Arts Orbit's blog

This excerpt is from the Minnesota Literacy Council's annual reading by adult learners held on May 12, 2011 in collaboration with the Loft Literary Center. The event featured the stories of adult literacy students enrolled in English as a Second Language, GED, reading and other classes. Several of the readers were authors featured in the book Journeys: An Anthology of Adult Student Writings. Some are immigrants or refugees writing in their second or third language, while others shared their writing for the first time after years of frustration and anxiety attributed to low literacy skills. For more information or to order a copy of the book, visit mnliteracy.org.

Muzamil Yahya is a learner from the Minneapolis Adult Education program. This excerpt is taken from the Minnesota Literacy Council's annual reading by adult learners held on May 30, 2012 in collaboration with the Loft Literary Center. The event featured the stories of adult literacy students enrolled in English as a Second Language, GED, reading and other classes. Several of the readers were authors featured in the book Journeys: An Anthology of Adult Student Writings. Some are immigrants or refugees writing in their second or third language, while others shared their writing for the first time after years of frustration and anxiety attributed to low literacy skills. For more information or to order a copy of the book, visit mnliteracy.org.

I'm from Somalia in East Africa; I grew up in North Somalia. I was born able to hear, and throughout most of my life I could hear. When I was 14 years old I began to have hearing loss and I don't know what caused it. I have an auditory neuropathy kind of hearing loss.

I am in my bedroom, on my knees on the thick blue shag carpet that only existed in the decade previous. In my hands is a copy of KISS’s Destroyer album. Around me, on the floor, are other KISS records. They have been snapped cleanly in half.

One of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the season three entry “The Wish.” In this episode, social queen bee Cordelia returns to Sunnydale High after being impaled by a wayward spike of rebar, but even worse, after being cheated on by her unpopular boyfriend. But even though getting dumped by a social pariah is about the most humiliating thing she could bear, she walks into the hallways with her head held high and wearing her version of the late ’90s power suit: a oxblood leather pencil skirt and jacket, complemented with thick brown eyeliner, a spiky updo, and brown-red lipstick. The look is incredibly severe and wildly dated.