Nasim Marie Jafry's Blog, page 2

Birds are poets, they are jewels, they are philosophers

As a distraction from the rain, am posting some birds from last year, mostly in garden from window. Birds are poets, they are jewels, they are philosophers. Goldfinch, robin, blackbird, blue tit, mallards, baby blue tit, greenfinch, chaffinch, starling, jackdaw, baby blue tit with baby coal tit.

Birds

As a distraction from the rain, am posting some birds from last six months, mostly in garden from window.

The Invalid by Matisse

I had never seen or heard of  Matisse's The Invalid until I saw it on Twitter last week and I can't stop thinking about it. This painting would have brought me comfort as a severely ill bedbound young woman in eighties. I would have had the postcard on my wall. I wish there were a postcard I could get hold of. I can't find out much about it except it was painted in 1899.

'The Bangle Man'

I saw a gorgeous photo on Twitter of a bangle-seller, choori-wallah, and it made me think of my flash fiction 'The Bangle Man', which first appeared in the anthology 50 stories for Pakistan, published eight years ago to raise money for victims of the 2010 floods.

Every day he arranges the fruit outside his shop. He wears an old grey sweater, thin trousers and chappals. He has a limp. Molly wants to tell him he causes her beautiful pain, this old man with dark skin. He makes her think of the ba...

Autobiographical novel: 'a prosthetic voice' (Alexander Chee). And (films of) Guru Dutt

I recently dipped into Alexander Chee's collection of essays How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. I find reading about writing to be reassuring: you learn things that you already knew but didn't know you knew. It's the kind of book where you want to write down fragments and keep them close to your heart. Chee describes his first (autobiographical) novel as a 'prosthetic voice', which gives voice to those things too difficult to speak about, in his case, sexual abuse. His image of prosthesi...

'Elsa and the heron'

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Ten years since The State of Me - publishing & illness (&Lionel Shriver)

This August it will  be ten years since the The State of Me was published. I'm still very proud of the novel and it remains my weapon in the fight for truth about my illness. A decade has been enough time for me to get over the roller coaster of the publishing process - and I have happily mostly forgotten the shock of it all. It was like a never-ending game of snakes and ladders. As a result of the liquidation of my indie publisher, the novel did not receive the marketing it should have...

Ten years since The State of Me - and Lionel Shriver

This August it will  be ten years since the The State of Me was published. I'm still very proud of the novel and it remains my weapon in the fight for truth about my illness. A decade has been enough time for me to get over the roller coaster of the publishing process - and I have happily mostly forgotten the shock of it all. The process was indeed stressful and possibly was the reason I later developed idiopathic bilateral uveitis, a rare and serious autoimmune eye condition, where your...

Millions Missing protest - Edinburgh 12 May, 2018

I got to the #millionmissing protest for the last twenty minutes, just in time to hear Carol Monaghan MP's speech. I was happy to be able to shake her hand and give her a wee brief hug afterwards. I told her she will never know the enormity of what she is doing by challenging PACE and campaigning for biomedical research. The sun was shining and it was glorious to see activism in action by a community of patients who have been wronged by the medical establishment for far too long. Heartbreakin...

Blue shoes with zips and advocacy for ME

With all the focus on #millionsmissing just now I have been thinking about the shoes I was wearing in September 1982 when I went off to do my (ill-fated) year abroad in France, not yet nineteen. They were blue and pointy with a diagonal zip - I got them in Schuh and later fictionalised them in a scene in The State of Me where Helen is on a ferry returning home from France because she feels so hideously ill. In real life, I came home from France twice - I  actually went back, because my G...