“Set my teeth on edge
The Empire is dead
The colonies dying
As my song toasts
Them on my see—saw-see—saw
Moving between my selves uneven
I am all these made woman.”
—Anonymous, Of Woven Strands, 1985

“I like to spell ‘Asian American’ without a hyphen. Hyphenated, 'Asian-American' implies a conflict between equal halves. With the removal of the hyphen, the term becomes a base noun with a modifier instead of a compound noun; the ‘Asian’ part is made subordinate to the ‘American’. I feel that this point of grammar is worth fussing about, for Asian American history and literature has been dominated by an overblown perception of ‘alienness.’ By reading, we are able to learn the hyphenated past of mistaken identity, but only through writing, can we begin to envision a different future.”—Julie Koo, “Word Warriors: The Text and Asian American Identity,” Of Woven Strands, 1985

*****

For his journalism workshop, an acquaintance is writing about the Muslim experience at Harvard. He asks to interview me. We grab trays stacked with various food groups—bowls of Marshmallow Maties and soup and spaghetti steeped in sauce, plates of grilled chicken and cucumbers and waffles—minutes before the dining hall closes.

I swirl my spoon around in circles as he asks questions.

“Is your Muslim identity ever at odds with your South Asian one? Have you ever faced discrimination, either by peers or professors, following terrorist attacks? Have you ever had to explain the actions of ISIS to your friends?”

I stop him with a raised hand and feel the urge to loudly scream, shattering the glass barriers separating the upper level of Pfoho’s dhall from the bottom. He blinks in response.

“What it is like being a Muslim here?”

I exhale, my voice softer than I intend, barely audible, belying a kind of dull ache that had, for so long, throbbed.

“Hard.”

He writes my comment down, dutiful reporter that he is. And I write comments down, too, after he leaves, filling the margins of my comp lit notebook with shitty verses better suited for my angsty middle school days.

“Instead of taking a dose of this / Or popping a pill of that / You tell me to search within/And I’ll find something worth looking at.”

*****

After she got famous for reporting on hippies in San Francisco, Joan Didion wrote an essay called, “Why I Write." It’s self-reflexive, as one might expect. She stole the title from George Orwell, and the reason for her theft, she explains, is the assonance. “There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound.” The sound they share, she continues, is “the act of saying ‘I.'”

My mom is a selfless person by nature and a doctor by practice. The act of saying "I" or focusing on herself seems contrarian at best and heinous at worst. When she realized that I wasn’t going to be pre-med—that literature fulfilled me more than bio or chem—she wrapped me in her arms. “Write as if you’re saving someone’s life,” she said.

Ask me why I write and I’ll tell you that I write to find out what I’m thinking, to release and expunge feelings, to find what it is that I see in my head—what I want, what I fear. I don’t intuitively think about a "you" or a "they," or even a "we." Maybe, I’m beginning to realize, it’s okay that I write to save only a single life, that I write to save my own.

Aisha Y. Bhoori ’18 lives in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.