 now, and in another minute, I will start the introduction. So here we go. And we're live. Hello, and welcome, everybody. Thank you all for coming to today's program, which features authors reading from their new anthology, Muslim American Writers at Home, Stories, Essays, and Poems. I'm John Smalley, and I'm a librarian at the San Francisco Public Library. While we're waiting for everyone to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and to acknowledge the many Ramatish Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these families and community members, and we encourage you to learn more about first-person rights. SFPL Summer Stride Literacy Program is continuing through August. Summer Stride is the library's annual summer learning, reading, and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Join us for author talks, reading lists, book giveaways, nature experiences, and more. You can register today by visiting our website, SFPL.org. And this Sunday, July 25th, editor and Afro-futurist scholar Tim MacMillan hosts writers featured in the new anthology, Black Panther, The Tales of Wakanda. Award-winning authors will read selections from Black Panther and will share their insights on science fiction, fantasy, Afro-futurism, and the enduring power of Wakanda. On July 28th, please join us for a time-travel journey to the mid-century nightlife of San Francisco via the unique letter forms and designs of matchbooks and neon signs associated with legacy businesses. Next month, on August 24th, please come to SFPL's total SF Book Club program when authors Daniel Handel and Gary Camilla discuss their new anthology, The End of the Golden Gate. On August 30th, SFPL's on the same page book club meets to discuss award-winning author Jacqueline Whitson's new novel, Red at the Bone. And that concludes my announcements. I'd now like to turn the microphone over to one of the editors of the Muslim American Writers at Home Anthology, the San Francisco-based poet and therapist, Kitty Costello. Please welcome Kitty. Hello, everybody. Gosh, I'm wondering if I can see the gallery view. Yes, good. OK, I just want to see who's shown up. Oh, very exciting to see. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for being here with us. We also have Hanan Hazim with us. You want to give us a wave, Hanan, who's one of the other co-editors of the book. So I'm the one non-Muslim who worked on the project and worked on it with Valerie Behieri, who can't be here with us tonight and with Hanan Hazim, who are both Canadians who lived in or lived in Toronto in the case of Valerie. And Valerie was sorry that she can't be with us tonight, but she lives in Saudi Arabia now. And it's the middle of the night there. And I said, well, what do you want us to say? And she said she just wanted to send her greetings and the blessings of peace to everyone. And she wanted to tell you she's so happy. These voices are out there. And she prays for there to be more and more. So she's the one who conceived of the anthology in light of the increased attacks and vilification of Muslims that she was seeing in Canada, in North America in general. She herself couldn't get a teaching job in Canada because she wears a hijab. And she moved to Saudi Arabia to find work. So it's just another underscoring of this problem just shows up in her life in a lot of ways. She and I met online in a writing class in 2018. And when she heard that I volunteer with Freedom Voices publications, which we publish works that speak to and from communities on the margins. And when she heard that, something went off in her head. And we had a discussion about doing this anthology, which for me at the time just felt like, oh, I get to do something about what's going on and the horrible rhetoric that was happening and the violence and hatred being promoted from the top in this country. So it just, I said, this is a great idea. Let's do this. So we put out a call that was, well, let me first say, Valerie came up with the name Muslim American Writers at Home from the beginning. And just with the realization that for a lot of people in North America and a lot of places, the word Muslim and the word American doesn't go together. It doesn't fit together in their mind. They just don't have a space for it. And the idea that this is home to Muslims, it's like, no, there's all these people from somewhere else. A lot of people see it that way because they've never been shown anything else. So she just drew together so much just in that title, Muslim American Writers at Home for starters just to establish that really solidly. And from the beginning, she was the one that wanted it to be a collaboration of Canadians. And I want to say USENs now because I'm starting to realize that the word American is a kind of chauvinistic way that people in the US grabbed a name that now no one else in North or South America can use. So I don't know what our name should be, but I'm just, anyway, that's the best I've come up with. So the call we sent out was about drawing people out about their identity. Their sense of identity and their sense of where home is. So some of the questions we posed that people could consider were how you experience your Muslim identity, how you or your ancestors made your home in America, how your Muslim beliefs and practices are integrated into your life here. What connects you with the home your family migrated from? How or when you felt the most welcomed here or how and when you felt the most misrepresented or misunderstood here? What you would like for other people to know about your culture, your beliefs, your journey? So yeah, just the idea that Muslim people could speak for themselves and not have it be mediated through a media that totally over focuses on the threatening part of Islam. That's what we see. That's what the images that filled us from Iran or Afghanistan or whatever, like historically as we've gone through these past few decades, it's just shaped people's ideas that that's what Islam is without anything to counter it, really. So just having this access for hearing people's voices, like I went through this process myself as the only non-Muslim working on it. And so far, I've benefited the most and learned the most from this book being put together because I got an incredible education and I'm really excited to share it. So I want to, well, let me say before I call on Hanan, the diversity we found was to me just extraordinary. I was very surprised. Like we knew we were inviting Canadians and people from the US. But then there were people whose ethnicities come from four different continents of all different colors, like the story of Malcolm X going to do the Hajj and seeing people of all colors and realizing that. It's like kind of like, I knew that, but I had to realize it again. So it's Asians, Native Americans, Africans, Middle Easterners, Europeans. And then some of the people in the book are North American born and some are immigrants, more recent immigrants. So of the people who were born here, here's some example of the range of who's in the book. One whose ancestors came on