Artwork by Herikita
November 9, 2016, past midnight. I tried and failed to undress in my dark bedroom, caught in a tangle of clothes. My hands shook too hard to meet the demands of buttons and zippers. I gave up and fell into bed half-dressed. No sleep would come. I am Muslim and my country had just become Donald Trump’s America.
The day before, my husband and I had signed a contract for our first home—a cooperative apartment in a small immigrant neighborhood known as Kensington in Brooklyn, New York. As I lay awake that long election night, I wondered if, like Jewish families in 1930s Europe, we’d have to flee or would be taken to camps, and our apartment would breathe on without us. I imagined other people stepping on our rugs with shoes and scratching forks against our dishes.
I visited my new neighborhood occasionally in the weeks that followed, while we waited for the paperwork to come through. I’d clamber into one of the shared taxis that struggle stop-start along the chaos of Church Avenue. Inside, it was always silent as commuters stared out dingy windows. Alighting in Kensington, I’d stop at Kabir’s, a Bangladeshi bakery where I’d get a scalding cup of chai to accompany my walk along McDonald Avenue. The F train hurtled overhead scattering pigeons. Further down, I’d cross over to Ditmas Avenue, past the cafe where men smoked over backgammon, the Uzbek restaurant’s aquarium window, the halal cart’s steaming wares across from a pharmacy. The playground next door to my new building was deserted and melancholy during school hours. It felt subversive to imagine this as my neighborhood, still. That I might have a home in America, still. The future was so uncertain.
At the time, I’d been floundering through a draft of a novel I’d begun during my graduate creative writing program about five years earlier. In those solitary years, I struggled to keep going without the structure and support of the program, and especially missed belonging to a community of writers. Now, plunged into despair by the election results, I began to wonder if my novel about the solidarity built between migrant women was a pointless and distant dream.
In the days after Trump’s inauguration, I learned about a rally in my new neighborhood organized by a grassroots organization—DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving). The event called for designating Kensington a hate-free zone. Though I didn’t know any of the activists involved nor their plans for this zone, I decided to venture to the advertised location and watch from the sidelines.
Close to sunset, I trudged through residential streets lined with houses and brick apartments, past the public school with the bright red front door, a hardware store with lumber stacked outside, and another store selling bitter gourd and jackfruit and halal goat. Eventually, the streets came together into an open, public space at an intersection. Avenue C Plaza seemed almost too small to be called a town square—only a narrow triangle demarcated by three criss-crossing neighborhood arteries.
Others streamed in from the surrounding area as trucks and buses trundled down the streets adjoining the plaza. White folks in jeans and puffy coats, children trailing mittens. South Asians like me, some in traditional garb layered with nylon parkas. Many others of all stripes and colors and shapes carried handmade placards. “I love Kensington” proclaimed one sign on the back of a flattened cardboard box, concentric hearts traced with a sharpie. Hundreds of my new neighbors gathered on this January evening to declare their solidarity with the people our new government vilified. My heart lighter and heavier at the same time, I stepped forward to join the milling crowd and listen to the speakers. After, we marched chanting around the plaza. The people, united, will never be defeated. Voices ringing out around me on streets growing familiar, I could almost dare to believe it—that we might survive this administration together.
“Right before 2016, I felt attached to the open and public space conversation—trying to help shape this plaza that sits across from the mosque. I felt really compelled by the mission to make the space a place for women to gather, to roam, to be, to meet their friends, and for young girls to have additional room to play… The plaza has helped shape culture and community solidarity in ways that I couldn’t have projected. It has made the community feel comfortable to gather at some of the hardest moments of political life in our city and state. When Trump got elected, people gathered here. At moments of community struggle and resistance, the plaza was where there was a clear demonstration of ‘we must not be divided’.”
—Shahana Hanif, New York City Council Member for District 39
Later in 2017, a few months after I’d moved to Kensington, a friend referred me for a last-minute gig. A local iftar celebration during Ramadan needed a writer to read from their work.
The request gave me pause. My relationship with my faith is personal and often complicated. Through my decades in Brooklyn, I’d kept my distance from the wider Muslim community, and especially from religious spaces where I’d never felt welcome. Most of the spaces I’d visited centered men. Women were found praying in the back, behind the shoes.
