Witch Writing

I

The inside out

Changing person

Other voices

Comfortable knowing

This discussion doesn’t end but continues

throughout writing

Interwoven like the knitted “Habiba” sweater woven by Nargis in 1985. Marginalized no more

Writing, an action, a rebellion against those with the power saying

to you, “I am free”

My words are no longer hidden. They are bursting and blurting out, “No more. Never again!” The wild woman is loose.

Yes, stories, not ethnographies.

Not literary works, stories – my stories.

Nothing more than a storyteller. True context and author-ity. Identity never only body & emotions. Identity, mind. Not womanly?

I philosophize, write, calculate and debate.

And I cook, clean

But rarely inspire or enchant. I am woman.

Refuse to be a domestician. Revoke my privacy. Deny my partiality. Invoke my wholeness. Exhilarated

I yell. I scream. Do not whisper anymore. Do not apologize. Or hesitate. I shout.

I write. Make mistakes.

Make up grammar. And words. Language unacademic. Not traditional or standard.

My grammar – Partly third generation Holocaust survivor

Daughter of immigrants

Sufi-Muslim commune member. Wife of a non-English speaker

I am not writer. But I will write. Not in a dilemma. In an impasse to express this raging and psychotic voice.

Awaiting excavation

All journals waiting for this? I am excavating you, my journal. Digging up your relics.

Dusting off the grains of sand. Using a toothbrush to clean the obscure crevices

I will shine you. But keep you in your original form. Unchanged, but unburied. Full of luster.

Since my memory is soft. I resort to you who does not forget. Your voice does not change. You are constant. Some say trivial. You are truth

For that day, that moment. The only truth I will ever touch.

Thinking is not better. Doing is no less. Day-to-day is my record. My social-constructionist life. Not square, but circular. A confession and a daily log.

You are flexible.

Always there. Transactional language

No end, beginnings.

With bumps, holes and rainbows. Being close to the self and exploratory. More beautiful and endearing.

Exploration making us alike. Conveying information setting us apart. A marginalizing technique. No end, know no right, simply exploring. Organic and living. Writing dead?

Didn’t work it out before telling it?

Dynamic. Not a dead thing. Dare you call my process dead! Going on a personal trip. Chronicled by letters

Language participates

An action. Not serving all equally. It is separatist. Exclusionary

Sometimes silent.

Discursive and judgmental. Can be empirical and analytical

Holes of silence

Abuse. You can be found. Silenced journals are actions, quieted.

Peek-a-boo, I found you.

Abuse, my bleached mark, worn on my shirt.

My workings. Cleaning laundry slave shirt.

In a cornfield. Must go on. Lost, no. Moving, yes. A destination, no.

Exploring. Submissive to my polarity. Alienated by fissures and gaps. Darkness and height. The realm of imaginary, the semiotic.

Exotic, but cold.

Genetically human.

Not like your mother

Eyes or hair unlike your mother. That adorable, tiny nose – not mine.

Beautiful brown, velvety skin. Has to be your dad’s. Sharp wit and brains. No, no, no

Not from a woman

You, autonomous and separate.

My mother’s voice, My grandmother’s

And slaughtered great-grandmother’s voice

Share linguistic intimacy.

Highly controversial

Must tell the truth

Engendered by macropolitics

Male dominance

And explicit sanctions

Not accepting, endorsing or accommodating

But revolting.

Mute, no more.

My language poisoned by my germy spit.

Inaccurate in your murderous mind.

Your patriarchal palace.

Made of symbols and signs. Falsifying my counterfeit words

My phallic serpent tongue. Muted groups

Dominant groups.

I encode.

You articulate.

I speak through.

You speak to.

You generating rules.

I follow. I do.

Accommodating your he-man. You human, me girl. Me a she. A generic man. An attractive primate.

A woman, a label, title and descriptor. Even a whore, mistress, courtesan, dame

You an animal, tiger

Me, a fruit – a red, purple and juicy pomegranate

Made of perfectly fitted-pieces.

I am Miss, Ms. or Mrs.

You, a Mr. Only one

Me, three. Always accommodating

Transitory words.

Lost in silence.

Thorny. With generated illegitimate odd meanings.

A lived experience of violence. Not represented, recorded

With enormous discrepancies

Validated today.

You belong to a language. It belongs to you. You are mankind

I am anonymous. An alien tongue. Unnamable. Alone

Restricted to the internal

Scrutinized by your authenticity.

You name.

I am named.

A purveyor, proprietor

A manufacturer of language. Never sanctioned, always strategizing against the powerless. Relegating my words,

Norming my behavior

Severely ensuing my category. My spherical bodily temple. A kingdom unto you

Instituting slavery, militaristic. Strengthened by your male dominance.

You, a legal entity.

