DAY 2 // HAYAT

The sum of formalities we tie ourselves into is just a sum of things to hang on to, some language in case we lost our spoken or written ones one day. All the thank yous, pleases, door holdings, these are a language of their own semantics cannot categorise, I call them a thread of human language, in fact I think they are the most humane ones, the most original and raw ones. Deprived from grammar rules, history and origins. Their origins are the first human, probably. Adam being too yearning for heavens and Eve trying to comfort him and the only way to do so is to pass her palm on his shoulder, asexual, missing any form of obligation for Adam to return when receiving, insignificant but significant at the same time. Something people who go on Oprah and write books about how to know the secret of a woman’s crossing her legs in front of you try to explain, the cheap books market holders. Body language, common language, whatever it is they call it. 

To wave is to want attention, to say hello, to prove you’re here. To nod is to say yes, to sex, to mass murder, to mass production of wide-screen televisions. 

I am crossed legs, frowning shouldered, blank faced now. It’s almost midnight and I am okay with living, I will go downstairs and chit chat with my parents whose bodies will be positioned in a way which they don’t position in front of everyone, for the parties to go on. I will say goodnight, leave a faint smile and squeeze my palm on the mug of tea I will take to my room with me. In a best-seller, I am barely mentioned, my understanding of this all doesn’t mean anything, unless I take it to a publisher to polish it and promote it to be the book of the books, the one which will get you company in bed, let you know when to tell your husband to stop stealing your money, tell you the secret of the secrets of why politicians always look down and then straight into the camera when deciding on a new war, because after knowing why and how we shake hands, rest our faces on our hands when being told we have six weeks to live, we would know things other don’t. Or maybe just be more careful next time we hold someone’s hand, maybe that would dodge us another pinch in the heart.  Be more careful to not huddle on our knees and kiss a stranger’s feet next time a stranger tells us what we write keeps them from tearing their wrists open, that would make us look to vulnerable, too out of place. Keep your shoulders proud for people to be more attracted to how you have your shit together through your spine, always smile, always position your body in a way to show that you’re playing the role and you’re okay with it, you’re having a good day, a good day.

WATER // RAGHAD

Today, I am 70% made up of acid.

I wake up and the walls of my belly are caving in. Everything is rising up until my windpipe is a pond of burning matter. I rage over geographical borders. I will explain to you; not everything that’s said nowadays is hallow. I know, history used to draw us into a picture, and if we looked up, it’s holy. If we looked down, it’s holy. And if we hit shore, oh land, all your water was holy. And I’m looking for the point in time where we got banished outside of self-love, through narrow doors, shoulders caved in like shame.

So I look to the north of you, land, and I see a golden crown on fire. It was still holy. I look south of you, land, and I see genesis, I see heaven cultivated with blood. It was still holy. Today, I don’t believe in your borders, only your skies. Transcending beyond your pride, I know you used to offer love in abundance. Arabia-felix, you were beating with joy. But I rage dipping my feet in your Gulf of oil pipelines and green waters, your Red Sea about to burst at the seam like it did for the israelites.

Today today I’m tired tired of your repetition, land. 

When we broke the holiest of waters and screeched into being it was that same water that sustained you. Your motherhood was massacred when you failed our mothers. 
Now let us learn how to belong to all of you

DAY 1 // HAYAT

The history of letting go in order to get in books started with Moses, they don’t mention it, but if you set foot close to his grave you’ll see the crowds of all the words God couldn’t sing into his left ear which he cut off, you’ll see the other half of the truth that wasn’t handed to us. A man’s desire to stay a king, to stay in between the walls that held his mother’s perfume, and just as I am trying, to stay a storyteller.

