Sanah Ahsan for I Cannot be Good Until You Say it

Who gets to be good in a society built upon hierarchy? How do we embrace each other's madnesses?

Intricately weaving Quranic verse, psychology, and the hip-hop soundtrack of their childhood, Sanah Ahsan's poems reach for divinity in the body, an archive that refuses erasure.

This collection traverses through whiteness, islamophobia, homophobia, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of therapeutic processes. Belief and unbelief, goodness and badness, the material and spiritual are all intertwined, reclaiming queer love and desire as holy.

Ahsan asks questions that travel to the heart of our humanness, bending the lines between psychologist and client to show us the sacred nature of our wounds.

Refusing binaries of gender or religious doctrine, I cannot be good until you say it finds what is to be revered in the grey spaces of morality, advancing imagination and self-compassion as points of communion.

This book is a call to prayer, fearlessly complicating what is good, and what is god.

Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, writer, clinical psychologist and educator. They work in the cracks, revering our messy emotional landscapes, and the wild edges of falling apart. Their psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on embodiment, therapeutics and poetics as life-affirming practices, to support racialised and marginalised people. Their published research is on the deconstruction of whiteness within UK clinical psychology.

Muneera Pilgrim is an international Poet, Cultural Producer, Writer, Broadcaster and TEDx speaker. She co-founded the Muslim Hip-Hop and spoken word duo Poetic Pilgrimage, and she is a co-founder of a new platform, Black Muslim Women Bike.