Mutmainah > Recent Status Updates

This needs more structure I think

Struggling through the bits about minstrel shows and black blind pianists (this is sanitized, it is of course much worse in Cather’s capable hands). It’s good to be humbled sha.

Grateful I walked into this blind, if that’s the word for it. I feel physically sick.

Did not expect a conclave aside but gladly welcomed it. Nigerian women are so totally and utterly cooked. The cool girls, the boss babes, the traditionalists… Absolutely scorched!

Had to run this back even though the prose makes me feel like my brain is being scrambled (it is better in print though). This is the farthest I’ve ever gotten!

Back after a hiatus

I’m feeling more and more dejected with every page

Very depressing to be reading this in the thick of the reactionary backlash. Things seemed so more promising a few short years ago.

Thinking about Fanon and DuBois and double consciousness for obvious reasons. Combing back through my annotations: “Harrowed by the glimpse of a strange outside view of himself”
“There was nothing for it but to submit. He pressed forward with the multitude.”
Then the lines about first impressions after a hiatus, the known and the unknown, and the eye of an academic and that of a tourist. So much to unpack.

Hammad really is in a class of her own when it comes to prose. She describes Fatima’s henna-d hand as an “embroidered palm”
I love this part - “Rage flooded his body. He had done everything for this man. For this man’s opinion, every choice. And he had succeeded … And where was his father? Midhat’s whole life, stripped down to feeble reeds. They collapsed without him.”

“He was a guest, but the host had trespassed. And he too had trespassed, and transgressed, with the host’s daughter. Whose then was the crime?… But if he was the father’s subject, how could he be the daughter’s husband? One did not study one’s son-in-law”

“Nablusis spent their lives close to their graves, at nature’s mercy and sought antidotes to the world’s pain in the vapour of ritual”

I feel like I’ve been dropped in the middle of the story, and not in a good way.