My writing and work are, at their heart, about bridging beyond the gaps that have been pried open within us all. In a world where our collective norms have long been shaped by fragmentation and hierarchy, these combative oppositions seep into and fill our lives and our bodies – carrying us further away from ourselves, one another and the nature we are part of.
I reframe the world through a lens that has formed by deeply sinking into all the layers of the stories that are mine. I notice the quiet abundance that lives in the silences and liminal spaces I inhabit. I retrieve the potency in all we’ve been told to discard. It lives in the negated layers of my Afghan ancestry and in my reclaimed sense of my womanhood. It thrums in my witnessing the fullness of the shades of light and dark that make my refugee and diasporic trajectory.
My work is not a resistance or a refutation against the confinements around us – but a generativity and a sentiment that emerges from our shared and unceasing wellspring of existence.
My relationship to the nourishment that lies in all that has been rendered unseen is often communicated through food. Food forms the aroma and the rearticulated language of my offerings. From its grounding and orienting role throughout my family’s early journey and into my present-day life – it is through food’s vitality and engrained propensity towards reconciliation that I share my reimagination of what is possible. Food carries the complexity, the memory, the emotion, the vitality, and the fluxing cycles of dissolution and reformation we each are. From seed to roots and fruit, from raw to ripe, it holds an innate invitation – to accept the integrations which buoy us into the transformations we need.
