WMEG
My blogs
| Gender | Female |
|---|---|
| Industry | Law Enforcement or Security |
| Occupation | Fashion Police |
| Location | San Francisco, but our hearts are in, Palestine |
| Introduction | We are rowdy. We are wayward. We are SWANA (or, Middle Eastern and North African for you Eurocentric folks). We are also maybe not completely SWANA, but remember, we come from the same hypothetical village. We are people of color, and proud of it. We are technically girls, but we are also femme, butch, queer, straight-but-queer-friendly, and bored with your labels. We're usually hungry. We are tatas and sittas and metzmamas and mamanbozorgs in the making. We laugh at marriage, have more degrees than you have teeth, and are usually subverting normativity in the most public forum possible. We are mighty and powerful despite diaspora, racism, and xenophobia. We would rather be dancing. Like, right now. |
| Interests | making conservatives cringe, rejecting normativity, going away to college and cultivating our progressive personas, our sexy olive skin that will never wrinkle (and if it does we'll still look sexy), occasionally acting like your grandmother, not being afraid of sexuality, food food and more FOOD, saffron, cardamom, cumin, za'atar, and sumac, diasporas (but not the events that cause them), resisting occupation, not hating our bodies, not removing the curl from our hair (usually...), trying to avoid injury while removing body hair, tattoos, piercings, being well-read, well-informed, and down for the cause, avoiding marriage, reading fortunes in coffee cups, trying to explain our unconventional dating status to family in arabic/armenian/assyrian/farsi/etc. (or avoiding it altogether), formidable noses, making trouble, dancing better than everyone else in the club, confusing the man with our varied identities, charming your pants off, kicking asses and breaking hearts, all with incomparable style. |
| Favorite music | Nancy Ajram, Googoosh, M.I.A., Fayrouz, Abdel Halim Hafiz, The Philistines, NaR, Shakira, anything with a beat and a soul that's down for the cause |
| Favorite books | Our favorites! We Don't Need Another Wave, Colonize This!, Women and Gender in Islam, The Feminine Mystique, Middlesex, Persepolis and everything else by Marjane Satrapi, The Poetry of Arab Women, Let Me Tell You Where I Have Been, Orientalism, Palestine by Joe Sacco, spoken word by Suheir Hammad, anything by Hanan al-Shaykh and Etel Adnan, Naomi Shihab Nye. Arundhati Roy, Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Sandra Cisneros, This Bridge Called My Back, Sufi poetry (esp. Coleman Barks' translations of Rumi), and we hold a place in our hearts for the most special of men: Edward Said and Naguib Mahfouz. Hot stuff! |
When your science teacher smashed a frozen rose with a hammer, did you warm the petals to bring them back to life?
No. We either cried and wrote a poem about our feelings, or picked up the hammer ourselves and started attacking the other children. Or both.