![]() I’m a Capricorn, but we’re the same in that sense-we don’t like being disrespected. I really seriously thought he’d ever come back-he’s a Leo, so he’s extremely prideful. He hasn’t been back to America since 2002, after he was detained (there’s a poem named after him and this ordeal called Being An Immigrant) as he’s a professor that’s pretty anti-American. I’m so fortunate to have been allowed to say what I needed to say. So I take a deep amount of solace and gratitude in that. There’s something unimaginably powerful in saying your truth out loud. ![]() Every time I read it… I feel closer to liberation. After I journeyed (through ayahuasca) the first time something began to click… it didn’t really matter if no-one liked this book-because my god do I like this book. So I wrote this book.įA: How has it been having a book that’s so personal, particularly around family, released in the world?įR: I’ve probably told you this before, but I truly went insane this summer. I think I was tired of not being seen, I was tired of suffocating. At least not in the context that I talk about it. Having said that, it’s really not talked about. ![]() This is my roundabout way of saying: intergenerational trauma is not only real, its insidious. It’s extremely hard for me to feel good about myself… but this year, with How To Cure A Ghost coming out, I understood the cycle needed to stop. When her hands did touch my body they were always cruel… which has led to a host of problems on my end: extreme sexual and physical trauma that’s leaked into my feeling of inadequacy in both relationships as well as my professional life. It’s lonely having been raised with no tenderness. I’ve rarely (if ever) read anything that described my experience of growing up. I was tired of not being seen, I was tired of suffocating. I feel like a failure because I didn’t save her, I also feel like she’s failed us because she hasn’t saved herself. So, what to do with the feeling of being a lost cause? It’s been that way since she and my father married since my sister and I was born-it’s not changed. It’s something that my father, sister and I have suffered the most from… the onslaught of violence that we’ve systematically experienced from her. Growing up was painful because it meant there was no reprieve from the trauma she’d inflict. She’s probably said something nice to me a handful of times, truly. The thing I didn’t know how to articulate back then is that even then, there’s always a difference between who administers that violence. It was at that moment (I was 14 at the time, so was she) I think I first understood how deep this normalization of violence was, how pathetic its normalcy was. I remember telling a Sri Lankan friend of mine that my mother would regularly beat me, and her response was a bemused so what, my mother beats me all the time. We all seem to be locked into some kind of horror show without knowing it’s abuse or violence that we’re witnessing. What are your thoughts on intergenerational trauma, and the way that your book looks to name and grapple with it?įariha Róisín: Ancestral trauma, and not knowing how to handle it, is something that I find so often in South Asian communities. ![]() ![]() In How To Cure A Ghost, Fariha writes “nurture makes you hate yourself less.” These poems are a project in nurturing, a poetics that interrogate the nurturing of an abusive mother-daughter relationship, the nurturing of a brown girl unloved by her various countries, the nurturing of having to walk through the world as a person of color under white supremacist violence. I’m grateful for Fariha’s words and Fariha’s friendship, and for this opportunity to talk to them and do a deep dive into their work.įatimah Asghar: A thing that struck me about your book was the deep explorations of family and trauma, particularly through the lens of your mother. Alongside the poetry book Fariha published a journal workbook, Being In Your Body, as a space to expand the healing impulse so prevalent in their poetic work. What struck me most about Fariha’s work was the insistence on healing, the commitment to being able to write through pain not to just get through it, but to heal it. As a fellow South Asian queer Muslim writer, I found myself gravitating towards its topics and the perspectives and lyricism that Fariha was bringing to the page. The book is expansive, touching on queerness, Islam, and institutionalized racism and structures of power, among many other things. This past fall Fariha Róisín released a collection of poetry, How To Cure A Ghost, a lyrical exploration of trauma, loss and rebuilding. ![]()
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