jihad over my ribcage

Posted on November 23, 2017 Updated on November 23, 2017

Once upon a time I was called a girl carrying two lemons, and she who said this the most, the one whose lips and deep voice I sensed regularly in my sour soft dreams, would compare my chest to tiny lemons or tangerines or tennis balls. And once she, whose lips and deep voice tickled my daydreams and nightmares and wet dreams, grabbed and squeezed and laughed and mocked, size zero she called me, and the presence of her hands felt so good, and years later, the memory of her hands felt so bad

Once upon a time I stuffed my baby bra with tissues so that her whose lips and voice shook my belly would stop comparing my body to lemons and tiny tangerines/  once upon a time I wished my lemons away after his hands touched me in my sleep and I felt my spirit step out of my body and leave, unable to handle the violence of the thing that the internet told me was “child sexual abuse” and when I got my spirit back the next morning she was broken but silent, and I prayed and prayed and prayed surah falak forever because every night my spirit would get up and leave and it felt so bad every time my body and spirit were torn apart and each shredded into powerless little pieces that pretended to be all-put-together, and years later, when the pieces did reunite again, it felt jarring/    because there are things my body remembers that my spirit has forgotten /   amnesia is necessary for survival, she says   / no, amnesia is a privilege, my body responds  / my spirit is still shook /

Once upon a time a man who I call father and abbu and babajan and king and hero and monster told me it was time to wear a dupatta when I wore a tight kameez because you know I was old now and you know, he was just saying it to protect me from the boys, because you know, his mother had given him special instructions on how to be a good father, and of course his mother meant everything to him because you know, he respected women, because you know it was her womb that birthed his agency, because you know she is my dadi after all, because you know we need to respect our elders, because you know feminism begins at home with respecting our elder women whose faces are etched with cracks of family labor, and you know he was a feminist because he had dedicated his life to being a puppet to an old woman who had seen so much violence, and you know its just a dupatta, just a piece of cloth, just an accessory, stop making it a big deal

Once upon a time there was a boy who kept looking at the lemon-like burdens I carried and I felt myself wanting a dupatta, wanting a chaadar, wanting to be naked, wanting a bandook, wanting a grenade, wanting an atomic bomb planted deeply under my ribcage that would blow up in his face as he looked and looked and looked and looked and — ha ha ha my bomb-breasts would explode into sharp shreds implanted in his destroyed face-rubble ha ha ha

Once upon a time my spirit felt like she owed too much to my broken body so I bought myself a low-cut shirt and a pushup bra in unprocessed efforts to reattach my body to my self to my spirit to my life. Once upon a time I thought that I needed to show the world that I could carry two sexy breasts and that the things over my ribs were my own to own, my own to fuck with, my own way to take away the violence embedded deep in the pores of my bulging skin, and so to honor my body, my spirit started to love the word breasts so much I would say it over and over again breasts breasts breasts breastsbreastsbreasts and let the stss sound hiss through my mouth through my vagina through my armpits through my ribcage through my utterances of surah falak

Now that child who giggled with thoughts of bombing boys straddles labels of gender clinging to my hips, undoes feminism handcuffed to my ankles, unravels the violence hanging heavily from my chest. but I still have wet dreams of her lips and deep voice mocking my size zero breasts, and I still have nightmares of his hands tearing apart spirit from body. Wa min sharri ghasikin iza wakab

Now my spirit is learning, is in awe of the spirits around me who also trans-ed out of rage, whispering surah falak, and binding my chest and gelling my hair back. Dupatta-hands-fingers-mockery-violence- – have culminated into – – Binder. I wonder if sexual violence turned me queer, and brush away the thought. I wonder if healing from sexual violence turned me trans, and brush away the thought. I run my fingers over my chest feeling the flatness, feeling the fantasies and dreams and nightmares living underneath my ribcage, and brush away my need to connect cause with effect, and step into this life feeling a little more attuned, a little less panicked, a little more weaponed, a little less armored

/Once upon a time I ran away from my gender because boy meant violence/

/But now I am becoming boy to avenge all the boys who made me run away from my gender/