the Mayflower, a Mi'kmaq Native American from Canada, African Americans who were descended from enslaved Muslims who were part of, who was rounded up and brought here, Muslims of Irish and French and Italian ancestries, one sixth generation, Louisiana, African American and one Puerto Rican Muslim. So we managed to get Latin America in there. And then of the more recent immigrants, there are a few Tunisians, including a nine year old poet who's in the book, who's probably 10 by now, Somalians, Libyans, Kenyans, Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians, Indians and Pakistanis and one Bosnian. So we actually, without meaning to, ended up with a really large number of Pakistani and Indian people reading tonight. So that wasn't planned, but the range of people you're gonna hear from actually represent a lot of other kinds of diversity in the book. But yeah, it was just funny when I went to look at their bios, I realized, oh, the book is so diverse and this is what's happened for tonight. But the other thing is that there's a lot more women in the book than men and that's because that's who submitted. So it's about 75% women and we certainly didn't set out to do that. And it just reflects what we received. So I'll leave it there for the moment and pass it on to Hanan to talk about another, like the main thing is to allow these voices to be heard that haven't gotten to speak for themselves. And then there's this other issue that comes right up that Hanan made us very aware of in the process of doing the editing of the book. So Hanan. Thank you, Katie. And thank you to the San Francisco Library for having us here tonight. So yeah, so this issue came up when we were putting the book together and I said, I don't want all the pieces in the book to be about Islamophobia or to be responding to Islamophobia because we all have intersectional identities and being Muslim is not our only identity and fighting Islamophobia is not the only thing we do in life. And so our stories do not always have to be about our traumas or our experiences of racism or Islamophobia, we have other experiences. And so some of the stories you'll find in here, yes, some of them are explicitly about direct experiences of Islamophobia or oppressions. Like I think one of the writers wrote about their experience going through security at the airport and how awful that was. But we also have stories about a woman making chocolate cake where we have a poem about jasmine flowers. So it's not all about Islamophobia, it's not all about oppression, it's not all about trauma. We also have, I think one of the stories was like a fantasy piece, which was really lovely. Just as much as the book is diverse in ethnicities, as Kitty was saying, it's also diverse in the genres that we have. So we have poetry, we have short stories. We also have personal essays. And within those genres, we have fiction, non-fiction. It's just amazing. We also have multiple languages, transliterated words in English. We also have one poem that Akhil Varani, who was the graphic designer for the book that he put in, which consisted of multiple languages as well. So there's a huge diversity. And what I really wanted from people reading this was to not approach it as, oh, you know, these are just stories about Muslims. I wanted it to look at it and say these are stories by humans. And that was my main reason for wanting to be one of the editors of this book. I just want us to be seen as human because I don't think you have to be Muslim to read this book or relate to it. I think if you're human, you can relate to it. And so in my introduction, we all have an introduction in the book and I ended mine with a poem. And the poem is called Introduction to Poetry by a Muslim poet. And this poem is a, it takes after Billy Collins's poem, which is called Introduction to Poetry. And I think you may have read it. It's a pretty well-known poem. And so my poem is, I guess I don't want to use the word parody of it because it's not really a parody. Maybe it's just taking the same form as that poem. It's inspired by it. And it's called Introduction to Poetry by a Muslim poet. It's on page nine of the anthology. It's technically part of the introductions. It's not really part of the poetry or the fiction in the anthology, but it is also technically the first poem. And that's, I wanted intentionally people to read my poem going in and to not have any biases about what they think Muslim writing is or Muslim poetry is. So Introduction to Poetry by a Muslim poet. I asked them to take my poem and slowly unfurl its intricate layers like a blooming tea flower or press an ear against its pulsing heart. I say, deep dive into my poem and explore its shadowy crevices or shine a light on the poem's surface and watch as its iridescent metaphors dance. I want them to take an evening stroll with my poem and invite it to Sunday brunch with their mothers. I want them to cradle my poem in their arms and sing it to sleep under the moonlight. I want them to bring my poem to their lips and savor its diverse, deluxe flavors. But all they want to do is tie my poem to a chair with rope and smother it in exotic spices, curry, saffron, turmeric. They want to slather it and hummus, make it taste more Muslim. They begin stabbing my poem with pitchforks to find out where it's really from. Thank you. Thank you, Hanan. So it gives us some framing for how to listen in a deeper way. Thank you for that. Yeah, there were moments when we were reading the pieces together and I would read something and say, oh, but it's not about being Muslim. And Valerie and Hanan were like, exactly. And people, there have been Muslim readers or some of the Muslim authors just expressing, oh, I'm seeing myself. And I think that's a huge piece of it that it doesn't have to be about drama. It can just be about life. So the book is divided into seven different sections and we're sort of going through like the order that we're having the authors read and kind of goes through the sections of the books. But we'll talk about that as we introduce people. The first section is called shout out. Like each section is named after one of the pieces in the section. And the shout out section is people talking very frankly about what's going on now and what it's like to be a Muslim in this current climate. The first piece in the book is by Mahin Ibrahim who's gonna kick us off here for the reading. Yeah, so I didn't say at the beginning introducing with us editors talking and then gonna have the reading and then there'll be time for Q and A. So Mahin has published a lot of work in HuffPost narratively and on the Muslim women's website, Amalia where her essay, What It's Like to Wear Hijab in the Trump era was the most read in 2017. She's in LA though she was, I just found out she grew up in the Bay area. So she knows the San Francisco Public Library well. Welcome Mahin, looking forward to hearing your piece. Thank you, Kitty. It's such a pleasure to be with you all today. And thank you so much for having me. So I'd love to just share my piece with you all as Kitty mentioned in the part one