Waris Dirie, ex-Model

the film was honestly excellently directed, obviously i would say rather exaggerated in how somalia looks like and somalis interact. i love in particular the delightful surprise of using real-speaking somalis, who are, in fact, somali!

i also congratulate the use of ethiopean model liya kebede; ethipeans sharesome genetic DNA factors wiyth somalis, eritreans and djiboutis, being east africans themselves, and so i found her to be deceivingly true to somalis. her somali words were obviously lacklustre and a little broken, but nevermind, i appreciated her efforts. the storyline itself was all a little in-your-face, and provokative, and highly exaggerated, but it is meant to be that way, so that the general public (through he whitewash, stereotypes and falsehood – i sound harsh, but i saw these elements there) can extract the essence and improtance of the film, which is a portrayal (however inaccurate) of FGM (“female genetal mutilation”).

Waris herself disagreed with much of the film’s occurances, but agreed with it’s mass production because the message is more important. although in the oong-term, tackling prejudices and stereotypes is even more important, a quick sharp dosage of shock about FGM was needed to bring it to the attention of joe public.

my verdict? 3.5/5… i find it dangerous territory for someone who isn’t somali, because it can be deceiving, as not all our roots are like that, but for the quality of acting, the film cut and direction, and the appreciation and respect shown to the existence of the somali people (and therefore using real somalis), i enjoyed it.

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i hope you guys take heed of the poem below. it resonates some true messages about what it is to be a somali woman. i had a tear in my eye when i finished it.

The Letter My Mothetr Would HAve Written Had She Known English ~ by: Warsan Shire
Dear Daughter

The women in our family are known for their lucid hearts
For the frightening vigour with which they love
And they way they let men eat from their open chests
As if their insides alone could offer redemption
As if their flesh could create portals for men to escape
The ugliness that they themselves created in this world.

If I could do it all again
I would’ve raise u in the sergenti
Where we could face east five times a day and pray
Where the simple things would leave me enough time to tell you how much I love you

Daughter, I would raise you with my knees and fingertips
Small mercies would make u pious and all my children would love me more
Our faces would be ash covered
Hair laden with the winds of the harmattan
Your father would see the beauty in me that can only exist when he looks at me
And my stretch marks would be worth it all.

But this reality is not in shades of pink
Like the dolls with the fake smiles that you would
Point at, and I would say inch Allah
Knowing that I could never afford them.

In Africa I was so beautiful
On the plane here
My husband stopped seeing me.
Here I would be compared to a woman with blue eyes
And a clitoris
Here,
I am not beautiful
Here I’m sorry
Here you can leave a wife and two children
And income support and child benefit
Can take the fathers place at the kitchen table.

I wish I had held you when your father left
But the insides of my ribs were still dented
And to touch you would’ve
Been as painful as love itself.

I want to leave you with more than empty picture frames
And moments that could be classed as Kodak if they had ever taken place
But this countries weather had the ability to sink into the bone of you

You learn that being an asylum seeker will mean u have malaria instead of the flu.

I know the taste of translation
And if my lips own any hesitation
It’s because semantic and lexis has us separated

In Somali syllables are soft
So they can’t solidify all the things
We have left unsaid
Perhaps the fact that you think in English
Is proof enough that we have a gap
Wider than the tongue and tooth
You wanted us to be.

I taught you
To be proud of your religion
And pray for your brothers at Guantanamo bay
Never fight a woman for a man
And make sure that love exists through actions
Not plans
Wash your under wear every night and watch out for
Demons who dance on your back if you sleep on your chest

To be afraid of the in-betweens and call in children at Maghreb
Make sure windows stay closed after sunset

To shudder
When a shoe is turned upside down
And what prayers to read before entering the bathroom
And leaving the house
And how u should never answer to a voice you can’t see
Calling your name
Even if it sounds like it belongs to your mother

That déjàvu doesn’t exist in Africa
Neither does surviving aids
And that men will always say they love you
That trusting too much will be the death of you

That children with faces of old people turn out the best
And adults that like to touch small children
Burn in hell

But as a mother who literally could not help her children with their homework,
That right there is already all my pride swallowed.

I am one of the mothers
Who wouldn’t think twice about burning off her fingertips
And running with you on my back across borders and through tunnels
Shrugging off shrapnel and bullets
To escape sodomy
And entered this country
In the quest for democracy and found out that
My spine was Teflon in wars
But divorce could cripple me.

London’s skies are above me now
And esol could never teach me enough of about past and present tense
For the many times I tasted love
I would sacrifice them all
For a chance to whisper an English
Lullaby into your 6 year old ear.

