This volume of pithy, defiant poetry and prose explore the burden of taslīm—an oral transmission of heritage and ancestral knowledge—on Coptic Orthodox women. These poems highlight the ways in which Coptic women navigate the responsibilities of transmitting ancestral knowledge while reckoning with its costs: deferred joy and pleasure until the afterlife, an almost compulsory notion of motherhood, and a gendered comportment of sacrifice and submission, even in diaspora. Taslīm in the Christian minority of Egypt becomes an even more rigid bind in immigrant communities abroad. This book is ultimately a feminist manifesto for freedom, and the choice to live and desire out loud.

“While reimagining faith and salvation outside of patriarchal systems, Ramzy confronts the limiting beliefs we’ve been taught around desire and pleasure, especially for women and queer people of colour. In naming the fear, shame and guilt often associated with erotica, her poems … rewrite these narratives by celebrating eroticism as part of our path to salvation.”

—Herizons

“Carolyn Ramzy’s Taslīm: We Are the Prophets refuses silence. Like [Audre] Lorde, she lives as an act of resistance. Following in Lorde’s tradition, her work is both a model of autoethnographic refusal and a blueprint for cultural transformation. By claiming what others have tried to strip from her—her Copticity—while reckoning with its fractures and dissonance, she forges a path toward repair. More than just personal testimony; it is an invitation.”
—Aly Tadros, from the Afterword