Taslim: We Are the Prophets

This volume of pithy, defiant poetry and prose explore the burden of taslīm--an oral transmission of heritage and ancestral knowledge--on Coptic Orthodox women. These poems highlight the ways in which Coptic women navigate the responsibilities of transmitting ancestral knowledge while reckoning with its costs: deferred joy and pleasure until the afterlife, an almost compulsory notion of motherhood, and a gendered comportment of sacrifice and submission, even in diaspora. Taslīm in the Christian minority of Egypt becomes an even more rigid bind in immigrant communities abroad. This book is ultimately a feminist manifesto for freedom, and the choice to live and desire out loud.