Daughter,
How do you say I’m proud of you in English?

aside: don’t you hate it when you go to wikipaedia to extract valuable (or time-consuming and IQ-reducing, in my case) information on something (or in my case someone) and they torture the whole thing heartlessly by pasting a washed-out, disturbed image of what that thing (or who that person, in my case) was meant tobe? to a point of beyond recognition? he looks like a frigging homeless drunkard there. tut tut tut.

lost boys parody: the saxaphone guy

and the purpose of this post? perhaps to remind myself in future how i spent my time when i most needed time; wasted on jon hamm’s comic appearences, listening to elvis castello’s “she” (from notting hill, the movie), wondering why people hate janet jackson (nipple incident with the distinctlty unhelpful justin timberlake), etc etc etc…

so… must go bed. au revoir, le monde.

come, all ye faithful.

so that, in a firgure of speech, humpty dumptry can be put together again?

note to self: this was the day you changed the theme and the header. all looks weel. yes, the white patch left from the image above the lamp is annoying. deliberately so. effects are not bad overall. honest. important.

i fell from my own grace. several times over the past week. it was painful to begin with… then i started getting used to it.

which isn’t good. shall, God willingly, formulate a plan which works to alleviate myself from the stress it’s beginning to bore into me. like a really sore pressure ulcer. a complete and utter bastard. unnecessary and damned excruciating!

in other news, my “yours truely” page is beginning to exude deceit. it is pricking at the fortress of my soul. should consider dramatically changing it.

en les autre autre news, je suis tres fatigue et harasse avec la vie que j’ai habite. j’ai beaucoup le choses qui attendes moi pour ils faire. trops de choses a faire et un tres peau temps pour ils faire. je suis tres desole avec ma vie. ils pronds un trop des improvements.

whether the above made sense to you, i don’t know. it makes sense to me, or at least it does, now. it did, then.

i want a break. and the momets during which i look for a break the most, i fill it up with the most consuming things.

it happens, just so, you know. cannot be controlled.

i       a  m         l  e  a  r  n  i  n  g.

slowly, but surely.

sometimes though, even I am not sure enough. it’s not due to a lack of patience, though indeed patience is lacking.

but instead due to a lacking conviction. a lack in will.

is there really a way where there is a will?

i hope i live to answer that question…

yours truely,

a broken-hearted girl

ps: i hope HE forgives. many times over. the way in which only HE can. wipe out oceans and mountains of it. purify the darkest abyss. Please Do… I Need YOU! and i’m sorry. truely. always.

i was thinking a lot – obviously, DUH! – about phylosophical deep things which i won’t detail on this page (no, i’m affraid you’ve received as much enlightment as to my life as you’ll ever get, i think!).

i attempted to make myself useful by doing something which will benefit me around summertime, 2010. this failed, somewhat. but al7amdulillah regardless.

i also seriously pondered over what plan suits my life best, from this year onwards.

when people say they don’t do new years resolutions, they lie: either they are saying they and their lives are so perfect that improvement is unwarranted, or they deny that in fact much improvement is needed, especially from within, such that no other human can bear to know its true magnitude, and thus these prayers of improvement are left with Allah.

i subscribe to the latter congregation.

Allah only knows what this year holds for me. good, is all i hope. even bad things that i can permanently learn from, can be good, still.

either way, inshaAllah 5air.

oh, and by the way, my parents are incredibly averse to the idea of any of their offspring marrying a non-somali.

i did not, thank God, discover that the painful way. i had no hopes, it was a proposition more than an offer. a whisper through the grapevines, if you like.

he was iraqi. and young. 4yrs my senior, when the whisper reached my ear. i think in reality perhaps 3 years separate us, and a little.

let’s not make the matter grand. it was what it was… a whisper, nothing more.

i went shopping. to the sales at oxford street. i queued not, if you perchanced asking me, in front of the Gucci and Chloe houses (amongst others) in selfridges.

i did, however, do the incerdulous deed of going out to sales, to buy something “cheap” (lies, i tell you) and instead emerge out of the civil cold war that happens once a year, having bought something which is, though unlikely to “break the bank”, was in fact anything which best describes the opposite of cheap, and will perhaps be sitting most its days inside the warm comfort of my precious wardrope.

it’s only use, that object which i bought, is to make me look more refined and presentable if and when i need to draw the world to myself. it works too, mark my words.

i like the object’s designer, who shan’t remain anonymous (i’ll unveil him below), simply because i am perhaps the fussiest female i know when it comes to fashion and style (though i have been known to buy worthless articles of clothing), and he, let it be known, is the only person in whose design i habitually find something… naturally appealing to me.

something which can only be best described as though it were me, designing clothes for me. or, as i prefer to understand it, as though i were the maniquin on which he tailored his womanly designed and derived his creatively elegant, expertly hand-crafted style. it feels hand-crafted, mind you… donno if it really is.

said designer is….*drum roll*….. Jasper Conran

i must admit; one wades through life’s endless ebbs and tides which one, at that instance, insists on remembering to record here later… then when one finally manages to write the curves said ebbs and tides, one is either at a loss for words which best suit these waves, or one cannot for the life of oneself recall what they were. though they mattered much, at the time…

funny, huh?