Dancing with Jinns : Black Women Write on Taboo

Ten candid essays by Black women writers that open up conversations long kept private, examining the personal and political forces that shape women's lives across Africa and the diaspora.

Dancing with Jinns is a bold and compelling collection of essays in which Black women writers confront the cultural taboos that shape life across Africa and its diasporas. Edited by Layla Mohamed and Momtaza Mehri, the collection brings together ten powerful voices to write candidly about subjects often kept in the shadows: menstruation, sexuality, mental health, grief, AIDS, patriarchy and the unspoken rules that govern women’s lives. Blending personal experience with cultural and political insight, the essays challenge inherited silences and question who gets to decide what is respectable, sayable or forbidden. At once intimate and expansive, Dancing with Jinns opens up urgent conversations about identity, history and power, creating space for honesty, complexity and resistance where silence has long prevailed.