particularslantofsorrow-blog - Tumblr blog

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Before you fuck up and call her anything less than her name, before you grab her by the arm you need to know the trigger that you are pulling at. You need to know that the safety is never on. You need to know her history before you tell me that this isn’t my business. You need to know that her history is my history. See, she and I, we come from the tribe of raw knuckled little girls who call our father by their first names and wear their mothers like bruise coloured war paint under eye. We grew thick skin before we grew permanent teeth. We learned to piece together our own families in the backyards of rented duplexes where we promised plastic faced babies better things in soothing tones that we mimicked from TV. We do not have daddy issues even though our daddy’s have issues. We have piercing eyes and promises to keep. We grew up to be nomads surveying domestic war zones with black eyeliner binoculars, always refusing to camouflage. We threw our heads back and laughed at oncoming explosions, never flinched, absorbing shrapnel, never let them see us cry. We do not dream of boys who will save us from towers. We dream of boys with courage caked under their fingernails. Boys with hands rough enough to wipe metal tears from our faces but warm enough to mold them into stars. Boys with vertebrae strong enough to lock with ours so they can sleep sitting back to back with us and keep watch. And these are the boys, these are the boys who will find love under our armor. These are the boys who will find that we love selectively but we love fiercely. These are the boys who will learn that we love in ways that leave claw marks down the baseboard before we ever let go. So do not think she doesn’t know how you fear her absence - you should. Your cage is not stronger than her will or her smile. Do not think you are good enough to tame her. You aren’t. And do not think you are the first to try because i have already closed your eyes and crossed your arms before your body hit the floor. And you think she deserves better than you. You are right. So be better than you. Be thankful that she knows your name and be careful never to forget hers.

Rachel fucking Wiley (via queenofthewest)

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

What I used to pray for

I want to find Him.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

If you don’t like where you are, move on. You are not a tree.

Unknown  (via dysfunctionalmoment)

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

I wondered how many people there were in the world who suffered, and continued to suffer, because they could not break out from their own web of shyness and reserve, and in their blindness and folly built up a great distorted wall in front of them that hid the truth.

Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (via larmoyante)

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

People do not seem to realise that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (via fuckyeahemerson)

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Mantra.

I've received my fair share of disappointment, but life has got another thing coming to it if it thinks I will be brought down by trifles. I am strong. I am competent. I will keep on going.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

I am

I am the Queen of Anarchy, and of madness. I am that sound beating against the walls of your mouth, breathing itself out into a furious song. I am language. I am what straightens your gait before you flinch. I am the storm.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Because there is no healing without full revelation, without acknowledgement of harm done, without deep listening. And I let the sorrow open my heart wider to the seemingly impossible- to full healing for those effected, for our community and our collective dream. I let the sadness soften me in how I greet the day. I let the knowledge of how unfeeling we humans can be make me alert to the places where I am sure I am right, not taking others into full consideration, not taking time to see each other as another myself.

Oriah House (c) 2013Oriah MOuntain Dreamer (via eatmangoesnekkid)

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening[…]Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.

Alice Walker, with a quote for every classroom wall. (via caitsmeissner)

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

I miss my red lipstick. Normally I would wear it on a daily basis, but I haven't been feeling myself lately. It just feels pointless.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Death and the Maiden

I absolutely recommend for everyone to read this short work by Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman. It deals with themes of injustice, vengeance, unfulfilled retribution, the crimes and excesses of an oppressive regime, and the psychological scars it inflicts on the oppressed. What I found most interesting was the parallel of the governmental policy of (probably Chilean) ex-regime with the national reconciliation program approved and put in place in Algeria in 2005 by referendum, to deal with the shreds of the country wrought on it after a decade long, bloody civil war.

Some important implications and questions:

1)The Missing People -

So common a theme in history is that of the disappearing of citizens and the oppressed in the context of oppressive regimes, governmental power struggles, and civil wars. It was rampant (bit of a quirk to say that the missing were rampant, isn't it?) in Algeria, and even now, the government largely refuses to acknowledge the parties responsible for the missing, to identify that , or to provide services to the families who are still left wondering, still left longing.

2) The Healing -

What exactly is the ethical or practical (or both as I doubt they very often coincide) method to be put in place after the fall of oppression to deal with the psyches, moral, and personal filters of the people?

What do you do with the oppressors who go into hiding, or claim the fear of death or torture as the basis for their cooperation in evil?

How does a nation begin and continue healing the scars while the arbiters debate their own personal versions of what happened? How do you establish an unbiased, objective context in which to rationalize the evil before moving forward?

3)Justice -

Since pain and oppression are reoccurring in the mentalities of the oppressed, it seems impossible to insure pure justice without taking away that which caused the pain, which isn't so much the person, but the act itself. Catch 22 - remove the person and the procedure, justice. But it isn't justice if it never happened. What is justice?

Should the pounding, primal desire for revenge be codified into law or used to persecute those responsible?

To compound, how does one make sense of sheer madness, not just in themselves, but in the turning, infallible speed of the world?

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Ramadan

This is always a very cleansing month for me. Fasting, although a bit difficult at first, gets much easier with time. Without the allure and time spent thinking of and consuming food and drink, I focus my attentions on the ostensibly banal and common place, like the clattering of pots and pans in the kitchen or the loosening of my once form fitting jeans on my legs. I come to love the silence of my crouched figure after prayer and how the barrier between me and God is stripped away.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Who Am I?

I am in love with revolutionaries, with political discourse and rhetoric, with the drum beats and convulsions of history and of peoples, with lush, fragrant writing, and especially, with the fibers that bind us, make into a conglomerate what is otherwise disordered shreds of universal particulate.

I am a woman inclined to harbor dangerous and ineffable whims of passion. I am an Arab. I am an African. I am a native English speaker, with aspirations to the otherwise. I am 19 years old.

A caveat: What is very unfortunate about me, is that when the opportunity presents itself for me to open up, to reveal what is simultaneously surface and sacred about myself, I freeze. Too often, what I do reluctantly decide to reveal is painfully superficial and while true, out of place; a stone in the high spanning wall that is my emotional protection. And sometimes the weight of my wall is suffocating.

More to follow.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Silence is beautiful.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

As long as you keep Algiers, you will be constantly at war with Africa; sometimes this war will seem to end; but these people will not hate you any the less; it will be a half-extinguished fire that will smoulder under the ash and which, at the first opportunity, will burst into a vast conflagration

Baron Lacuee

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

The thing about patriarchy is that individual men, gay and straight, are often really wonderful people who you love deeply, but they have internalized some really poisonous shit. So every once in a while they say or do something that really shakes you because you’re no longer totally certain they see you as a human being, and you feel totally disempowered to explain that to them.

(via theymightbeyonce)

I have found that this occurs quite more often than once in a while.

[particularslantofsorrow-blog]

Algeria

L'Algerie

Al Jazair