But at this juncture in Donald Trump’s America, I was tired of hiding. I was tired of letting others define what it meant to be Muslim in the public sphere, especially when keeping my identity private had done nothing to protect me.
With this fatigue came curiosity about a community event that appeared to highlight Muslim women artists. I accepted the invitation and considered what I might read that would be interesting to this unknown audience. I decided on a piece about my late grandmother who had taught me to pray and read the Quran. She also taught me her kind of rebellion, one that doesn’t hide from doubt or contradiction.
I was surprised to learn that the iftar would be held in the same plaza where I’d turned up for the DRUM post-election rally: Avenue C Plaza, watched by a small mosque from one corner, and by a Jewish community center from the other. I learned later that the communal courtyard used to be a parking lot commandeered by local car mechanics. A band of cultural organizers, grassroots organizations, and activists lobbied hard to have it converted into a public plaza for this working-class immigrant neighborhood devoid of parks.
The night of the iftar, I walked up to the front past members of the Bangladeshi community and others from the Pakistani neighborhood a few streets over. As I blinked into the lights from behind the mic, I could just make out their shadows in the dark. Men were still clad in kurtas and caps after Maghrib prayer, women in shalwar kameez and scarves. Teenagers skulked around the back. A few non-Muslim neighbors had also turned up, eager to support the event in this phobic era.
Closer to the front, Hasiba Haq, event emcee and organizer, listened as I read my piece about my grandmother into a malfunctioning microphone—she was likely one of the few people who could even hear me. “That piece had such a sweetness to it,” she said afterward. Her words stayed with me. In the years that followed, Hasiba would become a cherished neighborhood comrade as we collaborated to organize creative writing workshops for Muslim women and young adults.
Soon after me, another South Asian woman went up to read her piece. She wore glasses, cotton shalwar kameez, and held a cane to support her gait. Shahana Hanif spoke with an unforgettable command to her voice. I could already tell everyone would know her name someday. Indeed, just a few years later, our district would elect her as the first Muslim woman city council member in New York City.
“I really believe Muslim women are at the heart and center of so much movement building, especially in this country. Lifting up one another. I think Muslim women are also often boxed into an idea of what people think they are. Whether you are more conservative in your dressing style or not, whether you’re more practicing or not. Everybody seems to have an opinion about Muslim women. And it’s annoying… we have so many incredible storytellers and creators in our community and being able to center Muslim women through art just feels like – you let women take up space and become women in public and become themselves in public. [At the Kensington iftar, we showcase] what does it mean to take public space as an artist, as a woman, as a Muslim woman? And we let the artists choose whatever it is they want to talk about.”
–Hasiba Haq, community organizer
Six years later, it was late winter or early spring, depending on where you fell on the glass-half-full half-empty spectrum. After more than a year of rejections from publishers for the novel manuscript I’d finally completed, I was trying to edge over to the top half of the glass and claim an optimism I did not yet feel.
I was meeting that day with Caron Atlas, the director of two community organizations—Arts and Democracy, and Naturally Occurring Community Districts New York. Not long after connecting with her and other community leaders at the iftar celebration, I had begun working with her as a freelance teaching artist. Now, I hoped Caron would have some advice for me as I approached a crossroads in my creative life.
We met at Prospect Park, both of us eager for a walk outside after the long winter. Caron and I had already worked together on workshops and events, but I’d never spoken to her about my own writing—my fiction about migrant women who take up space outside patriarchal and colonial norms.
Now, pushing past my hesitation, I told her: “I worked on a novel for more than a decade. It’s about migrant women, a story I really care about. But I can’t sell it. I never really thought that would happen, but it has.” We stepped forward along paths that skirted the yellow grasses of the Long Meadow, maples and oaks and London planes around us still devoid of leaves.
Caron was quiet, as is her way. I almost wished she would rush in with comforting words. But this is what it means to be a good listener. She left space empty for me to fill. I continued. “I thought, once my novel came out, it would be a way for me to build community. But now, I have to move on.” I swallowed past the point in my throat, grateful we were walking instead of talking across a table somewhere. “So, I need to figure out how to build community in a different way.”
