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Who Gets to Take Up Space? Women, Desire and the Ordinary in All We Imagine as Light
This essay is adapted from the introduction I presented at Rialto/Griffioen for a screening of Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light. I had the privilege of introducing the film and wanted to offer the audience a few ideas to carry with them into the screening: about women and the city, migration and home, intimacy,…
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When the World Hardens, Go Where Beauty Still Lives
At the VU Women@VU International Women’s Day gathering this year, I found myself thinking about absence. Not only who is present in the room, but who goes missing from our frameworks. Whose names fall away. Whose lives remain insufficiently held by the language, institutions, and categories meant to account for them. During the event, Ismintha…
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Exception, By Another Name: answering some frequently asked questions about my identity
Today the state writes my name with a borrowed pen. Not the pen kept in velvet for lost inheritance certificates, but a pen found in the bottom of a drawer: a little cracked, ink clotted around the nib, the kind you warm with your breath to make it move. They call it citizenship by an…
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London, in the Heat of Memory and Change
The city arrived first as a smell—Hot brick dust and the faint iron taste of the Underground, mingling with the ghost of diesel and rain. The kind of smell that makes you feel you’ve lived here before. London in July and August—it pretends to be gentle with you, lets the sun linger longer on your…
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Ziyafat and Radical Hospitality: Towards an Ethics of Reading Across Border
I have been ruminating on this topic for so long. It is time to stop reading it solely through the lens of an academic researcher and simply release it into the world, because its urgency can no longer wait. This essay examines the influence of Persian poetry on American literature, tracing its path from transcendentalist…
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Burning Through the Forest of Noise: Mosab Abu Toha’s Poetics of Survival
In Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha offers us not just poetry, but the breathless residue of survival. The title itself rings like an invocation: a forest, dense with memory, static, and surveillance; a noise, unceasing, buzzing with drones, rubble, and the keening of the dispossessed. This is Gaza, yes—but also the poetic terrain of…
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The Secret Lives of Second-Hand Books
There’s a particular kind of magic that lives in second-hand books—a sort of hush, like the soft turning of pages in a dream. They arrive in your hands like messengers from another life, carrying the scent of time, the weight of old hearts, and the whisper of a reader who once fell in love at…
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The Ache That Binds: Reading Difficult Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Memoirs
There is a particular kind of grief that does not scream. It simmers. It simmers beneath daily rituals, under the echoes of a mother’s reprimand, or in the silence that follows a phone call. To read memoirs like Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi, and I’m Glad My Mom…
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The Beauty of Grief in Performance Art
To the one who walked through light like it was ash, You came to me not with thunder, but like rain that had forgotten how to fall. On a screen already too full of noise, you entered quietly, like a question. I didn’t know your name then — and I don’t write this letter to…
