cautious and cruel instead of
so naive and kind,
I can stop you from
becoming yet another me.’
Lessons in Surviving Long-term Abuse
She listened to the roar of the thunderstorm,
She fell in love with the fragrance of petrichor,
She searched the night sky for shooting stars,
She planted flowers on her meagre windowsill
to brighten up her attic room every evening.
She hid away books with words that would
touch her slowly fraying soul,
She took pleasure in the smell of fresh-baked
bread that she had just brought out of the oven.
She made friends with all the mice who lived inside
and all of the birds who nested outside
in little pots and shoeboxes
she had given them to reside.
She placed her trust in these little things
to keep her alive,
and this was how Cinderella survived.
Fairy Godmother
For years, I was a closed gate.
Prayers escaped my lips, affirmations
in two different languages.
Ask me what I was praying for,
and I will tell you: a Fairy Godmother
who never appeared for me.
But that is what faith is, I was told.
Finding a reason to believe even when
no reason finds its way to you.
So I began to find her in odd places.
That time the car narrowly missed me.
That time the sea nearly drowned me but couldn’t.
That time when I thought I had found a tragic ending
but instead ended up finding a beginning
dipped in peace and all things holy.
I used to think that prayer would solve everything.
I still believe that firmly. Except the prayers
that I utter now are stronger in what they believe.
You see, at the end, I learned the truth about her.
My Fairy Godmother lives in the details.
My Fairy Godmother is my heart sustaining me.
Two Misunderstood Stepsisters
If you ever want to have
a look at the way a word
can totally demean and destroy
the entire worth and value of a woman,
just look at what the word ‘ugly’
did to Cinderella’s two stepsisters.
Children aren’t born abusive, it is nurtured in them. Children aren’t born ugly either. They learn to hate themselves from society’s narrow-minded ideas about how they must feel unsatisfied in their own skin.
Let me start at the beginning of this tale, one filled with considerable pain for all involved.
These two sisters may have seemed fortunate because they had pretty dresses and nice things, but they also had the misfortune of growing up as the not-so-pretty daughters of one of the most beautiful women in the world, a burden that they bore on their little bones till their bodies had no choice but to grow fangs. This is what real damage looks like: a sweet, innocent little girl being told over and over again how ugly she is until it becomes a storm raining down on her innocence, forcing her to choose cruelty over kindness.
You can give her a million lovely things in the form of silks and necklaces and diamonds, but through your cruel words, you are still killing the thing which is most valuable inside her, the softness inside her soul.
This is also what the human instinct to survive looks like; you become the thing that hurts you until it can hurt you no more.
First and foremost, girls are survivors. We are trained to expect the world to be toxic to us and make the best of a bad situation by developing the skills to survive it. No one ever says the skills won’t be toxic. No one ever mentions how we are cruel sometimes and we don’t choose it.
So when they see Cinderella, a girl who bears both the envied beauty they have been tormented about, as well as an innocence they were robbed of, they take out their rage on her. This is what happens when girls are taught other girls are competition instead of their sisters. This is what happens when we make women think their outer beauty is all that matters.
We end up stealing from them their hearts, their souls, their softness, by making them believe that none of that really matters.
This is what I mean when I say:
If all girls were taught
how to love each other fiercely
instead of how to compete
with each other
and hate their own bodies,
what a different and beautiful world
we would live in.
Trapped
You may be gentle and sad now, girl
but you are still made from daring dreams,
wading through the silhouetted thoughts in your
own hapless mind that harness you.
He is mercurial with his love
but more so his violence.
Knowing this need not be a ruinous thing.
Knowledge after all is a dark art,
full to the brim with liberty,
a trembling, malleable power.
And it is yours for the taking.
You were called Alice
after your mother, who took on
Your own jabberwock awaits.
Fearless already runs through your blood.
Now do it justice.
Badroulbadour
Her father gave her a name
near-impossible to pronounce
but every refugee child’s
tongue says it
as easily as a prayer.