Sometimes, we need to shed parts of us to stay faithful to the stories we’re telling, Van Gogh and Moses cut off their ears, the modern storyteller misses a step on the staircase, forgets how much sugar to take with their tea, not pack books when travelling, fall in love more often than they should or claim that they don’t believe in love in the first place, publicly, in our papers or in cafés where atmospheres and people with better stories than us come to get their coffee are sold. In the romantic era, John Keats decided to leave Fanny Brawne for his body to ache for her so that his poems would swell. Milena and Kafka never touched, and that turned him to an insect, something so ugly and gruesome that the norm of crushing a bug was created. 
 I stayed in bed for so long the other day staring at a wall the furniture pieces started making noises afraid that my silence will eat me up and turn me into a sibling of theirs, or that’s how heavy my heart felt anyway. I couldn’t reply to the messages confirming the ride to my mother, it’s been over a year since I last saw her but I tell the nightstand with a short hand that it’s because of all that I put into the paper the night before, the paint chips on my eyelids and I refuse to not write again. This is how far one would go. If you’re not a Majnun howling with the animals, if your pain isn’t as big as the world the words will come out dull, the vocabulary will be home-work good enough only.

O ALLAH // JUMANA ALJOHANI

O Allah, I seek refuge in you from being among the ignorant.
O Allah, this life is inclined to drag people into the gutter,
And I seem susceptible to falling.
I stumbled and stumbled and each stumble seems to weigh more than the former.
O Allah, I seek refuge in you from the evils of my feelings, my seeing, and my hearing.
Make the trivial and temproray matters in life seem as they really are.
If forbidden matters in life seemed artistic,
Make me appreciate Your presence and Your mercy instead.
If forbidden matters in life seemed aromatic,
Make them malodorous and remind me that Paradise is just divine in all its forms.
O Allah, Your mercy is beyond all the power of mankind,
Beyond the Earth, the seas, and all that is infinite.
When everything, O Lord, seems like a forlorn hope,
When I am at the edge of giving up,
Just remind me of the reason why I’m here in the first place.

ICH // WIDED KHADRAOUI

This is your face,
a women says holding up a 
leaf from an azemmur
as a mirror
and this is your story, 
pressing dust into my palms. 
This land of barbed questions,
in spite of everything,
this is your only identity.
I didn’t recognize myself in the shade of the Aurès.

This is my inheritance, 
centuries of spilled blood, 
storing it for the alter of the ancient gods.
Cultivating false courage, 
this is how legends are destroyed.
From the mountains 
they still come unrepentant.
Still grinding galena,
still trying to rediscover the 
geometrical path to Home.

The nations who call themselves the free people.
The attempt to eradicate continues,
occupied, then ruined.
Yet history could not be eliminated,
which rooted itself deep 
soaked with lineage and 
the bold repetitions of stories
articulated by women who
can not differentiate 
between
warrior and queen, 
thinking they are synonymous.

For too long we have been silent as you 
attempted to block admission, 
imposing the shape of your words into our mouths, 
and
breaking loom after loom.
Under the risk of collapse,
on the verge of revolution 
we’ve finally realized that we too, are 
also the guest of eternity. 
Now, we can finally master tifinagh* 



*Azemmur = olive tree tifinagh= our language

TITAN // NOURA ALZUABI

Titan you are,
Rising up from the abyss of Tartarus reclaiming your right to exist in a world that shunned you from being.

I SAID:
Titan you are,
The mere idea of you has always been more than what they could handle,
has always been more than what their minds could conceive.
So, in return, they banished you to a darkness so… consuming that even the deepest part of the ocean couldn’t compare to.
Not realising that you were in fact the ocean.
That no darkness could dim the light that came from within you.

I SAID:
Titan you are

I SAID:
Titan you were

I SAID:
Titan you will always be
and I will keep saying this until you hear me, till you believe me, till you realise that you’re free now
that there’s no longer a reason for you to carry the world on your shoulders.

Titan you are.

NOTHING // JOHARA ALMOGBEL

It is a wisp
of nothing-

Of something.

And it drifts through.
marking you.
branding
wishing
hoping
shaping

Waiting.

