They drew me wrong.

Sketched sand in place of skin,

wrote me fragrant, veiled, and thin—

called me mystery, called me sin,

a silk-wrapped prayer you could begin

but never end.

They made a myth of my mouth.

Put gold in it.

Stripped اللغة from my mother’s lips

then taught me how to mimic it with empire’s tongue.

Said “tu es l’histoire” — but meant specimen.

Measured my wrists, mapped my hips, colonised my metaphors.

My name arrived misspelled in books I did not write.

I read myself in glass museum cases, under dust and curated light.

“Orient,” they whispered. Meaning: soft. Meaning: strange.

Meaning: owned.

I am not your opium dream.

Not your daughter of the Nile,

not your hookah-haloed memory.

I am the silence you mistranslated,

the history you footnoted into fiction.

You called me East, as if I were sunrise only —

never storm.

I come bearing ملح . My voice is not jasmine,

it is rust on a coloniser’s coin.

It is border, and wound, and anthem.

I know the taste of Babel.

I have lived inside mistranslation.

I speak in ghosts and borrowed books—

ت ، ي ل

I speak in a tongue that no longer belongs to me.

Still, I speak.

And I write my name in calligraphy

so sharp it cuts through parchment. Not yours.

Not now. This story begins where you stopped reading.

This time, I hold the pen.

So draw me again—but do it with ink that bleeds.

Not exotic. Not other.

Just me — unframed, unowned, and unbeautiful

in the way that truth must be.