shout out section. And it details a personal essay of my experience when I actually was volunteering in downtown LA, a neighborhood I lived in at the time. So I'll go ahead and get started. I had been doing it for years, walking past homeless people like they were decor on a dirty street, occasionally donating a few dollars or leftovers. I volunteered to help the homeless before is how I rationalize it. Or I'd wonder, what if they use the money for drugs? Los Angeles has one of the largest homeless populations in the US, nearly 60,000. And it was after I moved downtown close to Skid Row where 5,000 homeless people sleep every night. And I realized I couldn't just ignore the homeless any longer. They were now my neighbors. And like any neighbors, I should get to know them. I decided to volunteer for homeless care days, a bi-weekly resource fair organized by the city held at a park. It's a fair where the homeless can get HIV tested, apply for housing and more. When I asked the coordinator what I'd be doing, he said, just show up. So I did. The first time I arrived, the park was mostly empty and the fair was sparse. Jessica, our coordinator said, the park rangers came and told the homeless they had to clear out of here with their tents for an EDM concert. They can do that, they asked. She nodded. The next time I went was an overcast day, my favorite in LA. When we passed the park hundreds of times, I had never visited. It had a huge lake in the middle with a tall, springing fountain and blocks of ducks. Moms walked around the block with their babies and strollers. Spanish music blared through a speaker across the street. That day, the park was filled with homeless people, reading and chatting with friends. Jessica put us to work. We canvassed around the park, handing out flyers about the fair. Prior to this, we had read a training manual which told us to be cautious when speaking with our clients in case they were on drugs or we sensed danger. This wasn't an exaggeration. Jessica said they had to shut down the fair for a few months after a violent incident. I walked around the park with two regular volunteers, Meredith and Stacey. We approached the first group of people who were sitting on a bench having a chat. I greeted a man on the left with silver, gray hair and a crew cut. He had a giant purple scar running down his neck which I tried not to look at. Before I could tell him about the fair, he had said, please forgive Americans and us. I am sorry for everything we've done. This was in 2017. And as a Muslim hijabi, I knew exactly what he meant. Please forgive us for the anti-Muslim incidents that rose by 65% that year, resulting in hijabis being murdered on the streets. Please forgive us for having a present who was relentless about pushing through of his Muslim travel ban and quick to tweet Islamophobic remarks. His words made me feel incredibly loved. I told him there are good people here and he had no need to apologize. I couldn't stop thinking about him while he walked. Here I was ready to make social niceties while this man had cut straight to the truth. Wasn't used to people being so blunt. In our everyday life, we try to be so politically correct we often say nothing at all. Yet this man was completely unfiltered, offering up love like he was my best friend. As a homeless person, he was less. Less guarded, less removed, less indifferent. Further on, we continued our journey. And I finished my volunteering, really getting to know a few more of my neighbors. More recently, at the library, a homeless man asked what I was reading. I showed him The Road to Mecca by Mohammed Assad. Your Muslim, he asked, I nodded. That's great, he exclaimed, as if I had cured a terminal illness. In America, you're welcomed and loved if you're rich, pretty, or famous, not religious. My interactions with these people showed me otherwise. While walking home that day, I was humbled to realize of all the communities I had encountered, who was the homeless, the most marginalized, who were the most welcoming of all. Thank you, everyone. Kitty, did you want me to read Akil's poem? Yeah, that would be great. That would be great, Hanan. Thank you, Maheen. Thank you so much for that reading. I just wanted to say it's so in line with freedom voices since we grew out of the inner-city neighborhood of the Tenderloin in San Francisco and published a lot of stuff about homelessness. It was just the perfect thing to put first in the book. It just went right along with the publisher's point of view. The next piece in the book is a short poem by Akil Varani, who Hanan was just mentioning, who did the beautiful design of the book, both the outside and the inside, and is what is Akil? He is a part French. I can't remember, I'm trying to find. He's got a lot of mix in him. He's a smallie Muslim, I think. Indian and French. And he was awarded Artists of the Year by the Quebec-based artist, collective artist for peace. And he has some other really beautiful pieces that are collective poems that were, like one is an expression that Hanan was referring to of what happened after the attack on the mosque in... Quebec, in Quebec. In Quebec, thank you, yeah. So, yeah, this is the second piece in the book, and we were about to hear the third piece, so I thought, well, why not hear them all in a row? So Hanan's gonna read Akil's piece for us. So, oh, it's one of Akil's pieces. I'm disappearing. Oh, here, I'll hold that up. Yeah. Oh, you read. It's on page 35. So this is actually a reproduction of... They set up a place where people could come and write whatever it was they wanted to say about the attack on the mosque. And they wrote in three different languages, at least three different languages. And he gathered it all. I mean, it's an art piece in itself, but he gathered the words and put them into a poem that's included in the book. But Hanan is gonna read us something that's a little funnier. Yeah, so this is by Akil Varani, and it's called You're Infected with Islamophobia. And so a reminder, this was written long before the pandemic, so we got a lot of these poems to us, I think. 