Reem Mahmood

Reem Mahmood is a poet, writer and feminist activist from Syria. She focuses on writing as a method of change. Her first self-published book "Very Feminist Stories" has gained over 10,000 downloads and received a plethora of positive feedback from many young women since it was released in 2018. Reem writes for different regional platforms and magazines with a special focus on women issues. Through writing, she tries to deliver her experience as a feminist activist, a young Syrian woman, and a young person living the human experience in the 21st century.

I will use this fellowship to better focus on my project “Why so angry?”, a collection of poems about feminism, home and identity. In this project, I am not using solely my creativity and art. It is not only about the craft of poetry itself, but more and foremost about how anger has changed me as well as about the ways I am aiming to use it in order to ignite it in people’s hearts and minds, since I believe that anger is the first step in changing reality. According to the American Psychological Association anger is an emotion characterized by antagonism toward someone or something you feel has deliberately done you wrong. In this regard, I am also using my psychological intellectual skills to analyze every situation I have been through that made me angry and to speak about its importance and the extent to which it can affect our social, political and personal reality.

The first part of the book will focus on the notion feminism through my personal story and how my anger towards gender discrimination drew me to the conclusion that something is wrong that should be changed; how my anger towards the injustice in laws, religion and social norms pushed me to raise my voice and tell my story that inspired hundreds of women in Syrian society.

The second part of the book will be about Syria. Talking about Syria involves a long series of pain and anger. I want to deliver my experience of being at home when it is hard to barely meet basic human needs as well as of being forced to leave seeking a life that every human has the right to have and one that is impossible to find now in Syria, due to the political and economic situation.

The last part of the book is about identity. I will tackle the complexity of every individual identity, how economic and social class play an important role in creating people’s destiny, and how (in contrast to what capitalism promotes) it’s not always only about how hard we work, because the unfair distribution of resources and the exploitation of unprivileged people always played a role in each person’s future. I am also aiming to highlight my experience with mental illness.