We edged past the pond where, in warmer weather, dogs splashed gleefully. Caron said: “What I know about building community is—most people, they don’t do it alone. It’s hard to do alone. They get together with others to build community.”
“I feel like so often, we want to escape this place, rather than embrace it as home… I always used to think that the grass is greener on the other side [outside the neighborhood]. But I realized the grass just needs to be watered. It just needs to be cared for, it just needs to be nourished and invested in… I feel like there’s times when I’ve not wanted to be visible in my own neighborhood. And now there’s times where I’m embracing it. Recognizing that I can have ownership of this neighborhood and the spaces. In little Pakistan, you see how gender-segregated the neighborhood is – but there are some women that are proudly, publicly taking up space, visibly working. So that’s really challenging so many of these norms.”
—Aamnah Khan, youth activist and organizer with DRUM
“I think I always kind of downplayed Kensington, I never really saw it as a place to hang out or to be proud of… But once I actually started to immerse myself [in cultural organizing] and have a voice, I think that’s when I started to recognize people in Kensington as my community members. Kensington really is a foundation of my politics and what community means to me.”
—Fabliha Yeaqub, writer and youth organizer
Soon after that walk-meeting with Caron, I began gathering Kensington’s stories. Serendipitously, it turned out that Caron was launching a foundation-funded participatory research project and she asked me to co-direct it alongside another staff member, Emily Ahn Levy. The project explored the power of community networks in Kensington and other under-resourced neighborhoods through workshops, observations, and interviews with neighborhood leaders.
Emily and I started the project by connecting with the women we fondly dubbed “aunty organizers,” who had constructed the neighborhood’s cultural life for years with little time and few resources. Through their guidance, we interviewed the founders of community organizations that celebrated and reimagined cultural traditions. We hosted a zine-making workshop with teenagers and listened to their memories of chai and samosas and chicken patties at Kabir’s (now shuttered) as well as their fears about rising gentrification rapidly changing Kensington’s landscape. We heard from the rabbi who led peace walks bringing together Jews, Christians, and Muslims for 15 years, beginning in this neighborhood after 9/11. We served lunch to Kensington’s many musicians who jammed together to thread the chords of their disparate musical traditions into a communal song.
“I am from the generation of Mexican immigrants that were taught that you had to assimilate. Día de los Muertos, I think, was the start of how I identify myself [publicly]. Because it was also a way for me to deal with loss. When we do the communal ofrenda at Avenue C Plaza, you see everyone bring out photos of their loved ones. And for that brief moment, not only are we celebrating those who passed away, but we are interacting with one another, sharing those moments, hearing those stories. And it’s a moment where you don’t feel like you need to hide emotions, you know, if you need to just let it be.”
—Cynthia Fortozo, founder of Casa Cultural
In May 2023, a few months into our research project, Emily and I met near Albemarle Playground to observe and record the Boishakh parade– a celebration of Bengali New Year. The event was a collaboration between some of the neighborhood’s powerhouse women we’d come to know well. All mothers and teachers who had met through the public schools, they now mothered our whole community.
At the playground, women adjusted pleats in resplendent saris, most in shades of red. Children shrieked and fidgeted in their best clothes. Massive hand-painted masks leaned against the fencing past the swings and seesaws. Annie Ferdous, the parade’s artistic director, told us the masks represented the ancient kings of Bengal. She’d had them made in Bangladesh. Some of the children clutched companion masks made from paper plates adorned with peacocks and tigers, animals native to Bengal.
Drum beats began the parade and people streamed from the playground down McDonald Avenue hoisting the giant masks. A man cycled a rickshaw painted in reds and pinks and teals. Onlookers lingered on the sidewalk, stopping for a moment to let the colors and music wash over them. Emily and I took pictures and helped shepherd the crowd into the single permitted lane, making sure the children didn’t edge into traffic.
Closer to Avenue C Plaza, a group of young women stopped to dance in a circle around the drummer. Annie took up a loudspeaker for a call and response in Bangla as she led the crowd into the school playground just ahead.
