FARIHA RÓISÍN on the Courage of Listening to Our Bodies /354
This week, Fariha Róisín offers both timely and timeless wisdom on what it means to live in a body that has experienced trauma. This is a conversation that bears witness to the deep terror and distress of the world and still charges forward with undying compassion and care – the compassion and care of wild survival.
Offering both deep personal reflection and spacious contemplation about the state of the world, Fariha reminds us that our bodies guide us to what we need. This episode brings up the things that we so often don’t want to touch – trauma, abuse, global systems of disregard – and handles them with care and love. Fariha shows us what it means to take pain seriously. It takes courage to listen to our bodies – especially bodies that have been abused, subject to violence, and forced into paradigms of “wellness” that do not work. As we face the new horizons of this rapidly changing world, how can we understand the world by understanding ourselves and our bodies?
Throughout the episode Fariha threads in a profound relationship with god, and a type of faith that is filled with questioning, fueled by queer thought, and driven by love. In even the darkest of times we can turn to love, accountability, and community to find the care that we need.
“What happened to you as a child, who your parents are, what kind of lineages you come from—all of that is explained in our bodies. We are that living, sacred form of our ancestors.”
Photo of Fariha Róisín by Sylvie Rosokoff
Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, in liminality, otherness and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities and has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020), Who Is Wellness For? (2022) and her second book of poetry is entitled Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, due fall 2023.
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♫ The music in this episode is “Not Every Lake Dreams of Being a Magical Swamp” by Misha Sultan (with special thanks to Patience Records), “Canta” by Amo Amo, “Arabesque No. 1” by Colloboh (with special thanks to Leaving Records), and “As We Walk into the Night” by Amber Rubarth.
Episode References
Rabindranath Tagore | Academy of American Poets
Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
Fariha Róisín | Substack
“Celibacy As Survival” | The Cut
GUEST Recommendations
Who Is Wellness For? is a roadmap for people wanting to heal, but also people practicing South Asian or other Indigenous healing modalities and want to learn how to move with determination, intentionality and care in that space. I think it's so important to uplift the work of the Global South, and I hope this book is a template for people who are wanting to do the same.
Like A Bird, my novel, is a book dedicated for sexual abuse survivors and I hope it's both a reflection and toolkit for others to move toward healing.
How To Cure A Ghost and Survival Takes A Wild Imagination are testaments to the spirit of being human, they are explorations of the erotic – through the lens of the abused body – but the most recent book, Survival (which came out on October 17th) is a book of poems about the breakthrough and the courage that comes with being on a focused journey toward self and embodiment.
Being In Your Body is a workbook for anyone trying to understand and arrive at more compassion within their bodies.
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For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.