The Town Where I Met You is both romantic and haunting — a poem which gently guides itself into a stunning final few lines: “I have since been waiting / for a Satan to swallow those / famished beasts, / or for a God to wake up in / this town where I met you, / the town that buried you.” Can you tell us more about this poem and its point of origin?
Like most of my poems, The Town Where I Met You is also a personal one. It talks about the obvious and undisguised homophobia thriving in my place. The poem struggled to take birth because I tried to smother it countless number of times for the fear of people reading it and labelling me as anti-religious for writing something in favour of the LGBTQ community. I don’t, in any way, wish to call my town and its people unenlightened, but they are, in every possible way, orthodox and illiberal. By mentioning Christina Rossetti’s Echo, I tried to pay an homage to one of my favourite poems written by her. And just like her poem, this one also talks about longing for a beloved who is departed. It’s not easy to wake up everyday and hear stories where people are thrown out of their homes for accepting their true self, or to be banished for falling in love. It is suffocating.
Black Raisins is similarly beautiful and heartbreaking in its consideration of language. With lines such as “I see his eyes welling up and I wonder, / Is this man becoming an angel, / or is he just drunk as usual”, I’d love to explore what storytelling means to you as a focus of poetry?
Storytelling and poetry go hand in hand. Storytelling in poetry is as important as words are for writing a poem, as important as language for any kind of communication. If readers cared to look close enough, every poem, even the most layered or the most esoteric one, has a story hidden inside. Storytelling is the only way of sailing through my existential crisis. Escapism is another way of putting it. It’s ironic how poetry is fiction and truth at the same time, just like my poem Black Raisins. Nobody talks about misogyny here. Chauvinists act like they rule the world. What’s so manly about beating a wife or a sister? It only makes the oppressor the weaker sex. Unlike my poem, the prejudice isn’t subtle in my town. It is so pronounced that women themselves don’t know they are being treated wrong. A woman from my community, has her head smashed against the window of her husband’s car for talking back. Upon speaking up, her mother shuts her up, says it’s your fault, even God doesn’t like back talk. For a place that claims to be so devout and pious, often forgets that the God they have placed on the highest pedestal, that very God warns about the supplication of the unjustly treated, says there is no shelter or veil between it and Him.
Alongside a Masters in English Literature, you’ve pursued your Bachelors of Sociology. How does your understanding of society’s systems aid in the construction of your poetry?
I have always been a wallflower. A shy observer. I didn’t intend to take up Sociology to change my society’s way of conduct, but to understand it better. When I realised how deep rooted the problems are, I found myself in a maze, panicked and frustrated with poetry as my only way out. Most of my poems, like the society I grew up in, scream despair.
Where can our readers find more of your work?
Currently I have only been submitting poems to Lit magazines making them a bit exclusive. I do not have an Instagram or a Tumblr page. For struggling/aspiring writers like me, I personally believe that the content becomes vulnerable once it’s out there on any social platform. And like every other desperate writer, I too, wish to see my name on a hardcover someday.
Interviewed by Munira Tabassum Ahmed
Hyades Magazine 