Hadiyyah Kuma
Part of the "What does being Muslim Indo-Caribbean mean to you?" Series
How To Mend Things
With morning prayers and prayers again in the night
With alarm clocks that play only music, no beeping
With satin pillows so curly hair doesn’t frizz and you
Can claim: Mother look, I am beautiful as well as neat
There is no counterfeit look that can level me
With Astaghfirullah
With soap and water
With soft rope and wrists that need to be redeemed
As good as right-side angels before bed
Without playing the knife game and scratching up
The table so nobody beats you with the back
Of a metal spoon
Touch my sonic pre-crisis
Inject our history into your future
Touch my spine and see how it wanders toward home
Take tape to my brothers’ pride and renovate
Their shoulders into vulnerable timepieces
Take bandages to my sisters’ mouths
Stop the beatings
Stop the bruising
The chatter, stop it
Pillow talk with Western media and bribe
It to reframe you
It’s not legacy that defines you but time so
Never beg
Share the heavy with me, share the passion
Share the danger, share the almost-deaths
And blue-tinted overnight recoveries
Share the cousins, share the aunties
And their good news
Asana? Roti came out perfect and flakey
Margaret? Got fake Gucci for Christmas
And it looks real enough that there’s
no metaphor available to describe
the feeling of new
Share the shoes, share one sleeve of my jacket
Combine with me
Hoard prayers again in the night
Needles and thread and prayers
With bare hands on bare hands on her barer ones
Realize there’s nothing more you can do alone
Turn your hands off
Pocket them and wait for me,
Remember even in the west I am
Always dancing to you, eyelashes batting
Battling myself out of cages
Downing sand to make a path for you
To get there, always now, always
I am exactly two stations away
Post-crisis managing
My prayers again in the night
When prayer is about healing. The multitude of experiences I have within my family have called upon prayer as a form of management and processing. Outside of family, I can never find anyone who has truly understand this. Praying for each other, whether it be through supplications or simple thoughts, is like an invisible language we share.
Hadiyyah Kuma is a 20-year-old Indo-Guyanese writer and sociology student from Toronto. Her work seeks to examine rest and pleasure under capitalism, gentrification, platonic intimacy, and anxiety. Her poems, essays, and fiction have been published in places like The Rumpus, Yes Poetry, The Hart House Review, and GUTS magazine. Her debut chapbook, ‘tired, but not spectacularly,’ was released in 2019 by the Soapbox Press.
The views in this article reflect the lived experiences and positionality of this author based on the intersections of what being both Muslim and Indo-Caribbean means to them.