#these books represent i think two complementary sides where i fiercely love and because of that i also have so so so so s o much rage

[sembulapeyalneerpol]

If you had to introduce yourself with 4 books, which ones would they be? tagged by very cool @sivavakkiyar​​ (thanks!!) this sounds so difficult because so many books aaaahhhh but here we go (also i mention suicide briefly in the third item so feel free to skip that)

I’m blanket tagging all my mutuals, and i would love love love to see y’alls answers so please tag me if you do!!!

1. parable of the sower by octavia butler

i generally don’t like to reread fiction but this is one of the ones that i come back to every couple of years. i first read it in high school i think, in the midst of my deep hunger games dystopic teen angst phase but the storytelling, it was one of the few books in sci-fi with a lead who was very explicitly non-white. now probably over 10 years later in the work i do, we have projects named after this work and earthseed. though i don’t believe in god, but my spirituality is rooted in the work of liberation and my community and inspired this work of what it means to understand that change is god.

2. wretched of the earth by Frantz Fanon.

read this in college. it captured my rage fairly well, witnessing what people around me claimed post colonial from a malaysian and south asian context, it just brought clarity and structure to the chaos of what i felt being young, angry, and radical

3. all about love by bell hooks

I got myself this book after the suicide attempt that landed me in a psych ward, and it was what got me through my healing, coming out of a space of deep self loathing and hatred.  it also centers how i view love as central to  liberation. critiquing love as construted by a Imperialist White-Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy and then reclaiming what love truly can mean and. my mentor had a journey in her spirituality a couple of years ago where she was studying love and gifted all of us a copy, and re-reading it in a different space, it hit me so differently. love not as a noun but a verb, an intention and action.

4. ms. militancy by meena kandasamy

I racked my brain for this last one, since there were so many but i finally landed on this one. primarily because she was the poet that got me to open up to poetry as a whole, i hated reading poetry in school both because it was within the context of grading for comprehension and i just didn’t get it. but i did reading ms. militancy, my dad actually recommended her to me, i think he sent a link of a lecture or a video she made critiquing caste and i ended up looking into her and her writing and after getting a copy of the the book i devoured it, and for the first time i read poetry and it unlocked something for me, that so many emotions and so many feelings can be described in several lines. it doesn’t play nice, and it fully reveled in that and in some of the days where i feel like the rage and anger is all consuming, ill read this.