BIANCA JEFFREY
YEARS AS MENTEE: 3
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: The High School of Fashion Industries
BORN: New York, NY
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: My experience with my mentor, Jennifer, has been phenomenal. Over the past few years that we’ve been working together, I have grown as a writer and a person. We’ve been able to shed light on my identity on and off paper. Our sessions bring joy to the week, and I am thankful for this wonderful opportunity and for my mentor. We’ve truly been a successful team.
JENNIFER ROWE
YEARS AS MENTOR: 4
OCCUPATION: Writer and Teacher
BORN: Miami, FL
LIVES: New York, NY
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Working with Bianca for the past three years has been amazing! Not only has she grown so much as a writer, but as a young woman as well. I enjoy the soul-sister bond we have created, and always look forward to our weekly meetings. As a bright, courageous, and determined young woman, I am so excited for Bianca to seek the next chapter in her life, graduating from high school! The experience we have had together has been beyond outstanding.
Letter to You
BIANCA JEFFREY
When I started thinking about Ctrl + B, I recalled the great experiences and characteristics I had as a child. When I was younger, I was confident, fearless, and bold. This letter talks about how age and life hardships can’t determine my destiny.
Letter to You,
I remember the nights you spent sitting on the bathroom floor, reading until you got caught. The fairy tales and the perfect endings used to consume you. You believed in happy endings and new beginnings. You used to have hope in everything and wouldn’t give up anything if it meant success wasn’t in the cards. Thriving was a part of you. I remember the Saturday mornings you woke up with the birds and danced as if nobody was watching. You were always off beat, but it didn’t matter. You never really cared about what people thought, anyway. I remember you used to say that words don’t hurt unless you allow them to. Pain was only a feeling and not a lifestyle; I guess that’s why you didn’t cry much. I remember the way you used to pose in the mirror. Your crazy patterned leggings and striped dresses shaped the perfect princess. That’s what you called yourself. The way you gave yourself attention and love was definitely something to never forget.
I have to be very honest, I miss you a whole lot. It has been years since we’ve been together. I know you’re out there somewhere and you’re ready to reach for the stars and take risks again. You used to do that a lot. Remember the times you stood on the seat of the swings. You planted yourself there without any fear of falling, and when you did, you got back up and did it three more times. I want to be like you forever. I wish I could be fearless. At this point in my life, all those wonderful attributes seem to be distant and impossible to achieve. I have been focused and that is good, but I have managed to lose sight of the fun. I have let pain become part of my life and have lost sight of my own strength and my ability of thinking outside of the box.
Frankly, the voices of others started to influence my perception of the world, and that was pretty bad. It felt like my views weren’t important and made me feel like I no longer had power. While being fearless was always the goal, I spend more time now constantly being fearful. My carefree personality has been corrupted by stress and I don’t like to dance anymore.
I can’t stop thinking about the time we spent together, but our journey doesn’t end here. We are simply going through some things. Looking back, I realize that you will always be a part of me. Our life doesn’t have to be defined by the obstacles that occur. We’re strong and we’ll get through the storms. Our character won’t be tainted. You have taught me that we can always live a little, have fun, and be bold.
Sincerely,
You
u can’t control a bad b
JENNIFER ROWE
I was inspired to write this piece after watching the documentary And Still I Rise about Maya Angelou. She projected strength, empowerment, and love in everything she did. This poem is for women to always remember how amazing and badass they are.
bold, bodacious, beautiful queen
like the phoenix rising from the ashes you will be seen
forever and more for the people to always know
take the world by storm and stay in control
your destiny shoots higher than you can imagine
you’re a gift giver, life creator, and magical beyond fathom
just breathe and think of who you want to be
a beaming beauty gliding down the street?
the brave warrioress ready to face any feat?
Or a brilliant lady empowered and ready to lead?
You are the keeper of your strength and the teller of your tales
Let your wisdom and grace guide you and you will prevail
Remember you were derived from divinity herself!
bold, bodacious, beautiful queen
like the phoenix rising from the ashes you will be seen
AMINATA KARGBO
YEARS AS MENTEE: 1
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: University Heights High School
BORN: Freetown, Sierra Leone
LIVES: Bronx, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: I met Grace in a Harlem café. As I rushed in, already twenty minutes late, she stood up, ready to greet me, with a huge smile on her face. On that first day, Grace taught me to value my time and the time of others, because it shows what kind of person you are. Since then, she has taught me to be confident in what I write and to put who I am into my writing. Grace has been a model of who I dream of becoming as a writer and as a person.
