Besharam E-Book

Nafeesa Hamid

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 52

Beschreibung

Learning that your mind and body have been taken hostage is one thing. Learning how to take them back is another. What if those that are returned are different to the ones that were lost? Besharam – Nafeesa Hamid's glorious debut collection – asks this and many other questions. When does a girl become a woman? When does her world allow her to become a woman? And what kind of woman should she be? The answers aren't readily forthcoming. As she treads the shifting line between woman and daughter, between Pakistan and the West, between conservative Islam and liberal, Nafeesa has almost had to find a new language to try to communicate the difficulties of her situation. And what a language! At times hard and pointed, at other times wonderfully and colourfully evocative, erupting with femininity, empowerment and rebellion. It is this language that makes Besharam such a pleasure to read in spite of the pain it contains. This really is a magical first book of poetry. Besharam contains guest poems from Birmingham poets Mina Mekic, Yasmina Silva and Zeddie

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nafeesa Hamid is a British Pakistani poet and playwright based in Birmingham. She has been writing and performing for 6 years at events around the UK, featuring at nights such as Outspoken (London), Poetry is Dead Good (Nottingham), Find the Right Words (Leicester) and Hit The Ode (Birmingham). She was invited as a performer at TedxBrum 2016 (Power of Us). Nafeesa has also performed at Cheltenham and Manchester Literature Festivals as part of The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, a recent (2017) anthology publication by Saqi Books, edited by Sabrina Mahfouz. She is alumni of Mouthy Poets and Derby Theatre Graduate Associate Artists. She runs Twisted Tongues, an open-mic only poetry night at The Station in Kings Heath.

Nafeesa’s poem ‘Doctor’s appointment’ (featured here) was Highly Commended by the judges of the Forward Prize and appears in The Forward Book of Poetry 2020.

Twitter: @NafeesaHamid

www.facebook.com/nafeesa.hamid

https://vervepoetrypress.com/2018/05/10/nafeesa-hamid/

ABOUT BESHARAM

‘Besharam is an outstanding collection from Nafeesa … I think her poems are very special.’ – Imtiaz Dharker

'Love this collection and finding it deeply affecting. The fearlessness is astonishing. Bravo!' – Roz Goddard

‘Yesterday I read and was deeply moved by Nafeesa Hamid's debut, Besharam. Thank you Nafeesa for articulating so deftly and elegantly such complex material. I know I'll return to this book often.' – Ruby Robinson

‘You know those times you pick up a poetry collection and read right the way through because every page is a grenade? … Besharam is powerful, rebellious, tender and bold. I could not put this ‘woman’ down.’ – Hafsah Aneela Bashir

‘I love Nafeesa's vibrant, original and refreshingly original poems.’ – Josephine Corcoran

‘I highly, highly recommend Nafeesa’s first book of poetry -Besharam - as this writer resonates on a whole other level.’ – Pam Reader

‘Besharam is staggering and heartbreaking. Absolute fire in the hand.’ –Anna Saunders

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

Birmingham, West Midlands, UK

www.vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2018 Nafeesa Hamid

The right of Nafeesa Hamid to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

No part of this work may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, recorded or mechanical, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

FIRST PUBLISHED SEPT 2018

REPRINTED SEPT 2019

Reprinted and bound in the UK

by Imprint Digital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-912565-05-4

ePub ISBN: 978-1-912565-72-6

For anyone whois still findingtheir way home.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Joelle Taylor

Part 1: Body

Missing

Body

Your first girl

Passport photo

Sisters

Hijab

Shades of woman

First time

Illness

Porn stash

Blame

What she is for you

Night off

Her

First date

You are everything against nature

Two girls having a conversation on a step outside a church

Upon finding your daughter

Man of the house

Mum’s Spicy Chicken

Like a virgin

Even her spit say sex

The in-between date

How men are made

School assembly

Girl

Penny the Magic Bunny/ Nafeesa the Magic Student

Instruction manual for giving birth

Morning after

Teeth

How alone do you feel post-sex?

Back seats

Ice cream

Dough

Giving her away

Tracing steps into the loneliness of it all

Part 2: Mind

Women who cry

Doctor’s appointment

Paperweight

Summer storm

Woman as McDonald’s Happy Meal balloon

Funfair in the bathroom

Putting out fires

Candyfloss

Last legs

Riding the wave

Change

What to pack when you’re about to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act. Again

Food: a relationship

Demolition

Lonely

Crisis

Lovers

After you’ve gone

In this poem I am the atomic bomb

New beginning

2003

Jinn

In this one no one notices

Part 3: Heart

Nafeesa introduces Mina Mekic, Yasmina Silva and Zeddie.

Acknowledgements.

FOREWORD

Nafeesa Hamid’s debut collection is a necessary and potent meditation on the meaning of Womanhood, as witnessed through the eyes of a poet who has survived its most restrictive excesses but continues always to write forward. I agreed to collaborate in the collection as editor because I strongly believe that some stories must be nurtured, remembered and passed on.

As a girl of nine years old the poet was taken from the street outside her home and held hostage in a stranger’s car for several hours, only being returned to her family on the morning of the following day. In those intervening hours the whole world changed. Grief, searching, loss and recrimination became her closest friends. Besharam suggests that on some cellular level Nafeesa is still lost in a stranger’s car trying to remember the way home.

As a result, this whole book is a kind of hostage situation, and the kidnapping itself a metaphor for the condition of Woman in the 21st century. It is a therapeutic and personal collection, that veers from that defining moment into the universal symbols that mark the development of a girl child into a Woman body, and all that entails.

Honest, imagistic and at times surreal, we stand in the corner of the bedroom as she tries on woman body after woman body, finding that none of the bodies quite ft.

Divided into distinct Body and Mind sections Besharam attempts to name and own the two parts of each of us that we as women still have little agency over. The book finishes up with a Heart section that needs no words from me to understand and enjoy.

Read the book slowly and remember your own growing, or that of your sister, daughter, mother. Let her poems create poems within you.

Let this book be her homecoming.

Joelle Taylor, Editor, 2018

Besharam

Part 1: Body

Missing

My father walks from door to door,

hands held together like he is doing dua.

They are covered in blood.

He splutters

‘beti’ to anyone who will listen,

blood spraying from his grieving mouth.

He is covered in blood,

Jummah salwaar kameez

bleached white before.

(I wonder how my mother got out the stains.)

A blood vessel has erupted

and my father thinks he is beyond repair.

I wonder if my mother bothered scrubbing the stains out