Who Speaks This Story
dūmya ḥakkāʾ writes like she bleeds-on purpose, and with precision.
A Mizrahi Jewish artist, dancer, and ritualist, she stitches stories from silence, memory, and the sacred violence of survival. Her work lives at the crossroads of queerness, grief, and reclamation. Raised between funeral homes and forbidden languages, between broken dolls and broken borders, she carries the weight of generations in her spine-and lets it sway to rhythm.
She does not flinch. She remembers.
Her body, marked by tics, tattoos, and illnesses both visible and buried, refuses obedience-but never stops performing. Through performance, she survives. Through art, she confesses. Through language, she resurrects.
In this memoir, Dancing While Dying, she threads grief like embroidery, repurposes trauma into choreography, and refuses to let her name be swallowed by someone else's silence. Each chapter is a spell. Each stitch a rebellion. Each breath proof she made it.
Even now, she's still dancing while she dies.
