Ndeen leading the March for Humanity: #SanctuaryEverywhere Jeff Fazio / Jeff Fazio
It was one of those days, it was one of those days where the sunshine blew air kisses onto the river and it gleamed
My mother and I sitting on the edge of its sandy horizon where dirt splits water and grass like the prophet Moses
My mother’s hijab hugs her head the same way she cradles me and my sister
We stare into the river only ever daring to make eye contact through water
I watch her image the same way I do executions
She pulls the pin from her hijab, stabs it into the dirt, trying to find some way to hurt this land back
Unravels her scarf, unwinding a twenty-year-old marriage to her religion
Lets it drift through the wind, her hand shaped blimp still lingering through the air
My mother, giving her life back to its creator
Watching her weep into the river so there is no evidence she had ever cried
But my tears proof enough
A white supremacist becomes president
And the first thing my mother does is give up
And I am saddened down to the bone
An unjust arthritis crippling us both
The whole nation in a coma
And my mother weeping at its bedside
For all her nameless sisters in hijabs and their daughters and hers
And I am saddened and I am shameful
Because my mother does not quit
My mother runs over oceans for her children
She does not weep into rivers
Mom, I am not saying it’s not okay to give up
I am just saying that when you do
Make sure your hand is a claw
Make sure their skin finds home in your fingernails
Staple your hijab to the nape of your neck before you ever let them take it
Muslim women do not get buried without digging ourselves out as Muslim women
Do not flinch at the name of a white man
Us Muslim women do lose faith sometimes
But us Muslim women got a love for Allah like boomerangs
The minute it leaves it is already on its way back
Today we may give up
Today our hijabs may drift in the river
But tomorrow when we do wadu, the cleansing before we pray
And we turn the faucet on to worship Allah for the fifth time that day
Our white hijabs will seep out, tear-soaked and wrinkled
But still as wearable as they have always been
And we will let their president know that twenty years of faith do not blow in the wind that easily
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