momtaza mehri 💆🏾♀️
@RuffneckRefugee
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mostly a poet | mostly away | mumtazamehri @gmail .com
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Interrupting my retreat to tell you that 𝓑𝓪𝓭 𝓓𝓲𝓪𝓼𝓹𝓸𝓻𝓪 𝓟𝓸𝓮𝓶𝓼 is landing in bookshops this summer (July 6th).
Spent a long time running away from these poems. Glad they caught up with me, and that I can finally share them.
Pre-order here:
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worth remembering that like so many informants, he worked with the FBI in exchange for having his felony charges dropped. also like many others, he ended up ostracised by his community & finally killed himself.
This is William O'Neal. The snake ass FBI informant that drugged and set up
#FredHampton
for $300.
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Samaria Rice has always respected herself & the rest of us enough to be unabashed with the truth.
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most forms of hate-reading, hate-watching, hate-consuming, hate-engaging, hate-following & hate-obsessing are basically just you disrespecting your own brief period of time on this planet.
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It always staggers me that she wrote, recorded, and co-produced a stunning debut like The Lion and the Cobra as a pregnant teenager, in a flea-infested hotel, still mourning the loss of her mother.
Rest easy, Shuhada.
JUST IN - Irish music legend Sinead O’Connor dies aged 56.
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Baldwin was poor, scrappy, desperately curious, flagrant with his failures, a diamond-bright imagination scratched out between railroad tracks, damp bedsits, and church pews.
Any such writer in our contemporary moment would be punished and isolated for these traits.
James Baldwin, with no college degree and def no series of endless workshops, is a great reminder that the neoliberal invention of a fixed procedure to create writers is actually creating more dilettantes than anything. He wrote to survive not to pass a course, why do you write?
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one of my favourite images of Baldwin is him taking his shoes off to enter a masjid in Istanbul (taken by Sedat Pakay).
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zoom saw my bornday looks first 🙃
this year will not kill me!
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please note that Paul Robeson was harassed, red-baited, denied a passport & possibly poisoned by the CIA into a drug-induced suicide attempt because of his "extreme advocacy on behalf of the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa."
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The Story of the Watermelon, Khaled Hourani (2007).
In the years after the 1967 Six Day War, the Israeli army arrested/harassed anyone displaying the Palestinian flag's colors in Gaza and the West Bank. In response, many Palestinians in the region would carry sliced watermelons in a sign of subversive protest.
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a restful peace to a legend. most of your faves were his sons.
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the greatest trick creatives ever pulled was convincing themselves that they’re more interesting than their immigrant parents.
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Baldwin is probably one of the greatest film critics of all time & Morrison's essays touch on everything from the Iraq War to Disneyland. her literary criticism is unparalleled & she wrote an entire opera libretto.
again, how you read is as important as what you read.
Because of racism, some of our best brainpower (Baldwin, Morrison, so so many others) had to be diverted to the cause of anti-racism, and we are still asking the same things of this generation’s finest minds. What else might they have wanted to write about? Think about that.
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The personal essays we deserve aren’t written by the kind of people who get published. Try your luck and you might overhear snippets on the bus, though.
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"I am against boys becoming heroes at ten."
— Rashid Hussein
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before his execution, emmett till's father was imprisoned in italy. alongside ezra pound, of all people, who referenced him in his pisan cantos.
this will never not blow my mind.
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Ntozake Shange's contribution to the Literature & the Urban Experience conference of 1980 is grounding for those times when it feels impossible to make a life out of poetry.
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the "inaccessibility" of theory is the least of our problems in a world where we sorely lack the time, opportunity & resources to just sit together & think, even for a little while.
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been sick & suspicious of the increasingly mainstreamed language of "privilege" for longer than i can remember. finally wrote about why.
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still hasn’t sunk in.
still trying to find the words.
overjoyed & indebted to so so many.
Congratulations to Momtaza Mehri (
@RuffneckRefugee
) &
@Tim_Etchells
- the winners of the Manchester Writing Competition 2019, which is run by
#McrMetUni
&
@McrWritingSchl
.
Find out more about them and their winning work in our latest news story:
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there’s a kind of liberal feminism that’s so infantalizing & belittling of women’s critical faculties it might as well be misogyny.
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Zadie Smith has always been the High Priestess of coffee-coloured contrarianism. Our literary foremother of Blairite multiculturalism. In her aggressively specific lane, she excels. Outside of it, not so much.
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hamilton is beatboxing slaveowner fanfiction & not even my dearest friends can convince me otherwise.
Remember a few yrs ago when someone was deemed genius for composing a musical that framed a white man from a colonial outpost who participated in founding a settler colony as a metaphor for contemporary migrant refugees, racialized the founding fathers, & made them rap awkwardly?
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the figure of the "informant" haunts the intimacies of movement work. what is dangled in front of the already precarious reveals how inhuman a world with such a scarcity of options really is.