2018, 2019, we were working on this, so it's kind of ironic. But yeah, it's called You're Infected with Islamophobia by Akil Varani. Ignorance is a sickness, insidious, contagious. It's in the water, a public health issue. If your parents have it, you probably have it too. You may have it and not even know. You can be treated, but only if you want to be treated. A proper dose of education, 300 milligram pills of critical awareness, regular exposure to Muslims. Make sure to get your kids treated too. And it has these cute little drawings of, thank you, Kitty. My Zoom is making me- Oh, I still can't give it a good, but yeah. Yeah, it's like little drawings with little bacteria in there, so it's pretty cute, so. Thank you for that, and I just wanted to mention I was really excited to find out that today there is a national, government national conference happening in Canada, or it's probably ended by now, but on Islamophobia. And it came about as the result of horrible incident that made it to the top of the news. But I just want to make sure people know that just because Trump isn't in office anymore and they canceled the Muslim ban, the problem is still there. It just doesn't come up to the level, you're not gonna hear about it on PBS or whatever. It just doesn't make that threshold, but it's a problem that is continuing to go on in terms of attacks and in terms of across, I don't know about Canada, but across the US, there are all these anti-Muslim laws that are being intentionally, they're trying to put them in. There's like 200 of them. And of course, there's like more in Mississippi and Texas and places like that than anywhere else. So it just even familiarizing yourself a little bit with this stuff would go a long way to being someone who can, you know, can speak about it. Like just when you're talking to other people, I'm posting some websites specifically for the National Council of Canadian Muslims and an article about the National Summit that happened today, it would be so cool if we could have a National Summit on Islamophobia in the US. That would be just mind blowing. So anyway, the National Council of Canadian Muslims is like from what I can tell the go-to place for knowing what's happening in order to protect Muslims and the civil rights of Muslims in Canada. And in the US, it's the Council on American Islamic Relations. And I'm including a link to their website, but also to like they do a semi-annual report and just posting the one that they have, which is so informative and will really give you a snapshot of why we need to care about this. And, you know, if you're not Muslim to be a better ally to Muslims. So I'm gonna post this and I'm gonna post it a couple of times during what we're having the reading, but just as a way to get started, if you spent like even five minutes poking around on any of these websites, you would have already learned a lot because we just never hear about this stuff unless it's really dramatic. So. Katie, I don't wanna take up too much time about this, but I was one of the youth that was consulted by the Canadian Council of Muslim Women for our recommendations. And so they've released a statement of recommendations that we've made. And I'm gonna pop their website in the chat. I'm not sure if they've made the statement public yet, but if anybody wants to know about it, you can feel free to connect with me. Oh, I think they do have it up. So there are some recommendations we've made for the government to take action. Good, thank you. Yeah, the stuff that's being proposed and looked at is so, you know, in the same way that, you know, we've had such a focus on the legal system here and policing and all that. It's very focused on the systemic issues that are underlying, you know, going on and on. So it's really exciting to see that there's a lot of people that have already thought this through and are finally gathering and having a way to begin to talk about it. So thank you so much for that and on. Okay, so next we have Sarah Bashir, who's the next piece in the book. She's a graduate in communications from the University of Illinois in Chicago, the area where she was born to Hyderabadi. Am I saying that reasonably well to Indian parents who came to the US, I'm sorry, Kingto America, it says in the 1990s. Sarah loves to write and bake, loves her black and white cat, Lea, and is a massive Harry Potter fan. Just for another little flavor of diversity here. So Sarah, hers is the piece this section's named after, shout out. Hello everyone, I'm super excited to be here and just being featured in the book with so many incredible Muslim writers is really touching for me. And I apologize for the fading light. I'm actually about two hours ahead of you guys in San Francisco, so the sky is just slowly darkening. But I'll share my poem, Shout Out Now. Okay, okay. This is a shout out to the Walmart cashier who said, I like your tattoos, but I know they're not called that when I handed her my money with Hanna-Claude hands fresh from me. This is a shout out to the neon yellow vestoring cart pusher who stopped my mother and asked if she was Muslim. And when she hesitantly said yes, he said, Jesus loves you. This is a shout out to all the middle-aged men who hold the door open for me whenever I go shopping. This is a shout out to my high school AP literature teacher who hugged me hello when I was nervous to visit her at school after recently starting to wear my hijab. This is a shout out to the older white woman who said, I looked beautiful and a heavy and ornate Anarkali when I stepped out of the hall to go to the restroom at my cousin's wedding. This is a shout out to my college stats professor who said, my eyeshadow matched my scarf perfectly when she struggled for the right word for my hijab. This is a shout out to the woman who tapped my shoulder at a Trump rally, smiled at me and said, I'm glad you're here. This is a shout out to my high school classmates on Facebook who liked my profile picture after I started wearing hijab. This is a shout out to my best friend from sixth grade, Cindy, who after catching up years later texted me saying, I'm so proud of you for deciding to wear your hijab. I remember you were nervous about that in high school. This is a shout out to my black coworker from college who said, who came to a Muslim student event just because I asked him to. This is a shout out to the community members who put signs on the doors of my mosque saying, we love having you in the neighborhood and love Trump's hate. This is a shout out to every person who stands up for diversity and a religion and the people who practice it when there's so much hatred, when the media labels Muslims as terrorists, when the Chinese and Israeli and atrocious world governments torture and kill thousands of Muslims, when the American president tries to ban Muslims from entering the country, when white men deface, break into and set mosques on fire, when Muslim women are harassed, assaulted and killed in the streets for practicing their fate, when three university students are shot to death in their homes for being Muslims. When it feels like there's no solace for Muslims in the world, it's because of people who protest at airports who defend Muslims on the some way, who ally themselves and offer people like me a piece of my humanity back, that I can continue walking with my head held high and continue to love even in the face of hate. Oh, thank you, Sarah. Yeah, a lot of courage to name all that and speak it aloud and just a chance for us to get to hold it together so everyone isn't caring at all by themselves. It was so heartening for me to read that, just to feel like how much it matters if I do something. It was very heartening for me to read that piece. Ah, so next we'll hear from Shamima Khan. Shamima, I love this in her biography. She published her first poem at age seven and won the City of Ottawa's Youth Poetry, when she won the City of Ottawa's Youth Poetry Award. She's been included in the CBC Canada site publishing there. She performs annually at the Expressions of Muslim Women showcase in Ontario and the way that