Words by Musa Roshdy
Artworks by Diane Sultani Milelli
This article is part of the “Sana Wara Sana” issue
Author’s Note:
I started writing “The Truth in Our Bones” on October 2, 2023 as I prepared to live in Cairo for the first time in my adult life, as an Egyptian born and raised in diaspora. For me, there is no way to disentangle this story from the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, the war in Sudan, and global repression of movements for justice and indigenous sovereignty. Throughout the siege on Gaza, where global powers have coordinated to brutally butcher tens of thousands of human beings, a regular form of misdirection is to claim that this horror is done for the benefit of queer Palestinians, and queer Arabs at large.
Drawing on Afrofuturist tradition and the untapped potential of what tomorrow might hold, this story is an attempt towards Arabfuturism, imagining one potential for what our world could look like after today’s revolutions have been won. What would it mean to unpack the legacy of queerness in the Middle East Must we always raise our voices, or is that instinct in some ways a colonial reflex we might outgrow? Despite the myriad of ways we are unseen, policed, and erased from contemporary and historical narratives, don’t we already know and celebrate our truths? Queer community is formed from the same instincts of hospitality and generosity that are so central to our cultures. This abundant care is part of our bones.
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is queerness’s domain.”
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)
A story from before my time
My grandmother was born the same year our river was freed, and our city officially re-adopted a lunar calendar. Her mother used to joke that, when she was born, Allah blessed her with so much feminine energy that it forced all the men in the city to remember nature’s cycles, to shake off the colonial concepts of dams and channels that forced our family to live on uncultivable land for centuries. When the water was allowed to slow and curve, its biodiversity re-emerged. Within a generation, it was once again a truly sustainable source of freshwater.
I think of this story whenever I take the hyperloop train back over the river. That somewhere under its waters is a house where my great-great-grandmother raised her kids and made ta’ameya on the weekends.
Dhu al-Hijjah 9, 1545 AH (9/12/1545)
This afternoon I took the loop to see Khalid. His mother gave me maqdoos to bring to him, worried he’s too busy studying to feed himself. I love her, but it drives me mad that she doesn’t recognize that his flatmate Samir is more than just Khalid’s flatmate. If she would just taste his maqluba, she’d never pray that her son finds a wife to feed him ever again. She’d thank Allah for that miracle of a man who, despite being enrolled in the same medical mechanics program as Khalid, still manages to cook them both a warm meal every evening. There is a special kind of “unseeing” that only families can do.
Khalid and I grew up in the same apartment building. He was a witness to my first truths, and, to this day, there are few I trust as much as him. Today marked a rare first in our nearly twenty-five years of friendship: it was the first time I trusted him to take a scalpel to my body. I had filled all three bones in my left arm, and if I were to continue my role as part of the archive, I would need the transcriber surgically transferred to my right arm.
Aging is ironic. I used to tease Khalid endlessly for being such a squeamish boy. I always wanted to look at the corpses of the birds the neighborhood cats killed, or the huge slabs of lamb hanging in the butcher’s window. But from a young age, such things made him sick. He even fainted at his own Voice ceremony. Now, however, he’s almost a full-fledged surgical mechanic specialist.
I started noticing the shift five years ago, when I first got my transcriber installed in the back of Leila’s makeshift living room tattoo studio. Khalid had been pestering her with questions, wanting to know every detail of how the device carved words into bone, without compromising the bones’ strength nor structure. I eventually begged him to stop so I wouldn’t lose my nerve. But to my own surprise, I didn’t even flinch when Leila actually inserted the device. As the oldest child of the eldest daughter of an eldest daughter, I have always been keeping the stories of others inside, waiting for the right moment for them to be retold. The transformation felt natural.
Bone Recording #12
My name is Khalid, and my family have been mechanics since the time of cars. I am the first surgical mechanic specialist, or doctor of any kind in my family. I am also the first man to live openly with his boyfriend. My dear Samir fills my days and nights with companionship sweeter than I could have ever dreamt.
