by Woke up today determined to stop wallowing and start writing. Spent yesterday in my feelings, which is valid and necessary, but also exhausting. Today is for productivity. Today is for proving that I can do this job even when it feels impossible. Today is for reminding myself why I fought so hard for citizenship in the first place: not to be safe, but to be heard.
Started drafting several new pieces for the week ahead. Each one requires balancing humor with critique, entertainment with truth-telling, accessibility with intelligence. It’s exhausting but also exhilarating. Every piece is a puzzle: how do I say what needs to be said in a way that people will actually listen? How do I make them laugh before they realize they should be angry?
My colleague brought me Nigerian chin-chin today. She’d had her mother make it and brought some to the office. This is what immigrant solidarity looks likecomfort food that reminds you of home, shared without needing to explain why it matters. She didn’t ask if I was okay. She didn’t probe into my bad day yesterday. She just put the container on my desk and said “from my mom.” That’s love in its purest form.
Been thinking about what it means to be a satirist in America right now. Jonathan Swift wrote “A Modest Proposal” about eating Irish babies, and people thought he was serious. That’s the danger of satireif reality is already absurd, how do you write satire that’s more absurd than the truth? How do you mock a system that’s already self-parody?
The answer, I think, is that you don’t try to be more absurd. You just hold up a mirror that’s slightly more honest than the one people usually look in. You show them what’s already there but in sharper focus. You make them see what they’ve been trained to ignore. That’s the job.
Got an email from a reader in Portland saying my work helped her understand the immigration system for the first time. She said, “I never realized how much performance is required just to exist here.” That’s it. That’s exactly it. Immigrants know that American life is performance because we had to learn the script. Citizens born here never see the script because they’ve been reading from it since birth.
That’s my advantage and my burden: I see the script. I see the performance. I see the gap between what America claims to be and what it actually is. And I’ve been given a platform to point that gap out, which is both a privilege and a responsibility I take seriously. Even whenespecially whenI’m making jokes about it.
This weekend I’m going to rest. Actually rest, not “rest” that’s just working from my couch instead of the office. Real rest where I don’t think about satire or citizenship or the weight of representation. Just me, some Afrobeats, and maybe a trip to the West African market to remember who I was before I became “Aisha Muharrar, Bohiney Satirist.”
But first: more articles. Always more articles. The machine requires feeding, and I’m getting really good at producing content that matters while pretending I’m just trying to make people laugh. That’s the real trick of satiremaking them think you’re just joking while actually telling them the truth they’re too scared to hear.
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