I’m an injunction, hard to decipher. Disrespectful to you, your inscription – against me. Isolated by codes. Me, insignificant and inconclusive

Wavering and slow

Uttering nothings.

A human subject in your domain. Eve silenced by church and the public realm. A societal slave, preserved by a paradoxical memory.

Strongly prohibited from discourse.

Religion belonging to men. The ineffable source, symbolic of all things. Participating, teaching, baptizing

Woman, an exorcist.

Rebuked for healing, suppressed by groups.

But spiritual and filled with words.

My vengeance and dreadful hate against authorities having an inquisition against us bitches. Possessing esoteric speech burned into earth. Unintelligible and inarticulate. But ecstatic.

I’m your taboo, threatening. A linked phenomena. Your forbidden story, distanced by my confessions. My controversial will

Growing up female, informal and not confident. Delivering a monologue. Passionately throwing myself into expository prose. Without abilities.

Not able to acquire.

But pretty.

Standing on a platform

Committed to expansion

This love-hate. Risky, overbearing and unsuitable. I gossip

Quilt soft fabrics

Share vocabulary

In stereotypical fibers

Fascinated by trivial, weak and tentative speech. Speaking gibberish, in euphemisms. Littered wonders.

Charming, but not much to say. Decorative, void of wisdom or effectiveness

Not vivacious, or perfect

I am a chatterer, loquacious. A vacuum of ornamentation

Speaking separate. Etiquette. Demanding to be desirable. Chaste as Anne. But with an unstoppable mouth

Judged and named

Being imposed upon

By a distorted institution

Eloquent and honored

But a beast.

I’m irrational, not female or male.

An empire, shameless and enlarged

Conceptualized by boundaries

Gendered identity

Asymmetrical and approximate. Verbally weak. Not able to argue or recite. Patterned by routine. I am a preferred model. An interaction for which you subscribe.

Controlled by your status. Competing with your space.

Seizing your vivid sample. I’m barely audible, Structureless

An interrupted ghost

Violating and interrupting your constant. Stewed by the word fuck. Volleying this hierarchy. Single-sex discourse. Drugs and coffee. A stable dominant order.

In a pressure cooker

Inexpressive & limited

With firm boundaries

And masculine personalities. With consequences for destruction. Assaulted by power and prestige

An image of strength.

Ding . Accommodating to be invisible, but omnipresent. Domestically engineered

X

Vis-à-vis shit. Unequal distributions. Perennial weeds. Collaborated but in consensus. Challenging feminisms, fundamentalism, ism

Coordinating highly skilled players

In critical socialness

Maintained by woman-work. The engineer of the kitchen. Scrubbing dried egg whites from stainless steel pots

Fighting against fading black dye. Combating the grayness of once bright-sallow. Using my complex skills

I am an appearance.

I sit. I listen.

I know how to converse.

I can demonstrate weakness and cooperate.

I am a great sustainer

Accommodating your conversations.

Monitoring your richness

Mounted on a cross

Competing for leadership with alternative values

In your omniscient presence. Anecdotal in my speech. A psychosexual. Actively listening. By nodding, gesturing, guessing even bragging. Demanding attention.

I am girl

Making lots of noise

Rarely interrupted by your unengaging comments. A compelling illusion

Analytical and protestant. Not excusing, denigrated no more. Interest emerged in spheres. Coming into focus. Becoming real

Relieved by the body

Split open. A spot

Symmetrical and sacrificed. Located in layers of mutation

Not reported by the universal radical

Never convicted

Victims of coercion shattered by betrayal

Fragmented and disassociated

Gapping in blood

Lies unwrapped, realities forced Precisely common, a perpetrator

Conspiring judges acting seductively. This rare pathology explained by ill falsity. By external and internal festering by coping. Proprietary mechanisms. Verbally coerced, sexually abused *

God

*

This massive silence surrounding me Insidious in your presence. Pervasively unwittingly lying.

Confusion—faltering, fragmentation and indifference. Black without a music sheet

Not a heroine.

Quarrelling with this masquerade. Massacred with poet dreads, forbidden stories

With glory, fascinating and frenetic. A critic, artist, survivor. Multileveled consequences, muted perceptions suppressed by unpublished laws

Succinctly separated

Designed with contention. Circulated and published. Reviewed by colloquialisms, artificial classifications

Bureaucratically advanced with insightful vernaculars

Schooled by the uneducable

Illiterate and barred from education. Basic tools of numbering

Unable to create permanency. No recorded compositions.

Lullabied to sleep

Maxims and jokes, by a creator needing validation. An aberrant role with facilitated access. A natural service for a counterpart

Sacrificed energies – toiling, spasmodic

Half.

A room of my own

Prevented and discouraged from writing. Of obstacles

Writing. Aristocratic and learned. For a price.

