when you’re abroad, you tend to romanticise where you came from. today after watching the local news for ten minutes, all that romanticism i had built up in six months seemed so futile, so naive. in those ten minutes i heard about an eleven year old girl who was assaulted by the family she worked for and a thirteen year old girl who was whipped and kept in chains by her forty year old husband. these words don’t do justice to the severity of the crimes - the pictures were heartwrenching. the violence against women in this country is ridiculous, fucking unbelievable in this day and age. pakistan, you’ve forgotten your women and you’ve done so at your own peril.
I’m not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance.
— Jon Stewart (via thalamtnafsee)
(Source: ghostisborn, via muslimfeminists)
Why Afghan Women Risk Death to write Poetry →
“Her memory will be a flower tucked into literature’s turban.
In her loneliness, every sister cries for her.”
Performed by the band my friend Umer aka Duck sings for, Great Uncertain by Poor Rich Boy is a beautiful, bitter song with one of the best lyrics I’ve ever had the chance to listen to. Poor Rich Boy is a band based in Lahore (my city, if I may add boastfully so) and has created one of the best songs in Pakistan’s underground music scene. Because I love the lyrics so much, I’ve decided to post them here. Give it a listen.
I’ll follow you down through the meadows
Down to the old crow killer crossroads
And there we’ll wait for your children
Where they’ll lead us down to that old mamba snake of a roadOld men to my left
With their wives and their faces marred
And these miseries they wont leave us
Cling on to our skins
Like boiling hot tarThe bowerbirds have boulders attached to their feet
They’re tearing down the buildings as we speak
I’ll let go of the birds I held
In captivity
And let them soar through the night
And it came to me again
How all the roads are laughing serpents
They’re leading us on to the latches of doors bolted tight on a mighty brow
Now as the sun
Falls to dust
All of our memories are but rust
One lonely step on to the pier
With the river still running deep
And the reflections of vibrations of
A cold dipping sun
We are but one
You and I and the great uncertain
We’ll part these curtains
We’ll hang ourselves tonight
The crows, they’ll dance with the wind
Across the steeple
Where our Gods lie
And all of your children they are but people
Buried in the sand
Forgive me lord
The fire fairy died.Best comments received on one of their songs, “I didn’t know Pakistanis could sing in English!!!” Silly people online. This is pure Pakistani talent. Shehzad’s voice haunts.
Picture of the Day: Islamabad, Pakistan. Men, originally from a village nearMultan, now displaced from their homes since the 2010 flooding, play pool in a slum in the capital’s outskirts.
Credit: Muhammad Muheisen/AP. Via.
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The battle against misogyny does not follow a “men hate women” formula. It cannot be reduced to a generic battle of the sexes spiced with a dose of Islam and culture. It cannot be extracted from the political and economic threads that, together with patriarchy, produce the uneven terrain that men and women together navigate. It is these lessons that one would have to engage before meting out an indictment about the politics of sex, much less envisioning a future of these politics. There is no one answer because there is no single culprit, no single “culture” or “hatred” that we can root out and replace with “tolerance” or “love.” Similarly, the absence of a sustained and critical attention to sex and gender cannot be solved, syllabus style, by a separate glossy special “Sex Issue,” the content and form of which reproduce what it purports to critique.
— Let’s Talk About Sex by Sherene Seikaly and Maya Mikdashi for Jadaliyya (via muslimfeminists)
(via muslimfeminists)
a little late, but wesfest made me so happy. completely reaffirmed that i am the right place and surrounded by the best of people.
