Rojal

Rojal's profile picture

"asleep"

Palestinian

Last active:

Mood: plz don't wake up plz don't wake up

View my: Blog | Forum Topics

SpaceHey URL:

https://spacehey.com/dearrojal

Rojal's Interests

General

The usual stuff, yk?

  • Studying the psychological effects of war on children (me)
  • Linguistics
  • Reading declassified documents for fun
  • Collecting quotes that feel like emotional stab wounds
  • Facts that hurt
  • Sketching while dissociating (multitasking queen)
  • Conspiracy Theories 
  • Making strangers online feel uncomfortable then seen
  • Maps
  • The way grief colonizes the body
  • Playing "guess the empire" when I see crumbling infrastructure
  • Ants, they're better organizers than the governments
  • Old ruins


Music

I like stuff that sounds like it's been through something.

  • Old revolutionary anthems
  • Arabic ballads 
  • Violins that sound like guilt
  • Electric guitars be crying
  • Lyrics that feel like they were written by someone mid-breakdown
  • Anything with happy melodies and devastating lyrics
  • Chase atlantic and Abdul Halim Hafez (duality is essential)
  • A mix of both would be Jadal (give it a listen TRUST ME)
  • Random 2000s bangers (Not fucking Katy Perry, I'm talking Haifa Wahbi)



Movies

  • Coming-of-age stories where no one comes of age and everything gets worse (relatable content)
  • Foreign indie films where the subtitles are 6 seconds behind and the plot is mostly vibes and childhood trauma
  • Psychological thrillers where the villain wins or disappears into the woods smiling
  • Criminal Minds
  • Movies where nothing happens except emotional devastation in beautiful lighting
  • Black comedies. Not the genre—literally comedies about death and loss that make me laugh too hard
  • Oh, and Studio Ghibli. Yes I cry at Spirited Away. No I will not explain myself. 
  • Philosopical Theatres

Television

Pretty chaotic

  • Criminal Minds 
  • My Little Pony, don't ask
  • I like shows where smart people talk fast and no one is okay
  • Obsessed with weird animated series that were clearly not made for children but aired at 3 PM anyway
  • Binge-watching psychological thrillers 
  • Can't stand military propaganda disguised as “healing journeys” for American soldiers (I killed a baby I need therapy I'm so sad) 
  • Dislike documentaries because they either lie or feel like homework
  • Occasionally watch reality TV to study the downfall of the human psyche
  • Watch cooking shows when dissociating—"I can’t feed myself, but I love watching Gordon yell at people who can"

Books

The average person reads 12 books a year. I read that in a month—accidentally.

  • I read Arabic and English—sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes just to spite colonizers
  • Obsessed with postcolonial theory—Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is basically my bedtime story
  • Read Edward Said’s Orientalism when I was 13 and never knew peace again
  • Currently rereading Discipline and Punish by Foucault because I like knowing how institutions surgically craft obedience
  • I love Palestinian literature. Suheir Hammad, Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani—people who write like every word costs blood
  • Read all of Sylvia Plath, then moved on to the women no one quotes because they didn’t die pretty
  • Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih changed how I see identity, READ IT!!
  • Darwish isn’t just a poet, he’s a prophecy. “We suffer from an incurable disease called hope” is tattooed on my soul
  • I annotate Arabic poetry like sacred scripture—Qabbani, Adonis, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra.
  • I own more than one edition of the Qur’an—not for religion, for language. 
  • I’ve read Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah twice. He explained colonial cycles centuries before colonizers had a name
  • I prefer stories passed down through grandmothers’ mouths—ya know, the kind that never got published because someone thought we weren’t “relatable”
  • I study oral storytelling traditions in the Levant, especially pre-1948 Palestinian folktales—because memory is resistance
  • I collect banned Palestinian novels and read them in cafes, just to make settlers uncomfortable
  • I once read a 900-page book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire just to prove a point during an argument. I won.
  • I believe every Arab girl should read Girls of Riyadh and Frankenstein in Baghdad back to back and then start a revolution

And I break my books spines. I love that.

Heroes

  • Abu Obeida
  • Yahya Al-Sinwar
  • Ismael Haniyyah
  • My ancestors who held more dignity in their silence than most world leaders in their speeches
  • The children of Gaza
  • The women who slap the soldiers
  • Every martyr they try to reduce to a name. 
  • Every fighter they call terrorist because they dared to want THEIR land, air, and water

Rojal's Latest Blog Entries [View Blog]

I'm currently procrastinating...unhinged but real procrastination busters (view more)

Why I Don’t Watch Disney Anymore (And Other Cinematic Crimes) (view more)

The Brain's Favourite Lie (view more)

I Watch Cartoons While the World Burns (view more)

Rojal's Blurbs

About me:

I started posting online because someone told me to “stop yapping.” So I did what any self-respecting Arab girl with internet access and too many thoughts would do:

I yapped harder.

Louder.

To strangers.

Btw the word yap was first used in 1603 by an astrologer to describe a dog's loud bark.

People think I’m autistic because I drop historical facts mid-sentence and forget to blink when I’m ranting about empire. Maybe I am. Who cares? I like knowing things more than I like being digestible.

What I am for sure is Palestinian.

And يا خسارة to anyone who expected me to stay quiet.


Who I'd like to meet:

The woman I would've been if my people weren't colonized.



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