we could have been good friends, my grandmother and i.

i remember the texture of her fingers, the way her hands were shrouded in wrinkles like earned robes. i remember the way her eyes crinkled with mischief when she smiled, her eyelids adorned with kohl that leaked, ink-like down her cheeks when she made wudhu. i even remember her smell, the scent of jasmine and laundry detergent that clung to her white abayaa’s. nearly thirteen years have passed but i still smell her ataar on the jackets she left behind.

i cannot remember her laugh though.

i wish i could forget every name i’ve ever learned out of politeness, and erase anything else that takes up space in my head. if only i could take a vacuum to memory and replace it all with her. it scares me, how much i am willing to give up just to hear that laugh ring around our living room one more time.

what is there to say about grief that has not already been written? i am convinced the angel of death is a man. in my experience, to take and take and take without ever giving is a masculine practice. maybe i’m being cruel and reductive. maybe i need to meet better men; in my grief i can be unforgiving, so forgive me. i think death too selfish to be a woman.

i was sat watching a k-drama of all things when it dawned on me that i no longer have a grandmother. i struggle even to type that word out. in our home, we called her ‘hooyo’ or ‘mother’ instead of ‘ayeeyo’- the somali word for grandmother. it feels like a distancing through language. she raised me alongside my mother. they were a maternal unit, so we gave her the same name. i felt a wave of something cold pass over me. a longing that more resembled homesickness than it did anything else. i was once a granddaughter. the grief of knowing that i no longer belong to someone in that way is dizzying.

everything in me goes soft at the sight of a black woman over the age of fifty. in my eyes, they are living, breathing miracles.

look at this world they have had to navigate. we exist because they lived and dared to dream before us. they passed on their customs to us with such love: here babygirl, lay your edges like this. they hung gold nameplates around our necks when we were toddlers; in their eyes, our mere existence was worth commemorating in gold. they’d get through tubs of cocoa butter and vaseline in weeks, lathering our arms and legs and faces until we resembled glazed doughnuts. they’d see us watching them get ready for a rare night out and tell us come here. do you want me to give you an eyeliner wing like mine? black lip liners and clear gloss, matte faces. stacked jewelry and lavishly done nails.

everything these older women did is synonymous now with cool. with glamour. they were persistent in their preparing of us for the real world: you are beautiful and capable, little black girl. the world will not see you as such but you are everything. remember that.

we are the product of their love and labor. i am the product of her love and labor.

even my name was a gift from her. ‘fortunate one’. i wear it now, like a crown. training western mouths to form it correctly in their mouths;“it’s not AIYAN or AAYAN or IAAN OR ION. it’s ayan. four letters. no elongation necessary miss wayne.”

i grew up at the feet of the most remarkable women. truly, the somali diaspora exists and breathes because the shoulders of our mothers and grandmothers have endured the burden of keeping a community ravaged by trauma and emotional desolation together. the somali woman watches as her husband- formerly a military commander or high school teacher in a faraway land now only seen in save the children advertisements- marries a second, third, forth wife the same age as their daughter. he does not work; he eats the food she cooks and goes of to the maqaahi, debating tribal politics with other men who have deserted their houses. she works as a cleaner in a school that calls her into a meeting every time she brings in a doctor’s note for chronic pain. they mean to shame her for feeling pain.

the somali woman sits in a police station at three in the morning, trying to understand what the officer means when he says your son is under arrest for dealing drugs. she wishes in that moment that she’d never tried to escape the flames of her childhood home. war would have been better than this, she thinks. at least back home you spoke the same language as the one carrying the gun. there was always a chance, however slim, of being able to appeal to your captor. the british have no interest in humaness. she’s learned that the hard way.

white women call us subjected/ oppressed because we wear a headscarf. i dare anyone- male or female- to try to dictate what a somali woman does with herself. we have ownership of ourselves; it’s why even our men seek out girls to wed. they’re trying to get in with them before their spines have fully formed. the women who raised me injected me with so much self- respect, it reads as cockiness to those who wish to humble us (anyone who follows me on here will know that even on this very platform, people seem eager to humble this somali girl; they have failed). i am only remarkable because they were. i miss my grandmother’s strength but it is her softness i crave most of all.

she would dissolve like sugar in hot tea at the sight of us, her grandchildren. it became a running joke, my mum teasing her for being so cliched in her reaction to us.

look at you smiling so big. i can see all of your teeth mama. we get it; you love the little one’s more than your actual daughter.

i wish i had someone i could dissolve in front of. i wish i could be petulant and self-absorbed the way only the presence of a grandparent allows. i want head rubs and sweet promises of darling, it’s all going to be okay and someone to coo at how tall i’ve gotten. our parents are too realistic. their love is too persistent and present in our lives. i want my head on her lap as she braids my hair, totally spies re-runs playing in the background. i don’t want my hair in a stranger’s hands.

i wish that good people didn’t have to die. i wish kindness could grant them a few extra days.

do you see me from where you are hooyo? i’m trying the way you taught me. i learned to love our people as you did. i write about us now. all that cleverness you told me to share, here i am, sharing it.

i wonder what you would make of me. i think we’d be friends, you and i. you’d scold me and tell me to give one of these men a real chance to earn my heart and know me. your walls are too high; why did Allah make our hearts if not to feel little one? you’d be proud to know that i love clothes as much as i did when i was small, that i am just as cheeky. i think you’d tell me to stop working as hard as i do, but how can i? i carry your hopes for me like a directive.

i wonder if in my love for you i ever removed your humanness. did my childish admiration f you strip you of nuance? i see that now. i’m so sorry for sanctifying you. you were no less worthy of loving even with you flaws. i see yo in every older woman i come across. the blue rings you had around your irises have started to show up in mum’s eyes. sahid has the same little freckle on his hands that you did.

there is nothing else to say other than i miss you, the way an amputee misses a limb. you are essential to the understanding of me. there is so much i wish i had asked you. i’ve been scavenging for bits of your history like we were strangers.

wait for me, wherever you are. you believed in an afterlife and contaminated me with that belief. i hope for the sake of both our hearts it exists. drink from the rivers of honey you were promised. if anyone is deserving of that eternal joy, it is you. i’ll be there one day with a notebook full of questions.

glory to our mothers and grandmothers. glory to those who lived rough lives and remained beautifully soft. glory to black women. sit at the feet of your elders and know them. commit their laugh to memory; one day you might have to go without it.

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thank you all so much for reading. i don’t think i’ve ever wanted to post a piece less, so frightening is it to share bits of my softness this openly. i’ve decided to be braver and share honestly what is on my mind. i hope it makes you all feel a little braver too.

for my paid subscribers i’ve decided that on the week’s i publish a free essay, i’ll have an extra little post sent to your inbox every saturday so that you always have something exclusive to read. there are so many of you already; i want to say thank you for seeing the value of my work. money is tight, so if you’d really like a paid subscription and can’t afford one right now, please message me. i want to give a few out every month.

entertainment media is crumbling and i’m trying to navigate between making sure people have access to my writing while also being able to make a steady living of my words. i may not always get the balance right, so please be patient with me.

feel free to follow me on insta [@itsayanartan]; i plan on turning that page into a digital scrapbook of sorts.

thank you as ever and until next time loves,

aa xx