i need to speak about living room

…because i need to speak about home

i need to speak about living room

where the land is not bullied and beaten to

a tombstone

i need to speak about living room

where the talk will take place in my language

i need to speak about living room

where my children will grow without horror

i need to speak about living room where the men

of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five

are not

marched into a roundup that leads to the grave

i need to talk about living room

where i can sit without grief without wailing aloud

for my loved ones

where i must not ask where is abu fadi

because he will be there beside me

i need to talk about living room

because i need to talk about home

i was born a black woman

and now

i am become a palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room

and where are my loved ones?

it is time to make our way home.

june jordan, moving towards home

hey lovely people,

i wasn’t sure how — or if — to return to you this week. the questions i asked are still with me and still, for the most part, unanswered. 

but i recently read a post on krystal c. mack’s patreon, where she shared june jordan’s poem “moving towards home.” it reminded me how often liberation work is passed hand to hand, through poems, essays, conversations, and community offerings. how witnessing someone else’s clarity can sharpen your own.

how do we talk about nourishment, joy, ritual and rest in a world that denies people the right to eat, to live, to return home?

what june jordan does in the lines above is make solidarity embodied. she reminds us that solidarity is not metaphor. it is a shift in the soul. a reorientation of loyalty.

“i am become a palestinian.”

not as virtue signal. not as performance. not as trend. but as an ethical stance. a refusal to accept what is being done in our name. a willingness to locate yourself within a wider struggle. not to overwrite anyone’s story, but to join it honestly.

it is not enough to mourn. it is not enough to post. it is not enough to cook comforting food and pretend the world is not on fire.

the architecture of oppression is global. so must be the resistance.

to stand with palestine is not just a political stance. it is an ancestral responsibility. it is an act of returning to the wisdom of those who came before us, who told us that our liberation was always tied to others'. that survival is not enough. we must seek freedom, not just from harm, but towards life.

as i have previously shared, i carry an uneasy relationship with place. for much of my life, the concept of “where i belong” has felt elusive - more myth than reality. but reading jordan, and mack’s reflections on her, i am reminded that home is more than a shelter. it's a condition. a possibility. the right to breathe, to exist, to love, to raise children without fear. 

in my creative and culinary work, this question is constant: how do we create spaces that offer true refuge? not just aesthetic comfort, but protection, recognition, solidarity?

while researching for the iniva artist kitchen salon series themed “if the sea is history, what is nation?”  i explored how thyme is used both culinarily and medicinally across the black diaspora. during this research, i came across the powerful example of the palestine hosting society, a live art project by artist mirna bamieh. thyme is integral to palestinian cultural identity in the form of za’atar, the arabic name for the wild thyme that grows in the region and a key ingredient in the popular spice blend. this project highlights the vibrant culinary traditions and the preservation of culinary knowledge as a form of fertile activism. this embodied, pleasure centred pedagogy invites guests to experience palestinian food as a living archive, a form of resistance, and a hopeful path toward cultural preservation amid ongoing dispossession under violent and oppressive settler colonialism. 

it’s the kind of hospitality i strive for in my own work — where sharing a meal is a way to hold each other in truth and possibility, and where care becomes a radical, collective practice.

these are the spaces i want to keep building, where nourishment is not an escape from the world, but a way of being in it differently. where food doesn’t just comfort us, but calls us into deeper alignment. where care extends beyond the table, beyond the self, and into the structures we choose to uphold or dismantle.

radical hospitality, for me, is not just about feeding others,  it’s about making room. for grief. for joy. for contradiction. for truth. for change. the poem that inspired the name sisterwoman reminds us to talk about the pleasure and talk about the pain.  to hold both. to not flatten one in favour of the other. that duality is the heart of care. it’s not just a poetic suggestion but a political imperative.

may our tables reflect our politics. may our politics reflect our love. i’m still learning how to make room. i hope you’ll meet me there.

saf x