7/2/1546
Before committing my bones to join the archive, I had to decide whether I would set my transcriber to record in script or in sound waves. Script was smaller, allowing for more tales, prayers, hopes, and confessions to be carved into the ivory of my frame, but sound waves preserved the exact tone and cadence of the delivery of their testimony. It felt to me like sound waves would make me a vessel more than a record.
I wanted to host the voices of my peers as they become elders and ancestors, their precise essence held in their accents, lisps, timbres, and passions. These things felt like they could not be preserved with mere punctuation. How does a script preserve a laugh? How would it ensure that my friends’ joys were not forgotten nor erased?
I knew that, by recording in soundwaves, my pain would be great, since each detail of inflection in their voice must be carved. It also meant that I’d be a smaller, more curated archive. The possibility of inadvertently taking away space from those whose stories would not be recorded, or taking on fewer stories to carry forward, weighed heavy on me. I had no idea what words would connect with the queer youths of the future. And for a while, I thought it was my responsibility to record as much as possible and leave it to those who would find my bones to imagine the tone and delivery intended with each record, or to invent whatever reading suited them in their time.
Until one day, I caught my grandmother watching a classic video of an activist named Sarah singing along to Oum Kulthum. It was the first time I saw her weep openly for another woman who was not of her blood. It was not just the words, but hearing Sarah’s voice sing them, that brought that vulnerability out of my grandmother.
She never made a big deal of announcing things about herself. When she was of age, she married a man, and lived happily-enough with him for 15 years, until he passed prematurely. This was the case of many in that unnatural, inflation-starved age. She never took another husband, despite encouragement from my mom and the other women in her life. She would simply say, “I had one man in my life, and that was more than enough,” adopting the veil of a widower as a shield from whatever deeper truth she cared not to share.
Witnessing her watch that clip, I saw her in a way she had never allowed me to before. Though I always knew she loved me – even when she chided me over my short hair, leather and denim jackets, and sturdy boots – she seemed to wish me to not take so many “risks” in my presentation. When the clip of that beautiful woman played, long gone in a world before my time, I felt I understood her fear not as cowardice, but as care. I remain grateful for that haunting duet, which resolved for me that sound was more important than script, and that, long before we were given Voice, we have always been a people who have sung our truths.
Bone Recording #17
My name is Raina, and I captain a river boat. I see travelers of all sorts, northern or southern, rich or poor, we are always amongst them. At night, we throw parties for women who love women, and those who they love. There is nothing more wonderful than laughter echoing over the water’s surface, unafraid to be heard rejoicing.
21/3/1546
Voice first arrived as a promise. It was supposed to be a technological revolution. A device that would ensure democracy for all people would never again give way to the will of a few. The idea was to embed every citizen with an advanced speaker system, embedded in their wrists. This speaker would only play what they permitted, as it was their Voice.
Then, during public debates, they would freely sync or un-sync their Voice with whoever was speaking according to their own will and belief. Whoever spoke the loudest could then claim to speak with the Voice of the people. And if you no longer agreed with what they said, you could simply un-sync your Voice from theirs.
But even back then, it felt immature. This idea that, just because others agreed with you, you must be right. How colonial to only speak with those who parrot what you already think.
My grandmother also thought that Voice was a stupid creation. She is one of the last living people in our city to have never been implanted with a Voice. She always said she was uninterested in anything that would allow men to be even louder, and that everything could be expressed in an ululation, a laugh, or a direct conversation. She was horrified when it caught on, and suddenly she was left without a vote when:
every half moon, our neighborhood would gather to address grievances and resolutions to be determined by Voice, or that …
every 6 moons the city would gather until it spoke with supposedly one unified Voice, or that
every 18 moons there would be a Council of Waters, where each city state along the river would send a delegation in hopes of continued cooperation and prosperity.
She would tell me stories about cities far to the south that never bought into the concept of Voice, and that sometimes, travelers from those cities would appear in town for the Council of Waters. As though we did not all agree on how to best communicate, all cities along our river were committed to avoiding the water wars that have been the defining plague of our age for many watersheds.
Bone Recording #23
My name is Noor, though it used to be Amir. There is much I am still learning about myself.
I pray you have the community to hold you in your learnings.
