Unlearning, Decolonizing
Kahn | Khan
A woman in a field of fruit, the gorgeous green vines tangled around your blistered brown feet, the bright purple of the falsa fruit almost as luminous as the sun beating down on your neck. You reach your arm up, lifting the weight of it agonizingly slowly, place one palm against your sticky forehead, feel the red hot warmth emanating.
You turn towards the well, the other women already there, dip your bucket in, drink, take scoops of water and splash your burning face. You put it back in the well, drink again.
Here and There
There, I am powerful — one of the most powerful in any room, even. I am the white woman, often the accomplice of the white man, but sometimes — many times — subject to his whims, and even his abuse.
Aside from my womanhood, my kind is King. I am still Brown, still Muslim, still This Me. But I am also light-skinned (more Wheatish than Brown), Sunni (not Shia, or worse, Ahmadi), Urdu-speaking, and English-speaking too, not Punjabi-speaking, Sindhi-speaking, Pashto-speaking; no populist provincial language graces my urban tongue.
First Kisses
Me: Freshly minted copper-colored girl of 13 new to the city. That city. Hailed from its armpit, Garden State, paradox of a neighbor.
Them: Subway-riding-since-birth, born and bred Manhattanites, the “Gossip Girl”-esque characters of my nightmares come to life, their doormen plenty, my anxiety palpable, the defense of sharing my former neighborhood with Stephen Colbert nonexistent at this point — it is a few years too soon for us to be watching Comedy Central.
The Fear
Content warning: This piece contains situations of sexual violence and abuse, as well as discussions of trauma and mental illness.
When I opened my eyes, the room was filled with a blinding white light. But it didn’t hurt me, because I was a part of it too — I looked down, eyes running over the skin of my Brown legs and torso, fingers reaching down to trace the outline of my navel, and I knew I was alive.