SA
Fati, my love, how are you?
F
Hey boo! I’m feeling pretty tender today. I got some hard news yesterday so just sitting with that, and recalibrating a little. How are you?
SA
I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me love, I know how difficult these days are. How do you usually navigate hard news?
F
That’s a good question. It’s different news, day to day. But yesterday I cried, then I thanked the universe for the opportunity to be alive & for the joys that came from the lessons of the heartbreak & I asked the universe for permission to make more art. Then my friend and I went to the beach and I cried to the ocean. So just oscillating between grief and gratitude, and being present with what comes up.
SA
Uff, this is so painful. I asked, also, because I know that art is so tied to survival for the both of us. To me your art evokes this lost time, lost self, a past self with such tenderness, even though I know your early life was so tragic. I don’t know if that’s the word that you would use, but I feel the same way about my own childhood… and I know that art is a way to not only make sense of these lost parts and selves, but also a way to re-imagine ourselves. Does that resonate at all?
F
Yeah that totally resonates. I think I’ve always reached for art as a way of touching through parts of myself I’ve lost or as a way to re-imagine, to create safety for myself in a world that is so unsafe. I think so much of my childhood was so tragic, though I am just getting around to even admitting that in myself, which sounds so silly. I think I often have a guard up where it’s hard for me to admit that something bad is happening, because I’m looking at the layers of the beauty in the heartbreak as well. For so long I was like “I’m an orphan yes, but there’s so much good in my childhood.” And it’s true, there was/is. But I can’t only hold that narrative and not look at the incredible heartbreak of so much of what was happening, and really look at some of the situations more clearly as an adult and just be like– wait a minute. That wasn’t right. I think only even in the last year have I been able to really even admit just how abusive certain things were in my childhood.
SA
I was talking about this two days ago with my sister because she’s a relationship coach and is very much a toxic positive person who raised me on Marianne Williamson lol so I feel like so much of my own life was seen through this almost martyred position of, “I give more because I can” kinda bullshit which is like… so enmeshed in my system because that’s how I survived but that I doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer silently the entire time. I couldn’t accept how bad my life was because I would’ve died in all honesty. Grappling with that totality of it is so hard because you have to accept so many things that failed you. I was telling my sister that seeing this clearly actually releases you from the burden and pressure you put on yourself by not telling the truth to yourself. How do you feel now that you’re facing all the sides of your life more?
F
I really resonate with what you’re saying. I feel so much clearer, honestly. Even being able to admit certain things to myself, to affirm certain things to myself, I noticed the ways that I was able to just release so much trapped energy that I had in my body for years. To be able to let go of things easier. And to be able to understand myself and have so much more compassion for myself (& others) in the process of doing. And just: to rest in the complication. To rest in the complicated truth that some of these ideas of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ don’t even exist, or they don’t resonate for me. Things were what they were. To not turn away from the ugly things is so powerful. To really look at that and be like, how do I not let this thing run me anymore?
SA
Yeah, “How do I not let this thing run me anymore?” That’s so deep! Because it runs so deep. I don’t think we ever fully have answers, or come to a point of full arrival or knowing something, but as an orphan, you experienced a very unique and phenomenal human experience. I can’t imagine it was ever easy, but then, it’s like you said, there were moments of goodness or softness, of love and magic, too. But through the day-to-day, did you ever process being an orphan? Or did that come much later in life?
F
Growing up, most stories I read were about orphans. It’s so often these things about orphans then becoming superheroes or magical or something, and so many writers gravitate towards orphaning in storytelling because it gives their characters a tragic backstory they can play off of. But then, like– most people don’t know that many orphans in real life. Most people can’t fathom the loss of one parent, let alone two. Let alone that happening when you were a child– both my parents and both sets of my grandparents had died before I was 5. I think people can abstractly understand that, but I don’t think a lot of people actually know what that feels like, or can empathize with what it means to be so unparented.
