Glissade

Suffering Is Literature’s Big Game

July 10, 2024

Apropos of writing an essay on the experience of plodding through a difficult time in my life, I have been thinking about what suffering means for the artist. The process of writing that essay, as one would expect, was a dark affair layered with distress and pain. I wrote in spurts, never steadily, as both …

My Loneliness Is Killing Me

February 13, 2023

He smokes until he sees something moving in the smoke, remembers Joy like blindness: swimming at Jazeera Beach, gorging on belonging, barwaaqo, iftiin. He remembers riding through Suuqa Bakaaraha on a motorbike, held onto by women with hair trailing behind them like black smoke. It’s raining in London again, Hassan Aden Samatar sings from a …

What Made You Leave Home?

June 4, 2026

You are careful not to build castles on her words like the fool in your Sunday school lesson who built his house on sand.

Instant Coffee

March 4, 2024

In movies, the actors intertwine lips, and hold the other person’s bodies. You wonder if you should do this. Kendi beats you to it.

Music Is The Balm That Soothes The Soul

March 4, 2024

Heartbreak is painful, sure, I believe. But have you ever plugged your phone at night with the conviction it’d be completely charged by dawn, and when morning greets you like a curtsying teenager, you find out it’s exactly at the point you left it the previous night, unmoved and unshaken like mount Kilimanjaro?And what’s worse …

The Utility of Speculative Fiction

February 5, 2023

All writing is speculative. No matter how grounded in history or current reality; even nonfiction requires a reimagining, a speculation on what we think we know. I sit comfortably with ‘speculative fiction’ as a way of seeing rather than a genre because it is impossible for me to divorce it from everyday life. Consider Harry …

ISSUES

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