Hear me, Here me. by West Coast Radical Zine Collective

Hear me. Here, me.

holla if you hear me... In November of 2017, shortly after the election of Donald Trump, we began writing each other a series of call and response pieces. In these letters to each other we’ve explored what it means to be un/homed so publicly and the ways we have been externalizing / narrativizing / keeping score of our survival along with our families’ and communities’. How can leaning into language help us bear witness when the urge to run overtakes us? Through our encounters with the world, we have been able to create what Alexis Lothian calls an “archive of our own,” an archive of found tongues, dis-familiar and foreign lands, severed ties, photos, letters and re-constituted identities that we have been using to give up (and sometimes give into) the ghosts which haunt us and hold us together. These letters began in a desperate attempt to reach out to each other in a time of uncertainty. These letters are each of us, in our respective spaces, calling to community and asking: Will you see me in my grief? Will you see me in my joy? Will you love all the messy iterations of myself? Sometimes all the wound needs is a witness. Millitant love and solidarity, Jamila & Sadia

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When has life been most precious? When Ayan died I was left with so many questions that I had no way of answering. I wanted to know what she had worn on her last day. I wanted to know what color lipstick she had put on, whether she had applied eyeliner that morning, whether she’d smudged her eyeliner and rubbed it off with a Q-tip in quiet frustration. Knowing these details would not have made dealing with her death any easier, but I obsessed over her last precious hours and minutes of life. What song was she listening to as she pulled in front of that truck on highway 49? Did she see the end coming, or did it come as a surprise? Is it easier when the world ends suddenly and without warning, or would we be better off if we could see it coming? A week before the car accident that took Ayan’s life, we were on a family trip to California. I remember sitting in the back seat of our beat down minivan singing as loud as we could. The windows were rolled down, and the wind blew our long hair into our eyes and open mouths. The van was old. It had transported us to different cities and countries… it was the van we drove to Farah’s wedding that year, and Ayan’s funeral, too. I can’t remember what songs we sang, but does it matter at this point? Nothing matters except the fact that we felt moved to sing and we did so. There are so few moments in life where our bodies are not prisons, but birds. Where our mouth is not a cage, but a chorus. I can’t remember life ever being more precious. These days joy is a bittersweet thing I can’t hold in my mouth for very long. Grief is a second heart. It is always beating inside of me. The day after the accident I stood in the middle of the road in the exact spot where it happened. It was a rural part of Oregon. I was surrounded on both sides by farmland that had been devastated by the long breach of pavement. There was glass all around me. The air smelled of burnt rubber. The flowers along the side of the road were in mid-bloom. I was taken aback by the audacity of beauty in that present moment. How can I survive this? I wondered. The months and years that followed were a wrecking. A reckoning. When Ayan died a part of me died, too.You know this. I did not know until later that grief was a kind of love. I did not know until later that surviving was a kind of love. Life has never been more precious in the years since Ayan’s death. Life has never been more devastating. Sadia, beauty and terror are the twin anchors of my life these days, and I am trying to embrace them both. It has never been either/or. It has always been everything at once. How can I survive this? I wondered then, I still wonder now.

Our ancestors survived the brutality of colonization and the indignity of war. I imagine when the British and the Italian and the French came language must have failed our people. What people could have predicted the theft that befell them and planned a language accordingly? We had no language for the crimes committed against us. We survived.We resisted. We survive.We resist. Nothing is more precious than that.

What lies did you tell your

Nabra’s mama knew she was at the masjid and still, a man took her life. Knowing where I am is no longer enough. Nothing but home will suffice. Mama calls me almost daily after and each time I hang up, I turn to my good friend Marian. I say, this country is as foreign to my mama as the woman I am becoming. I say at least we are free. I say free and mean something entirely different, something hard and impenetrable. I say leaving home is a sacrifice my parents made and they would rather me be happy than close by and afraid. The night Philando Castille was killed, one night before my baby brother’s birthday, I found myself out on a bridge with thousands of other enraged black and brown folks. For a minute, a man plays his trumpet so loud it drowns out the sirens and we dance. Not long after, the truck before us revs his engines and my friends begin to write the numbers of lawyers on their forearms in case we get arrested. My baby sister hears of the protest and calls to make sure I am home. She hears sirens and immediately panics. Sadia, she repeats. This is not our country.This is not our fight. I see the truth of that claim change quickly. Donald Trump sets his sights on the Somali and soon there are ICE raids. I do not come back home even though I hear please in the voice of every relative who calls to check in on me. I see the naked fear on my parent’s face each time I choose a country that hasn’t chosen me. We cannot protect you from where you are. I come only to leave again. I am a constant disappointment. When Somali folks ask why, I say there was a fire and so I left. I say the fire followed me to the desert and then to the sea. I hold California in my mouth like a secret until they can imagine a reason brave enough to leave my mama. This is how I move across the country.