women, Muslims are presented has been a really important feature of her thought and her work. Shamima's pieces are in two different sections and one is about family about kin, called blood harmonies though hers is mostly about the kinship with nature and the divine rather than a particular family member. And then also a poem from the last section of the book that has the more mystical poems in it. So Shamima. Hi everybody. I'm here on unceded Algonquin Anishinaabe territory known to some as Ottawa, the capital of Canada. And I'm three hours. So it's like 940 here and very dark outside. I love hearing Kitty describe my poems because it's a very different experience when a reader talks about your work and I just always feel so excited whenever I'm holding this book. It's still a very surreal experience for me to have this physical object. And be amongst such incredible company. And it's interesting that Kitty you described this first poem I'm going to read as kinship with nature. It is, but I actually wrote this poem to accompany a brand new piece of music by my walking buddy. So I go for walks around my neighborhood on trails with a friend and she's a musician and a singer songwriter and she composed a brand new piece of music and then I wrote these words to accompany that piece of music. So this poem is called Another Form of Prayer and it's on page 140. You walk in silence in the company of a chipmunk or a robin and stop to admire the view in October. The lone maple at the edge of the parking lot, a tree of red stars, ridiculously beautiful. The world is strange and lovely and painful. People don't like talking about the pain though about being alone, the problems before us, death and what comes after that. Somehow with each step you take, you feel closer to God. How could you not think of the almighty when you're in the midst of his bounty, his creation, the leaves rustling on the sidewalk, the smell of green around you, the steady ground beneath your feet, the air filled with birdsong. And as you stop to tie your errant shoelace, you realize walking is a form of prayer. Thank you. I really should have this book marked. So I'm now looking at the table of contents and it's 234. So this one is called Orders of Magnitude. Sometimes it's difficult to understand the magnitude of God. It's like the size of the moon. It is enormous. I don't think human beings are capable of holding the moon's size, let alone its distance from earth within our minds. We're so small, we can't picture it. But the thumb of a seven year old girl can cover the whole moon depending on where she puts her hand in the night sky. And suddenly, just like that, we can hold out our palms and somehow we can reach God. Thank you. Thank you, Shamima. So heartening to hear those words. And I know I said this at another reading, but just hearing different people involved with the book talk about some of the misconceptions that non-Muslims have. One of them that Akhil Varani brought up was that people often think that Muslims worship a different God, but that it's actually all the same, it's all the same through line from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. So yeah, just the way that Shamima's palms and others in the book just bring that universal feel of what God is, just felt like, yes, we really need that. Thank you for bringing that. So Tayava, we didn't even get to say hello to you yet. So good to see you. Tayava is, I keep not getting the pages all set up before I start talking. She's an award-winning author of a children's picture book, which I will let her say more about in her reading because it's included in that. She's been published in Encyclopedia Britannica and PR, Chicago Parent, Islamic Horizons. She volunteers for Daybreak Press, the publishing arm of a women's nonprofit. She teaches writing, leads a weekly women's, oh, I'm not gonna say this word right, you have to help me, holoca, holoca, close enough. And performs readily as a fun storyteller. So she has a piece that's in, there's a section that is either from, one is actually from a child, from someone who was nine years old when she wrote it, who's 10 now, but there's pieces from the point of view of children or about children. So one of her pieces is from that section and another is from a section called The Home I Left that is where people have reflected about having migrated from someplace else in the world. So she will tell us more about that in her reading, Tayaba. Thank you, Kitty. So honored to be here. Thank you to the San Francisco Public Library for hosting us. And just the opportunity to be part of this anthology and these group of writers, it's truly an honor and very humbling. Like Kitty said, my name is Tayaba Sayed and I originally began writing as a journalist which I still do a lot of non-fiction style writing but I eventually transitioned into children's literature because I really felt a void in diversity in the books that I was reading growing up and same thing with my kids. I have three kids of my own, my eldest, she's an avid reader, she's in high school and then I have a son who's in middle school and I have a little one who is starting second grade and my most recent book, Huff's Us Kisses is based off of her. It's actually a baby board book that just shows a little girl that loves and gives affection in her own special way. And I didn't, in that book particularly, it's not so much a Muslim message but it's just a Muslim family that's depicted in a very simple story. So, but the pieces that I got to share in this book, they talk about kind of my struggle of figuring out what my identity truly is. Growing up, I grew up very detached from my faith and my family wasn't very practicing and the concept of hijab was just foreign and I actually sometimes feel like I almost converted to Islam because I came back to my faith in college after really realizing that I'm almost some first before anything else. But before that, I just knew I never fit in, I never felt like I belonged because of the color of my skin or my hair or my eyes. And these pieces are a little reflection of those. So, the first one I'll share is it's on page 155. And this is, so I was born in Pakistan and I came to the States when I was four years old and I never went back. So for me, I don't know anything else but here but this piece is kind of that longing of finally coming to terms with the fact that I would like to visit Pakistan one day and not hiding from the fact that it is part of who I am. The home I left, Pakistan, you're a foreign land to me. I may have called you home once but then life took me another way. I don't know you or remember much of you. Yet you still run through my veins to this day. The sustenance that formed my flesh and bones grew from your earth. The first air that entered my lungs came from your trees. The first soil that met my feet bore from your ground. The water that quenched my first thirst flowed directly from your springs. You are of me and I am of you. I may have left you but you never left me. I wait for the day I return home and lay my eyes upon you again. And what