by Ali Nuri

Noor Hindi’s micro chapbook Diary of a Filthy Woman skillfully disentangles the stubborn sociocultural fibers of contemporary America, probing timely themes of gender, sexuality, immigration, and racism. Imagery evoking filth, death, and violence offset recurring motifs of flowers, figs, and earth. Examining the intercultural and intergenerational reinforcements of harmful stereotypes, Hindi interrogates the overt insistence on a woman’s submissiveness to absolve her of the innate sinfulness of her gender:

I rub

wine on my knees, make them tidy, make them

pretty like the pink-skinned girls mama loves.

There is violence in the way I hinge myself

to the back of her ironing board.

Make me smooth, mama. Make me flat.

In addition to the questioning of gender as society defines it, the chapbook interrogates the perceived role of immigrants as thieves stealing resources that don’t belong to them. The speaker swallowing a plant is likened to the consumption of “stolen” freedom—what was intended as sustenance became pernicious and led to malnourishment. These inalienable freedoms, granted conditionally, ultimately poison the immigrants when faced with the harsh realities of the competition and discrimination they provoke:

Dear America I am plucking

your dandelions and eating them too

I greedily swallow everything

that comes from your earth this land

is not my land this country

is not my country yet still I pull a root

from my two front teeth I shine

a smile to you as I consume what

is yours I am a filthy immigrant

I take your jobs beware the way

I sink my knees into a dusty prayer

rug and wish you a happy Ramadan

Noor Hindi’s Diary of a Filthy Woman provides a small taste of the everyday obstacles experienced by immigrants and women of color navigating a world they feel excluded from. Having no adequate representation of their identities now, they must “carve [their] own scripture” to live a life abiding by their own terms.