GRACE ANEIZA ALI
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Curator and Professor, New York University
BORN: Georgetown, Guyana
LIVES: New York, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Fulbright Fellow, Provost Fellow at New York University
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: Bold. Sophisticated. Conscious. Aware. Focused. These are the laudable characteristics of Aminata Kargbo. One sees that clearly when she writes in her essay, “I support the choices of other women and girls who choose to wear the hijab—as long as it makes them happy, too.” What I’ve witnessed in her writing and in her life is what it means to possess a most important thing for a young girl living in our twenty-first-century world: self-awareness. As she transitions to college, she is remarkably poised and clear on the radiant possibilities for her future.
The Pink Hijab with Sparkles … I Wore Only Once
AMINATA KARGBO
Ctrl + B means being fearless and courageous in becoming who you want to be. It means not being afraid to open up and share who you are. This piece is my journey into becoming bold and confident.
During the last days of summer vacation, I was watching the television show Teen Wolf when my mother said to me, “You are about to go to high school in a few weeks. You will be old enough to wear a hijab.” My brain filled with many thoughts and I couldn’t focus on the show anymore.
Muslim women and girls are expected to wear a hijab while praying to cover their heads and display modesty. Many show their commitment to Islam by wearing a hijab every day, but I never considered myself to be that kind of Muslim, or that kind of girl. I immigrated to the United States as an eight-year-old and was surrounded by diverse cultures. This exposure pushed me to notice how my religion treats women. The imam states, “Only women have to cover their bodies in public and only women are restricted from leading a prayer.” I started to believe that the Quran limits women from expressing themselves, and, by doing that, makes men superior over women. Choosing to wear the hijab daily would mean I was accepting all of my religion’s restrictions and denying my womanist identity. If I decided not to wear a hijab, then other Muslims might think I wasn’t committed to my religion.
“Aminata!” my mother yelled.
“Do you want to wear your hijab?” she asked a second time. I said I didn’t know. “It’s okay if you don’t know,” she said. Surprised, yet happy to hear her response, I told my mother about the doubts I had. She told me she had felt the same way when she converted to Islam. Hearing my mother express similar thoughts made me feel less isolated. She suggested that I could try wearing a hijab for one day when high school started to see if I liked it or not.
On September 9, 2015, I attended my first day of high school wearing a long, pink hijab covered in little sparkles. I felt uncomfortable, I felt I was using the hijab to hide from the world. I felt as if I couldn’t share my own perspective and ideas because I wasn’t the person people perceived me as—a “perfect” Muslim girl.
When I got back home after school, I went straight to my room to take off my hijab. I started to cry. I cried not because of other students or my classes, but because I was not myself. I felt like I was trapped inside a room for eternity, but when I removed my hijab I felt free. My mother came to my room to see if I was okay. I didn’t need to tell her about my day because she could see it in my eyes. She gently said, “Okay.”
The next day, I showed up to school with no hijab and my kinky African hair out in a bun. All eyes were on me during first period, especially on my hair. Later, a girl named Ashley approached me. She told me that she liked my hair. “Thank you,” I said. We soon talked about our backgrounds and experiences. I told her about my religion and the struggles I had with it. When I went home that day, I told my mom about my new friend. She asked if I was okay not wearing the hijab. I hadn’t even realized I wasn’t wearing it. I was just being me. I smiled at my mother and said, “Yes!”
I am Muslim and a womanist. Not wearing a hijab does not make me less Muslim, just as being Muslim does not make me less of a womanist. My choice makes me happy. And I support the choices of other women and girls who choose to wear the hijab—as long as it makes them happy, too.
On Storms and Survival
GRACE ANEIZA ALI
Aminata and I are both immigrants. We made our way to this country as young girls from Sierra Leone and Guyana. Our stories convey what we overcame in what can be a daunting American journey.
I marvel at the word “survival.” I am awed by the heavy burden of its charge “to live or exist in spite of an accident, ordeal, or difficult circumstances,” as Oxford’s dictionary proclaims. It is a word I do not claim nor self-label as. Yet for years it has been the singular word defining my family’s ordeal. “You survived,” they tell us. With all its altruistic intentions, it only lands harshly. Next to “good,” it is the other word often associated with “immigrant.” I find no grace in the word. It makes a bombastic show of strength. The truth is that, for those of us who do find a way through the ordeals and traumas, survival is often lived quietly.
On a sweltering night in July 1995, just months after my family arrived as new immigrants in America, disaster knocked at our front door. A major thunderstorm swept through the town of Hyattsville, Maryland, where we had rented a small two-bedroom apartment. A police officer came to our door. I remember his kindness, the gentleness he showed as he prepared to unleash chaos. He said two things to my mother: First, my father was robbed and severely beaten, and second, she must get to the hospital immediately.
My father survived the violence. He lived. Days later, he emerged from a coma with severe brain injury and physical disabilities that would permanently scar the future of our family’s American experience. He could not walk or eat on his own. He was wheelchair-ridden, his speech was indecipherable, his memory shot to pieces.
My father survived the storm; he did not survive the trauma.
