Alycia Pirmohamed

@alycia.bsky.social

2241 Followers 330 Following

poet 🌙 free 🇵🇸 she/her

A woman swims in the pacific ocean. Only her head and shoulders are visible. The water looks rough with waves on the horizon and the foreground. The sky is foggy and overcast.
A navy blue graphic with the title "the waves, the waves: conversations about grief". At the bottom is a photo of Alycia wearing a white shirt and a skirt, walking into the ocean waves.
A woman with dark hair faces away from the camera and toward green plants and trees. She is holding up an old iPhone and taking a photo of the greenery ahead of her. It’s bright outside. She is wearing a dark jacket with swirling a swirling pattern.
Yes. The shifting, after the return of the tide, and my own. A question rushes out of the stillness, and then advances an inch at a time: has this day ever been before, or has it risen from the shal-lows, from a line, a sound? When we name things simply, with words preceding their meaning, a cosmic narration takes place. Does the discovery of origins remove the dust? The horizon's shimmering slows down all other perceptions. It reminds me of a childhood of emptiness which seems to have taken me near the beginnings of space and time. Now, dark animals roam in the forest, you could touch them. A particular somnolence takes hold of you when the shadows start growing. Then, the heart creates different beats. You want to touch the leaves, look intensely at each tree. The night falls, already tired, already bare.
Because she arrives, vibrant, over and over again; we are at the beginning of a new history, or rather a process of becoming in which several histories intersect with one another. As a subject for history, woman always occurs simultaneously in several places. (In woman, personal history blends together with the history of all women, as well as national and world history.) I wished that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard of songs. Time and again, I too, have felt so full of luminous torrents I could burst - burst with forms much more beautiful than those which are put up in frames and sold for a stinking fortune. HELENE CIXOUS, UTOPIAS
A cove where ocean water funnels into a still swimming area. The water is blueish and clear, flanked by rocks. A head is sticking out of the middle of the water as a body treads water underneath.
The cover of microbursts is dark blue with small white text. The text says “microbursts, Elizabeth Reeder & Amanda Thomson”. In the bottom right corner is a black and white image of a white house with a large tree right in front
A snowy evening landscape through a car window. The remnants of a sunset are on the horizon. The light is otherwise a dusty blue.
alycia standing in the sun, smiling at the camera. her hair is dark brown and there is a braid down one side.
The title of my substack post "nomadic consciousness" and the subtitle: "the mixing and mingling of who I am". The preview text is "What’s a piece of writing that you find yourself returning to? Or perhaps turning to, in those periods when you feel at a loss; untethered and reaching?" The backdrop is a snowy Edmonton street, showing a narrow, slushy road, telephone poles and wires, and coniferous trees or trees with otherwise bare branches.
Alycia is swimming in a river. She is facing away and looking toward the horizon. Her hair is dark and tied in a knot on her head. The water is greenish-blue with a visibly moving current. On the land across the river, there are rows of coniferous trees.
A slightly blurry photo of a beagle’s head and part of his body. He is looking up at the camera with big eyes. He is wearing a little white and red Christmas sweater
The cover of THEOPHANIES held up against a row of books and in front of a mirror. The cover looks like a tapestry on various shades of brown. The title looks like it has been stitched onto the book.
Black background with white and red text. A green band down the right side. SBWN Reading List #ReadPalestineWeek Swipe for what we read in our sharing space this week read & resist together
Pouches and purses embroidered with watermelons, Palestinian flags, and attractive geometric patterns displayed on a wooden shelf
A green graphic with the text: SBWN Solidarity Space #ReadPalestineWeek 3rd December, 2024 12pm to 1pm online read & resist together open to everyone: Black people, people of colour, and white allies
I’m trying to unlearn. Much of what I was taught in academia emanates from a lie. In my life, the institution takes up space like pollution takes up space. It’s tied to my privilege, my usage, my lifestyle, and my complicity. I’m embedded in it because I revered it. I’m embarrassed because I still revere it. I climbed and climbed (and climb). If you look at me, really look at my life, you’ll see that I’m so good at assimilating, at being palatable, at embodying the language of citation within a rigid framework. Back then, almost a decade ago, with the dark red withered book in my hand, just off the library shelves, I wanted so much to belong in that gilded room. Now, I feel a darkness up my spine when I think of it, when I think of postcolonial theory as subsumed into colonial practice. When I think of what I wanted to belong to. When I think of what I want to belong to.
The cover of this too is a glistening on a blue-purple-pink gradient background. The cover is a cyanotype of two leaves. The cover is printed in bright pink.
Forest of noise by Mosab Abu Toha. An abstract red and green hand print on a white background