The semblance of a woman. With noble efforts, marked with trends. And large traditions. Historical flukes. Circulating the process. Aiding and abetting. Again and again. Era

Initials, not only a period.

A mad and scribbling woman, ameliorated over time. Leaps

Phrases coined.

Persuasively arguing against prejudice and contempt. Classically public and incorrect, full of faults. Hiding in letter, thwarted head-on

Orally apologizing

Strictly native,

Lyrical and medieval

Damned by my sins

Mandated by religion

Moral treatises

Between literate boundaries. Protesting childbirth. And granted access. Denied education. Useless and ugly. Lamented by sitting. Presumptuous. Inadequacy. A cartoon character, styled vernacular. Techniques garnered. Signs everywhere. A grieving packet of papers. Killed by cancer. Enshrined in humor. Following vignettes of gender dynamic.

Striking the text

Noisy and intrusive

Undisclosed by hostile presence. Obvious but not minor. A puritan

Traced in exploration

Modernly generated in murky ponds. Dramatically increasing in prototypes. Akin to damned supplemental maps. Vacated and vacant. By the Father

Dramatically intellectual

A photographical genre,

Imprinted being. Apogee. An intriguing carrier perfected by days. Emulated by dis- tinguished predecessors

Technically Victorian, restored by exploits.

Partially written in shorthand. Missing publication. Smut and smuggle excluded

Descriptive and prescriptive criteria

Modicums of leisure

Highly improbable and never fully developed.

Inscribed by the crucible

An anomalous case on not real work. Poorly duplicated, courted by incident. Included in war. Sickness, despair and death.

Trivialized by priv-atization. Self contained and artful. Frivolous in canons. Archived in value. Destroyed parts

Edited beyond re-cognition. Volumes of discretion. In the custody of copying

Social histories. In a ranting world. With antagonism and irony.

MURDER HER

Cover her in fig leaves.

Burn her affairs. Aging daughter, “I have played a pernicious role.” Candid in commentary, my alma mater. For one hundred years. Leather bound and shackled. Suspected serials, status quo. Safely revered, granted permission

An uncommon occurrence of good luck,

Centuries of kismet

Manifested in complex naturalism. Proving moral and spiritual synthesis. A maidenhood and organization of red and white roses. Musked with Amber.

In accordance with intellectual tasks. Allowed for creation, confirmation. Wildly wild. Functioning with flair. Reproached with restraint. Disturbed by howling coyotes, Battling bobcats

Pleasing my husband in observant grace. Marriage silences.

Counting blessings, cautioning vigilance

Recording wishes

Leisurely inducing sweet and delightful walks. Boarding schools in the sea

Chronicled by cobalt

Detailing exquisite deaths. Recording affirmed births

Haunted lovers

Descendents of formulated material

Sketched then stretched on company sand. Not estimated by pleasures

But esteemed by networks . Affiliated bonds of migration

In the tavernous wilderness. Parsi-monious. Steeped in a steeple. Showering on a mountain. A politically comprised place. Marked and mediated

An occasional visitor

Ruptured and oozing

Not an artist. Or writer. Not a poet. Unspeak-able in cathartic conflict

Disappointments. Of mysterious ideas. Care-fully passing. Out-wardly deprived.

Healed, cooped up

With white saliva. In a zone. Moon glow

Enormous. Washed up in aquatic dollars. Illusions. Not fully aware. At the invisible

Inherited assumptions.

Fluently consoling my textuality. Sexuality

My short breathe.

Haphazard prose

Muck. Uniforms of class. Sport play

Events touching

Finished possibilities

Hardened mists

In midst. Amnesty of worry. Stop smiling

Be serious. Unanswer my questions. Both lips spread apart. Releasing liquid. Disclosing members. A self-induced picnic. A hair

Curly & brown.

Commented on by men

Generally pressured. An uncanny resemblance.

To an echo. An adulatory notebook

Negotiating real and reunion. Cup of Bengali tea. Remarkably connected to difficult times. Documented growth, wasted theories

Metaphors of fertility

Luxurious poetry.

Surfaced in a fishing net

Discomforted know-ledge. Overly rare climbing habits

Public logs.

Passages of per-formance. Pandora’s box. Peering inside

Directed knowing

Evidence of the ephemeral. Silly human woes. Polemical rhetoric. Multicultural pedagogy. Aloofness of molded mounds. A translational aggression

Desensitized by tied sittings. Merited in melancholy. Excerpts of campaigns. Super-lative discussions

Capacious renderings

Minimal democracy

Yes, I am convinced

I can actively piece together the shreds of my life. Certainly the threads. Beginning then abruptly ending. Noted in notations. Cited in citations. A spicy nirvana. A bratwurst

A gourmet mission

Versatile but raided

Damaged by break-ins

Mudslides of madness

Reduced to bones

Capped giants

Fraudulent night colors of contraception