2/4/1546
I was 19 when I learned the history of how transcribers were invented as a radical alternative to Voice.
For those of us who were women, or queer, or southern, or poor, the concept of society’s unified Voice has always been a threat. It’s one that, within months, seemed to swallow the history of how we helped spark the Revolution, and that it was the care work of all forgotten people, like us. We baked fresh bread, cooked large pots of rice and bamya to feed the people in the streets demanding justice.
I was told this story by Shula, an upperclassman in my university, who was the first person I knew who spoke with her hands. I was obsessed with her and how she seemed to know a thousand things no one had ever told me before. It was from her that I learned that it was loving communities of people like us, together in struggle, who dug the channels wider and returned the river to health; and that if we let the “official” record go without alternatives there would be no space for people like her. This was also true for me, in many ways I had yet to fully understand.
She was the first person who taught me how sweet it could be to be keepers of each other’s stories. And, that those of us who felt called should leave our bones as an indisputable record for future historians, so that no child, in any era, would have to feel so alone or wonder if they were the first to ever feel what they felt.
Artworks by Diane Sultani Milelli
Bone Recording #34
May Allah give me strength. I am not yet brave enough to share my name with you. But if you can hear my voice, please know I dream of you, and that you walk down the street as yourself and the sun warms your face before you are welcomed in your father’s embrace.
13/5/1546
For the first time since I took needle to bone, our city is hosting The Council of Waters. Whole neighborhoods are suddenly flooded with delegates, traders, families, and vagabonds migrating for the celebration. I have tasted food I never knew, and through the extended network of queer connections, even got the chance to record the stories of three of our kin from the South.
One in particular has left me in a state of awe and longing. We met at a feast at Leila’s place, and Khalid had to poke me in the ribs to keep me from staring. She smelled of tobacco and sage, and her kisses were sweeter than basbousa. After we met and spent half the night curled up on the couch trading stories, I asked her if she’d let me take her testimony for the archive.
We got into an argument because she felt I had no right to try to take her stories to my bones after barely just meeting that night. She said that I was a “typical Northerner,” feeling entitled to what was not mine. She said that, though she didn’t come from a land of Voice, she didn’t need me to keep her stories for her and that her people had their own ways of passing down their wisdom. They didn’t have to hide it in their bones, they could wear them proudly on their flesh.
Her response was so biting, I almost couldn’t believe this was the same person I’d left my friends to spend the night with. We argued for nearly an hour before she declared that she wanted to leave a testimony, after all. But at that point, I was so furious that I said I no longer wanted her testimony. She asked if my ego was so fragile that I’d really deny her the right to leave a record just because we’d fought. Wasn’t this disagreement part of the “truth” I wanted to record? Or, was I so used to being a gatekeeper of history that I would try to erase not just the memory of the night we passed together, but her right to leave a record as well?
Bewildered and exhausted, I relented. For, while she may have been cruel, she was not wrong. We settled back into the couch, and I curled up in her embrace. She held me firmly and with great tenderness as I bit down on her arm to endure the pain. As the transcriber etched my bones with her words, I knew that the mark I left on her would fade, while I would carry her words forever.
Bone Recording #56
My name has never been part of your story. Who I have loved will never be the most important thing about me. For every attempt of inclusion, there are a thousand ways you have unseen me. In creating your archive, who have you already forgotten?
I only claim this space on your humerus so that those who find your tales do not delude themselves into thinking that all the river’s stories could fit within the bones of a thousand people, let alone the well-shaped bones of a handsome northern girl.
27/5/1546
On occasion, we come together in community as the different living archives. It can be nice to share the weight of our calling with others who understand it.
We pass on the little wisdom we’ve accumulated about enduring pain and curating stories to newer archivists, and some even copy the most moving stories from the records of others, so they may spread even further. I don’t copy any records I didn’t personally take myself – I don’t feel right holding a story that wasn’t given to me.
Each individual is free to inscribe their bones as they see fit. We know our completeness will not come from a perfect set of practices, but rather an imperfect plurality. We do not use Voice when we gather There isn’t anything to vote on. We are not some formal institution, just a collection of queers who feel like there’s something important in documenting our stories of our communities.