So, a lot of my life growing up, I didn’t talk about my dead parents. I actually got really skilled at not using past tense or present tense verbs when I spoke about them to keep it a secret. There were actually a lot of high school friends I had who didn’t even know my parents were dead. It’s so painful to have to announce that all the time. I don’t even think most people realize how much of your casual conversations revolve around parents and family. It happens all the time. But it’s so painful for people who don’t have that, or people who come from an abusive family.
It wasn’t really until I was in college and started writing poetry that I processed that. And I remember the first time that I heard someone say they were an orphan– I was in college and there was a politician who had come to speak at this conference I was at, and she said “I’m an orphan.” I literally stopped listening to anything else she said– it was the first time in my life I had ever heard someone who was in a position of power be like “I’m an orphan.” And it just always really struck with me, that feeling, that naming– what it opened inside me.
SA
It breaks my heart on so many levels that you were in such loneliness. As you were writing I was thinking about the cultural tropes of the orphan: Bruce Wayne/Batman, Oliver Twist… I mean then we have Prophet Mohammed in Islam, who was my first awareness of an orphan, so in my mind I always considered orphans to be people who garnered strength and heart through the devastation of their experience, but I guess that in itself is so flattening. Which I’m just grappling with in myself—all the ways I flattened my own experiences, too. I guess that’s the other part about naming things, we all need to name things for so many different reasons, otherwise the miscommunication of self continues and the father we get away from our truth. I’m so honored to witness your journey to finding your roots, in multiple senses, but I really think of it more of rooting into Mother Earth… which I feel comes with knowing or understanding yourself fully dimensionally, which means ancestors, culture. I know you’ve been gathering parts of yourself through ancestral healing, how has that been?
F
It has been so deep. Because my parents are dead and because I am not close with a lot of my blood family, I’ve always struggled a bit with thinking through my ancestry. A lot of the ways that I grapple with ancestral healing in the past is through writing. But, because my parents are dead, there’s so few things I know about them. There’s literally only a handful of stories I know about both my mom and dad. Like, 5. And not even stories, but like: facts even. There’s so much I don’t know about them, so much that’s a mystery. So writing became a way for me to be in communion or conversation with them, or at least with ideas of what they could be. It’s such a motivator to me, that heartbeat: what could they be? What were they doing? What were they thinking? I think a lot of my poetry rests in that, a lot of my novel I’m working on– which you’ve read a draft of! It’s so interesting because so few people even know anything about that project. But I’ve also been communing with them outside of art in my own ways, and that feels so beautiful. It might sound silly but I think for so long that didn’t feel like a thing that I was allowed, because they were dead, and I feel like I’m slowly building up my access points to it and them.
SA
I’m sorry you felt like you didn’t have permission but I’m so glad you did. You are one of my favorite writers and thinkers and beings and comrades. I feel lucky to call you family. Even though we had different childhoods, you’re one of the (maybe) three friends that I feel truly get this scale of violence and neglect, because it’s so specific. To be raised without maternal/parental love creates such a hollow existence and a hollow sense of self. But, finally we’re nurturing. I just made ghee and kichadi (or in Bangla it’s kichari) for myself before we started talking and I’ve been reading The Path of Practice by Bri. Maya Tiwari (which I was talking to you about) so I’m finally getting in touch with a true ayurvedic path, and it’s been so healing to just find some way back to this lost source because it feels like I’m tapping into an old DNA. It’s hard, but I’m happy.
I love what you said about communing with your parents, being in conversation with them. The novel you’re writing is so about that as well, about accessing this life through memory but also creating a language and vessel where they spoke through you. It was surreal to read as someone that loves you and knows you I’d say quite well (but we are all eternal mysteries too!!) because it was devastating to read in all honesty. I could just feel the pulse of your baby self and your sisters, but also you parents. This book will be a salve to so so so many. For anyone who has had a similar circumstance to you, what can you say in terms of reparenting? Do you feel like you’ve learned (again a constant mission) how to reparent yourself?
F
Thank you my love, that means the world to me. And you have to send me your recipe for kichari! I feel so deeply seen around you too. It’s so beautiful to not have to explain pain to a friend, to be able to say something and trust that they’ll make space for it.
