#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

"...the tongue is a muscle not unlike a pagan dancing around a campfire."

#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

"...conversation was filtered through a fine screen that held back the most important, large, brave, lavish, and truthful words."

(I love the choice of the word 'lavish' in this sentence.)

Egana has a question for us!!! Check out:
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody
www.instagram.com/reel/DdWTOuu...

I liked singing more than speaking because music lent new meanings to words, dressing them in new clothes. Singing also meant adding beauty to meaning and immortalizing words.
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

There was always a sense of heartache in my mother's speech, as if this heartache were a stone at the very bottom of each of her sentences, though this was not simply heartache-it was heartache filled with doubt: What if I had done things differently?
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody
Brutal!

My mother's tongue was sadness: it could be spoken in Russian, Azerbaijani, or Turkish, but it was invariably sad and it always had words for prayers, entreaties, and suras. though a sense of yearning was most important. #Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

I'd become part of that language, but it was poisoning me like contaminted water, and the words burned like the bodies of plague victims, piercing my alien body, my Eastern woman's body, my Eastern woman's sickly, thickening body. How was I to speak of that body?
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

My face was solidly hidden behind books in all the family photographs, which may be why Bibi called me *the Russian professor."
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

These phrases were unrelated to human love and were instead needed to demonstrate one's love for Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate.
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

" At one time the tribe decided that love entailed the capacity for self-sacrifice, so its members determined that forgoing one's own body guaranteed the prosperity of the community. It also decided that only a knife plunged into flesh attests to love.
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

My Dreadful Body, chapter VI: Hands. “A woman’s hands were always supposed to be busy—only a man’s hands were entitled to be carefree… Any woman in our family knew her hands were not given to her for writing” 🤲 😬📚 #Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody #WomenInTranslation

#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

"Children became more than their own childish bodies..."

"...life adds all kinds of people into its soup, tossing in spices without asking who likes what."
(I love this line.)

Her hands knew that Allah would transform any task they performed into a day in Paradise.
#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

#Djabbarova26 #MyDreadfulBody

"...the teacher's face crumpled like the quizzes we tossed in the wastebasket."

The similes in this book are 💯