Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
Naima Rashid is an author, poet, and literary translator. Her first book, defiance of the Rose (Oxford University Press, 2019), is a verse translation of selected verses by Perveen Shakir. Her forthcoming works include her own fiction and poetry, as well as a series of literary translations. She has a background in linguistics, education, and writing, and has taught French language and literature at the French Consulate of Jeddah, the Alliance Française de Lahore, and Kinnaird College for Women, Lahore. Her writings on visual arts and other subjects have appeared in Asymptote Journal, Newsline magazine and other publications.
These poems are from my first finished poetry manuscript, Sum of Worlds. It is a work of reckoning, of coming to terms with the self. Central to the work is the intent to explore where, in the realm of identity, there is an overlap between languages spoken, places lived, and the self. Languages spoken and places inhabited, both chosen and born into, are matrices through which the self grows and knows itself. Over the course of a life lived, it becomes necessary to pause and do a reckoning of how these have shaped one’s self and vice versa.
Sometimes, the strongest, most defining choices of your life were determined by impulses which you understand only in retrospect, or not at all. They are stronger than you, and you have been led by their spell into ways that have shaped you, made you who you are, planted in you affinities and connections so strong they determine the course of your life, even as they defy logic.
To date, I have never understood what strange force led me to obsessively learn a language that was not my own, that no one around me spoke, how I learnt it at an age when most deem it senseless to try, why I lived two decades of my life teaching it, and why, with an equal intensity, I now have an urge to return to the language I was born into, but which I never understood in the heart-breaking way I do now.
Maulvion Waali Kothi (The House With the Bearded Men)
Lines and Circles
← October 2019 Issue
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