Said Shaiye: Are You Borg Now?

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 Said Shaiye will be in conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib, bestselling author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster.

Are You Borg Now? is an experimental book blending nonfiction, poetry, and self-interrogation. Shaiye uses The Borg from Star Trek: Voyager as a foil to answer the central question of his existence: who am I, and how did I become this? The book explores how hope, culture, race, faith and nationality shape one’s identity. It also asks what it means to be Somali American, and how childhood war trauma skews that meaning

“Why should one write? This is the question that pervades Said Shaiye’s experimentalapproach to memoir in Are You Borg Now? This book offers many different kinds of answers to such a question, answers that involve facing the effects of trauma and violence with courage, honesty, and a willingness to risk vulnerability. One reason to write is to call forth a voice in solidarity with others who suffer. Shaiye is a writer who transforms the pain of alienation into beautifully lyric writing and from that writing springs a profound faith that one is never really alone.

 -Kathryn Nuernberger, author of The Witch of Eye 

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Said Shaiye
Are You Borg Now?

Hanif Abduraqib
A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance

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