rself in order to survive? I say I am American, too, and I will go where I want and nothing will stop me. I repeat that lie until I see my face in every Muslim woman whose body is bloodied on a street corner I walked freely. I say, is it my hair? Is it my jeans? I say the hijab is a choice knowing choice is political and we get so few. My mother has no choice at all. To ask her to un-hijab would be to ask her to disappear.. To ask my sister to be careful would be to remind her that there is nothing mama and I can do to protect her from this particularly American kind of violence. Some days I wake up and wear hijab in solidarity with myself. I know I lean on an ambiguous blackness when I walk around Oakland with my hair uncovered but that blackness is also Muslim and carries itself with caution. Nobody loves a black woman like White men with an appetite for flesh. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t say it, but I am afraid to wear anything as bravely as my mother does. I say one day we will return to Somalia and none of this will matter knowing the privilege to leave and the right to return are not promised to us. I tell myself this country is a country of laws. That a single man cannot change the fabric of an entire nation. I am wrong. I tell myself my mother was right. Eventually they will reject us and all we will have is family. I say family like it will keep us when nothing else will and then I remember all of the women who weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve abandoned to their grief when taking responsibility for their harm became inconvenient. I remember the uncles we protected instead. I remember the stories we spun about those women and how, in my young age, I have become the woman in the stories people tell. I remember why family cannot always be refuge but try anyway. go home muslim nigga bitch. I am a citizen. They not talking about me. There is no coming genocide. The money will save us. Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve been here long enough. Those who love us will not let us be disappeared. Our neighbors will miss us. This is a country of laws. This is a country. No one can hold this much fear in their body and still come up singing. Home of the brave? How? I do not understand.

Jamila, where do you keep your fear? Sadia, I first drank fear with my motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s milk. I imagine she had a lot to be afraid of: a teenage mother alone in Canada? It might as well have been a foreign planet. There was a lot to be afraid of in those days. It was the early 90â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s and the world seemed as if it was always on the brink of ending. I guess there is a lot to be afraid of these days, too. I am writing this to you four days after the fire at Grenfell Tower. I am writing this to you two days after the police officer that killed Philando Castile has been acquitted of all charges. I am writing this to you on the day that the body of a seventeen year old Muslim girl named Nabra was found beaten to death in Fairfax,Virginia. Every day feels like the end of the world. Every day I have more questions than answers. Can you answer me this: How many more Black men will we bury? How many strangers that look like everyone I love will I mourn in this lifetime? How many police officers with blood on their hands will kiss their daughters goodnight before bed? Who will sing a song for us immigrants and refugees? For us displaced and dispossessed? How many countries will we lose? How many countries will refuse to claim us? How many countries will erect borders that leave us fragmented? What planet will accept those of us who are the aliens of this one? I am avoiding the question by asking some of my own. I am afraid to answer. I am afraid of how deeply this fear roots me. I keep my fear close to me. I wear it like a second skin. I wear it like a necklace. Sometimes I feel the silver clasp of my fear catch against my throat. I keep my fear under my tongue, and feel it swell into an unforgivable silence. Last year, on our way to a bridal shower, a friend and I were accosted by a strange man in a nearly empty parking garage. He was drunk. I know this because at one point he stood so close to me I could feel his breath on my face. Dirty bitches, he called us.You dirty terrorists. I should kill you, he said. I should kill you right now. I keep my fear in the part of my mind that circles the wound, returns each night to the scene of all the crimes this country commits against me. I keep my fear in the part of my mind that wonders what if...? The part of my mind that knows we got lucky that night. The part of my mind that knows that luck is not enough to survive in America.

