41
" If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body.
Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless. "
― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night
57
" When I was a child, I believed God would set everything right. When I found out about the Nakba, I was sure that one day my friend Ahmad's grandmother would be able to return to her house in Palestine. I waited for the day our teachers would explain the theft of the land we lived on, the way our textbooks spoke about Indigenous people like they no longer existed and all the books we read were written by dead white men. I was sure that the school bullies would be punished, that the police would stop pulling over my Black friends' parents late at night, and that my classmates with undocumented aunties or grandparents would one day be able to stop worrying they'd be taken away. Allah is the remover of obstacles. But after the fire, after your burial, after the police dismissed the threats you'd received—by then I'd understood for a long time who had built this system, and for whom, and I'd long since let go of my ideas of justice. "
― Zeyn Joukhadar , The Thirty Names of Night