Carolyn Ramzy, Taslīm: We are the Prophets, Poems on a Coptic Girlhood (Mawenzi House, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Carolyn Ramzy (CR): As an immigrant kid, my first ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher handed me an empty journal and instructed me to write down all the things I could not yet say in English. Starting at ten years old, I learned about my new diaspora life in Upstate New York by writing everything down. This extended to my Coptic Orthodox life too as I regularly sat down in the Church pews every Sunday. There, I used to write my observations, poetry, and reflections during the extended services and sermons, and I have not stopped since. During graduate school and when I began to deconstruct my religiosity, I used to share these entries to forge a sense of community as I began to feel increasingly outcast for asking questions about gender, sexuality, and holy belonging as a Coptic woman. Unchurched, queer, and questioning Copts began to see themselves in my words and one day, a friend encouraged me to be brave and to publish them. So, I did.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
CR: Taslīm addresses both the joys and the burdens of passing down our ancestral knowledge as Coptic Orthodox Christians to the next generation. As the title of the book suggests, I reckon with what this means for diaspora Coptic women to juggle these labours, often inaudible and invisible, in a highly stratified religious culture that is deeply patriarchal.
The scholar in me, trained as an ethnomusicologist to study music as culture, also noted how our gendered music world both reflected and shaped our lives as Coptic women. Our Church hymns and spiritual songs are replete with familial and maternal metaphors that praise our Coptic Church as a Bride and as a Mother of the Martyrs, often reflecting our experiences of discrimination and sectarian violence as a religious minority in Egypt. As proud Copts, we continue to sing and pass down these songs in diaspora to remember and commune with the saints and sing about our ideas of a heavenly afterlife. As part of my scholarship, I wanted to ask: what does it mean to sing and learn about our heritage through a framework that hinges on martyrdom, death, and dying for one's faith as a liberatory practice? Importantly, what does it specifically mean for Coptic girls to only hear and see themselves in Coptic song as martyrs, mothers, or mothers of future martyrs? I engage with Orthodox hymns as well as literature from the fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
CR: I have been writing about Coptic music culture academically for more than a decade now, publishing with major journals, the US Library of Congress, and other online exhibits. This book is the first time I experiment with nontraditional academic writing, though. Inspired by scholars such as Sandra Faulkner and Sean Williams, I turned to poetry as a transgressive form of autoethnographic storytelling. What does that mean? It means that I tell my story (auto) as part of a larger social group (ethno) as it is situated within a particular moment and context (graphy). This method straddles creative writing, the genre of memoir storytelling, and social science research to bring readers into the intimate sounds and senses of everyday Coptic immigrant life. In the end, I did not just want to bring readers into a story of Coptic migration and song, but I also feel them to feel the joy of fingers dimpling the face of sun bread (aysh shamsi) fresh out of the oven, especially on a cold winter day in upstate New York. I wanted them to smell those familiar yet bittersweet wafts of incense during Church services, where many Coptic women and girls could not always loudly sing their favorite parts of a Coptic service because of their sex. And finally, I wanted readers to feel what it was to swallow back pleasure and desire in an ascetic and purity driven culture.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
CR: I wrote Taslīm first and foremost for Coptic women and girls who have been told—explicitly or silently—that their bodies, desires, and questions are too much for the Church, and not enough for the world outside it. I hope they can see their own complicated loves, doubts, and joys reflected in these poems, and feel less alone in the tug-of-war between devotion and dissent, desire and deference to our living and robust heritage. I also hope the book reaches unchurched, queer, and questioning Copts, whose lives rarely appear in the official narratives of our community. For them, I want Taslīm to be a small archive of feeling, a reminder that they have always been part of the story, even when they were written and sung out of the liturgy.
Beyond Coptic and Egyptian diasporas, I also imagine that any readers who are interested in how minoritized communities inherit faith traditions, gender norms, and sonic worlds across borders will find themselves here. I hope the book complicates easy celebrations of “heritage” by asking what it costs to pass it down, especially for those whose labor is assumed and whose silence is mistaken for consent. Ultimately, I would like Taslīm to encourage more experimental, embodied, and vulnerable forms of writing about religion, migration, and music to also wrestle scholarship back into the hands of tradition bearers and indigenous community insiders who have not always been represented in the academy.
