sorry mum

Hindsight is a process through which we narrativise the past, shuffle disconnected events into order in an attempt to make sense of randomness. And hindsight tells me that I lost my faith when I realised that my mother could be wrong.

Through a process of storytelling in half remembered religious stories from her own youth my mother impressed upon me her own brand of aspirational middle class Islam (as long as we didn’t have to go out in the cold we were all up for equality.) And I took this version of my religion at face value. This all changed when I realised that my mother was not in fact infallible. She was just as flawed, bigoted and human as the people she decried in the name of moral superiority. As a result my faith fell away from me. And so I return to storytelling; half remembered parables from a misty youth served up to my childhood as fact.

sorry mum audio

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