Seema Yasmin is a British physician, writer and science communicator, born April 13, 1982. She is the author of four books including Muslim Women Are Everything (HarperCollins, 2020) and the forthcoming If God is a Virus: Poems (Haymarket, 2021). A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in breaking news reporting with her team from The Dallas Morning News, she is a fiction fellow of the Kundiman and Tin House workshops. Yasmin served as an officer in the Epidemic Intelligence Service and is director of the Stanford Health Communication Initiative and clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University.
MY SISTER TEACHES ME HOW TO ULULATE
Seema Yasmin
Yallah habibti, move your tongue like the sea
easy. My big sister teaches me to ululate, rolls
her tongue in waves. Dips thin fingers inside
my mouth to pull out mine, stretches it long
and pinches the tip. Watch, we move tongues
like this. I see the walls of our father’s house
collapse and we swim free leleleleleleleleleee
On the ferry to Tangier I shriek across the sea.
Practice how to sound like a real woman. Old
aunties grab my buttocks, smush their breasts
against my back and sing leleleleleleleleleleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
Don’t cover your mouth habibti! Only women
on the upper deck, only sea. We move tongues
like this to tell the waves stay back, tell men
stay back, tell the dead stay gone, tell runaway
wives stay gone. They turn me into wisteria
woman, limbs wrapped around poles and thighs
as they guide me. Throw back your head, epiglottis
to the breeze. Salt air burns my hot membranes,
scratches at the tight knots of my chords.
All my life I was told
women must swallow sand
unless we are sounding
a warning.