Thread by @monaeltahawy

My goal for 2020: to get the half-sleeve tattoo done on my upper left arm - Arabic calligraphy of women’s erotic and love poetry.

I don’t have 5yr plans. Or 10yr plans. Just every day plans of the fuck-the-patriarchy kind.

I will write but I am increasingly pulled towards longer essays and not 800-1000 word opeds that I’ve written so often over past two decades. I’m bored with reacting to headlines. I want to make and influence headlines, not react to them.

I have long threatened to start Fuck the Patriarchy publishing house. FTP Press.

In Nov 2011, when I was being held incommunicado by #Egyptian military intelligence - both my arms broken thanks to riot police - all I thought of was “Just you fuckers wait until I write about this.” Writing! In the face of such brutality! Sound naive?

“Writing is dangerous because we are afraid of what the writing reveals: the fears, the angers, the strengths of a woman under a triple or quadruple oppression...A woman who writes has power. And a woman with power is feared,” Gloria Anzaldúa

The older I get the Queerer and the more Anarchist I become. And that’s how I envision FTP Press.

Free as in independent.
Free as in beholden to no one.
Free as in fuck your reviews and your lists and your awards.
Free as in we are here to defy, disobey, disrupt.

So I’ll get my ink and I’ll work on the rest of the ink in 2020.

"Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boyfriend, the girlfriend, the Goddess or the Revolution," Gloria Anzaldúa

ps: in military intelligence custody, I was blindfolded and interrogated. I even asked them if the blindfold was necessary seeing as I had two broken arms already. I think often why I kept silently vowing “Just you fuckers wait until I write!” Writing!

https://twitter.com/monaeltahawy/status/1205544339625168897?s=21

pps: I have no money. So if you are a Queer Anarchist with money that you want to dedicate to FTP Press

OR

You will dedicate your time and effort out of love for FTP as in all the meanings of Free above

Talk to me.