ive got queer dreams

1. the curvature writes a kick ass piece on the relationship between birth rape denialism and feminism.

But even questions of technical definitions and what exactly it is that we wish to eradicate in fighting this thing called “rape” aside, I do know one thing for sure. When women come forward and start saying “I was raped,” when they find the power to use that word to describe their own experiences and open up to share their trauma with the world, responding with “no you weren’t” — with whole blog posts about the subject, in fact — is about the worst possible way that a person can do feminism.

And doing feminism this way has consequences, just like using feminism oppressively always has. As far as consequences go, I don’t care whether or not it “turns people away” from the “movement,” frankly — after all, if this is what they hope to encounter upon sticking around, I think that they deserve fair warning, and I can’t exactly blame them for wanting no part. What I care about is the pain and the harm that it causes. What I care about is the fact that if, after years of struggling to finally claim the word “rape” for my own experiences, someone had immediately responded to me in this way with something about how calling myself a rape survivor was insulting to real survivors or harming their activism, I just might have died. Literally.

2. you ever have those moments in your poly queer life when you realize that people think that you dont have sexual ethics, because you dont have the same ones as they do?  like folks fear the unpredictable?  i never read that book, the ethical slut, but there are days when i dream of being around folks who just assume that you are queer unless told otherwise.  although i find it funny when folks wont just come out and ask you.  maybe i should make tshirts.

3. like when someone knows you are an atheist, and act like you are condemning your child to everlasting hell because you didnt teach her that ‘god loves her’.  i dont care if you tell that god loves her.  its weird when folks talk to my daughter about god, but arent willing to talk to me about god or religion or theology.  like, what are you so afraid of?

4.  i am so grateful for my friends.  honestly we know the coolest people.  quirky alive and and pure hearts.

5. it is early morning and aza and habibi are sleeping.  each on a couch.  i am in the living room, at the table, next to the television, typing.   ive got early morning dreams.  dreams of gaza, of dancing, of sitting by the sea and writing poetry for hours and months.  dreams of telling the truth no matter what.  dreams of black and white photographs still wet.  dreams of watching life into this world and leave this world.  dreams of good food, good music, and good laughter.  queer queer dreams.

stay curious

1. last night was a beautiful night.  more and more i find myself simply being myself in all of my social awkwardness, radical politics, temple goddess, dorky smile, bad mama, bra-less with flip flops, bookworm, philosophical debate loving self.

i had thought i would have time to paint: stay curious on my office wall before the party.  but people arrived on time!  what?  not everyone thinks that when i say ‘around nine’ i kinda mean ‘around eleven’?  ah.  start the grill and hand out drinks.

2.

we started talking about fusion music arabic meets jazz.  so i put on miles davis sketches of spain.  aza starts to dance in the middle of the room this amazing improvisation.  she was completely into the music and the dance and the audience.  starting with her eyes and then radiating through out her body.  she was the embodiment of longing and reminiscence.

party3

Originally uploaded by primitivedragonfly

Wild Poppies

ok so i tried my hand at a short story.  i have only written a couple of short stories in my lifetime.  which is strange because i love to read fiction, but i dont really write it.  hmmm…..

anyways any and all feedback would be appreciated and is encouraged.

i am working on illustrations for this piece…they will appear soon…inshallah…

Wild Poppies

Ellie startled awake that winter morning and sat up in her bed. She rubbed her aching shoulders, her arms, and then reached between her shoulder blades. Two large bumps were growing on either side of her upper spine. She grabbed the hand mirror off the nightstand, and raced to the full-length mirror. Dark burgundy nubs poked out the back of her camisole. She held her breath and touched them again. She was growing wings.

Last time she had seen her dad his wings were stuffed in the blue trench coat he always wore. He looked toward Ellie and smiled. He dropped his coat on the front door’s threshold. His wings popped open like a spring-loaded umbrella and he flew off the porch. Her dad flew over the world and sent nothing more than a postcard photograph of flowers every once in a while.

She was fairy too.

random stories

1. there is so much to do in this world.  and these days i feel so small about it all.  and so i have to slow down and deal with what life brings me.  piece by piece.  day by day. it is cliched but it works.

2.  the raven eye blog will be up soon.  i had to change hosts and shit.  get used to the time difference between here and there.  business hours are a bitch.

3. in the mean time i have been reading blogs galore.  oh my god.  woc and tpoc y’all are amazing.  there are all these beautiful blogging experiments out there.   exquisite writing.  art experiments.

i am especially digging:

on the night of eid

yoga and seeds

i was shocked when i first read a few years ago about patenting seeds.

In 1998, Mr. McFarling bought 1,000 bags of genetically altered soybean seeds, and he did what he had always done. But the seeds, called Roundup Ready, are patented. When Monsanto, which holds the patent, learned what Mr. McFarling had sown, it sued him in federal court in St. Louis for patent infringement and was awarded $780,000.