The toll on our family during those dark years seemed insurmountable. To provide for our family, my mother—already daunted by the things she did not know about the trappings of this country’s healthcare system—took on multiple minimumwage jobs. My brother and I worked after school and weekends. At fourteen and fifteen, we were the breadwinners for our family.
We grappled with the irony: Is this the American dream?
Throughout those years entrenched in the deep despair of what had happened to our family, we never used the word “survival.” We had no language for what we were doing as we clawed our way through the abyss. No alarms sounded; no trumpets blared. The storm raged on, and we fought on. We survived, but we never called it that.
FAIZA KHANOM
YEARS AS MENTEE: 2
GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: The Baccalaureate School for Global Education
BORN: Sreemangal, Bangladesh
LIVES: Queens, NY
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: Meeting with Nandita after school is a joy. Every week, I look forward to the safe space that we create during our pair sessions. I forget about the stress from my responsibilities of school and home. We connect over our South Asian heritage and in finding ways to buy more affordable Indian clothing. She has helped in finding my natural voice in my writing. This year, we have tackled vulnerable topics. I have written words that I have not expressed to my friends and family. I am grateful for finally giving a voice to my stories and having them in existence.
NANDITA RAGHURAM
YEARS AS MENTOR: 3
OCCUPATION: Editor, Mashable
BORN: Chicago, IL
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: The Village Voice, Mashable, Vox
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: I love meeting with Faiza every week in Manhattan, but by far my favorite moment of the year was when Faiza and I finished her college essay. It was an incredible piece of writing and she utilized all the things we had discussed about writing for the past two years: sensory descriptions, casual voice, and tone. I was so proud of her work and of her.
A Proposal
FAIZA KHANOM
My uncle approached my parents with a marriage proposal for me when I was fifteen. This is my story.
I smelled the aroma of samosas in my bedroom while I worked on my homework. I sprinted and followed the scent, which led me to the kitchen. My mother rushed from the fridge to the counter while holding the telephone against her ear.
“Faiza, can you check the salt for this, and the samosas are on the table,” she told me.
My mom was speaking with my aunt. She suddenly slammed the oak kitchen door. Her voice was very raspy, which surprised me, because they speak almost every day and this had never happened.
“How can he even propose the idea? She’s only fifteen,” she screamed over the phone, then hung up.
My heart started racing. I was fifteen at the time, which is the age when women in South Asian households are married off. I had a feeling that my mom and my aunt were talking about a marriage proposal for me. For the next few days, she and my father would speak in a low tone when I was around. Or they would send me off for an errand, so they could be alone and talk about me. I would catch them murmuring the word “marriage.”
I was disgusted at the fact that my uncle would try to set me up with a husband. My uncle, a man who had been living in the United States for more than thirty years, was still upholding this tradition.
It never went any further than that, fortunately. As I grow older, though, older family members will question me as to why I am not married yet, and my mom will not always be there to stand up for me. While I was lucky, not many women are. Today one in five girls are married before the age of eighteen.
For example, my cousin who lives in Woodside, Queens, is a pharmacist. Her father died in 2011. Since then, she’s taken care of her four younger siblings and her mourning mother. She’s twenty-eight years old and has family pushing her to get married. During family gatherings, my aunts constantly nag her about looking for a potential husband. She just ignores them.
My friend told me a story about her cousin in India who was seventeen and reaching the age of marriage. When men would come with marriage proposals, her mom would load her face with pounds of makeup in order to make her s
kin appear lighter and more attractive. I imagine her cousin searching through recipes just like the girls in Indian soap operas. I imagine her carrying the tray of food to the guests while her hands trembled. Résumés and profiles of men would be placed on top of her textbooks. I imagine that if she got married, she wouldn’t be able to graduate from high school.
My friend told me that when the proposals would get rejected by the potential husbands, her cousin’s mother would say, “It’s not our fault, she’s just ugly.” This is the reality for many young girls around the world.
This epidemic has to change. Women are not born to get married and have babies. The only way to prevent this is to change people’s mind-set just like the way my mom educated my uncle.
Today I am seventeen years old and I will be attending college this fall. This is my way of challenging the system.
Ajji
NANDITA RAGHURAM
This piece is about my grandmother, inspired by the different stories Faiza has told me about her family.
My grandmother is thin as a piece of paper and speaks no English. Married at fourteen, she’s meek but warm. Glaucoma stained her eyes red and her skin wrinkled, dripping off her cheekbones in pools. Our conversations, a series of head flicks and hand waves, left a heavy block of sadness on my stomach.
When I was twenty, I spent a week with her in Shimoga, in a red terra-cotta house with banana trees in the front and orchids in the back. I traveled the eight hours from Bangalore with my uncle in a rickety train with peeling brown seats. Every five minutes a different man would walk down the aisle selling aloo parathas, dosas, coffee, and milky tea. The bathroom was a tinwalled room with a hole in the ground leading to the wooden tracks below.
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