#aunties
One Ramadan, I’d gotten really sick. I was sweating buckets, throwing up, and suffering endless rounds of diarrhea. It occurred to me halfway through the day that it was plainly wrong to continue fasting in this state, especially since I had a duty to family members who depended on me. Even so, as I took my first sip of water with my medicine, I felt a different kind of nausea: good old fashioned religious guilt.
Somewhere in all of our hearts, there’s a small corner reserved for the voices of our communities’ judgmental uncles and aunties. Their voices are always whispering, and their eyes are always on us. It’s like a twisted, sick version of an omniscient god, to whom obedience is more important than, you know, actual morality.
We hear their voices every time we pop in earbuds to listen to music. We hear them when we hang out with friends who drink. We hear their angry whispers when we read any book besides the Qur’an (and medical school textbooks). We feel their burning gaze as we fight for LGBTQ rights, advocate feminism, or even, God forbid, speak with an American accent.
These aren’t the effects of a guilty conscience. These are paranoid fears of an irrational ideology. We know those opinions aren’t even Islamic in the least. After all, how can you ever Islamically justify corralling women into dungeon-like conditions in Allah’s House when they share the same open space as men in the Prophet’s own mosque?
The voices in our heads are simply that: voices. They’re disembodied, removed from actual people. What they represent is our own understanding of our religious tradition and heritage. Somewhere along the way, we’ve come to believe that Islam is restrictive and rigid. This belief keeps us in line, and allows the power-mongering creeps in our community to hold one over us. Sure, we don’t believe in the voices personally, but since everyone is aware of these voices, we indirectly perpetuate them. When we hear that a convert was driven out of a mosque simply because he had tattoos, how many of us moved immediately to impeach the mosque board or personally reached out to the convert? Yeah.
So some Muslims, exasperated, leave Islam altogether. They cannot reconcile the differences between their consciences and what a judgmental, angry, racist, sexist, and xenophobic “Islam” asks of them. The rest of us hang on, but bitterly resent a beautiful tradition being bent into chains.
These chains only exist so long as we believe they’re there. In fact, they’re barely there as it is. Try counting how many backbiting, opportunistic, evil bigots there are in your local community; I’d be surprised if there were more than a dozen. There will always be more Frodos than gollums. They will always be a minority. All we have to do is own Islam for ourselves, to live unapologetically and proudly as Muslims of our own accord.
“Haters gonna hate. Keep calm and Muslim on.”
- Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), somewhat paraphrased
Dial A for aunties was such a fun read with so many shenanigans. The aunties were great and funny and very protective towards Meddy. The story takes place in an island where a very lavish wedding is taking place. Nathan, the one that got away from Meddy is the hotel owner. One big snag..Meddy accidently killed someone and the aunties are trying to help. So many funny moments in this book that you just got to read it great read.
#aunties #meddy #bigwedding #blinddate #readingtime #booksofinstagram #bookreader #readthisbook #shenanigans #funnybook #closefamily #nathanchan #dialaforaunties #booksbooksmorebooks
So your aunties done as we was told and opened our bottles of wine for the arrival of our Princess Amelle Ivy Singhateh already being a bad influence by breaking my Dry Jan #baby #wine #aunties #love
Post link
An afternoon with Kevin Young’s “Aunties” sounds awfully good right now. The poem, from his collection Dear Darkness, appears most recently in Blue Laws, a selected and uncollected gathering that is an essential tour of Young’s work.
Aunties
There’s a way a womanwill not
relinquish
her pocketbook
even pulled
onstage, or called up
to the pulpit—
there’s a way only
your Auntie can make it
taste right—
rice & gravy
is a meal
if my late Great Aunt
Toota makes it—
Aunts cook like
there’s no tomorrow
& they’re right.
Too hot
is how my Aunt Tuddie
peppers everything,
her name given
by my father, four, seeing
her smiling in her crib.
There’s a barrel
full of rainwater
beside the house
that my infant father will fall
into, trying to see
himself—the bottom—
& there’s his sister
Margie yanking him out
by his hair grown long
as superstition. Never mind
the flyswatter they chase you
round the house
& into the yard with
ready to whup the daylights
out of you—
that’s only a threat—
Aunties will fix you
potato salad
& save
you some. Godmothers,
godsends,
Aunts smoke like
it’s going out of style—
& it is—
make even gold
teeth look right, shining,
saying I’ll be
John, with a sigh. Make way
out of no way—
keep the key
to the scale that weighed
the cotton, the cane
we raised more
than our share of—
If not them, then who
will win heaven?
holding tight
to their pocketbooks
at the pearly gates
just in case.
More on this book and author:
- Learn more about Blue Laws by Kevin Young.
- Browse other books by Kevin Young, including Stones, forthcoming in September 2021.
- Hear Kevin Young read poems from the first pandemic year, along with other contributors to the anthology Together in a Sudden Strangeness, via Left Bank Books on April 19.
- Share this poem and peruse other poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.
- To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.
Post link
The family you choose….✨
PC: @ayobperoid
#aunties #auntieassembly #indigosfirstbirthday #cutebanies #oneyearold #blackqueens #melanin #melaninpoppin #melaninmagic #blackgirlsrock #blackgirlmagic
https://www.instagram.com/p/B5IqdYbFRhD/?igshid=7haetwwr8xqp
Post link
Why we probably don’t deserve the child-free “aunties” in our girl squads
My baby girls have more aunties than they know what to do with. I roll with several tribes of Black women and WOC, friends I have made before and during the past 10 life-changing years of my adulthood. My girl squads cover me perfectly like Venn diagrams of space and timeliness and love. Black women’s sisterhood has been having a big and small screen moment via Girls Trip and Insecure, which is…
