People who I'd rather let fry in my DMs
On being ridiculously happy & tan in California & I May Destroy You
I just want to TW up front that I discuss rape and sexual assault in the context of the show I May Destroy You later in this newsletter so please do what you need to do to protect yourself.
I’m in California this week. Let me say that again: I’m in California this week. When you read that, it should automatically conjure up images of me living my best life. If you follow me on instagram, then you have been SPAMMED with photos of me tan, young, wild and free. A true text from me to a friend said “Confused why we don’t live in LA-I’m ridiculously happy and tan. I need nothing else.” Nothing else! Look, I used to shit on LA-more so to myself than anyone else but to me the city gave me stuck in traffic, vapid, skinny and sad vibes. But, in reality, I’ve CONNED myself here people because this place slaps. I know that because every time I pass a mirror I see this ridiculous smile on my face and my phone as we speak has a million and one texts from friends and people I’d rather let fry in my DMs saying “you’re fucking glowing.” Yes, I know-it's the California effect so please feel free to find me in bliss as I sip on an iced latte knowing that my soul thrives out here and plotting my return.
In other news, you have one job this week and that is to watch Michelle Coel’s I May Destroy You. To many, I am their go to pop culture beat, feeding them the latest things to watch. To my friend Al Co ( hi Al Co!), who will forever be the best bundle of joy I know, I am her chief curator of “I know you don’t have time to sift through the TV, so I’ll text you when you need to drop everything” and I take that role seriously. And text her I did after I binged Coel’s show. I had been putting it off because I knew it had (TW) sexual violence and rape and I just worried it would bring me down (not in “I shouldn’t watch heavy shit way” but in a “watching women get brutalized in ways society does everyday, including to me, is fucking hard and I’m not sure I need to be the intended audience of such entertainment.”) But, because Coel is a genius, it somehow isn’t heavy. Like it is but it isn’t. She makes it feel like your listening to a podcast that somehow gets to the fucking point real quick and yet is relatable, light, may I even say a little laughy (bc again Coel is a fucking genius) and bingeable. More than anything else, it's a kaleidoscope of perspectives and angles on the hypocrisy of those who rape and sexually assault (l cannot get out of my head Coel’s character saying about a guy who took off his condom mid-sex without her knowing “He is a rapist in the UK. Rape adjacent in the US and rape-y in Australia), the double fucked up standards of how sexual assault survivors are treated (aka when you’re a WOC whose raped and when you’re a POC queer male raped by a man), the shitty ways the people who you love but don’t love you the right way back gaslight, humiliate and blame you for assault, the messy and confusing ways your friends can be complicit in your assault (WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THIS ENOUGH-like when friends don’t realize your drunk and send you home with a guy and you wake up and don’t know how to feel because we don’t have enough words in the English language or vocab beyond betrayal to express how your friends somehow both fucked up and let you down) and how a WOC boss doesn’t always mean allyship (we don’t talk about this enough either, bc internalized white supremacy is a thing in POCs too, people). Coel also hits what community care looks like and it's something I don’t see enough when we think about friendships. So please, trust me & just watch it.
It doesn’t feel right ending this newsletter without mentioning the COVID crisis in India (this is a beautiful essay on how the diaspora is feeling about survivor’s guilt) and what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah (which I initially typed in this newsletter and deleted and then wrote again because I know what it means to write about these things as an Arab woman who wants a successful career and knows mentioning things like this can get you blacklisted which I mention so my non-POC readers understand the repercussions and burdens POCs face when talking about issues that have direct consequences for them), among many other heavy things in the world.
And with that, I leave you with a huge fucking hug because I’ve been feeling more like myself than I have in fucking months and part of that is being able to work on what I’m passionate about (aka Booksh3lf and writing to yall).
Lots of loveeeeeee xxxxx
Books I wish Read in High School
Death in the East, Abir Mukherjee: two story threads here focused on East London and India for a murder mystery that has you rooting for flawed characters, wondering if the colonized will always be working for the colonizer and filled with historical flowers that blooooom throughout the book. Think Sherlock but woke.
Read if: You too haven't touched a mystery since Nancy Drew and are excited for a historical crime thriller that grapples with an “enlightened man of empire.”
Books where you save yourself
Halal if you hear me, Safia Elhillo, Fatima Asghar: a collection of poems that smashes the idea that there is a correct way to be a Muslim by carving space for multiple, intersection identities while protecting those identities. I cried when I read parts of Halal if you hear me because it was raw to read someone tell me I get what it feels to “exist too much” (in the words of @zainaara), it felt too intimate and personal to know someone understood what it felt like to struggle to pull on the cloak of their identity because too many people were pushing on them other clothes and masks, because it felt weird to feel solidarity from another Arab woman because so few had shown it before.
Read if: you love beautiful writing and odes to the amazing women who write words for feelings you never knew how to explain and show us what showing up for ourselves looks like.
On Trend
The Vegan Remix: A Soulful Spin on World Cuisine, Afya Ibomu. Eleven Madison Park, a Michelin star restaurant in NYC, has gone vegan. This is huge because no Michelin star restaurant currently is vegan but Chef Daniel Humm doesn’t fucking care because the current food industry is unsustainable and he wants you to do more to give a shit about our planet. So in an honor of radical shifts, read Vegan remix which is a beginners guide cookbook for fresh baby vegans on how to make international cuisines.
Read if: You think vegan food has to mean no fun and only rabbit food because it doesn’t & my favorite thing here is how Ibomu is challenging how international cuisines can be vegan friendly (please tell my mom that!).
Not your typical eat, pray, love
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, a poetry book! Last month was National Poetry Month and I'm definitely guilty of reading more novels than poetry, this book highlights Woodson’s personal experiences, a “coming of age” series of vignettes if you will, when she thinks about her childhood memories growing up in the Jim Crow South.
Read if: you want to read something beautiful that Jacqueleine Woodson wrote to “understand who my mom was before she was my mother and I wanted to understand exactly how I became a writer.”
Decolonize your mind
The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York, Suleiman Osman: New Yorkers and many folks romanticize the idea of a Brooklyn Brownstone and in this book, Osman looks at the history of gentrification in BK. He states that this process started in the 60s and 70s when white college grads were looking for that #hipsterlife outside of the burbs or Manhattan. What used to be a place where immigrants and non billionaires lived, now these brownstones are valued at millions of $$$. Osman grew in in Park Slope about the before times of hella expensive DUMBO and Carroll Gardens.
Read if: you’re interested in real NY history and how the bougie parts of Brooklyn became what they are today through gentrification :(
Independent Bookstore Map:
I’m going to Portland in July so naturally I wanted to know the POC bookstore scene. I was pretty sure it was going to be hard to find something that fit the bill because..well.. Portland. I was sort of right-Third Eye Books is the only Black owned bookstore I could find in Portland (please HMU if I’m wrong) but they were forced to shut down during COVID. It sounds like they have fundraised enough to move their beloved bookshop to a new location so they should be hitting the scene soon and hopefully by the time I get there. Third Eye Books aims to be the number one supplier of African centered books in the Portland Metro area so check them out!