🛡️ No Right to Keep Me Small
The Vikings have no right to keep me small.
Not with their horned nostalgia,
not with their Netflix myths,
not with their museums built on silence.
They crossed seas,
and yes —
they reached Baghdad.
But they never stayed.
They never knew her breath.
They never wept in her streets.
They traded silver,
but they didn’t carry her history.
They wore runes like tattoos.
I carry a language
that was nearly buried
beneath four flags.
They sipped mead
and called it legend.
I drink memory —
thick, bitter, unmarketable.
They told their stories first.
That’s why mine was called
too loud,
too sharp,
too much.
But I was never theirs to shrink.
Because somewhere in my blood
there are traces of Abbasid breath,
paper-stained fingertips,
a quiet fire from the House of Wisdom.
Not from Baghdad’s walls,
but from the wind that left them —
northward,
mountainward,
into exile and survival.
Their ink is not my passport,
but it is my echo.
Baghdad was never theirs.
Not the Vikings.
Not the caliphs who sold it out.
Not the Americans with their peace and fire.
It was ours,
in fragments.
In inheritance.
In refusal.
And I—
I will not be small
because someone else
had a bigger myth.