FARIHA RÓISÍN

In our newest interview series, we introduce you to the people who inspire us most: creatives, educators, activists, community leaders and the everyday super-humans who keep us on our toes. We’ll take you inside their day-to-day lives, homes and workspaces. We’ll talk motivation and inspiration and of course, all things style.

Meet our October Monthly Muse: Fariha Róisín, an Australian-Canadian multidisciplinary author and activist with more endurance, dedication and wisdom in her little pinky than most can muster in a lifetime.

When we caught up with her via video chat the morning after she launched her latest novel, Like A Bird, she was wearing sweatpants, apple-red lipstick and a messy ponytail to regale us with tales of feminist power, wellness and science, race, gender and identity. Read on to learn more about Fariha in her own words.

But this year has radicalized me. It's made me question and look at capitalism in a really deep way; look at things like colonialism and immigration. And even more so, look at abolition and believe in its possibilities. I think abolition is really utopic. Mariame Kaba, who writes about abolition a lot, says so much of the movement relies on hope. And I think that's such a calling cry for these times—we have to have hope. It’s all we have.

I grew up in Australia. I was born in Canada. I come from Bangladeshi parents. These are very different worlds for most people. And with that comes privilege, and also its own specific blend of aloneness.

I'm a third culture kid. When I started writing Like A Bird, I was aged 12 and living in Australia. I worked on it until age 15, then took breaks, writing on-and-off until I was 19, which is also when I moved to New York for the first time. I became deeply obsessed with American culture. I wanted to assimilate to a certain degree; I had my first white boyfriend. I was just in a different world. And all of that was in the pages. 

I really should have cataloged each version of Like A Bird better because that is archival evidence. My identity has been shaped so many times. Even how I've become more radical has really started presenting itself in my work, in my characters.

Well, firstly, Australians are the coolest people on earth. They have impeccable taste when it comes to art and fashion. I think a lot of my taste comes from growing up in Australia. I remember dressing in motifs, all very similar, from age 12. 

I love to play and mismatch prints. I love color. Every day’s different. A lot of my style when I was a kid was thrifted. I was watching a lot of French new wave films. So that was a style motif. And then Wes Anderson came along and bam! Color.

Plus, South Asian—Bangladeshi—culture is so colorful. The older I’ve gotten, the more I began to appreciate my culture, which is a very sad reckoning. I was always told not to be in the sun, and that colorism is drilled into you. So I’ve learned how to like myself in my clothes. I grew up around a lot of white people who had very confused ideas about my body, which is why I wrote Being In My Body. And so that’s a constant negotiation which draws me to clothes that make me like me in the moment. Fashion’s made me a canvas. It’s given me a relationship to my body that wouldn’t otherwise exist, and to have a certain kind of acceptance of it.

Yeah. I love smoking weed and writing. I see it as such a tool. I rely heavily on it. Shout out to plant medicine—honestly! I have been forever changed by every single plant medicine I've ever taken. I guess I'm turning more woo these days.

There are so many methodologies that we just don't give any credence to, like plant medicines or spirituality or even something like ashwagandha that supports memory and your nervous system, it basically aids your entire being. We don't look at things from the earth as having value. And so many of us get so much from the earth. We live on the earth, we learn from nature and space. I've had plenty of fights with men about whether or not astrology is intellectual. And, you know what, it's a 3,000 year-old science...built on data!

Now that I'm writing this book about wellness and learning about all the ways it's appropriated, I'm also thinking about the ways in which language is coded, how it becomes weaponized and used. And how white supremacists code their words, and men do, too, all the time. They don't even understand how much they weaponize their masculinity.

I sold my fourth book, which is really exciting. Who Is Wellness For, coming spring 2022, is my first nonfiction endeavor. I’m doing a lot of research for that right now, looking into the wellness industrial complex.

I also have my weekly newsletter, which isn’t really weekly right now, but is something I've really fallen in love with. I'm also writing two films, a TV show and juggling a lot of smaller projects. It's really fun.

I have too many: Susan Sontag, June Jordan, Audrey Lord, Angela Davis. All of them speak truths that weren't allowed or encouraged. It takes a lot to tell the truth. 

Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain was a Bangladeshi woman—or a woman in the Bengala before the partition in 1905. She wrote a book called Sultana's Dream and Padmarag, which is a feminist utopia. She wasn’t even allowed to go to school or college. She just learned and wrote her own utopia. And I never heard of her until this year. Why? Because women are erased from history. And it's our duty to archive and remember them because we owe so much to our foremothers. They paved the way for us to be here.

Shop Fariha’s style below and stay tuned here, to our Off The Cuff blog for more style inspiration, DIY tutorials, sneak peeks of our latest collaborations and all the insider goodness you can handle.