seems so foreign now becomes fully part of me again. This is also kind of this reflection of this question that I've always asked is where are you really from? And I'm kind of just coming to terms with I'm from both here and there. Okay, and then the second one is page 201 and this gives a little bit more of a background of my journey in writing so far. It's called home in a colored land. I remember the first time I saw the ground blinketed in white. The snow seemed stiff and secure but my shoes sank right through it. Immediately chills ran up my lower limbs through my spine. I shivered and locked arms around myself. I looked up to see if I could find any familiarity in the sky. The sky looked like a reflection of the ground white and fluffy. It didn't look like my sky nor could I see my son. I was confused as to why the son of America was hiding and couldn't warm my bones like the son of Pakistan. Why did I feel so different here? My five year old self couldn't comprehend how I was going to call this my new home. It wasn't just the sky and ground that were white here but so were the faces. I didn't see myself in them, in their eyes or hair or food or words. I felt like a complete misfit because I wasn't one of them. So where are you from? This was the question that formed my identity in my formative years. Where was I from? As a young child, I would only identify myself as a Pakistani instead of a Muslim or American because that's all I knew. It would be another eight years before I could officially identify myself as an American. It didn't make much of a difference though. My citizenship didn't change the color of my skin or hair. I was still treated like an other. I needed to get around my otherness though. I had to find a medium to connect with my classmates to understand them and make them understand me. So I turned to books. Whenever we had library hour in school, I felt like a kid in a candy store. There were so many titles to devour as a curious reader. However, I quickly noticed something missing in the books that I was reading, me. I never truly saw myself in these books. It was as if the pages were as white as the people around me. These books weren't a reflection of me either and validated my otherness even more. Was that how the majority of children's literature was supposed to be in America? Non-inclusive? Why was I being taught in school about the pilgrims who came as immigrants and refugees to this country while feeling like such an outsider myself? How can we coexist if we aren't accustomed to seeing the richness of our diversity? When was home going to feel like home? When would I feel American? When would I feel accepted? As a mother, I see my children dealing with that same void and emptiness as I did. That mirror is still missing in the books they read and the imagery they see. So I thought to myself, I can wait another few decades to see if there will be more kids literature that includes every race, religion, and culture living in this country. Or I can start writing these books myself. If I wanted representation as a Muslim American, I'd have to start from what kids are reading at their most impressionable age. My book, The Blessed Bananas, A Muslim Fable was a wonderful byproduct of this vision. I just came up with the story one night as I laid my kids to bed. My children hearing familiar Muslim names and phrases felt like they were a part of the story as little Muslims. But hearing it once was not enough for them. They made me repeat the story often and told me it should be made into a book. Why? I believe it was because they finally felt visible. I then made it a mission to give every Muslim American child that same sense of visibility. I don't want kids to question the sky or the ground or the books or the images they see as not their own. Therefore, for the last few years, I've been presenting The Blessed Bananas as the puppet show to kids all across America. Just a side note, this was written before COVID and since COVID I haven't been able to do this, inshallah I can start again once things die down with the pandemic. The story portrays our universal qualities of kindness and generosity. I want every child that hears the story or reads my book to feel included and most importantly accepted. I want them to realize that books and stories are tools of the heart. They could make you feel anything, but what I truly want kids to feel is that they belong anywhere God places them. I want them to proudly identify themselves as Muslims, as Americans, as individuals who belong here and feel at home in this colored land. Thank you. Thank you so much. I think I've mispronounced your name in my mind all this time. Can you, it's a little different accent syllable than I thought. Can you say it? Yeah, that's okay, Katie. It's actually a soft T, so it's theyabah. Theyabah. Yeah, there you go. And then it was sayed and not sayed is I. Yes, that's okay. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Okay, I've learned a lot along the way at every turn. Reem, are you there behind your little box? Hello, hi, Katie. Thank you for inviting me. Am I the last one to go or no? No, Saba's gonna also go, but yes, if you would read us your piece that comes from the section about family. Reem was born in Aleppo, Syria and moved to Beirut, Lebanon when she was six years old where she grew up and studied. Then she moved to LA in the early 80s and got a BFA in design from the University of UCLA and worked in graphic arts and later found her passion in ceramic arts. So Reem, good to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you, it's lovely to hear everybody. I have the book and I've heard some of them and it's so lovely to hear them again over and over. It's just always in a different light. Thank you everybody and thank you for inviting me. My piece is a bit different. It's more resides in the realm of where I would tell you about I came at age 21 and got married and resided here and everything kind of, for me, I'm not a, I'm an occasional writer. I write with when there's like passion, something that needs propels me into writing and mostly about longing, longing, the connection here, this is a connection with my grandmother and my longing for her and she was basically my spiritual guide and I just in honor of her and my memories of her. I wrote the piece Jasmine and I'll read that to you. It is Jasmine, I smell the scent that brings memories to mind. Jasmine, every morning my grandmother picked new buds from the bushes surrounding her house and sprinkled them in bunches inside her linen closet. It was her ritual. The new buds would pour their perfume, wilt, die and be transformed. When I was a little girl, staying over at my grandmother's house, I would watch her arrange her freshly scented, crisply folded whites in that closet. What always attracted my attention were her bath towels. They were large and plenty, the kind that covered you from head to toe like a shroud. They were white and, sorry, I'm losing. They were large and plenty. They were white and had fringes all around their sides. Some had an added gold embroidered