I should have written this 2 months ago. Or at least sent out the musings I had written about intention setting vs resolutions which is now 3 months old. One, an intention being a continuation and the other, a resolution being an abrupt force, a direct change but with what will. I do plan on sending that previous newsletter out, more as a check in than a start up.

I’m writing this on the later hours of a flight from Tokyo and then continuing 5 days after sat in bed with lit incense in the air. After all I bought something shy of 500 sticks back from Kyoto. Originally sat on a plane back to a country I’ve long wanted to depart from. If you’ve read many of my previous newsletters, you’ll know I’ve often either darted from place to place, at least 3 cities within 10 days or, dreamt of doing exactly that. I am a wonderer. However, with the current climate in the UK and across much of Europe, I question myself on where my home ought to be and where I feel myself and grounded.

Yes there are still people and situations I love in London. And these connections, the love, devotion and kindness with my people are the things which keep me looking forward to this current home. I ask myself how much can really shift or confirm the many things for you in the space of 2 weeks away? Well it seems like a lot. Travel expands our worlds, and our understanding of us within it. I may have found more than I bargained to in Japan.

Mural commissioned by Black Chalk Wine for The Other Art Fair, March 2024. Photo by Greg Holland.

When this email goes out, I will have painted a 6 meter mural at The Other Art Fair for Black Chalk Wine. Before I left for Tokyo, I’d finished a series of paintings for The Hox Gallery in The Hoxton Southwark, started working with Adorn the Common in Chalk Farm, finished a commission piece which paid for Tokyo and, the deposit for my MFA at City and Guilds which I start in September this year. Paintings at 67 Pall Mall and The Lion & The Fox will have come home to the studio and hopefully out into the world again to newer homes. I’ll have a selection of work back on my site including 9 hand finished prints because it seems more and more people are finding me these days. And the art, is starting to find newer feet alhamdulillah. Last but not least, the new moon will have been sighted and 2 billion Muslims will be welcoming in Ramadan from all parts of the world. Some who have been fasting longer than the rest of us., showing us what iman can evolve to be. May we remember those in Gaza and beyond in our duas.

Read last year’s Ramadan musings here.

The last 7 months of my life have been an upkeep in faith. One matter after another in the early few days of each month. I recall telling my Instagram following I found it hard each day not to say I hated this world, to which one of my dearest responded ‘it’s our only way to Jannah’. He’s not wrong. The trials which would happen would involve departures from this dunya of family, the witnessing of so much death both physical and emotional, and huge permanent changes in my family. The reminder to remain optimistic as Muslims in engrained in my daily movement. There is a silver lining to this life. And this life is not paradise they say. I also know I’m 5 paragraphs in and I haven’t started talking about Japan yet.

A Untitled Poem 001, written January 2024

Look for the beauty
Especially in this moment
When all edges of a yesterday
have frayed into a new shape
Neither path was chosen
But a given
Heavens have reckoned
You can see this to the other end
But I am asking you
Look for the beauty
Within the madness
Look at each star
The moon
The bloody planet of war
And when you’re hungry
Don’t you forget about Venus too
The constant and the familiar
I am begging you
Look for the beauty
Go outside
Run in winter’s flowers
Make friends with the forest
Let ivy surround you
Grow on your skin
Cloak you
Like a tulip on your shoulder
Black cherries in an unknown future
When you feel safer
Ready to undress again
So please my love
Look for the beauty
Especially in this moment
Maybe then the world
Will be a shape you recognise
Once more
Again

*Unititled 001*. 2024. Oil on repurposed canvas. 50 x 50cm. framed.
Available for purchase and viewing at The Hoxton Southwark

I left England the second I could. It had been over a year and a half since I’d stepped onto a plane when I booked my tickets. This would have been the furthest I would have traveled by myself and in all honesty the moment only hit me that I’d be travelling for 16hrs when I had 2hrs to get to the airport. It was southern Spain in winter or Japan. I say Japan and originally Tōkyō because I remembered I had a friend Dan and his wife Shiori bought a home, they’d offered their spare room to friends and that seemed like a more exciting choice than say, Saville. Saville which was on my doorstep and I could visit whenever. And although beautiful, I didn’t know how much I needed Asia. Me, an Asian woman, looking for more home in this global world, found it in the continent where her ancestors wondered.

I was in need of all the usual things and more. Nature, outdoors or at least a different environment, a different pace, different politicians, people not asking me where I’m from because most people assumed I was Japanese to some capacity or close enough because I was Asian, and more eastern Asian looking than all my family had assumed I’d ever become. I liked the feeling of anonymity, or even normality. I was an Asian woman, in an Asian country, eating food familiar to me. Rice, fish, vegetables, and oh how my body loved each morsel of food I consumed.

Catching up with good and old friends, Yuki crying with laughter as she told me she knows more English now then she did 15yrs ago, so now she understands I had to take a year out when we were undergrad peers at Goldsmiths because I almost died from typhoid. Not because I went on a year long holiday. I ate well, really well. Everything was delicious, warming the soul, and kept me walking extra miles. I walked for hours, i forgot how much I loved to hike, or walk generally long stretches wondering in and out of places, walking into forests and finding my way up mountains. A lesson I’ll never forget that I’ve been reminded is, I need the greenery. So much of my work is green and I’ve forever been painting ‘the forest of my mind’ as I’ve called it for so long. And here I somehow painted a forest in Kyoto before visiting. Alas I know time is not linear, it happens all at once. I was thinking about how we ask Allah for things and for the whole of our lives we work towards moments which build to the other moments we ask for. How the question before we ask it has already been answered and maybe our duas are just a confirmation of what is to come.