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me: i wanna move
global anti-blackness: anywhere except
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"Why is the world always easier to fix
than our own homes?"
— Essex Hemphill
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wish he would have screamed it for the extra vim!
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Sinéad O’Connor left us a year ago today. I wrote about her, mothers and daughters, and what it means to risk losing everything you’re told you should want.
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this is reminiscent of the vietnamese national liberation front’s airborne leaflet campaign appealing to black american soldiers.
It should be noted that when the Iranian students took control of the American Embassy in 1979 and held ppl hostage, they let the Black people go. They knew we had no power in this society.
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rewatching Sudanese Film Group alumni Suliman Elnour's It Still Rotates (1978).
struck by this portrait of teachers running "self-criticism" gatherings with students encouraged to speak their minds in post-independence South Yemen.
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some of us suffer from gatekeeper mentalities without owning the keys to the gate. a conundrum.
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"Water standpipe as charity for the soul of my grandmother who passed away alone and thirsty upon our expulsion from El Lydd on July 13, 1948".
there are no words.
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"Love war so much they call the history of their civilization the canon."
— Amiri Baraka
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intergenerational friendships have significantly improved my life in so many varied & humbling ways 🥰
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if you loved ATLANTICS, do check out Abbas Amini’s HENDI & HORMOZ (2018). A tale of first love, Afro-Iranian island life, economic desperation & growing up much too fast.
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my last two brain cells after a hard day’s work juggling the mental gymnastics needed to denounce jay z as a ruthless venture capitalist yet celebrate beyoncé as an icon of the black feminist radical tradition.
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these will self-destruct in 5 mins but here’s to being in the shadow of the sea! 🥺
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wrote a little review of THAT interview, black british delusions, our era of liberal hotepry & our very green & extremely pleasant ENG-ER-LAND! 🏴💂🏾♂️
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grenfell will always be a harsh reminder of how so many us love & invest in cities that will never love us back.
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but if i start reciting imru’ al qais passages in public, someone will pull the emergency brake on the train.
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"diaspora of fleeing war crime tribunals vs diaspora of fleeing war crimes."
—
@bodega_gyro_ao
i was explaining to my spanish friend how we still have the documents for our house in Palestine from 48 but we can’t get to it, and she said ‘that’s like how my grandpa basically owns half of Cuba’. and she couldn’t comprehend how it’s not, at all, like that
i want to die
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Thinking of Eman and Bayan.
The Black women excluded from the imaginary of
#BlackGirlMagic
and intersectional empowerment. The majority of Black women in the world.
Eman Abdullah Salem, (56) a dedicated paramedic in the PRCS, and her daughter, Bayan Mohammad Jom’a Eid, ( 22) were brutally killed by an Israeli drone strike in Tulkarem refugee camp.
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there is literally no bigger turn-off than a man who can read.
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"imposter syndrome” but only ever in relation to family members surviving on subsistence levels who didn’t win the diasporic luck of the draw & are probably more deserving of everything i take for granted.
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so intrigued (or maybe obsessed?) with these figures that i have a series of forthcoming poems trying to grapple with these contradictions.
here’s one on O’Neal.
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Miriam Makeba in Algiers dedicating her Arabic cover of Africa/أفريقيا to the martyrs of the independence struggle (1978).
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one detail about the infamous "My Family’s Slave" piece that has never left me is its writer penning an entire book on the stereotypes plaguing Asian-American masculinity while a woman was held as a domestic slave by his family.
the dangers & delusions of diaspora cut so deep.
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unrelatedly spent yesterday reading Ghassan Kanafani's Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948-1966 (something must have been in the air).
struck by this poem written by an unnamed fighter awaiting his execution in the morning.
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recalling bell hooks on Malcolm X. how the solitude of prison was, in a cruel irony, the first place where he & others could just sit, think, read. how difficult it is to carve out community-centred spaces for intellectual life outside the academy.
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Malcolm X & Lorraine Hansbury being born on the same day always makes me think of the deep respect they had for each other, even through conflict.
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People who have a gotcha, more-radical-than-thou approach towards critique think everyone else does too.
Some of us are just searching for clarity.
We welcome being wrong and want to do that often, with others, on the way to something better.
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contemporary satire is functionally useless when you have brilliance like this.
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institutional critique being recycled into institutional pruning will remain our general condition until we reckon with how deeply entangled our desires, aspirations & metrics of value are with the cruelties we say we want to end.
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"No social system, no historical vision, no theoretical totalization, no matter how powerful, can exhaust all the alternatives or practices that exist within its domain. There is always the possibility to transgress."
— Edward Said.
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Kiarostami poems for today & every other day.
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three presidential inaugurations where the black woman poet as both figure & symbol is trotted out in the service of empire.
truly becoming a tradition.
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increasingly bored by imaginaries that too closely resemble mine, art that simply reflects my own preoccupations & anxieties. interested in portals, not mirrors.
