Trouble Sleeping

Degree awarded: M.F.A. Literature. American UniversityTrouble Sleeping is book of unrest, sleeplessness, and anxiety of personal and national proportions. This collection blurs the lines of awaken and sleep states. It is in this between-space that the reader quarrels with the age-old question of whether he or she is in fact asleep or awake. There are high stakes for choosing either. There are no heroes or heroines. To be awake is to witness some of the most horrific miscarriages of justice in human history. And to be asleep is to be haunted by unrests. The world of Trouble Sleeping is not for the faint of heart. This collection is a movie that takes place inside a dark movie house, probably in New York City. It's where major events take place--an unexpected run-in with my father at World Trade Center, seeing the film Birth of a Nation; a meditation of Troy Davis's lethal injection; several visits to my childhood home of Southeast Queens; a visit to the MOMA with my father, to name a few. The fascination and reverence for cameras that runs throughout the collection has to do with their ability to see, to refract perspective, zoom up-close, freeze time, and tell a story. These are not journalistic stories that have attributions, they're battle scars, bloody fingerprints staining the wall.Made available in DSpace on 2013-05-09T14:11:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Abdurrahman_american_0008N_10409display.pdf: 1092295 bytes, checksum: e7196815810c23ea6e7e0030ad5642e5 (MD5