birthday celebrations and a living room art party

1 July 2011

Today is Ammi’s birthday, and she receives three streams of visitors who bring cake, flowers and other treats.

At night we drop by for a late tea at Asif and Seemi Farrukhi’s home and experience a living room art moment when poet Zehra Nigah reads an essay about Indian visual artist M.F. Hussain who passed away a week ago. She also reads her famed poem in honor of a young women who lived despite a growing trend to abort babies based on gender.

As always, the plane journey between...

8 March 2010

As always, the plane journey between Houston and El Paso is short. Right at the end, a few minutes before landing, the airplane skids through a thick layer of clouds, making us hold on to our seats. And then, we land. As I wait outside the airport for Caro to pick me up, I gaze at the blue and notice how much more sky there is all of a sudden.

After she picks me up, the sense of scale and flatness is enhanced, as we drive through the city in search of a Sephora, where we can pick up a few things that I forgot in Houston. Once at the store, located in the middle of a JC Penny, Caro and I get rapid makeovers by our new friends Joe and Lily, who promise to do their best to attend the reading that Michelle and I will do tomorrow in celebration of International Women’s Day. I promise them that I’ll post this photo, so here it is.

Thank you Joe and Lily for reminding us that there can be laughter in the middle of artistic creation and activism. It feels good to be on this border again, and there are many new stories to share. Caro reminds me of the violence erupting just on the other side, where today things are escalating so rapidly that many residents of Juarez are just fleeing.

“We don’t go to the other side very often these days,” Caro tells me. “Even my mother who used to go all the time has to pick select times of the day to cross. It’s sad.”

I just published an essay...

30 January 2010

I just published an essay in The Mantle’s online roundtable “Pens and Swords” organized by Shaun Randal. The roundtable was a virtual conversation between Tolu Ogunlesi (Lagos, Nigeria), Vicente Garcia Groyon (Manila, Philippines), and myself. We were asked to write in response to a question: “What is the role of a writer in a conflict zone?” I began my piece with a conversation I had with a christian extremist who stood outside Houston’s Planned Parenthood headquarters at last year’s 40-day protests prior to easter.

Casa Azul at Macondo 2009

30 July 2009

Casa Azul at Macondo 2009