A boy. A village. A death.

 

There was a boy.

There was his family.

There was a village.

There was a sheikh.

There was Islam –

There was this boy.

 

His memory grievously entangled itself

As a rope around his neck,

Around his neck was

A rope,

A loss,

A life, not to be lived.

 

There was a boy

And this boy was my friend.

We were teenagers &

He was funny,

Weirdly beautiful,

Wildly queer –

 

Allah didn’t approve.

The community didn’t approve.

The sheikh didn’t approve.

His family didn’t approve.

His village didn’t approve.

His entire being

Disapproved,

Rejected,

Shunned.

 

And so the rope

Landed on his neck,

Somewhere inside I felt

The tightening of his life

Not to be lived,

 

And I can still feel the ripples

of this tragedy

Causing me pain,

Robbing me of my friend

Over and over and over again.

 

Reading at CEMB’s Pride event in London

 

Back then,

There was no word for it.

There was no word for who he was.

In my language,

They called him “Naag Naag”

Meaning “woman-woman” or “double-woman”.

Meaning he was not normal, in their eyes.

 

But in my eyes

He was just a funny kid!

So hilarious,

Weirdly beautiful,

Wildly queer.

 

Here comes the memory of the rope again,

The rope around his neck

That rope.

Me robbed.

Him gone.

 

Back then,

 

There was the sheikh,

There was the family,

There was an entire village,

There was a fuss;

There was them.

 

And then there was us –

He made me laugh

He made me laugh so hard

I could not stop and

 

 

I was naive and ignorant and

He was unsure of his own body but always
we had fun,

Laughing and talking, and giggling, and running;

Him smiling his gorgeous smile

And his electric laughs and yes –

Sometimes

He was confused

But oh…… so, so, so, so lovely.

 

I tried to kiss him once.

Turns out, he was into the boy next door.

We almost died laughing

At the absurdity of it all.

 

He told me

“I don’t know why but I feel…nothing”

I could not verbalise

That I knew,

I knew he was different.

I knew that was okay.

He was my friend,

I loved him

And he made me laugh.

 

That rope again.

The rope tangled around his neck.

The rope,

The pain,

His face,

All horribly gone.

 

Every minute,

Every moment,

Every memory…….

is a union of

the rope & his character.

 

The rope, painful.

His character, beautiful.

His tales, strange

and told with utter wit.

 

The day they found him out

is another vivid

haunting memory.

They beat the crap out of him

and the boy next door as well.

They told my parents

I wasn’t allowed to hang out with them anymore.

 

Remember,

 

There was a village.

And in this village,

there was a sheikh.

And there were whispers

 

He is gone now.

The rope around his neck

The dark mark of the whispers.

He never got a chance to find answers to his wonderment.

 

There was a boy

 

In that village,

 

With his family,

 

And their sheikh,

 

Within Islam.

 

And

 

His name was Abdi.

 

His name was Abdi.

 

His name was Abdi.

On my identity (a poem about Identity politics)

So you Simplify

Exemplify And

Ratify in an attempt to

Dignify

Vilify in an ‘oh I just criticize’

Exotic-fy and then go and Fetishize

 

This is to demonize

Dehumanize in an attempt to compromise

 

It is simply Shallow and Ignorant

And damn right Narrow and Arrogant

 

On my identity

All that makes me

The complex but non-conforming

The Fluid and non-believing

The Rapidly growing

Constantly changing

A million steps towards

Not one thing

But a million things

Image courtesy of @De Balie Amsterdam

 

It is impossible to Simplify

While I do not want to horrify

you

I do want to amplify

that

You’ve no idea what I have to nullify,

no

 

On days that I am horrified

By your utter ignorance

on my existence

 

On my identity

All that makes me

Confronts me

Discards me

And sometimes

Regards me

 

You are not an expert on it

In fact far from it

Sorry, you can not think for me

No thank you I think, I have saved myself

For me, It is my mind that is worth saving

And I think I already did that.

