APEX Express - 6 10 21 - We Won t Move kpfa.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kpfa.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Apr 20, 2021
Parents ask when their child’s teeth will go back to normal. Who has the heart to tell them never?
This is Demibone, a column by Ghinwa Jawhari that explores the stories our teeth tell.
We want to believe baby teeth are magic.
They were once, for example, tokens to the afterlife. They were susceptible to hexes and black magic. Reciprocally, they acted as protective charms. Warriors fashioned necklaces of baby teeth to protect them in battle. When launched toward the sun or earth, baby teeth could forecast stellar health. They could be planted like seeds for a lucrative future career. Baby teeth have been ground into powders, burned, buried, hurled, planted, hidden, and stashed. Americans will recognize the Western, classist iteration: A fairy exchanges the tooth under your pillow for cash.
Ghinwa Jawhari is a Lebanese-American writer, educator, and dentist based in Brooklyn, New York. Born to Druze parents in Cleveland, Ohio, she was frequently suspended between the Midwest and Middle East.
Her debut chapbook BINT was selected by Aria Aber as winner of the Own Voices Chapbook Prize, and is forthcoming from Radix Media in March 2021. She is a 2021 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop, where she is dissecting Phoenician and Lebanese tradition and identity.
Berkeley Talks: Poet Aria Aber reads from her 2019 book Hard Damage pressreleasepoint.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from pressreleasepoint.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.