I usually enjoy these gatherings, but today’s left me with an unbearable sense of dread. Hadiya asked me to meet her next week so I could take her transcription. I didn’t feel right to refuse her, since she is one of the oldest women in the collective; her requests are like your grandmother’s.
While amazing and remarkable, Hadiya is like a gospel of pain. She has filled almost every bone in her body, and seems to only commit the most painful memories to her bones. It’s like her true gender is martyrdom. I appreciate that things are still difficult, but surely some things have gotten better in her long life? Is there not even a pinky toe of joy worth recording!
Before today, she’d refused to give testimony to anyone of my generation. I can’t imagine what it is she wants to tell me, especially when I am one of the few who has never even asked for her stories.
Bone Recording #79
When I was a child I was inseparable from the river. I come from fisher folks, and was always splashing along the bank. I used to help mama weave my father’s nets, and would see him off from the shore, giving him the extra pieces of basbousa mama saved for him. He’d always give me half and make me promise to keep it our secret.
I was part of the first delegation of women to speak at any Council of Waters that our city hosted. I shared stories of my baba and mama, and I pleaded with the Council to remember that for so many of us the river is more than just a nuisance we must cross for work or university. That for many of us, our family’s bloodlines were best traced in the deltas of the river. It was incredible to speak, and have my Voice joined by so many others, from both the North and the South.
That night when I was out celebrating on a river boat with some of my peers. I was going to ask a particularly fierce and clever woman who spoke alongside me for a dance, when a net was thrown over me and I was dragged backwards into the dark waters of the River’s night.
Screaming and thrashing, I was dragged under. I tore at the net, in a panic unlike anything I had known. Something visceral and primal in me ripped through the cheap plastic of their net, not like the ones I used to weave with mama. Like a forgotten creature from the depth, I summoned all my force to pull myself up onto the deck of the boat of my assailants.
Gasping for air, coughing up water, I was defenseless when the shock of my emergence gave way to the anger of my attackers. One of them yelled to gut the fish, and before I could catch my breath enough to process their words, they were on me, slicing open my arm and ripping out my Voice. They pushed me back into the water, thinking my blood would call crocodiles to pull me under.
It took me 17 years to get my Voice reinstalled. For years, I could not bring myself to speak about it, even to those I loved most. Not even to my friends, the women who pulled me from the water and saved my life.
I need you to understand that I am not an archive solely of our pains because of some morbid fixation. I do it because, so often, we need to share our story with someone who has experienced something at least equally as terrible as us to begin to feel whole again. I let my bones writhe with pain of our kin for the same reason my father used to share his basbousa with me. When things are shared they become just a little sweeter.
1/8/1546
There are days when the pain of transcription doesn’t seem worth the results.
Community is an abstract concept, and it feels like we are always trading our now for a more perfect future. Others are always taking our bones as the foundation for their proposed utopia. It’s exhausting to hold these chronicles of pain and joy, of strange beauty blossoming under a desert moon by a river’s grace.
Then, I think about the young woman who saw me in a café and stared me down with her wide eyes before I waved her over to my table. She didn’t even know what to ask. Her eyes saw in me a future she had always felt, but could never quite find.
Eventually, she asked, “You’re like me?”
I played for her Noor’s words, Raina’s and Hadiya’s and Khalid’s and Samir’s. I play her a small litany of queer joys, blessings, and sorrows, until she wells up with tears, knowing her future is built on a history that could never be erased.
Bone Recording #100
My name is Durr. I was born the same year the river was freed, and allowed to remember its natural path. I spent most of my life denying mine. I lived to see the ravages of the city give way to a restorative oasis.
I ought to have forgotten my shame. But I live with it, learning bravery slowly alongside my grandchild. I pray their bones give you strength too.
Musa Roshdy is a gender-expansive Egyptian American wanderer. Their passions range from education, liberation, tarot, sexuality, and death work. They are held by the restorative nature of water, and moved by the transformative power of community. They’ve written poems, essays, and short stories for My Kali Magazine, Ghost City Press, and others.