 

No, I am not your posting

Neither your constant giving

Neither your well-meaning

In fact, I am neither or none

 

On my identity

The complex but non-conforming

The fluid and non-believing

The rapidly growing

Constantly changing

A million steps towards

Not one thing

But a million things

 

With an alienated past

And appropriated present

Further Humiliated by such narrow views

 

Newsflash,

This is my narrative

This is my story

This is my identity

 

I,

I,

I am

The expert on it

So you listen to me dammit!

 

This left, right, center and in-betweens

I do not play for any of these teams

If I were to ever choose a side

I will choose one called

JUST A FUCKING HUMAN

 

Poem by By Uncia aka Halima Salat for #CelebratingDissent Festival

@De Balie Amsterdam

WTF Islam’s Homophobia – a tribute to #LGBTQ+

#LGBTQ+

They tell them to be ashamed

“It’s a sin”, never, ever named

“It’s their choice”, they are blamed

“It’s a curse”, they are told

Shunned,

For being who they are

Targetted

For loving their mate

 

Islam’s homophobia by the way,

Dates back

way back

to that leader

who thought

it was abomination

to be born this way

“You must do a transformation”

“You can’t live this way”

“For Islam, does not accept you”

Lives struggling to make sense

Of their nature

And their ‘nurture’

And made worse

By Islam

 

Today

With suicides

and the homicides

faced by people

who just want to love

To embrace

To have intercourse

To LIVE!

 

 

Islam’s homophobia

says it’s a sin

Love is a sin?

Love is a crime?

Islam’s homophobia

says so

It kills people

 

for what?

for who?

And why?

 

It says in the Hadith

It says in the Shariah

To throw humans off buildings

for what

for who

and why

 

And mums and dads

rejecting, shunning

And ashamed of their own flesh

Shame, shame, shame

For loving

for embrace

for intercourse

for happiness

 

If you ask me

Islam’s homophobia

has no place

in this year

in this century

in this world

 

Keep your religion if you must

Believe in your god if you choose

but scrap the hate

 

Leave my fab people alone

Keep my friends alive

They can definitely fuck whoever they want to

Islam’s homophobia stops today.

That is all I ask.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Losing My Religion

So I have lost faith
So I have stopped believing
So I have stopped praying

I have nothing to pray for
Or pray against
Or pray towards
I may have pissed off someone
Down the prayer chain
Or someone pissed me off
for messing up with my prayer list

I may have forgotten what exactly I was praying for
Or who exactly answers the door at pray-land

Losing my religion
Losing that allegiance
Losing my identity
Shedding off my skin
All these came with a tiny question
A question no one could answer
A question whose answer I am yet to learn

I have a lot to learn
I have learned so much

So I have gained knowledge,
Knowledge in all the things worth believing in

Like the sound of the birds on their way to nest
And the smell of fresh water in a pond
And the feeling of not knowing enough of this beautiful vast universe we live in
And the hazy eyes of curiosity in the little humans I call my children

And the comfort of knowing life in its purest form

So I stopped praying
So I stopped believing

In all these gods and their complicated pray-instructions
lost faith in the logic behind owning me
I stopped believing in your god
He lost my file
So I deleted him

 

Losing my religion was not a loss
It was a gain
Losing my faith was not rebellion
It was emancipation

So I have stopped believing

In everything that mentions some God in the sky
Fearless in the stand that I gained

Then I realized,
I always knew this…
this invisible blind following
Was not going to last,
I always knew I fall nowhere
I always knew these many gods
were not for me

…………………..

So I have lost faith
So I have stopped believing
So I have stopped praying

So I lost my religion.

~ all rights reserved.

Uncia.

 

Dear Patriarchy

Dear patriarchy,

What’s your deal really?

Because when I woke

I wondered

Hmmm

Why exert so much power

Over my body

My soul

And my vagina

My feisty, hot head of rebellion!

 

Dear Patriarchy

is it possible

That you are a tad bit fearful,

of me

Because I do see through you.