Finally, if this book invites even a few readers to listen differently to their own worlds, to their own voices, and to their own misgivings about faith and the cost of belonging in any religious community, in the homeland and abroad, then it has done the work I hoped it would do.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
CR: I am currently working on a scholarly-creative project that extends the questions of Taslīm into a larger study of Coptic women’s sound worlds, from church choirs to kitchen tables and digital diasporas online. This work grows out of my earlier collaborations with digital sound archives and online exhibits on Coptic chant and women’s voices. Finally, I continue to write shorter pieces—essays, poems, and experimental autoethnographies—on religion, queerness, and the affective economies of martyrdom in Middle Eastern Christian communities. Many of these pieces are in conversation with students and activists who are reimagining what holy belonging can look like beyond purity, death, and sacrifice.
J: How did writing Taslīm change your relationship to Coptic music and to the Church?
CR: Writing Taslīm forced me to listen again to sounds I thought I already knew: the cantillation of the deacons, the crackle of the microphone inaccessible to singing Coptic women, and the quiet of my own unsung parts. On the page, these familiar sounds refused to stay liturgical in the poetry that I wrote. Instead, my poetry became textures of grief, desire, and sometimes laughter as they unsettled the neat separation between the “sacred” and “profane” that I had inherited. By doing so, writing these poems brought me so much comfort and reminded me to look up and see that I was not singing alone.
This process also made me more honest about the epistemological violence that can be carried in melodies that I so loved and deeply cherished, and in the way that they are often studied in the academy. Today, I can no longer hear and sing certain hymns about martyrdom and purity without also hearing the girls and women who had been disciplined in their name, including myself. Yet, at the same time, the book returned to me a different kind of tenderness for Coptic music and for the people who keep it alive. In writing these poems, I remembered the small acts of care that made belonging so rich: the kahk we rolled out for eid, the singing while we crimped out the flowers of petite four cookies, and collective meals we labored to make for our congregations following the labours of prayer. Today, I build community in the bittersweet memory of this communal life-making, in scholarship and in life. And while I know that Taslīm did not reconcile me with the Church, in the end, it did give me a way to stay in conversation with it, even when I can no longer sit comfortably in the pews.
Excerpt from the book
III. the priests, the bishops, and the converts
On Faith: for a priest of an oriental church
Do you believe in God?
Once I stood in one of these English-language-only Coptic Churches when a priest would not talk to me unless I told him that I believed in God; apparently my reputation as an academic had also transformed me into an atheist. This question, he told me, was the prerequisite to chat. Under the neon lights of the Church basement, I could not help but wonder why the price of conversation with him was higher for me than for the White converts he so readily approached in his own services. I wondered why my own survival, written in the curve of each curl, was not enough. Nor was the wheat colour of my face, mirroring the smiling silhouette of the martyrs in the gold leaf backdrop of the Coptic icons dotting his Church iconostasis. Like the saints in these written portals to God, I too held the promise of a shared theosis, a oneness with the divine, a oneness with fellow Copts, and maybe even a oneness with him, this priest from an oriental church.
But he insisted: Do you believe in God?
I refused to answer, recalling other spiritual evictions from this holy place. The priest cornered me. Against his coercion for a public confession, I finally replied: "My faith is between me and God."
"So you do believe!"
His reply sounded incredulous, like he did not believe me. Because the only way he assumed I could believe was to remain churched and secure under his surveillant eye, to take communion from his hands directly into my mouth, to do so in the right order, to fast, to carry a comportment that bent my body in submission to his, to kiss his hands. Here's what I wished I could tell him: in refusing this hierarchy, I could finally imagine a more divine way to encounter the Divine. I could even share my grief with him about a faith made so small and fragile that a little difference between us could dismantle his entire Coptic world.