design, a design that was fit to be seen and admired, most probably by the ladies in the Hammam's or public bath, bathing side by side with my grandmother. I looked forward during my bath to that moment when my grandmother would hand me one of her prize towels to wrap my toasty, steamy, freshly scrubbed body. I would grab the towel with great excitement to quickly contain the heat escaping the surface of my skin. The towel wrapped around me became alive again. Flowery smells were reviled by the steam and humidity. Feelings of gratitude and delight would overwhelm and humble me at once. I would often wait a while, covered with my white bath attire to rest my tired body and for my temperature to normalize. As I would begin to put my clothes on, little butterfly-like creatures pressed against my skin would come flying out in the air and slowly fall to the ground. Startled at first, I would step back to examine the creatures closely. They were lifeless and seemed to take on a different posture lying on the Persian carpeted floor. After picking one up, I finally determined their identity. They were the jasmine my grandmother had picked earlier in the week, carefully placed in her linen closet, passionately tucked in between her sheets and towels. Jasmine, the smell makes me long to be with her, to be tickled by the butterflies that blessed my bedsheets and the flowers that filled my nightly dreams. It wraps up everything. Thank you. Oh, thank you, Reem. Yeah, what Hanan was saying about just humans. So in your piece and just the way that we get to wander around in the book to a lot of different parts of the world, and just get yours is so full of the sensuality of what you experienced when you were little. It's just really rich to hear. Thank you. So we are going to close with Sabah Nazyamin, who I had it open, then I shut it. I could introduce myself, Kitty. I was going right ahead, Sabah. No, I'm just joking. Everybody, thanks for joining, and thank you for letting me go last. I actually, I'm joining you from New York, and I have my whole sisterhood over here joining you guys as well. So I'm American-born Muslim, and my parents were actually involved with a lot of interfaith work, and I'm continuing that. And these are my Jewish and my Muslim sisters. We're part of a group called the Sisterhood of Salam Shalom, and we meet every month, and then we try to find common ground. So the first piece that I'm gonna do is from the book, and it's about kind of speaks to colonial India. And is there anything else I should say, Kitty, about myself? Is Kitty muted? Yeah, that's probably muted, sorry. No, that sounds great, Sabah, thanks. That sounds good. That sounds good. Okay, folks, and thank you for being patient with me. I know I wasn't there for the first part, but we had our meetings. Oh yeah, my friend is gonna hold this so that I don't shake. Hold on, let me flip the camera. Okay. This is my, okay. Do you have a good angle there? Are you getting my double chin? Okay, this is called bold brew. Coffee, dark, strong brew of bold brown. Don't dilute it with vanilla cream. Coffee, dark, robust cup of caffeine. Don't sweeten it with bleached sugar. Let Columbus imbibe and sip it in toxicants. Hazy constellations stray his course. Let Radcliffe sip pale, blanched tea. Pinky raised, shivering on his icy isle. Come, earth, mother, blue sky, moon, wolf. Let's dance in my heavenly. Stomp out foreign borders to the rhythm of our deep devotions. Come, Muhammad, Aisha, Yusuf. Let's rekindle our fires, roast unadulterated beans, got brined the grounds of our fertile soil, spirit guides at our sides. Yes, Rama, Krishna, Sita. Let's smear red earth, wet henna on our hands, toast our ancient codes, drink the rich elixir of our heritage. Let's fill our lungs with the vapor of strong, bold brew and inhale that deep, deep, deep coffee, dark. Beautiful. Thanks. So I actually am a graphic designer and I wasn't very religious or spiritual. That was my sister. But I want to talk on Rumi and things just kind of clicked. And at the top, they were talking about the divine feminine. And I'm like, oh, what is this divine feminine business? And it really spoke to me. And they spoke about clay vessels and how women are like clay vessels and anything can be ported and take the shape. So this piece was the second piece I wrote and it's called Clay Vessel. So kind of my own to women. I'm a vessel, baby. Rumi and the Sufis told me so. Divine, feminine, my makeup, throbbing vitality. I glow. I'm a raw and earthy creation, wrought from wet, red clay. Intoxicating, illuminating, if they're infused, sensual clay. Yeah, I'm earth mother, baby. I'm tender, nurturing and fierce. I'm sweet, smooth, honey dripping. I'm empathetic, salty tears. And what was the next part? So listen, Yang folks. Oh, you men of standing. I'm a giver. I'm a receiver. I'm a harbor. I'm safe landing. A wellspring gushes inside me. I utter words that inspire and heal. My whispers wash away worry. My gravity will make you kneel. Manhood may be a past of patriarchy but your mind doesn't scare me much. Go ahead, raise your voice. I'll consecrate it with my immaculate touch. I'm an enveloping, encompassing womb. I'm mother, daughter, sister. I'm that unconditional love called Rehma. I'm for sister and I'm for sister. Long before the steps of Abraham trod over my green rest of this earth. Wait, I'm sorry, guys, it's been a while. Long before the steps of Abraham trod over my green grassy trends. I nourished and nurtured this earth. It's my sewing seeds that let them spread. So fill my vessel, baby. Flow in and take my shape. I'll veil your imperfections. I'll cover you with my super girl cape. Yeah, I'm bliss. I'm heaven. I'm the net rod that you turn to face. So pray, reflect and honor the imminent balancing race. That's it, guys. Thank you, Sava. What a note to end on. Sava, the one thing I guess I would have added is that she's clearly an old hand at open mics and poetry slams. So you got to see a little of that. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Thank you for having me. And thank you, Kitty and Hanan, for this incredible opportunity in this book. You are so welcome. Well, we have a little bit of time for, thank you to all the readers. That was just delightful to hear, everyone. We have a little time. If anybody had any specific questions that came to their mind or comments they wanted to make, you know, and that includes some of the writers got to talk a little bit about themselves, but if there's something any of the writers wanted to add, we know that question of where are you from comes at people from so many different angles and has never has a simple answer. So it's just one of the questions that we wanted to open up as well. If anybody wanted to reflect a little bit more on that question of home and where are you from, if any of the readers had any other thoughts about that. But yeah, if somebody has a question they'd like to ask, please just wave it us or put it in the chat if that works for you. And any of the writers are welcome to pipe up if there's something in your mind or heart. I