 

So you feed me lies

But in my mind, I always questioned

And you told me I was less

But in my gut I always doubted

So you had me in chains

But my body constantly rejected

 

So you told me more lies

More narratives,

More religion

More society

 

And dear Patriarchy, your deception I kind of accepted

At least for some time whilst

It lasted.

But…. my soul always searched

 

And finally, I woke

And I questioned all that you stand for

And the many ways you use

“supposed to be” as a means

To keep me chained,

not to wake

I looked at your narrative of religions

And your masculine God!

I questioned your consumerism

And corporate ladder bullshit

I questioned your inequality of emotion

In a relation

 

Dear patriarchy,

News flash, I AM emotion

you can’t shut me down

But I give you this much,

for a long time, I actually believed you

 

Dear patriarchy

I am not done yet

In fact, I am just getting started

 

Dear patriarchy

If I, a female makes you wonder

If you should feed me more lies

If I, a woman makes you shudder

At the thought of my rise

If I, a lady gives you a tremor

With fear of my power

 

Then surely patriarchy

You should not be surprised

That I transcend

Beyond the limits of your deception

 

Why?

Because I finally believe

That you are indeed threatened

By my feminine wisdom

You are exposed

To my unending love for mother nature

You are unprotected

From my fluidness to make a form

From any form

That is why you use every narrative possible

To make me question my reality

 

But Dear patriarchy

This is my fuck you to you

Because I am awake and I am not

ever going back to Sleep!.

You are welcome.

 

For the empath and HSP

The spectrum is so wide

And the gap between the divide

Each oblivious to the other’s desolation

 

Shit the worlds collide

I can’t be assed to decide

If this is just an elucidation

 

Or if I am sitting on my behind

Waiting for some divine

To call me to attention

 

Instead, I decide to shut out the world

Its noise is blaring in my head

I pump up the volume of my consolation

 

In this type of music, I do find

Some comfort to just unwind

For a moment I can forget the ramification

 

And try not to fix and rewind

You see the past it may remain unresolved

And the future is one tied in constellations

 

Too much I may have tried

To swim against the so-called tide

I ended up in tears & hallucination

 

Emotions from the immediate outside

And the horrors happening far and wide

The classic Empath’s curse and consecration

 

Lucky are those who can shut it down

For they have learned how to use their ability

To protect themselves from the harm of negativity

For those of us who struggle with this burden of empathy

Shutting the world out now and then

Is a ruthless necessity.

I am…….Whatever!

Reading at Rough Night Arts Lab 2.0 @Dokhuis Gallery Amsterdam

I am a sensitive soul

The world pricks me with its bullshit

Of unending apologies for biases so outright

 

I am a genuine Being

The world brands me as the misfit

In synchronizing orchestras of rows of black and white

 

I am an invisible soluble spirit

The world floats me as its flying carpet

On its landing nose dive towards concrete

 

I am a sex goddess

The world fucks me to my limit

In a condescending manner replicated from 4th-century brothels

 

I am a massive soul magnifier

The world puts a spotlight,

On my thinking process for that tiny inconsistency

 

I am a world wonderer

The world tags me as an immigrant

From trending calamities so fucking overrated

 

I am a social justice warrior

The world hates me with a fucking bang!

For speaking the truth that is so hard to contemplate

 

I am a ruthless truth seeker

The world already knows I am a threat

Threatening because I dare you to question

All that was fed to you

 

I am just a fucking poet

The world gives me a platform

To safely recite and not to speak

Because speaking would be

Cracking open the Pandora’s box

 

Man, I am just messing around

Or maybe I am doing something else

Maybe you have felt these words

Maybe we are doing something right this moment

 

Maybe I am vibrating with you right now

To a beautiful high frequency up there with the unicorns

Maybe we are flying high above the noise

Maybe they notice

And dammit, FUCK!

The world cuts the frequency of our safe communication!

 

You know why?

Because this fucking world hates souls.