Abstract

We are racialised non-Black Muslim women who are part of South Asian (Indian) and Palestinian diasporic communities living in so-called Canada and so-called Australia, respectively. We met at the first virtual gathering of the Afro Diaspora Futures in Education Collective. Through our conversations at this gathering, we learned about each other’s work with and for Muslim communities in our respective locales, where Islamophobia has become increasingly deadly. For both of us, our encounter was unexpected and welcomed. At this first gathering, Kevin Quashie (2022) invited us into encounters with slowness as a poetics of Black method. Thinking through slow methods with Quashie, alongside deadly world-altering attacks on Muslim communities, creates spaces for us to grieve, offer and receive care, and affirm life. In this engagement with Black and Indigenous feminist epistolary methodologies, we discuss what it means to be studying and teaching in settler universities, where we have witnessed and experienced a lack of care that renders our greivability as Muslims questionable. We are heeding Quashie’s call; we are slowing down time to think and write together with Black aliveness toward Muslim aliveness, to send letters as balms across geographies of grief.