exposure to sunshine
Make us sore and raw
Not our bodies
As much as our souls

-for women who stopped smiling years ago

Don't climb your way to glory 

On the carcasses of those who held you

And expect the pile of skulls 

Not to fall in on itself

Bones were deliberately built to disintegrate 

Unless nourished with truth

Is there anything more untrue 

Than digging out what belongs under the earth

To climb to the skies?

Where are You going, love? 

-Down to Earth ft. beautiful souls 

SEARCHING FOR A HOME WITHOUT WAR.

July 7, 2015aminnasyedAfghanistan1 CommentEdit

I was born in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 1967. I have an older brother and sister and one younger brother and two younger sisters. My father was a well respected prosperous progressive minded business man. The Afghanistan I grew up in was stable, peaceful, and rapidly progressing economically. We had the best airlines. As a kid I wanted to become an engineer when I grew up.

In 1973 when I was only 6 years old I remember we were in Kandahar, Afghanistan listening to the radio. All the regular programs that normally played were cut off. The military were issuing statements with some music playing in the background. Finally, it was announced that there had been a coup. The former present of Afghanistan, Mohammed Doud Khan had been disposed of by the Communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. A few days later, we found out that the president, along with the rest of his family (with the exception of one niece) had been killed.

The communists started filling up the government seats. They came up with issuing decrees every month or two with new rules and regulations mainly towards economic reforms and political structures. They declared they were going against the “feudalist society” and “backwards Islamic thought”. They started introducing a very communist oriented secular ideologies and systems. This new government was not welcomed by the people. They saw it as foreign and definitely did not represent Afghans. The communists knew this and started cracking down on anyone they assumed was unsympathetic to their way of thinking. People were arrested for no cause, people started disappearing, there were raids into people’s houses in the middle of the night. My father was an influential man in Kandahar and he was vocal about his dislike of the new government. Once the government heard about this, they started harassing him. They had actually come to our house to arrest him twice but he was out of town so they missed him. A lot of his friends started disappearing.

In 1979, my father passed away. He had a heart attack due to the intense pressure and stress he was under. In that same year, the Russians invaded Afghanistan. By there was a civil war going on mainly in rural areas of Afghanistan. People were resisting the government which scared the Russians. When the invasion happened, the conflict transformed into a war. People started taking up arms and joining the Mujahideen to fight against the Russians. The war escalated into the cities. The communist government became desperate to recruit personnel for their army. They started conscripting anyone male who had an able body as young as the age of 13. They tried to conscript us too. By this time I had two married sisters. One in Kabul and the other in Pakistan. My eldest brother, mother, and younger sister went into hiding while my younger brother and I made the intention to flee to Canada. We paid a Pakistani smuggler around $200 USD (which today is equivalent to $10,000 USD). He took us from Afghanistan into Pakistan in a car. It was just my younger brother, me, and one of my uncle’s. We by passed the border security and arrived in Quetta. We stayed here for a few days and then set off for Karachi. My family in Afghanistan eventually joined us here too however, they did not want to flee to Canada with us. They felt the war would eventually stop and they could return to Afghanistan. My brother and I felt otherwise. The Pakistani government wasn’t very friendly to us. There was no school, no jobs, we wanted to get out. We had decided on Canada because we had heard they were welcoming refugees, very multicultural, and was a peaceful country. We waited in Pakistan until the smuggler had gotten all of our papers and passport ready. I was 18 and only knew a little bit of English while my brother was 17 when we hopped on a plane to come to Canada. I felt happy to leave Pakistan because it didn’t offer us anything but I was also upset with our situation. Our lives had turned completely upside down because of the war. We used to own businesses, had an income, and go to school, now there was nothing.

We arrived in Montreal, Canada in 1985. I saw someone with a uniform on. I didn’t know who he was or what position he had but I stopped him and told him we were refugees. He then directed us to someone else who took us to immigration. We stayed in a refugee hostel for the first few months. There were a few other afghans there. A week later my cousin had also arrived. He eventually left Montreal for Toronto because of more employment opportunities. My sister and her husband and two children from Pakistan also came to Montreal not too long after we did. We all stayed in one apartment. My brother and I got a $150 allowance each from the government. We started to look for work. I didn’t speak too much English but I could read signs. I found out where some manufacturing sites were and started going from site to site to see if there was employment opportunities. I eventually landed a job at a t-shirt printing company that paid what was then minimum wage ($4/hour). My brother got a similar job in another textile company. I hopped from job to job trying to look for better pay. At one point I worked in paint company but had to leave because I had an allergic reaction to the paint (all my body hair fell off). We lived in poverty. My brother eventually enrolled in a college and then went to university to study engineering. I was suffering from depression and was in no state to go to school. My sister and her husband and family eventually left back for Pakistan in 1986. I moved to Ontario in to find better employment opportunity. I moved in with some distant family. I was working and living with them until 1989. That year I went back to Pakistan and got married. I came back not long after the wedding and sponsored my wife. 6 months later she arrived in Canada. We lived together with my cousin who I had shared a hostel with in Montreal. My first child was born. After my second child was born in 1992, I moved to western part of the GTA. There were no Afghans here, they all lived in the eastern end. My brother moved from Montreal to live with me after he got an engineering job in Toronto. I moved from job to job trying to find a stable job that made ends meet. Up until 1998 I worked as a pizza delivery man, working night shifts, living off of welfare and I still hardly made ends meet. Finally in ’98 (after my 3rd child was born), I got a job at a manufacturing company that paid much better than a pizza delivery man.

During the 2008 recession I was laid off from my job. I decided that I should own my own business instead so, in partnership with a distant family member, I bought a franchise. The business was a complete failure. I was working 70-80hrs a week just barely making it run and making ends meet. I enjoyed the customers I had but it was a draining job and the head office was a nightmare. I sold it in 2013 and am currently working for a small manufacturing company. I have 3 girls. 2 have graduated from university and one just graduated from high school and is entering university in the fall. I find the Canada I am in today is nothing like the Canada that welcomed me in. I am thankful that I am settled now and am no longer stuck in the newcomer stage because if I was, than I would be suffering greatly as the current conservative government is very xenophobic. On top of that, Canada isn’t very good at creating jobs for the low-income folks like me. They are getting rid of manufacturing jobs and replacing them with only part-time or very low paid jobs. All I want is for my kids to have stable jobs and be positive contributors to society. People from my part of the world like sons but I don’t like sons. I like my girls.

-Ahmad

https://citizensofwarproject.wordpress.com