GQ, 15.05.2024.
“It is not just a resistance to vulnerability; at some point Dada’s grief alchemised into pure, red-hot anger. His rage, when it comes, comes unexpectedly. Last year, there was a minor misunderstanding about whether I’d cook chicken wings for dinner – I’d told him earlier that I wouldn’t but he hadn’t heard me. My tone, when I said it again, was prickly and impatient. All of a sudden, he was screaming at me in the kitchen, over and over, “You lazy fuck, you lazy fuck, you lazy fuck.” In another instance, I asked him to stop slamming his door shut because it made the cardboard-thin walls of my room shudder. He didn’t think this was true, which infuriated me, and there it was. “Do you know what your problem is?” he spat. “You’re a fucking bitch.”
This is my brother at his very worst. Eyes vacant, bloodshot. “At the beginning, it’s something I can control,” he once told me. “But if it continues, it gets to a point where I don’t want to control it. I am so angry that I just want to swear at you. And at that time, I want to be cruel.” Anger is one of the few emotions my brother is comfortable wearing – perhaps being angry is the only time he can openly, overwhelmingly feel and not have to think. I’m familiar with the addictive numbness of rage. My own bouts of temper are shorter and smaller, but I gorge on them all the same.”
The Fence Magazine, Issue 14.
“I didn’t realise it then, but even in an all-girls’ school the male gaze is a sweeping, discomforting presence. Several girls dated gangly, patchy-bearded boys from the boys’ school behind ours, in which case they were identified with a hiss: ssslut, ssslag, sssket. But the rest of us were ladies-in-waiting, spending much of our time competing for a Not Like the Other Girls pat on the head from the invisible, looming hand of – what? Call it the patriarchy, or God, or the ghosts of our dead dads. A male surveyor occupies the very home of our psyche.”
“A twenty-something you went to school with has just had a baby. You know because the digital age has rendered this kind of news inescapable. A woman posts a photo of her newborn on Instagram, and WhatsApp chats light up across the country. My best friend (childless) and I (also childless) can be found exchanging vindictive messages like, She’s too young and Another one? I tell my mother, who gave birth to my older brother when she was 26, that so-and-so from a few roads down is pregnant again at 25, and she shakes her head, What a shame. The general consensus is that nowadays these women should be accumulating degrees, or career milestones, or Wordle streaks, instead.”
The New Statesman, 16.06.23.
‘At my bachelors’ graduation I am two rows from the stage, where students congregate and adjust their tassels in those fraught moments before their names ring out in the hall, and I watch as one woman points at another, whose sparkly shoes peek out from beneath her gown, open-toed with a pencil heel, and she gushes, ‘I love your shoes’. The woman with the shoes thanks her, beaming, and moments later when it is her turn to collect her diploma, she takes four or five steps across the stage before her right shoe completely disintegrates. As in, the heel unglues itself from the sole, as in, the dismembered part flails with every subsequent step and she is stumbling, contorting her foot and straining her toes to traverse the last few metres before she can escape the horrified stares, hundreds of students and parents gawking at their worst nightmare realised, silently anguishing, dear god, won’t someone help her? Once it is finally over and she limps out from beneath the lights and rips off both her shoes on the stairs, my friend, whose wide eyes are transfixed on her even as she rushes barefoot to her chair (whereas I’ve looked away, I cannot bear it) leans over to me and whispers, ‘I’ve never seen Nazar work so fast.’’
The Fence Magazine, Issue 17.