She once lived in a palace,
now she lives in a war zone.
Her fairytale ended the day
the first bomb dropped,
and the first child died.
Her city is no longer a city,
even though it is still home,
littered with the bodies
of what once were her people,
who now by missile Medusa’s wrath are stone.
The once-princess now
wanders the bloodied streets,
trying to help orphans,
and giving the injured
food and water.
What a far cry this is
from the mystical tale
of a boy with a lamp;
there are no more genies, they met
a different kind of metallic murder.
There is no magic carpet
to save the wounded.
Just Badroulbadour,
princess turned paramedic,
the Sultan’s brave and only daughter.
The Shoemaker’s Son
Baba told him one night
when the desert storm rose high,
Poor men’s sons do poor men’s jobs.
This is just their destiny.
They have no right to dreams.
No right to build sky palaces.
No right to pursue silly ideas
like magic and sorcery,
or flirting with alchemy.
Yet something ancient in the boy’s heart
did not allow him to give up the fact
that a bigger destiny ran in his arteries.
Baba would die a shoemaker,
in his little stand at the market
behind which they slept at night.
And the boy would be left orphaned
having lost his mother young,
and not an uncle or aunt in sight.
But do not despair for this child,
for he is made of fight and flames
and an intrinsic need for learning.
He pleads with the palace guards
to let him be an errand boy and slowly
makes his way through his own scheming.
Winning everyone’s trust, he meets a physician
who teaches him everything that you can possibly
do with a royal apothecary.
Steadily, he understands chemical magic
by romancing his way through atom theories,
almost-enchanted potions, and his careful study.
Baba was wrong; even poor men’s
children can, through their own cunning,
construct entirely different destinies.
Who would have thought that a mere
shoemaker’s son would go on to become
Ja’far, the Sultan’s most trusted vizier.
Scheherazade the Clever
A clever woman is more lethal
than a freshly crafted magic wand,
and this is why she is feared.
She is unpredictable, and unpredictable
is another word for ‘threat’
when a woman wears it well.
to snatch her power away.
Vilify her by saying she is
dangerous, manipulative, insane.
Whip ‘no’ and the fight out of
their daughters early
so they don’t turn out like her.
The vixen, the vamp, the witch;
they have so many words
to convey their dislike of this woman,
because she holds her own
on a planet clearly not built
for humans like her.
But how else is a woman supposed to survive
if not by her wits?
Look at the tale of the Sultan Shahryar,
whose fragile masculinity
punished a thousand innocent women
by marrying them and then
murdering them the next day
for a single act of unfaithfulness
committed by his wife,
and no one could stop the strife
being rained down on the women of the kingdom.
Until he met his match in a girl armed
with nothing but her wits and a thousand stories,
one for every girl he killed.
Imagine this girl, Scheherazade,
visiting the dead lake where the bodies
were drowned, speaking with the women
like they were her sisters,
‘It ends with me, I promise you,
it ends with me.’
And no other girl
was ever harmed after she told Shahryar
her never-ending story,
full of the spirit tales of the women
he so mercilessly murdered,
until he couldn’t help but be
entranced by her spell.
Open sesame,
a girl becomes a queen.
Open sesame,
a vizier’s daughter outwits a king.
Open sesame,
a crafty woman is stronger
than a band of forty powerful thieves.
Open sesame.
This is the oldest kind of witchcraft
that has ever lived and never leaves.
Open sesame. Open sesame. Open sesame.
