I want us to understand that sensuality is political — particularly because of where we come from, what we’ve lived through, and what it means to inhabit an Arab body in this era.

First it is political for the Arab whose sensuality continues to be occupied by a religion that has been edited to suppress the feminine and to disable one of the most powerful forces in the body sourcing our autonomous sense of direction. Severed from it, we become sightless, vulnerable, obedient. Second, sensuality invites the world’s gaze and senses towards the body it is attempting to erase. It is proof of life against the invisibility and silence imposed on us, denying us our vulnerability and humanity. Sensuality is survival; it is a life-saving form of protest that opens to unique and individual expressions of visibility; it is a space from which to shout, through skin and voice and touch: ‘no, I will not disappear.’ And third, through the use of shame and exotification, we have suppressed the medicinal and healing qualities of sensuality, and with that, erased its revolutionary history. We come from a land where a very long time ago God was once worshipped as woman, and during the great goddess era, there were women who served in temples and employed their bodies as sacral tools of the divine. As a writer, I am deeply curious about this discarded history of ceremonial sensuality, and much of my work attempts to understand what it means for a society to remember the body as medicine…