Interview by Zoë Brigley
“I have always seen poetry as a form of resistance and an (urgent) response to every part of our daily lives”
Displacement Ghazal
“Sudan Crisis: Over 100.000 have now fled says UNHCR”
The city, glutted with dead bodies and full of blood, is
displacing and answering the call of graves yet again.
It’s noon and a woman is pursuing peace at the border of a
strange country, say brimstones are eating up her home yet again.
The eyes of the little girls are deluged with red tears, they’ve
walked around horrid places and are migrating yet again;
I read their movements, listened to the exhaustion in their feet, and
wonder how the world will deny them and their history yet again.
The city foretells doom, I believe this because the sky
is drifting from the sounds of fireworks to guns yet again.
How much misfortune would we carry before God weds us
to light? Listen: the Sudanese boy is speaking to bones yet again,
his lips are fettered from beaming joy, and his hands have
become a huge house of tremor yet again.
So long the days, so prolonged the remembering of hurt.
Do we die one-time and still come alive to die yet again?
It is such a huge responsibility to write a poem about current events, particularly when those events include human rights abuses. I have personally been finding it really hard to write at all recently. How did you manage to overcome the difficulty of writing about difficult events happening in the present moment?
I have always seen poetry as a form of resistance and an (urgent) response to every part of our daily lives. If a woman is in love with me, I react with poetry; if my country or the world is setting my home or another person’s home afire, I also react with poetry. Poetry, to me, is an inner strength. But sometimes, the strong emotions from brutal occurrences can overpower one’s potency to write about them, and one would feel useless, but the ability to not surrender is how we save the world, even if we might eventually relinquish to the inimical force. In the second stanza of the poem, and into the painful resolution in stanza four, I correspondingly expressed the innate human behaviour of not giving in to life’s dark times, despite the cognisance that the resolution we would receive might be unfavourable.
The ghazal form is very powerfully used here. The refrain “yet again” expresses the horror of witnessing history repeat itself. Is the ghazal a form that you use often, and what about it do you find useful?
This is my first time using the form. I’m more into free writing. I only found myself reading poems written in traditional forms during the time the Sudan crisis erupted again, I was particularly reading “Call Me Ishmael Tonight — A Book Of Ghazals” by “Agha Shahid Ali”, and the more I read into the book, the more I was fascinated by the similar form of the poems; something unintentionally commanding, telling you to stay, to witness beauty and pain, although you already know the last words of the first couplet are the same as the last. The Ghazal type of poem gives your writings an uncut originality, and it trains your brain to express bigger thoughts with smaller words, especially thoughts that are unbearable. Although I wished this poem was lengthier, it was hard to extend on the uglinesses of the plot. I read on X recently, a tweet made by Jide Badmus, that the more he grows in age, the fewer words he can write on paper as a poet. I think people who have been so grounded in free writing might find this transition difficult if this hypothesis turns out to be the same for every other person. But for someone who has experimented with a Ghazal before, I don’t think it would be much of a hassle— such a good value.
I thought it was brave to end the poem on a question. Maybe it leaves us in an uncomfortable space. Do you use questions a lot in your poems?
Yes, I do. Right from secondary school, I’ve always loved the delicate nature of rhetorical questions. Questions make us feel seen, and believe it this is a major goal of a poem. Other punctuations will invite readers into a piece of writing, but questions will make them stay, will make them look back at their footprints, and ask why they’ve not come into this particular world all this while. In this poem, the last sentence, a (rhetorical) question, is a very heavy one — I wanted every single soul in the world to see how all the things we’ve neglected in this world could kill us in another world if the storyline remains the same but our identities and hometowns changed.
