Welcome to my Substack.

I started writing this in January 2020, months after my debut book of poems “How To Cure A Ghost” came out, and just a few weeks before our entire understanding of the planet went to a standstill as we entered the global coronavirus pandemic.

With that came the deep radicalization of our culture as ‘white supremacy’ and ‘abolition’ both became apparent in our global consciousness, as many of us radicalized even further into liberation and the importance of understanding that our collectivity was our way out of this darkness, out of this disconnection, out of the binaries of Empire. With the leadership of Black organizers and educators, and now with the march of Palestinian and Indigenous leaders and activists, as the realities of the Global South become more present, we are forced to bear witness to the presence of the immensity of the colonial project, and its vast and terrifying entity.

For the last few years, the focus of this newsletter has moved from places of spirituality and God to a place of politics. Much like my own writing that moves from the sentimental to the political in each book, whether How To Cure A Ghost, or Like A Bird, my novel, Who Is Wellness For?, my first book of non-fiction and even Survival Takes A Wild Imagination, my latest book of poems—there is always a place for the existence of the multitudinous ways my mind correlates and processes information.

This space is the place for me to do this. To reach further and bolder into my curiosity and imagination, to write what I know, from my perspective as a queer Muslim person who navigates the world with a whole host of traumas, and thus worldliness, experience - some would even call it wisdom - but also to write from the perspective as a researcher, an essayist and memoirist, as an explorer of time, and a lover of history and thus facts, my mind spins vast territories to show you how we are all interconnected. It is in this realization, that I present the possibility of healing. We heal together. Ultimately, I believe life on this planet is to heal ourselves. Especially in this iteration, in this current lifetime.

If you are able to financially help me, I graciously thank you.

Your subscription, especially your paid subscription, allows me to fund myself while I work on two new books and a few other projects, and your support helps me ground myself in a financial safety that as a working writer/artist I haven’t received from institutional support. Thank you. Every month, I spend a lot of money taking care of myself, as the medical world has failed me as someone with a chronic illness. I take reprieve in the care unit I’ve created for myself, and I’m grateful if you can support me in doing that. If you can’t, I trust you will support me in other ways.

humbly yrs,

fariha

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An exploration of all the ghosts that haunt me. I’m working through it as an act of healing.

People

Fariha Róisín is interested in the margins, liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. She is the author of How To Cure A Ghost, Like A Bird, Who Is Wellness For? and Survival Takes a Wild Imagination.