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he was a threat not because of his representational value onscreen but due to his commitment to interlinked global struggles, from rallying around George Padmore, C.L.R James & Nkrumah in London to lending support to Faith Bandler & the Aborginal movement in Australia.
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Menelik Shabazz's endlessly vital BLOOD AH GO RUN (1982) is available to watch here.
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the term "international community" has never included anyone i love.
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A slice of personal news 💌
You’ll be seeing a lot more of me at
@Cambridge_Uni
, dreaming, scheming, and working with readers and writers.
For now, just basking in gratitude.
We're marking
#NationalPoetryDay
with the announcement of our new Jacqueline Bardsley Poet-in-Residence! We are delighted that Momtaza Mehri will be joining the Homerton community Full story:
#Poetry
#Poet
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Recommended yet another work of wispy autofiction detailing the neurotically barren inner life of a millennial woman of colour trapped in a crowded situationship with a cold, rich white man, in a world entirely revolving around barbed workplace and dinner party microagressions.
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the gut-churning regularity of checking up on family after a bombing in mogadishu. now it's friends in beirut. the cycle only repeats & exhausts.
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a favourite baldwin birthday poem (from jimmy’s blues).
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Robeson was blocked from attending the Bandung Conference & the state department disseminated propaganda discrediting him across India & Latin America.
flimsily comparing him to inclusion-obsessed movements which prioritise style over substance is insulting.
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forty years after the St Paul's uprising, thinking of young Bristolians denouncing the forces (Black community "leaders" included) that came together to quell their rage.
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"Yes, I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid for the bombs and the planes and the tanks that they used to massacre your family."
— June Jordan
Some of you aren’t getting it—It is our money, our bombs. We leveled the press buildings. We destroyed the homes. We are murdering Palestinian children.
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Manu Dibango improvising with locals in Kinshasa during Zaire '74.
A true icon.
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without romanticizing starving poets in garrets, anyone who wants to make a life (not a profession) out of writing should anticipate an intimate relationship with failure & underestimation.
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me: hi
online content: meet the *insert marginalised identity* who's breaking stereotypes by *insert ordinary daily activity or hobby*
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"I know these people. They’re not my people but I know them. I ought to know them better."
Stuart Hall on being unable to let go of Palestine.
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diaspora woc poetry not everyday hardship & broken backs sometimes joy & blown out backs pls.
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the books i keep seeing on these reading lists for well-meaning "allies" are part of the problem too 😩
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on the cusp of something truly life-changing so any prayers/good vibrations flung my way would be dutifully appreciated 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
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An entire generation’s creativity stifled under the Tories. A decimation of arts and culture, and a narrowing of possibilities for bright and curious working class kids. So much unforgivable damage done by this cabal of incompetents, but today I am thinking of this.
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wishing we embraced professional envy as a natural human shortcoming that lies at the root of so much animosity instead of disguising it with the language of righteous "critique".
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save your useless book promotional cycles.
@m7mdkurd
is the only contemporary poet who matters right now.
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for freelance creatives with monied partners, this period of self-isolation is basically a residency programme.
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today's gem is Iraqi eighties icon Rabia performing what every legend should have in their repertoire – a song about long-distance love & telephones.
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a project i once researched led me to the tragic stories behind some of the photographs El Madani captured at his Studio Shehrazade.
Lebanese photographer Hashem El Madani (1928-2017) captured images of almost every resident in his village of Saida.
“In a conservative society such as Saida, people were willing to play the kiss between two people of the same sex, but very rarely between a man and a woman.”
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"The hurricane does not roar in pentameter."
— Kamau Brathwaite.
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for The Poetry Review, I wrote about the poetics of the Black Gulf & my visit to Bin Jelmood House, the only museum in the world to focus on the Indian Ocean slave trade.
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@divanificent
everyone suggesting africa as if the IMF, world bank & the entire global order won’t kill you there too.
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the crisis in black cultural criticism is ultimately a symptom of the increasingly blurred lines between minor and major celebrity.
it’s hard to interrogate creators who have the potential to be one’s future collaborators, financiers & photo opportunities.
power is seductive.
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Groundedness in your own reality is so vital. You can’t keep making life-altering decisions based on the delusions, fantasies, and anxieties of others.
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Abdulkadir Ahmed Said’s ALEEL/LA CONCHIGLIA (1992) is such a lush evocation of the Somali coastline, collective memory & ecological catastrophe.
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reading Lucille Clifton’s Cruelty together with Fady Joudah’s Mimesis.
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i even miss being followed around like a highway robber 🥺
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"The poet names the world. When it is destitute he names its destitution. But poetry itself becomes destitute except that its naming is an accusation. And to accuse one must first understand the why of destitution."
— Sylvia Wynter.
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"First of all he is a fine poet and secondly he states most clearly and exactly whatever I do not believe; I can find it there. It is a poem I read quite often just to know how I do not think."
– C.L.R. James on T.S. Eliot.
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