Saudis under the Mask

What a strange thing. Skin. How it can quite literally define a persons worth. So many different types of skin. Black skin, white skin, tan skin, light skin. All only a melanin pigmentation, something that seems to be so simple and basic yet has a much more complex and intricate understanding for most. It is known to have cause multiple social imbalances in time. Tattooed skin, pierced skin, oh the amount of stereotypes they place on them. Scarred skin, flawed skin. How must they fear the laughter behind them or the stares in front of them. It’s funny how something as simple and as basic as skin can literally be the reason why someone didn’t get a job, or someone was being picked on. It could be the reason why skin-lightning creams are bought for seven year old “dark” girls. How some people refuse to sit next to a darker person just because of the melanin in their skin. How can something as simple as skin be the root of so many of our problems? I sit here, as I trace my grandmoth...

Shaken like a rug full of dust, I was moved by the murmur of your honey-filled words. They were sweet enough to attract the bees, and yet they crush my bones, so I had to make mosaics out of them. They crushed my teeth and scarred my skin so that I cannot do anything but collect all that damage and wear it like a diamond necklace. They intoxicate me—fill me with a venomous air that my blood freezes, even as it is hot like our August summers— even as I am warm-blooded. My skin, a tapestry of my ancestors, is traced with scars of honey-filled, poisonous, and sugar-glazed wounds of you. Words fill your mouth as if they were pomegranate molasses, and I should savor their sweetness, but I find them sour, instead. They send bullets to my skin, and I have no more air left— no more room left to scream. Instead, I wear my scars like a diamond necklace in the middle of a funeral, and yet you rip it off my neck and cr...

See how the hurricanes make the oceans rise to destroy me as I walk my way to you. Look at the stubbornness of the sands, the collision of the clouds, and how the thunders strike to shake my grounds and blur my vision. Although I believe that rain will wash all of this away, but did you ever realize that the burning fires still exist between us, and nothing is going to wash that away.

I carried my sneakers along with my school bag with me to the door and stepped in front of the mirror to have one final look at myself, my usually curly hair was neatly split into two side braids with red bows tying them at the end, my shirt was neatly tucked under the hem of my skirt, my sleeves were buttoned and my collar was folded perfectly - I looked as ready for my first day of school as the other kids I saw on TV. I quickly put my recently-polished shoes on and headed to the bus stop. “Yo, Khadija, do you really think you’re going to school?” I looked to the back and saw my neighbor Isaiah. Being my best-friend, I always told him how much I wanted to go to school, but he kept telling me that school wasn’t made for people like us. At some point, I almost believed Isaiah, until my father was killed by a policeman and my mother remarried a white man who told me not to listen to anyone who tells me I can’t. I heard my mother speaking to my aunt once when they thought I was asleep,...

I saw heaven in your eyes, I believed the stars only brightened when you were near me, but how come I never noticed that the warmness I felt every time I approached to you was because you were fire and your flame had to make me fade? You turned me into nothing but ash.