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Zeyn Joukhadar Quotes

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Famous Zeyn Joukhadar Quotes

“If you put on a dress once in a while, habibti, you will see the boys come running, eh?" Teta gets up from her chair and bends to tug off my hair tie. She uses her hands to let my long hair roll down over my back, then thumbs my chin to make me smile. "You are a beautiful girl. You never let us see." I catch your eye, standing close by her side. And I do smile back, that false smile that I am supposed to make because now, as then, there is no room for me on this rooftop, and neither Teta nor Reem know the difference, because I have not smiled a real smile since the day the crows came to mourn their dead, and even my family no longer remembers the smile I lost.”

SadnessTransSmilesTransmasc
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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“I feel the same thing I felt in the club in Bushwick: that sense not of shedding my body, as I almost did on the basketball court, but of growing into it the way a vine unfurls itself to inhabit a broken fence. I rub the soft, body places on the back of my skull. The remnants of moonflower leaves are laced into the black rings of hair on the floor. I have been the ghost of myself, but this has never been about waiting to be raptured out of my own body. If I am a fox-hearted boy, then so be it. Call me king of the foxes, king of untamable, unreadable things.”

PrideGenderSelf AcceptanceTransTransmascGender Euphoria
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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“I still believed I could will my body to become what my mind knew it should be: free and strong as a coil of brass wire. My chest and belly felt swollen and full, and every movement reminded me of how wrong I felt. I moved slower. A chasm had opened between me and my skin, as though I were fumbling around in a too-big pair of gloves. The only words I had back then were for what I knew I wasn't—a girl. But how to explain this feeling that my body was a tracing of something else, and not all the lines matched up?”

GenderTransDysphoriaTransmasc
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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“If I am in a state of becoming, it has no endpoint. I imagine replacing the memories of everyone I've ever spoken to with the impression that they have only ever seen me as a being clothed in light. In the early part of the twentieth century, homophobes and eugenicists joined forces to study what they called inversion, an early term for homosexuality, gender nonconformity, and transness. They believed they could read and police queerness on the body. Maybe this is why I don't want to make myself legible. I want to erase the meanings that have been ascribed to my breath, to my sweat, to my hair and fat and skin. I trace the green veins in my neck that branch down into my breasts as feathers. I am painting myself as the bird that, to the world outside this room, does not exist. I draw myself clothed in wings and tell myself that even the angels are sexless.”

GenderDivinityTransTransmascTrans Bodies
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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“My body came with borders. I've lost count of the times I wished I could share in sisterhood, could lay my head on an auntie's lap and know we bore the same weight. But I've borne a different burden, and I've borne it so long that, as I turn the barrette over in my hand, I don't yet have the heart to tell Aisha that I have tried all the ways I can think of to make myself fit in.”

GenderFemininityTransTransmasc
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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“I have been taught all my life that masculinity means short hair and square-toed shoes, taking up space, raising one's voice. To be soft is to be less of a man. To be gentle, to laugh, to create art, to bleed between the legs—I have been taught all my life that these things make me a woman. I have been taught all my life that to dance is to be vulnerable, and that the world will crush the vulnerable. I was taught to equate invincibility with being worthy of love. But here in the darkness of this abandoned subway platform, I can almost imagine a world big enough for boys like Sami and me to love each other, to dance and let the pain out of our bodies, to breathe and make love and be enough and be enough and be enough.”

LoveGenderMasculinityTransTransmasc
Book:The Thirty Names of Night
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