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I AM BRINGING THE HISTORY OF THE KITCHEN SINK INTO OUR BEDROOM AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME

The fear is: the chalk of our origins will not smudge.

  • Momtaza Mehri
  • Fall 2020
Illustration by Upasana Agarwal
  • Poem
  • Intervention

Half-watching. Half-asleep. I flutter with misrecognition. We don’t ask for life,

we have it thrust upon us. Young woman turns back. 

Laptop glow frames an empire’s rain-drenched cul-de-sac. We don’t ask for history, 

but it asks too much of us. Don’t want to be a mother, she says. 

Don’t want to be a woman. Don’t want to be this particular person living this 

particular moment in this forgotten corner 

of this dangerously particular country. Perception is a gilded cage. 

I mouth along to A Taste of Honey, taste its pallor

like sherbet under a trained tongue, you need someone to love you 

while you’re looking for someone to love, is there is no end to this looking, 

to this being looked at? And who among us hasn’t mistaken a field of fallen soldiers

for something other than a wasteland of promises? 

The fear is: the chalk of our origins will not smudge. 

The fear is: it was never real but we will spend our lives pretending it was. 

We will call this the purest form of love. We will call it nation. 

When we say we want no part of it, we mean we want everything. 

We want more than we will ever be given. The rest is history, is fossilized heirlooms,

is bastilles of bone and beauty, is cubicles of inherited shame, is domestic

entrapments where we build solitary shrines to our suffering. 

Take this toothed necklace I refuse to pass on. Winged, white-headed bestower

of neck strains and dehydrated guilt, hug my shivering shoulders. 

My hanging albatross child of Arabic’s guttural diver, al-gattas, 

by way of Portuguese sailing ships, those carceral caravels 

scouting African coasts, generously giving their name to Alcatraz, 

to prisons on islands, to islands made prisons. Arm-in-arm,

two friends light my screen, walk through a twentieth-century mist, 

its tendrils snaking from chimneys, from emptying factories,

from their bitten lips. Unlike writers, they have no reason to distrust their hands.

They did not ask for what they hold. 

They will not mourn as they are told.


  • culture history migration nations sea

Momtaza Mehri

Momtaza Mehri is a poet, essayist, and independent researcher. Her work has been widely anthologized and has appeared in Granta, Artforum, The Guardian, BOMB, and Real Life Mag. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London and columnist-in-residence at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s Open Space. Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published in 2019.

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I AM BRINGING THE HISTORY OF THE KITCHEN SINK INTO OUR BEDROOM AND YOU CAN’T STOP ME

Momtaza Mehri

The fear is: the chalk of our origins will not smudge.

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