Contributor
Kanza Javed
1 piece in The Esthetic Apostle
About Kanza Javed
This poem was written after Kanza Javed left Pakistan and moved to a small town in West Virginia. Isolation was frightening. Disorientation was a real thing. The 2016 election had rattled her sense of belonging in the West, and in a town that voted for Trump. She felt unwanted in Pakistan where women are mean't to limit themselves by surrendering to early marriage and motherhood, and in America, where she suddenly realized the "worth" of her outsider identity and "brown-ness".