The International Criminal Court (ICC) finally issued today arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, key architects of Israel's ongoing genocide against 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. This decision marks a critical step, however late, in holding Israeli leaders accountable and restoring the ICC's damaged credibility. All States parties to the Rome Statute, including deeply complicit ones such as Germany and the United Kingdom, are now compelled to meet their duty, fully cooperating with the ICC and executing these arrest warrants. However, this alone will not halt Israel's ongoing massacres in Gaza or dismantle its 76-year regime of settler-colonialism and apartheid against Indigenous Palestinians. States must go further by fulfilling their obligation to impose targeted sanctions on Israel, including a comprehensive military embargo, to end its crimes and impunity. Israel's unchecked brutality and depravity, armed, funded and enabled by the US-led colonial West, have faced another unprecedented blow. The time to end its impunity, once and for all, is now.
A sketchbook flipped open onto a page with a drawing of a woman’s figure - without head or arms. In the background is a room with people and other desks and drawing materials.
On the left is the cover of Son of Sin. It is orange, white, green and blue, and depicts an abstract image of different elements. On the right is a headshot of Omar, wearing an orange shirt and looking at the camera.
A copy of this too is a glistening on a table. It has a pink leaf cyanotype on the cover. Next to it is a wrapped book in green paper. A leafy ribbon is tied around the wrapped book and draped around the table
A copy Wasafiri on a table, with a copy of […] laid atop it at an angle.
The concept of the archive looms large for these poets as they explore and commemorate lost histories. Their work confronts the power of the archival record’s exclusions and erasures to dictate what can be recovered. Derrida traced the lure of the archive to ‘an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’.9 For immigrants and their descendants growing ever further from an ‘original’ culture and language, the ‘homesickness’ of archive fever is cast in especially sharp relief.
Around 9/11, I was young and didn't know what to do with Islamophobia but to internalise it. I didn't know what to do with the abuse, fake narratives, and fear. The return of harmful language (terrorist), profiling, and the dehumanisation of Muslims is again being used to vilify, and this time to justify genocide. I know corrupt Western powers, governments, and establishment value whiteness. I know that incensing Islamophobia isn't about legitimate fear; it's a tool wielded for capitalist and colonial gain. And I see people that once lulled me into a sense of false security repeat it. This is a painful reminder of how quickly the world turns on brown and Black bodies to make violence against us, and only us, palatable. To misrecognise us, and only us, as terrorists. I'm reading Palestinian lawyer and human rights campaigner Raja Shehadeh today. The dedication to his 2008 memoir 'Palestinian Walks' broke me. "To my nephew and niece, Aziz and Tala, with the hope that they will be able
A photo of a coastline. Bronze sand is in the foreground. Rough ocean waters are in the middle, and a blue-ish sky is above the horizon.
A hand holds up a book in front of a sofa and bookcase. The title of the book is A Season in Rihata. A woman and a white house are depicted on the cover.
A wet, rainy day. Fallen leaves litter the sidewalk. Old, stone buildings are along the right side. An old church is on the left. A few cars are parked on the road between them. A lamppost with flowers stands tall in the centre.
A woman walks into the ocean. The photo captures her from the back. She is wearing a brown vest and white long sleeved top, and cropped black bottoms. The water at the coast is rust coloured. The sky is blue and calm.
A sunlit photo of an autumn scene. There are red berries hanging from a branch in the foreground, some closer to the camera than others. In brownish grass, behind the berries, is a brown dog out of focus.
Slow Drag with Branches of Pine Here I am, holding one more mirror. This time smoke, winding like a river. I close my eyes, not because the smoke stings- it does- -but because it's a way to examine myself, like looking at your face in a river certain it is not your face. The smoke combs like a mother through my hair or like searching the shoreline for shells unbroken. I sing to myself and the smoke drags my voice on its back just as the breeze heaves it. Here, in my half-singing, I'm reminded how to slow drag. I watch the pine trees creak
After the __, I yearned to be reckless. To smash a glass brought first to my lips. To privilege lust over tomorrow. To walk naked down the middle of a two-lane road. But, too late, without my bidding, life cracked open, rushed, openmouthed, like a panting dog whose name I did not call -my lips shut like a purse. The last man I kissed was different than the last man I fucked. We were so desperate then, the two of us, undone by longing, drawing night from the cracks inside us, drawing the night out, as long as we could, until dawn broke like a beat egg and our heartbeats quieted in private fatigue. I'd be lying if I said I don't recall his name. The end of the world has ended, and desire is still all I crave. Oh, to be a stone, sexless and impenetrable. Over half of me is water, a river spilling into restless limbs, the rest of me is a scalding heat like the asphalt under my feet.
A pasture with green grass in the foreground and a mountainous backdrop. The sun is beaming through clouds and the sky is blue. There is a cow in middle of the photo. The cow is the focal point.
A sunset over the highland hills. In the foreground is green grass. On the left is a small white cabin with a grassy roof. The sky is bright orange with some softer blues.
An info graphic for a new blog post. The text reads: highland docs #1: between murkiness and clarity. Behind the text is a photo of a cow pasture. In front of the cows is a wire fence and a road sign that says “passing place”. The sky is overcast.
A landscape photo of the highlands. Green grass is in the foreground, with brown, white, and black cows scattered on it. On the horizon are layered hills. The sky above is overcast.