FARIHA RÓISÍN on the Courage of Listening to Our Bodies /354

This week, Fariha Róisín offers both timely and timeless wisdom on what it means to live in a body that has experienced trauma. This is a conversation that bears witness to the deep terror and distress of the world and still charges forward with undying compassion and care – the compassion and care of wild survival. 

Offering both deep personal reflection and spacious contemplation about the state of the world, Fariha reminds us that our bodies guide us to what we need. This episode brings up the things that we so often don’t want to touch – trauma, abuse, global systems of disregard – and handles them with care and love. Fariha shows us what it means to take pain seriously.

Throughout the episode Fariha threads in a profound relationship with god, and a type of faith that is filled with questioning, fueled by queer thought, and driven by love. In even the darkest of times we can turn to love, accountability, and community to find the care that we need. 

Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist, born in Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sydney, Australia, and is based in Los Angeles. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, in liminality, otherness and the mercurial nature of being. Her work has pioneered a refreshing and renewed conversation about wellness, contemporary Islam and queer identities and has been featured in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Vogue. She is the author of the poetry collection How To Cure A Ghost (2019), as well as the novel Like A Bird (2020), Who Is Wellness For? (2022) and her second book of poetry is entitled Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, due fall 2023.

For an extended version of this episode join us at patreon.com/forthewild

Music by Misha Sultan (with special thanks to Patience Records), Amo Amo, Colloboh (with special thanks to Leaving Records), and Amber Rubarth. Visit our website at forthewild.world for the full episode description, references, and action points.