How do you forgive yourself? Jamila, I do not know if I can. I wake every morning in a bed I bought from an old couple in the military vacationing now in Hawaii and I think about the stain of their departure. I worry of the ghosts they leave behind, two bodies having made love fitfully in a bed without thinking maybe one day this bed would become another kind of home. A refuge. Before this refuge, my room was empty. Before this refuge, I was ravenous. A man is elected to power and I lose my appetite. For days, I burn candles and bathe in lavender. I try not to remember. Not the country and what it’s become, not the border or the bodies, not the trucks loading up migrants, not my brother or the bottle he grips tightly when no one can mirror his rage. I tie back the white curtains and let light in slowly. Slowly. I breathe. I place a coal on an idhini and create an alter. I find the yellow container mama gave me and extract a single square of frankincense. I place it on the coal and watch the smoke billow. I practice mirroring my brother’s rage. I practice blowing smoke. I hold it to the clothes in my closet. I hold it to my skin. I walk through the house a woman carrying secrets and become the torch-bearer of my mother’s scent. I calm. I have brought home with me. I have not betrayed us. A man is elected to power and I forget my body. I forgive myself by finding first the wound and carrying it to water. By holding the wound to my mouth and drinking. By emptying the abscess of my sins and saying hooyo’s name aloud Shamisay Shamsisay Shamisay three times and making ablution. Once I am filled with light, I empty the wound (my body) of shame. I forgive myself by coming to God, by coming home, by looking in mirrors. I forgive myself by speaking in tongues; Somali, then English, then nothing at all. A man is elected to power and I am quiet for a whole three months. Perhaps we forgive this country in the same way we forgive our mothers. Slowly. By circling the wound with healing balm. By understanding the context. By refusing to be engulfed. By hiding the matches and wood frame of your house when the world threatens fire. By running when you need to. By seeking water and shelter elsewhere in the years a mother cannot be a country and a country cannot be a mother and returning home when it is safe. How can we not, Jamila--forgive ourselves--I mean? How you can we remember the women we have had to be in spite of the world and hold love away? How can we witness what has torn through our parents, what has left their bodies a border beyond reprieve and say forgiveness, as if forgiveness is a thing we give or receive and not a thing that happens upon the body quick as a clap of thunder. A thing which finds you, crouched in the forest of your one lonely life and stuns you with its tenderness.

What does love demand of you? The truth is, sometimes it feels like love demands entirely too much of me. It demands my courage on the days fear quickens my breath. It demands my patience on the days I am a taut rope. Love is a language I am still struggling to learn. Most days it feels foreign as English must have been to my parents when they first got to this country. Most days it feels like tin against the roof of my mouth. It feels like syllables that crash and collide against one another in no order that makes sense. I am learning the grammar of this strange and beautiful language. I say too much. I don’t say enough. Love demands I learn how to siphon silence into a tender song. Recently, on a trip back into the United States, I was, for what feels like the millionth time in my life, randomly selected for additional security screening. I am always amused at the language of neoliberalism in this country. Random, they say, as if random is not a euphemism for black, for brown, for Muslim, for poor, for not-from-here, for immigrant, for refugee, for hungry, for lost, for unwanted. Are you a U.S citizen, they ask me at the border. I nod. Under the cold eyes of the border patrol agents, everything I say feels like a lie. I am suddenly everything they said I was. I am a pirate. I am a terrorist. I am a beggar with open palms and no one will meet my eyes. I forget my own name. I hold my blue passport in my hand, and the truth of who I am slowly returns to me. My citizenship always feels like a bargain I have made with a malevolent god. They let me cross the border, albeit reluctantly. The assaults this country makes against our collective humanity is exhausting. I am full of rage at the indignity of it. Here I am, on one side of the border while my people look on from the other. Here I am, on one side of the border, and on the other I see the ghosts of our detained our deported our drowned our dead our denied. To be an immigrant is to be the sum of what happened to you, what did not happen to you, what could have happened to you, what might happen to you yet. It is enough to make one weep with rage. But rage is a secondary emotion. I do not want to be moved by rage. I refuse to be a candle lit from both ends. Love demands my careful and complete attention to the full range of human emotion. It demands I look at the wounds of the world and refuse to look away. It demands I bear witness and testify. This is my testimony. We must love each other in a way that allows us to re-imagine our existence. We must love each other in a way that allows us to re-imagine the world. There are no insignificant acts of love. This summer in a cafe in Ramallah, a few friends and I sat around a table and told stories of our worst heartbreaks. “Are you afraid of love?” a new friend asked me. The question caught me off guard. “Isn’t everyone afraid of love?” I responded flippantly. If I were to go back in time I would answer him honestly.Yes, I would say, but fear is a hand-me-down language. I turn my back on its inheritance.

Sadia, how have you remembered yourself?

