This morning, I wrote you another letter. (All the things that should’ve been said) Though I told myself I wouldn’t, racing thoughts fill my head. Perhaps, I should just go back to bed. (All the things that should’ve been said) And forever you are my addressee, for who else do I really care to […]
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My nine-year-old nephew recently performed in the Cape Town Opera’s production of Cinderella/Cendrillon at the Artscape Theatre Centre in Cape Town in the July school holidays. I am very proud of this young boy who has wanted to be on the stage since he was about two years old and pinched his grandmothers’ scarves to […]
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Off a cotton shirt, the shiny, lone button popped, stray threads frayed in place, reaching around the vacant space with wispy arms and fingers, palms lost and blending on fabric. Soulful bonds, whorled and weft from dyed thread, from soulless creatures of fabric, tied by their shared brotherhood—the taut, red string. And their invisible mouths […]
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“Do you want to ask questions or do you want to live?” International-award-winning film director, screenwriter, and producer Viktoria I.V. King poses this question throughout her newest upcoming film, Alchemy of Solitude, which she describes as an “autopsy of an activist”. Set in an alternate reality, where activists-turned-assassins are trying to end a race war, […]
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My teenage years often feel some sort of sick competition, as I watch college applications and academic success swallow so many students like myself. Though it may not actually be the case, the feeling of having your future determined by the actions you make as a seventeen-year-old is terrifying. In addition to that, being surrounded […]
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Featured Illustration: Rebecca Fassola “And I see myself standing and looking at the picture with the two lines that cross in the middle, one purple line, one brown line, it’s a painting wider than it is high and I see that I’ve painted the lines slowly, the paint is thick, two long wide lines, and […]
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“The Night of Glory is better than a thousand months…it is peace until the break of dawn.” —The Holy Quran, 97:3-5 . . . Thick, feverish air swells in soft billows, falling like gossamer over soundless trees, a whisper lost between the minutiae of trembling grass shards. Their souls brush against one another, […]
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The Partition is known to be the world’s largest mass migration, displacing 14 million people and killing another million. Following the British Raj’s withdrawal from undivided India in August 1947, the Radcliffe Line was drawn between the newly independent nations of India and Pakistan. The task of demarcating the boundary between India and Pakistan was […]
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And so I write to my Rabb this time… Whenever August rolls around I become numb. From the Partition to Article 370, and the martyrdom of Imam Hussain. I can’t help but cry uncontrollably. August is the month I pour my grief onto the prayer mat. I stay there for hours until my tears turn […]
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