zahra

How can anyone go up against a gun with nothing but an empty fist?”

I’m fighting, alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.

Under what conditions is life endurable?

I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences.

When I think of my earliest days as a writer, what I recall is a kind of longing—I felt everything I wished to say, even if I didn’t exactly know it. There was so much I did not understand, and what I did understand I could never say with all the layers and color that would truly convey that understanding to my reader.

Suddenly it occurs to you to wonder, when the body dies, what happens to the soul? How long does it linger by the side of its former home?

I know there are writers who can imagine a world from nothing. But I’m not one of them. The sense of beauty I was seeking had to emerge from knowledge.