#mashallahproject

MAS#ALLAH by Storybrook Media

i learned in elementary school families grow on trees. i had to put my mother, father, grandparents, cousins, people my parents told me existed all on green paper leaves. One vein down the middle gave it life. Attached to an ugly brown stump with branches I learned to make by drawing a ton of "v's."

you, yes you, were a little leaf. i don't remember how long ago when you left dance lessons and storytelling as the only memories of you i had. i became a ballerina, i loved to dance so much. but your little leaf grew arms and picked itself off the ugly stump. i think maybe it didn't suit you the way your structured looks do.

maybe you fell freely towards the ground, maybe you were scared. something blew you away and i never knew where the tumbling took you.

in middle school i learned families didn't always have green leaves. my father's leaf turned brown and the veins in my leaf grew smaller. i was so dehydrated and tiny, my mother had to take me to the doctor. while an IV sat inside my right vein, the doctor prescribed me Boost bars and Velveta cheese to gain weight. i was still a ballerina.

in high school i drowned in small sizes and remained unnoticed. i stuck my nose in books and my head mostly dreamed in images i'd never seen before. overachiever with gap sweaters tied around my waist so my womanhood didn't leak and freak people out. i broke up with ballet and it tore my heart apart to know, for my family, art is not life.

in college i learned to love, and i learned to love books even more. i traded satin shoes for essays on foot binding and body modification. somehow fascinated with pushing bodies to the extreme, i never felt like bodies could ever hold all of human potential. my stem was letting loose from the stump and i think you were taking root somewhere

after college i "abandoned" family for finding my personal potential. i knew you were somewhere nearby and maybe could understand. maybe knew something about art and how it could fit in my life again. just a blip on my radar though, you never responded to my signals.

i could cry endlessly for the anger and sadness i brought back from afghanistan. 

there are mountains in my chest, and when i breathe, blood pumps through the valleys and frosts the peaks with cold hate breath in solidarity with my father's land. the pain of avalanches cripples me, ripping through my chest cavity and dissolving guts into a severe lack of appetite. my eyes are tired from wetness and my skin drenched. every trail of salt down my limbs is a memory line connecting me to the hopelessness of my people.

1. the cousin who jokes about sometimes just wanting to put a gun to his head because he either gives in to corruption or protects his morality and falls prey to corruption's deadly hand.  2. the blast outside the us army base killing 8 children excited to greet a missing friend, not knowing his chest was full of mountains of dynamite.  3. widows laying in middle of the street pity pits, too disconnected to beg. 

when i sit in the sun, i can feel salt lines harden into heavy wrinkles and my eyes turn that perfect blend of blue green; an ocean rocking to the blood orange moon.

the moon burns with anger, that every night it rises to illuminate a country naked and scared. sometimes the moon doesn't rise to blanket my people with night and all they have are the stars in the mountains, flickers of minute long gas lamps to see just enough of what might still be sacred when there is no light. my country is stripped bare and this is why we wear burqas.

we wear them to protect ourselves from the gaze of humans with a front cover poverty complex. to protect the mountains, the weariness of seeking refuge all over the world only to feel phantom pains of land crying dry tears please help. i don't know how to help other than to empty skull oceans and excavate the mountains in my chest, taking a page from colonizers to hurry toward the secret of flawless civilization myself. self-colonization is the path to peace, but my body knows war now.

i'm thanking the wrinkles in my skin for allowing me to stretch into transforming the anger into reflection, into remembering the inherited mourning of conflict- a place my mother once wore mini-skirts in.

the holiest place can be found in a stranger's impassioned gestures

the gift of remembering is to practice protecting the sacred from neglect. ritual repetition landing in the hands of a 27 year old, Russian-Algerian, mother of 2, Bristol resident, habitual note-taker, multi-lingual, former professional swimmer who will now occasionally swim the English channel in full hijab.