As coerced confessions go, he only got the partial truth. There was simply no safe way to confess to him that I have faith in God the same way that I have faith in people. I could not confess to him that, like my mother and a long line of mothers before her, I had learned to recalibrate my faith into a stubborn and lived hope, into one of a transgressive joy while daily navigating the exclusionary politics of the clerical patriarchy, daily bouts with racism, and continued coloniality that tainted our collective Coptic inheritance. I often think of my grandmother sitting gingerly at the piano she gave up for her university education, her fingers joyously playing out the translated missionary song meant to woo her away from her faith, only for it to invigorate her piety, and to burn in her the desire to send each daughter to university. She played on as she witnessed all her daughters finish university, and the daughters of her daughters become writers, professors, and physicians. Instead of being placated by my great-grandfather's patriarchy, my grandmother sang her faith into this piano's imperial ears, subjecting that instrument's power to hers, making it sing back to her. She made that piano sing while we baked kaḥk for eid, while she stitched the rich velvet vestments for the local priests to wear, while she baked Lenten banana bread without milk and eggs, while she fed the disappearing Arabic into her grandchildren's mouths. In my last images of her, this piano sang as she rounded out her final loafs of sun bread ('ayish shamsi) in my aunt’s kitchen. Traditionally baked on Upper Egyptian rooftops, I marveled as her small frame made it magically rise under New York's wintery skies.
Tayta’s faith and the one she passed on to me is a generous one, that everyone— Jew, Gentile, slave or free, man or woman [Galatians 3:28], the queers and the non-binary, the unchurched and the skeptics, even those traumatized by religious coercions that did not feed their souls— all belonged around the table, and in the oneness of Christ. I have no double that, at her table before she fed him, dousing morsels of sun bread in rich mulukhiya, tayta would have never asked this priest:
Do you believe in God?
+ + +
We are the Prophets
we are the prophets our mothers were looking for
the yearning of their unrequited.
We are the Dreaming
when they searched in their reflections. When they looked down into our faces.
we are the pinch of blood swilling in the mouth
when they held their piece for peace.
we are the crook of the elbow that holds the shoulder into place as it
bears
the weight of unrequited children to an unrequiting world.
we are the unfolding of the curls, beating back the heat of a colonial singe
into unruly silver, then grey, then a gentle henna copper against the sun.
We are the lifeline running from palm to palm, the quiet thread of taslīm from hand to hand
arriving
on the heel of many little deaths. and the slip of new life into this life.
We are all these quiet moments distilled into a lifetime of restlessness.
Requiting.
Relentless while relenting.
We are
giving into the Giving.
Then taking the Taking.
Falling headfirst into the Dreaming.
+ + +
kaḥk.
It was mesmerizing.
To watch new small hands sink into the batter. my sons.
My mind’s eye sank into the double vision: tayta’s hands glistening with samna, ghee.
the lifelines drawn on her palms leaving an imprint in the dough.
All I had to do was follow.
ḥissīha, she would say. feel it. then you will know.
She too is following the lines laid down before her.
And I wonder what her mind’s eye sees in its double vision:
rooftop ovens. Her mother. Circles and circles of women chatting and working and singing.
Small hands covered with flour, glowing with ghee. hands that raised three babies and mourned the death of one. the fourth golden bracelet she wears for her only son. lifelines weaving a continuous thread, crowning at the wrist.
my boys have such small hands. Upside smiles reflect back at us in the bowl. the frantic scramble to be the first and to be the last.
with each handful of batter, I am now the one leaving trails to follow.
ḥissuha, habaybi. I whisper to them. Feel it and then you will know, my loves.
matriarchy and memory work in tandem,
waḥid bisalim liltanī.
One passes it on to the next
Cookie after cookie.
kaḥkaya warra kaḥkaya.
This is where our histories are written. Sometimes sung. Sometimes not.
Walnuts stuffed in the warm embrace of the yeasty dough.
A na’sha drawn to hold a dusting of sugar.
+ + +
balacona baptisms
a chosen family
is made through the grit and spit of
sunflower 'azzazza
on a high Toronto balcony
all the discarded shells
a meaty metaphor
for the previous lives we have lived
and the masks we've shed
to make it to
here.
countless cups of tea
come and go
and
between the sweet and salty
watermelon slurps,
our alternate kinship
is made as we are
pinching with the
the gossip
of who said what to whom.
And when the rain comes in, sudden, heavy, and sideways,
we do not care that we are drenched,
instead we
greet this storm of
holy ghost and urban myron
as a balacona baptism,
a promise of a life well lived, together,
and a redemption of all that is joyous.