Fatima-Ayan Malika Hirsi, 32, poet & community arts organizer
Dallas, TX
Fatima, sheltering in place in Dallas, TX
Aside from your creative work do you have any additional source of income?
Poetry gigs were canceled, workshop gigs dried up, and the indie bookstore where I worked is currently closed. I work from home now for an area nonprofit focused on voter registration and progressive issue advocacy. I also do phone sex.
Who do you live with and how do you feel about that?
I live with a cat, a rubber fig, and a collection of rocks. It’s hard to think of a better living situation for an introvert during quarantine. Being across a closed border on a farm with the man I love would be grand, but I feel blessed enough to have the next best thing.
How are you spending your time?
A bald cypress and many spiders keep me company while days pass on my patio. I learn my neighbors and the pace of the sun across the sky. There’s yoga, meditation, and writing. I talk to my family daily and I’ve never been more connected to my friends, or more active on social media. Capitalism stole so much from me before the pandemic that I missed a lot in my community, so I’m just now feeling connected again — the irony! I’m really lucky that even my work nourishes me — having conversations with strangers and requesting that they call on our governor to relax abortion restrictions instituted “due to the pandemic,” or that they call ICE to demand all detainees be released. I just signed up for too many Coursera classes and joined DSA.
How is the pandemic impacting you?
I’m very privileged to carry a certainty of my own safety and very blessed that the virus hasn’t grabbed hold of anyone I love. As someone who always followed the news closely, I had to pull away because the crisis mismanagement and the horrors others are experiencing had serious psychosomatic effects. The effects of the media on my wellbeing weren’t clear until I began monitoring my intake. My last chapbook was focused on current events and had a lot of poems titled after actual headlines, but doing anything like that now would absolutely break me. So! I’ve promised not to let my work be rooted in rage and terror. During the apocalypse I’m trying to find joy and live that WWMOD life — what would Mary Oliver do?
What do you want to accomplish personally and/or professionally during this time?
It’s National Poetry Month and I’m doing the poem-a-day challenge. I’m hoping that by writing 30 poems I’ll have 15 I like by the end of the month. Since this is our new reality for quite some time, I’m excited to be working on a full-length project to follow my chapbooks. Sometimes I can’t decide if we’re heading closer to The Handmaid’s Tale or to Children of Men — will publishing even be a thing after this? Working so hard before to pay billsbillsbills didn’t let me be the person or the artist who I wanted to be, so I’m eager to embrace what’s growing in all this stillness. I want to cram myself full of knowledge and skills AND PEACE. When the other side of this arrives, I want to be able to help build something better than what we’ve been given.
What kind of world do you want to see on the other side of this?
Everything boils down to having more respect and compassion for life, which translates to dismantling capitalism and all its arms of systemic oppression. I want the fossil fuel industry out of our wild places and off indigenous lands. I want a world where teachers are actually allowed to teach and where healthcare workers don’t use trash bags as protective gear. Oh! And I want healthcare for all. I want people in our country to realize they deserve more and to step beyond Netflix and fight for it. Audre Lorde said, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house,” and to me that means we need to burn all this down and start over fresh. You can’t fix a house broken at its foundation, and the foundation of our county is theft, genocide, and slavery. All our institutions — education, healthcare, criminal “justice” — they’re all built on extracting profit and giving less to the brown folks. I want the opposite of that.
How can people find you and support you and your work?
Website: https://fatimaayanmalikahirsi.com/
Instagram: @fatimaayanmalika
Twitter: @FatimaAyan Venmo: @FatimaHirsi CashApp: $FatimaHirsi