think okay, I was really sick when I did my submission for the anthology. And so I didn't read the title properly. So I actually have a whole series of pieces on one particular piece where I talk about what home means to me. Well, a few pieces and I find it really challenging until I found out this term called third culture children because I was born in one country. I spent my childhood in a completely different country on a different continent. And then I moved in my teenage years to Canada. And I wasn't really sure. It felt like I had to give an entire paragraph if someone asked where are you from? Because where was I from? Was it the country I was born or the country that I identify with the most strongly? And so I'm very grateful that I finally feel like I have a home and have made a home. And I've also realized that home isn't a place literally. It can be people. You can make your home in people. And you kind of build your home and you take it with you in some way. So I had a lot of regrets that I didn't submit one of my pieces that was more directly associated with the theme of the book. And then I mentioned that to a few people and they said, I think it's great that you didn't know the exact theme of the book and you submitted something because in a way, aren't we all writing about home? Like whether it's our grandmother and Jasmine pedals or just that one really stuck in my mind. But all of them are about home in some way. And even mine where, yes, I'm really talking about nature and trying to be close to God. And that's also a search for home. And this planet is our home. So anyway, I've been thinking a lot about that. And I've made my piece with what's been published for this but I love the idea of home and thinking about it. And I just think it's very meaningful right now as we're kind of struggling through month 17 of the pandemic in North America. I feel like my ideas of what home is has changed dramatically. So I just wanted to share all of that. Thank you. Thank you, Shamima. I have to confess that we found Shamima's submission. It had gotten lost in some email and we were already in layout and then we found this great stuff. And it was like there was a longer piece that you submitted that was about home but we were in such a rush. It was like, oh, we can take these couple of poems and they're perfect here and there. But I really hope you keep working. I mean, I remember reading that going, oh, we want that finished piece. But anyway, I hope you keep working on that. Yeah, it just reminds me of how many of the pieces just talk about knowing multiple languages. And but now you speak it with an accent that's a little different. So the place you came from, you're not seen as from there and then you're here and you're, like wherever you are, somebody thinks you're from somewhere else in so many different ways is a theme that runs through the book and is moving and fascinating, just to see what people are negotiating in terms of people looking at them and are you seen or what do people see and who do you feel you are? And yeah, yeah. Oh, okay. Hanan is taking off because it's late for you wanna say goodbye, Hanan. I was just gonna ask you if you had anything to... Yeah, I just wanna say thanks to everyone. I'm really sorry, I've had a long day so I'm gonna head off. I haven't had my dinner yet, so I need to eat. So I'm gonna go and I'll hopefully see you all later. Thank you so much for being here and for reading. And thank you, Kitty. And thanks to San Francisco Library. Thank you. Thank you, Hanan. Thank you for everything you brought to us today. I really appreciate it. I just wanted to give a shout out to a couple other folks who are on the call too that are contributors to the book. Gail Canard is down there in LA. Hopefully we'll get to hear her read one of these times from her piece that's an amazing journey about being a woman in Islam. And Salma Arastu, who's here in the Bay Area. Like so many of the people in the book because Valerie is a visual artist and writes about the visual arts. A lot of the submissions that came in came in for people who are both writers and artists. And Salma is one of those folks and you heard from several, you know, Reem and several other people. So yeah, Salma's here painting and writing poetry in the Bay Area. Hi, Salma. Well, let's see, there's some, see what else has come in in the chat. Yeah, any other comments or thoughts from those of you who have listened? Thank you so much for your presence with us. I would just love to reiterate all the thanks as well to Kitty, Hanan, Valerie for just putting so much love and attention to this anthology. It just means so much for us to give a voice to the voiceless. And one of my favorite quotes is from Dr. Swat Abdul Kabeer who said, don't be a voice for the voiceless just pass the mic. And I think this is just such a beautiful example of that. So thank you so much and thank you to the San Francisco Public Library for being our home away from home virtually. Who said, just pass the mic, who said that? Dr. Swat Abdul Kabeer, she's a Muslim artist, activist, academic. I can put her website in the chat. She's really great. She put together the anthology, Muslim Cool a while ago. Oh, wait, that's great to know about. I'm gonna go ahead and post again to the organizations that anybody wants to spend any minutes at all just poking around being curious about what's going on out there. It's, you know, there's a couple of key places to find out in one in Canada and one in the US. I'm just posting those again. But boy, I'd love that. That's something to live by that just passed the mic. Thank you so much for that, Maheen. Well, I guess we're at the end of our, this part of our journey together though we'll be having more readings. There's 36 contributors to the book. So we've gotten around to most people but there's still some other folks we would love to hear from. So yeah, we're looking at maybe doing something at LA Public Library. Maybe that could happen or who knows. Thank you all so much for your presence and thank you to John and Anissa from the library. I worked at the library for a lot of years myself and know both of them from what's now a long time ago and was just really grateful that they were so supportive right away when I brought this to them. And we just happened to hit the perfect timing for being part of the Summer Stride program. So it's just been really great to have this home here. Thank you. Thank you, Kiri, who's also an accomplished poet in her own right. And you can find her book as well as many copies of the anthology we are reading from tonight at the library. Thanks everyone. Marvelous, really moving stories really and poems. It was a pleasure and honor to hear this and we hope you'll come again. Thank you, of course, Anissa and the rest of SFPL staff. Thank you to our YouTube viewers and we hope you'll all come again. Summer Stride has more programs which you can discover on our website, sfpl.org. Thank you and good night everyone. Take care. Yay, libraries. Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you everyone.