I feel like I am on a journey of reparenting that is daily. And that I’m constantly learning. But it’s so many things– the closer I get to a spiritual path, the more whole I feel, the more I am able to accept parts of myself and others and also to see with clarity. I think I pray for that most: clarity. To be able to see clearly, to be able to see past my own pain, to be able to see past my own wounds, to be able to see past a love that might blind me to the situation at hand, is important. To be able to see clearly, and still live in gratitude, live in abundant love, that’s what I want most.
I think one thing is that growing up I defaulted to this sense of — well, people are just trying the best they can. I couldn’t see anything clearly because of that. I made up so many excuses for people, to cover up horrible things. There was this rhetoric that existed in some of my extended family of, “well we took you in when we could have sent you to foster care so why are you complaining. We kept you together so you should be grateful.” And I think I was– very grateful. But that gratitude kind of transformed at the expense of myself, and a “everyone is trying as hard as they can and I should just be grateful.” Then when I actually looked at things in my childhood I was like… no. Certain people were not trying hard. This was abuse. Abuse is not an idealized form of love, or being neglected is not love, or making myself small or knowing that I can live off very little is not the love that I want. I can be grateful for the lessons some of that taught me, AND know that I am capable of building a life for myself where I can be who I am with myself without judgement, where I can learn to love myself in the ways that I wish I had been loved when I was younger, when I can feel what it feels to be secure and blanketed by love. I think that’s a life journey.
SA
This is such a beautiful note to end on. One last thing, I want to know how you care for yourself and also what you say to baby Fati to comfort her now?
F
I think of myself a lot when I was younger and just assure her that I have her now. Me and my therapist have done some EMDR, which is a tapping/somatic technique to help reparent. And we go back into hard memories and bring new resources in. In those memories, it’s always strongest for me when I bring myself now in. I just walk in, to my younger self, and I’m like– I’m here now. I have you. You’re not alone. You are loved because I love you. I promise, I love you. I’m sorry you had to go away from me for a while. Can you come back now? Can you trust that I’ll hold you now? I’m strong enough for you, and getting stronger every day. Will you come back home to me?
And I think that’s just it: is trying to show my younger self that I’m a safe place for her to be. That I won’t abandon her again. That we, together, are capable. We can build something together, our small safeties, the ones that we didn’t have before. It’s very important to me that I build my life to show her that. To show her she can be whole and free with me. Which means, when people come into my life and they cyclically neglect me, I can’t be with them, no matter how much I love them. Because I love her more. It means when I work at institutions that are toxic and do things to destroy my personhood, where there aren’t enough boundaries between myself and them, I can’t work there anymore. Because I can’t destroy myself for a company. I can work there for a bit with boundaries because we all need to live and pay rent. But not if it gets so toxic that it’s destroying my mind and body. It’s left me with a lot of trying to make a life for myself that doesn’t fit in the standards or norms of what people think of as success. But to me, success is trying to live a life that makes space for my whole self, and for the people I love’s whole selves. I want to be seen and I want to see. Fully. I want space for my joy. I want space for my pain. I want space to be whole, in this wild world. I don’t always know what that will look like, but it’s the most important thing to me, to try.
is a poet, filmmaker, educator and performer. Her work has appeared in many journals, including POETRY Magazine, Gulf Coast, BuzzFeed Reader, The Margins, The Offing, Academy of American Poets and many others. Her work has been featured on new outlets like PBS, NPR, Time, Teen Vogue, Huffington Post, and others. In 2011 she created a spoken word poetry group in Bosnia and Herzegovina called REFLEKS while on a Fulbright studying theater in post-genocidal countries. She is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and a Kundiman Fellow. She is the writer and co-creator of Brown Girls, an Emmy-Nominated web series that highlights friendships between women of color. In 2017 she was awarded the Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and was featured on the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list. Her debut book of poems, If They Come For Us, was released One World/ Random House, August 2018. Along with Safia Elhillo, she is the editor of Halal If You Hear Me, an anthology that celebrates Muslim writers who are also women, queer, gender nonconforming and/or trans.