“[Jill and I] met through one of our friends. She said, you know, in Dhaka, they do a New Year parade with mask motif. And we both got crazy dreaming and said, let’s do it together. That’s how I found a friend in Kensington. So that’s where I see that a community builds like that. Around the music, like I found Jill. I met people who helped me with grant writing, like Caron [Atlas]. I bring my dancers to their event. And that’s how I built community around cultural performances.”
—Annie Ferdous, co-founder of Bangladesh Institute of Performing Arts and Bangladeshi Ladies Club
A few months after the Boishakh celebration, I crossed Avenue C Plaza and headed to the west of the neighborhood one evening. I found the quiet block where Annie Ferdous lived and descended a few steps to the side door. Inside, Annie’s basement was bright with fluorescent tube lights. Ten or fifteen women, most dressed in shalwar kameez and abayas, perched on plastic stools arranged in a circle. A pair of young children dashed around the crowded space. The women were bent over squares of white cloth and colored threads in their laps.
Using part of the funding from our research project, we’d supported the Bangladeshi Ladies Club in hosting this six-week kantha embroidery circle for immigrant women. Alongside lessons in the traditional craft, Annie and Farida Ruhul—another Ladies Club founder—decided to incorporate English lessons as part of the gathering.
Later, Farida told me they initially planned for eight participants, but so many begged to be included that they expanded to ten seats with a long waitlist. One of the women even hid her hand injury from Farida and Annie at first because she was so afraid of being asked to leave.
That evening, women learned to embroider designs on white cotton with running stitch in the kantha tradition. Eventually, their individual squares would be joined together into one large quilt. I wandered around admiring their half-stitched flowers, peacocks, elephants. One woman sewed around the lines of a house and a tree. Farida translated into Bangla as I asked questions. All the women gushed about the opportunity this circle provided. They wanted to leave the house and connect with others, but as Farida told me: “They cannot come without a ‘good’ reason.” Some of their husbands did not approve of their going out or socializing, but everyone agreed that English lessons were important. And they all knew Annie Apa, as she is known. A gathering at her house was beyond reproach.
“They say they feel happy, you know. When they come here [to the kantha circle] they feel like they can count on somebody here, like a sister or a friend.”
—Farida Ruhul, Bangladeshi Ladies Club co-founder and teacher
“First time we met [for the kantha circle], I really liked coming here right away. It felt like coming home. I didn’t think I would find something like this in the U.S. Here in New York, no one ever has much to do with anyone else. But the workshop — it’s such a busy city but people still make time to come here.”
—Kantha circle participant, translated from Hindi
Towards the end of the summer of 2023, Emily and I met at the public library to plan out our next steps for the continuing research. As we charted initial findings and made to-do lists to seek out further interviews, an email pinged through with news. A non-profit scholarly press wanted to publish my novel.
I emerged from the library in a haze and floated past a giant screen playing Jay-Z videos on a loop, and vendors selling bolts of African mud cloth and plastic cups of cubed mango. Too restless to wait for the subway, I walked home through Prospect Park amid the dogs and frisbees and picnic blankets. My feet didn’t quite touch the ground.
That weightless feeling lasted a week. Then, I began trudging down another long road to bring my book to readers’ attention without the financial support and media connections of a large commercial publisher.
Over the next year, as I taught myself marketing and publicity skills in advance of my book release, Donald Trump’s campaign rallied. Eventually, he won again. And I am grieving again, but without the same shock and anguish from eight years ago. I no longer hold any trust or hope for politicians inside institutions. Like the characters from my novel, I’ve learned instead to trust immigrant women who nourish each other outside institutions that have always excluded us.
I won’t pretend I don’t fear the violence and harm of another four years of Trump. But also, something has shifted in me over the eighteen months I spent gathering Kensington’s stories: My neighborhood and the women who built it offer me a map for my own journey forward as an artist and activist; they teach me how to weave the scraps life deals me into whole cloth with running stitch. Because my art is not currency to buy community. My art is not mine. Art is born from community and sustains it. It helps us become part of one another. And it stitches my survival with yours, over and over again.