Honey, I have bordered my days with silence. I have made my bed and slept in it. I have woken up some mornings so thick with grief that I resolved to take myself back from it by walking. I think of my mama the day my grandmamma died. The sky a bruised melon, the kind of yellow that belies rain or a reckoning or a mama running from a fire she set with her own two hands. Death is an undoing. My mother cupped her motherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s face and begged her to speak. When my Grandmother would not, my mother ran and ran and ran. For months after, she circled the apartment grandma died in like a finger around an angry wound. She wandered empty parking lots, sat alone on benches waiting for busses that never seemed to arrive. She walked the half mile from our home to the grocery store, from the grocery store to her sisterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s house, and came back having forgotten why she left. I tell you this to remind you that language leads us nowhere. It just as soon becomes a locked door as a window.

When I could not find the words to articulate the fear that shook through me in November, my mother became the story I told myself to remember the country I come from. On those days, I would wake early in the morning and walk to the lake to watch the sun rise over a body of water whose beginning and ending does not spread like a fire or a madness. Containment was a wonder. On the way back, I would stop by the corner store at the end of our street to chat with Khalid, the Yemeni shopkeep whose grandmother is Somali. In his presence I became a long held memory, Halima-Sa’dia, joyful one, the prophet’s aunt, grandmother’s namesake. A name is a complicated inheritance. I remember myself by reconstituting my many parts. I walk under the McArthur Overpass and do not avert my gaze from the tents and cardboard box homes. I make peace with the stink of piss and the rustle of refuse. A man asks me to dinner as he begs on the corner and we laugh at the absurdity of where we find ourselves, an America where he is homeless and I am homeless and neither of us in the same way. Take me to the movies, he says. One day, I say, maybe my boyfriend can join us. I do not have a boyfriend. Each year I say I love a man and each year, the love is different and so is the man. On the night of the election, I called my father from the group home I was working in. Things were eerily silent. No one playing the dozens or making a milkshake way past their bedtime, no one singing at the top of their lungs or crouched behind a fridge ready to jump out and scare the everliving mess out of me, no body asking questions about tomorrow, because, of course, nobody believed it would arrive. Nobody actually believed they would wake up to Donald Trump as their president. That night, I could not sleep and neither could my students. One of my students wanted to know, “did you vote Sadia?” I watched another’s hands clench and unclench on the kitchen table. “ Man, if I could vote?...” The truth was I could, and I did not. It did not feel like a choice to me. It was a question of degrees, and integrity. It was a question of belonging or estrangement. I understood this country could never belong to me, and so I did not vote and tonight, overcome with the sinking weight of an accumulated shame, I could not catch my breath. The thoughts ran through my mind. We will all be deported. The Muslim ID cards, the internment camps, the CIA black sites, the border, the drones, the undocumented. My father’s voice on the other side of the phone steadied me. I was a river rushing around a single steady boulder. My father’s voice a buoy. “Aabe macaan,” I began, “Are you watching the elections?” He laughed. “Aabe, we have our children, what can they take from us? You are our two front teeth, Baba. Forget the madness, have you eaten?” Baba returns me to my body. As kids, Baba would hold his hands before our faces, slowly folding down each finger. A hand is useless without its fingers, he would say. We were, each of us, as vital and necessary to the body of his love as any organ. My father was a poet once, perhaps. For him, the body is the only language that remains after everything falls away. I put the phone down to get a drink of water. Really I step away so my father does not hear me cry. I want to take off running. Baba, I want to say, they are already coming for the children. We have already had to choose Baba, you see how I am not at home? You see how we are still poor? This country wants to disappear us from ourselves, Baba, wants to make us inscrutable, a foreign language you will have to sell your teeth to learn.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

The old maps are in a language that is no longer tenable in this wilderness. The landscape has changed. The old maps can no longer guide us. To hold tight to them is to hold tight to the lies weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve learned about ourselves and the places we have come to call home. Joy Harjo once said that truth can appear as disaster in a land of things unspoken. What we need in this present moment is the startling clarity of truth. Where do we go from here? To the past to retrieve whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been lost, displaced, and stolen. To the past to reclaim what has been snatched from our hands and out of our mouths. We burn the maps, we torch the bridges. We draw on our ancestral wisdom and memory. We go into ourselves. We learn intimately the terrain of our personal fears and desires. We continue to do the absurd: we wake up day after day, we look grief in the eye and refuse to cower from its enormity. We imagine, against all odds, Sisyphus happy. We imagine, against all odds, Sisyphus free.