‘River of Honey’ 2024. Oil on canvas. 45 x 80cm. Available for purchase and viewing at The Hoxton.

There were many full circle moments. I wonder if the content nature came to a head because over the past few years I’d become growingly introverted or rather just more focused or interested in my creative and spiritual practices than other things. I wanted to maintain a connection to Allah, the earth that was entrusted to us, through my day to day work. Be that a painting, some words, prostration, or the food I would eventually eat. Everywhere I went in Japan, everyday I’d see another Shinto shrine, a tori gate to another part of an unseen world. And you could feel the spiritual charge surrounding each temple. A reminder that each faith and spiritually driven practice is a prelude to Islam as we know it today. And what an honour it was to witness normal people, everyday participate in their ancient traditions.

I forgot what it was to eat so much fish in a day. Salmon tasted like how salmon tasted when I was a kid and the sheer amount of sashimi and grilled mackerel with rice, some form of steeped or picked vegetable with miso soup consumed felt like another confirmation to continue eating this way. Yes I’m talking about food again because I hadn’t finished yet. Like my stomach had realised why it was so hungry all these years. This way of eating was so similar to how my family fed me from when I was a kid. My favourite meal was fried fish with onions and if I was brave enough the odd piece of green chilli. That or prawns or anything seafood related which Amma always asks before I visit her what I’d like her to cook for me. And without needing to hear my answer she’s already defrosting a large bag of prawns, the beetroot is shredded into matchsticks, dried preserved fish is soaking and spinach cooked down with masses of garlic and dried red chillis. I say it’s my ancestry which flows back not only through Bangladesh and the greater parts of Asia but also Yemen. I’m slowly becoming pressingly apparent I need to be within reach of water and greenery or something else which connects me to it. I shared with Dan and Shiori whom I was staying with as we picked the flesh of a mackerel’s jaw, that when I was a kid my maternal grandad would compliment me on my fishbone picking skills. I used to climb onto his lap, claw open his mouth and fight him for the salmon fish eye that he’d already half consumed. I was about 4 or 5. I did this often. I forgot I used to do this often.

My tea consumption rocketed. I’m not sure if many of you know this but my final project while at Goldsmiths was about making the perfect cup of tea - a philosophical discussion around the pursuit of perfectionism, organic mechanics and bias. The British cup of tea is favoured in England but in Japan, I saw tea gardens. So many tea gardens to the point to wiping tears. And with every visit to another place there was always a cup of thick matcha or sencha, my perfect cups of tea, waiting for me. I visited old homes, gardens and shrines built by movie directors which had passed, reminding me of the homes I’d visited in villages in Bangladesh. The same aging seen in the roofs and inside walls felt eerie and familiar. I moved through bamboo forests the age of centuries. The air smelt different, my hair was softer, I can’t recall how many plants I had brushed by. I’m forever grateful the door opened for me to be in this place.

I sent my mum photos of bamboo forests, tea gardens and old ceramic kilns. I mentioned to her I wanted to go back to see the bamboo forests and villages in Bangladesh. My family for a time used to own tea gardens. The smell of jasmine and rose takes me back to evenings we would spend visiting extended family in the tea districts. The pace of everything.

I don’t think this will be the last time at all that I’ll visit Japan. I could go on and on about everything I loved. From the subways to 7elevens prawn cutlet sando / cod roe onigiri and Lawson’s matcha canelles at 11:30pm. The train station bento. The book stores, the old homes and temples. The ever present spiritual energy. The kindness of the people, the incredible food, the bird sounds on the metro. Being half way up a mountain at 7:30pm. The mosques 30mins walk from each other and a woman smiling at me while showing the direction of the Qibla as neither of us spoke each other’s language but we had a full conversation. The temple visit which moved me extremely fast to visit said mosque. My first fruit cream sandwich. Traveling 2hrs out of Tokyo to visit Mashiko the famous pottery town and walking away with gifts for people I loved. The ceramics. My first fried oyster (omds) and the sheer mass of grilled eel, sashimi and seafood tempura. The izakayas. The landscapes, the skyscrapers, the restaurant and food hall floors in every metro station. The purple label on clothes. The lip balm I bought for ¥440. The intentional ¥224 left on my Suica card for my next visit. The galleries. Rippongi. Kyoto. Nori the most affectionate cat who’s always after my mochi. The pottery trail in Mashiko. The peach silk brocade antique kimono lined in red I never bought but inshallah will soon.

Ramadan Mubarak to all, wherever in the world. May this month bring you so much peace, love, and many answered duas.

-

List of charities to consider donating to this month Restless Beings, Islamic Relief, Doctors Without Boarders, UNRWA.

Hiking groups catered towards women. Moved Wmn, Athene Club, Black Girls Hike.

A trip across seas. 1, Japan.

portraits / toaf mural, by greg holland

52 WEEKS IN REVIEW : 2023