The 55 bus hisses past me on a slick London street, and I feel it again, that untranslatable ache. London is meant to be home. But it often feels like a version of somewhere else, told in someone else's accent. New York lives in my fingertips. Cardiff lingers on my tongue and Bangladesh in my bones. My roots don’t sit in one place. They stretch across weather systems, border stamps, and the sound of my father’s voice calling us in for prayer.
British, Brit-ish
London taught me how to articulate myself, but only halfway. I am British, but Brit-ish, in the Afua Hirsch sense - qualified, caveated, and always adjacent to the question “where are you really from”. To be Brit-ish is to live in a place that claims you when you win and forgets you when you’re grieving. It’s to speak English with precision but be misunderstood in the pauses.
I learned to paint here. To remix memories and cultural codes until they made visual sense. My compositions are bodies, yes, but they are also geographies. A shoulder that remembers Cardiff. A mouth shaped like the gulf of Yemen. A colour palette pulled from the blues of Brixton tiles and the ochres of family kitchens. Yes, I’m painting people and patterns, but really, I’m painting memory held in flesh.
And memory, I’ve learned, isn’t linear. It curves and reappears uninvited. So, this week after an anxiety induced episode of “WHERE DO I START, HOW DO I PULL THIS PROJECT TOGETHER, THERE ARE SO MANY PIECES!” fear, I came back to my new truth. Story telling is story drawing. And story drawing isn’t just a one way street. It’s a story that draws me.
I’ve been carrying these family photos with me for weeks now. I had them printed two months ago and they were stored nicely - out of arm and minds reach at the studio. A few were taped up around the space, staring back at me like questions. But I couldn’t start. I wasn’t ready to look. The truth is, I began this project three years ago. I wrote the first lines, sketched a few ideas, and then I stopped.
Why?
Partly because the work wasn’t ready. But mostly because I wasn’t. I needed to grow into the version of myself who could hold this painting project about my family history; emotionally, spiritually, and artistically. I had to do some inner things first.
Learn how to hold tenderness without collapsing. Learn how to stay with complexity without rushing to solve it.Art = Inheritance. Naivel,y 3 years ago I thought it was just a painting project. Now, I realise I had to have the intention not just to document the photos but to project and prepare a new vision, and to layer a new generation. Not just archive a story. But tell a future story. And I couldn’t make it while I was still trying to prove something.
Now, I’m just trying to tell the truth.
And what is that truth?
That I (and all humans) am a living archive. I am the translation of every place that forgot how to say my name. That I am not trying to belong to a single geography anymore, I am learning to belong to myself. That my art isn’t about proving my heritage. It’s about holding it. Honouring it. And letting it breathe.
And that means not rushing. Not performing pain for the sake of recognition. Not filtering my family’s stories through the lens of legibility.
It means: becoming the woman who can hold memory, contradiction, migration, beauty, tenderness, and rage without needing to justify any of it.
The truth is:
I’m painting to cultivate a dream world. I’m painting to remember. To witness. To root, and above all, to love.
From The Factory >
Studio sessions, photos pinned up, the whiff of something new coming
Poem Cast >
Love as Inheritance from Tiger Bay, Cardiff
I grew up in South Wales. People don’t always realise how textured it is, Tiger Bay especially; it’s of the oldest multicultural communities in the UK. It’s British in that Brit(ish) way: you belong here, but you’re always kind of next to it too. My family’s a blend of Yemeni, Welsh, Arab and South Asian influences. A motley mix of last names, hair text…
Prompts >
JOURNAL:
What memories have been asking to be seen, but I haven’t felt ready to hold?
Where in my body do I feel them?
ASK SOMEONE:
What’s a story about our family (true or not) that you think I should carry forward?
CREATIVE ACT:
Choose one family photo. Without needing it to “make sense,” sketch or paint from it. Let the colours, gestures, or fragments lead you. Title the piece.
Musings >
“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.”
– Bell Hooks“The body is the threshold, the place where the sacred and the profane meet. It carries memory long after the mind forgets.”
– Zainab Salbi“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence... It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change.”
– Audre Lorde“Nothing ever really disappears. All of it—love, loss, migration, silence—gets stored somewhere in the body. Art is how I give it a voice.”
– Mona Hatoum
Love this phrase 🤍 “My roots don’t sit in one place. They stretch across weather systems, border stamps, and the sound of my father’s voice calling us in for prayer.”