For you to remember.
how to breathe

CONFESSIONS OF A SINNER // SAEED

Shame, the moment I felt it. It wasn’t just a ‘feeling’. It was nothing like experiencing an ordinary sentiment. It was nothing like I ever felt before, it was extraordinary, the bad kind. It was bad, overwhelmingly bad. Too many full stops in the previously acclaimed point, but I’m in utter frustration, having felt shame, having possessed it. Yes, there is no twist nor there is a clever conclusion within what I said, it was very much like a possession. I felt enslaved by the demon given shit, once I’ve gotten a hold to it I’ve fallen infatuated by it, I did whatever I was told by it. Perspective is a human being’s most valuable weapon, because if you’ve built up one, then your path of an eternity has been chosen, the beauty of it is that it is not fixed, it’s frequently changing. But, when you’re possessed by this demonic energy you’re asking for a long term contract, it is hard to stop even when you’ve realized it is too late, it demands to be a part of you and it demands to hold responsibility of your outcome.

Here I am telling you the story of Mrs Shame becoming my long life partner, my vital organ, my eve. Once it penetrated my soul it had built its fortress and marked its territory, it has floated viral within my spirit the moment it got access to me. You start to wonder whether whatever outcome is being produced by you is of sub consciousness or being responded to an order being made by the greatest demon Hell has to offer. Yourself, hiding behind the layer our lady friend Shame occupies, which happens to hide beneath this pure flesh God has given us. Once a self proclaimed philosopher/Serial killer called Charles Manson stated that God and the Devil are only self designed, and that the choice is yours. Well fuck you Mr Manson because   it isn’t that simple, there is creation and an even greater element in life called circumstance, where you’re subjected to act upon each and every moment of your life until you’ve become. To become. Do not take becoming for granted, because becoming is either a second chance or an end. It could end you. It could fuck you into oblivion, you’d be sliding over your way to oblivion before you’ve grasped awareness.

When is ever one a sadist in a scenario consisting a human being in a life? you always end being the masochist, one way or another, sooner or later, you will find your way around being one. Just another victim. Success is equally mortal to your pathetic vain existence, and that’s okay. Dominance is never forever because you will never rise above circumstance at a bumpy stop in your life, you rise and then you fall, you rise again and happen to slip off and fall off the ledge, one can never rise forever. I write to you people, this very note, to speak to you of how revolted I am by myself, and I am shameful to have ashamed God, by dragging on onto this path. Shame has stood tall and strong to a point where it is becoming visible on everyone else’s silhouettes and voices, it overshadowed whatever good that certain individual had to give to the world and their fellow contemporaries.

My mother always told me that a wrong committer will always accuse whomever in the sight of theirs of wrong doing, it takes a sinner to acknowledge another. But when does it ever take a deed doer to recognize another? even in the purest places with the purest of people, there is always vanity, selfishness, arrogance towards others.

We’re only one brain away from being animals, it always occurred to me that a savage is a human being letting go and getting lost into the void that hasn’t yet been filled. All the anger and dreams that reality has rejected. Mind me not associating civilization with reality, savagery to me is stepping out of civilization. Imagine a world without civilization; all the laws insignificant, mockery of monogamy, cultivation being taken as opposed to our current take-on, cultivation in violence. Imagine a world of elimination for survival. Here is a truth that stood too long on a corner as the elephant in the room. We are already eliminating each other, intellectually and morally, that is our nature, and have we really accepted it? We may deny it until our final day, but it is a life of God and evil, you either purify or destroy, and I’d never been purified by another human potential. Forgive me god for I have sinned, for I am about to pursue this path until I’m saved.

11. // REEM

do you ever feel like you've lost the ability to read? even the simplest of things? again. I look for him. I know how to cry really well. I said I'd learn how to die soon. but it's tricky. I never meant to hurt anyone but myself. I know I have a sharp tongue and millions of half-eaten thoughts shooting across my head. but I also know that I'm delicate (and all I want is not to be.) the first position is learning how to tell the truth again, the second sexual position is convincing your brain of your gentleness, the third is never looking your therapist in the eye because she'll know what you're thinking.

***

I like being alone when it feels that someone, someday, will walk into my room and engage me in ridiculous conversation and extreme images to provoke my nerves out of their slumber. I like ups and downs. I don't know how to be one thing for a long time.

***

how can I let go of this insane stability and give in to my well-dressed demons?

***

I want his entire world to close into mine. and then I want us to die. but I can't tell him these things because they don't make sense; he always needs something more practical out of my mouth.

***

I put a string of daisies around my head like some sort of primal being and danced for the world to see my issues roll out of my system.