The company calls the planting of saved seed piracy, and it says it has won millions of dollars from farmers in lawsuits and settlements in such cases.

how can a company have the right to own life?

but, frankly that is a huge corporation that in the US is legally treated as a person but has no moral conscience and must according to law work first and foremost in the interests of its stockholders…

but then this afternoon i read this:

Since its arrival in Britain and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it was popularised by Beatles guitarist George Harrison, among others, Yoga has become a $225 billion industry.

In India, however, it remains collective knowledge – practiced in public parks where gurus often teach fast breathing exercises, like pranayam, and different ‘sun-salutations,’ free of charge.

But as the number of Western yoga teachers has grown, there has been a steady increase in patent applications claiming each pose in their class is not part of the ancient discipline of mind and body, but their own unique invention. In the United States alone, there have been more than 130 yoga-related patents, 150 copyrights and 2,300 trademarks. Now India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is being made available to patents offices throughout the world so they can establish whether the claim is a genuine innovation or “prior art” from Indian systems of medicine.

10 reasons to fall in love

1. el compa and i have been arguing like crazy the past few months.  for a while it felt like when we werent arguing was more like a cease-fire, a temporary lull before it started again.  like we were just too exhausted to speak anymore and we might as well retreat in silence, lick our wounds, bury our dead, and prepare for the next battle.  i kept trying to figure out what we were arguing about.  on the surface it seemed so ridiculous.  the smallest things would just escalate into evil words being hurled at one another.  this isnt us, i kept thinking.  a few times i seriously thought this relationship is over.  how could we keep doing this to ourselves?

2. i finally realized that we had reached that age when a bunch of people around us expects us to settle down, get the striving for middle class respectability job, a house mortgage, a 9-5, a 401k, health benefits (and dental!), day care for aza, etc.  and instead we foolishly insisted upon living our lives.  in some people’s minds it is one thing for us to travel ‘to exotic places’ and have ‘adventures’ and co-create radical communities (uhhh…’whatever that means’) when we were childless and young, but now it was time for us to really give that up and focus on ‘raising a family’.  and we would have great stories to our child(ren) about our adventures when we were young…and so the emotional support that we had built around us was eroding because we werent following the plan.  and we still insisted on ‘going on vacation’.

odetta and mama africa

odetta dies. miriam makeba dies.  this is so sad.  not that their deaths are sad, but that these living legends retire from this world and so i can no longer point to them as the breath that inspires me to breathe.  black women folk artists who sang and their voices gave energy to those in the streets fighting. this is what i want my voice to do: inspire those who see themselves as voiceless or have been described by the arrogant as voiceless to scream or moan or just sing.

just sing.

because silence is an anathema.

odetta became more beautiful as she grew older.  there is a gorgeous picture of here.  she looks like a dragonfly.

frankly, i am not sure what all the words in this song mean.  but isnt it a beautiful song for the morning?  she was exiled from south africa and her music was banned.

doing yoga while mumbai burns

tonight i thought for hours about writing a piece about being a healer.  or how we create and share healing within community.  or something.  but i kept banging my head against the wall.  wondering what medicine could i give in a community?

i used to teach yoga one on one.  i loved teaching yoga.  guiding another human being to feel their body, their muscles, their bones, their breath, their energy more and more.

but for the past couple of years i have had some unfortunate encounters with folks who claim to love the practice of yoga, and yet seemed to be more concerned with the image of yoga than with the act.  yoga became distasteful to me.

one woman i know started to practice yoga a couple of years.  the first time i saw her after she had begun her practice she started exclaiming about all of the cool tricks she could now do.  and how what she did was ‘real’ yoga (ashtanga) and plus something called ‘hot’ yoga and how important the ‘core’ was.  she talked about how shallow her yoga community was, because everyone was in competition with everyone as to who could hold a position longer, but it seemed that what she was really complaining about was that she consistently ‘lost’ in the competition.  she later said that she had become disillusioned with the yoga community and yet when she spoke about yoga it was usually in the vein of competition, showing off, all of these external benefits that i really didnt care about.

to make matters worse, last spring i moved into to a mexican posada/ashram.  at first i thought that i had found a little oasis of yoga.  until they tried to kick me out of the room after we had a verbal agreement and i had already paid for the month.  until they threatened to call the cops on me if i didnt leave the posada in less than 5 hours because they wanted to rent my room to people who would pay more.  how do you threaten to call the cops on a mother with her young baby and then go into your meditation room and chant about peace and wisdom?

fucking yoga bullshit.

i wanted nothing to do with yoga.  it had become seared in my mind with the ‘skinny is healthier’, ‘check out my cool pose’, ‘you have negative energy’, ‘i am so spiritual because i chant/stretch/breathe really fast/ breathe really slow/wear a turban/ have a guru’–bullshit.