Wonderland Villain
Yes, I am dreadful
and I am desolate
and I am difficult to digest
No I do not apologise
for the things that I am
for what makes me today
I am that dark thing
that you loved to hate,
now the terror that keeps you awake
Call me gross
Call me stupid
Call me disgusting
None of those names
can ever hurt me again
I am a thousand treacherous things
I was not made
To be lovely for you
I was made to eat monsters for ME
I never lied
I never claimed not to make mistakes
I never said I was a saint
When you bullied me
with those names as a child
You made a horrible mistake
This is not silence
You saw in response to you
That was me putting on war paint
You can hate me for it
But I am both nightmare and sin
I wear thunder underneath this skin
I am both storm and calm
I am queen of all the hearts I consume
You made me this thing that you do not like
Now nothing will save you
when you look into the mirror
when you try to sleep at night
The Hatter
To understand what they did to the Hatter, I must first tell you about people who know how to play with your brokenness like it is a fidget spinner without so much as touching your skin—a form of abuse known as gaslighting.
You say it happened, they say it did not.
You say it had to, they say it cannot.
They pull at a thread of pain left by someone in your mind, and sew an entire ghost out of you.
Build you a dark wonderland and ask you to call it home.
Tell you, ‘Why can’t you just be happy?’ And you cannot because happiness in this story is a queen you do not trust being built from your own delusions.
When this happens, you are like the Hatter. Trapped here in this fairytale world, half mad because someone you love keeps lying to you.
Is this rain, dear? No it isn’t, it’s a raven.
Is this a door? No, it is a writing desk.
Is this my mind? No, it is now my rabbit hole, and I’m going to make you fall so far down there is no way out.
This is why the raven becomes like a writing desk, nonsensical riddles and memories become valid, nothing makes sense anymore anyway.
You start wondering if anything you ever thought happened to you actually happened to you and this is their violence. This is their abuse. It has left bruises and gashes along your brain that no one else knows are there.
Doubting yourself is now a reflex. Trusting yourself is no longer muscle memory but a long, strenuous process.
They called the Hatter
completely mad.
Because he is cursed
to both remember
and to forget.
They call me mad too
because my curse is to heal
through remembering
everything you tried
to make me forget.
How a Hero Becomes a Villain
Trauma when left untreated
has the capacity to make
a villain out of you.
No one understands how little boys
who save villages, who become war heroes,
who have fathers that just expect
them to be brave no matter the cost
to the insides of their mind, become
villains without even trying to.
How then hearing the word ‘no’ becomes a trigger,
how love rejected becomes
cautiously pieced self-worth dissolved,
how the thought of losing love and it being
given to someone else makes this
entire facade you have carefully constructed fall.
How you weren’t always an arrogant,
self-involved, obsessive bad guy, how that is
just the way you project yourself
to keep the vulnerable little boy hidden;
this is what is expected of you,
the strongest man in the whole village.
How obsession is a symptom of a dark
thing left untreated, and how truthfully
under your brash surface you have kept a beast
inside you secretly hidden, and what seeing the girl you love
hand over her love to someone who looks
just like the demon you fight every night does.
This is how a hero like Gaston
becomes the devil in the story which could
have been about his only chance at finding love.
Take this as your reminder.
Not all heroes wear capes.
Some wear darkness, some wear wounds.
Beauty and Bravery
I’ll tell you a secret no one
wants you to know.
You do not have to be good to be brave.
You do not have to be perfect,
your mind completely clear,
your heart full of joy,
everything soft and sacred.
They make it out like the brave never lie, but the truth is, all of us lie at least twice a day and that has no bearing on how much courage you can hold in your heart.
When I set out to save my father, I was not being brave. I was acting out of fear of losing the only parent I ever had. They may want you to believe that I was simply being brave, but anxiety makes more heroes than history would care to repeat. It is better than sitting and waiting, letting the demon claw into your mind with worry. Anxious people are resourceful, they need to know how to keep the sea of panic at bay so they do not drown.
When I chose to stay at the palace in place of my father, I was not being brave. I was acting out of love. The idea of him here, sick, old, in this damp prison, under the care of that beastly creature when I, healthy, young, could take his place, of course I chose to take his place, what would you do? We would all give up even the ashes of ourselves for a parent we love more than this fire of a life.