As the bus pulled to a stop, Nida slung her bag over her shoulder and shouted her thanks to the driver. Brown leaves crunched beneath her feet as soon as they made contact with the pavement. The sound followed her as she swiftly descended the street in the black of the night. Her eyes darted in every direction as the …
A Year of Doubt
The other night, I dreamt that my family was in Pakistan.My grandmother, brought back to life, was urging me to pray.She handed me a tasbeeh and told me to show it to my grandfather,transforming my acceptance of the beaded string into a promised prayer.After some time, I settled down and tried to pray, butI couldn’t remember the words I was …
Tug of War: For The People
Tug of War is a remarkable directorial return by Amil Shivji and the first Tanzanian feature to be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). Based on the award-winning Swahili book by Shafi Adam Shafi, Tug of War follows a communist revolutionary, Denge (Gudrun Columbus Mwanyika), and a woman escaping a forced marriage, Yasmin (Ikhlas Gafur Vora), in 1950’s …
I am now looking to my queer ancestors.
Growing up, I often felt lost, endlessly searching for unfathomable answers and some kind of purpose. The question of “who am I?” would ring loudly in my head and sometimes, it still does. In my attempts to understand my own being, I would find myself stuck in cycles of denial and hesitancy, struggling to come to terms with my seemingly …
