Mother | Line E-Book

Ankita Saxena

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 65

Beschreibung

What do we inherit from our mothers? From our grandmothers? From the legacy of colonisation and empire? Mother | Line, Ankita Saxena's debut poetry collection, charts lineage in all its forms, delving into female rage, compassion, and endurance. Drawing on the author's British Asian heritage and experiences growing up as a woman in an increasingly violent world, this collection weaves together the personal and the political in ghazals, odes and specular poems, which hold a mirror to the world and to themselves. "We are daughters of Kali", Saxena writes, and "mothers linger on the sides, hearing us become them; / our routines only theirs to thank for, our spices, / our blends, and even our greedy tongues. "A sublime and considered collection, speaking to, and spanning lineage, inheritance, friendship; what it can mean to be a girl, a woman in the world — across continents, oceans, time." - Rachel Long

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ankita Saxena is a British-Indian writer and performer. Her debut poetry collection Mother | Line is the culmination of over a decade of writing, editing and performing. She read English Literature at the University of Oxford (2014-2017), where she was Head of Events at Oxford University Poetry Society and President of Turl Street Arts Festival. She is a Barbican Young Poet alumnus, three-time commended Foyle Young Poet, part of the Octavia Poetry Collective, and one half of the ORIGINS Poetry Duo. Her poetry is published in Wasafiri, Modern Poetry in Translation, Bath Magg, Lacuna Lit and The Isis. She has performed widely across the UK, including live at Hammersmith Appollo, with The Guilty Feminist. By day, she works at a not-for-profit social enterprise, helping to tackle complex and enduring issues in society and create lasting and widespread change.

"A powerhouse of an anthology. Electric verse with a howling feminist soul. Bright. Witty. Poignant. Glorious. Ankita Saxena is an insightful, young artist and a voice that we need."

– Deborah Frances-White

"These poignant, muscular poems shoulder the weight of personal and national history. Uncompromising interrogations of empire and privilege sit alongside vivid evocations of family lore. Always remembering that ‘our school / is our Ma’s tongue’, Saxena recognises women’s stories, rituals and laughter for the precious gifts that they are."

- Natalie Linh Bolderston

“While Mother | Line touches on the traumas and complex inheritances of race, class, and gender, it’s also able to hold onto child-like hope, particularly in its reflections on friendship. This book plants a seed of faith that, despite our tumultuous histories, we are able to grow into something better, as long as we keep looking for the things that truly need to be seen.”

- Amani Saeed

"A sublime and considered collection, speaking to, and spanning lineage, inheritance, friendship; what it can mean to be a girl, a woman in the world -- across continents, oceans, time."

- Rachel Long

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2023 Ankita Saxena

The right of Ankita Saxena 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 APR 2023

Printed and bound in the UK

by ImprintDigital, Exeter

ISBN: 978-1-913917-34-0

ePub ISBN: 978-1-913917-78-4

“Build of my poems

a bonfire in your backyard”

Kamala Das

CONTENTS

Foreword

Anti-Manifesto

—

Mother | Line (1)

Nani (1)

Golden

Goldin’s Box

Nani (2)

How to Dismantle a Home

Walking to Agra, Azamgarh, Aligarh, Lucknow

Lost Property on Goldhawk Road

Nani (3)

Ghazal to my Other Tongues

Okra

Nani (4)

How to Make an Animation

Becoming an Owl

Nani (5)

—

Mother | Line (2)

Notes at The Migration Museum

On Jubilee Weekend, in Ramsgate

Privilege (1)

Kashmir

Schoolboys

Privilege (2)

It’s Late and our Mamas don’t Know

Baba Ghanoush

Privilege (3)

Love(less)

Brown Mums

Night Vigil

Privilege (4)

To the Date who Asks me what a Poem is

—

Mother | Line (3)

Stray Dogs

Mother(less) || or || The Five Stages of Grief

Experiments in Faith

Sky Burial

On Duty

—

Mother | Line (4)

Kajal

Ganesh’s Monologue

High Tide

Portrait of Lovers and their Prayers

How to Love a Man who Leaves

Scenes from the Night Bus

Ode to Butterflies

Ode to the Custard Apple

O, Ma!

We, the Pilgrims

A Woman is Laughing

Notes and Acknowledgements

FOREWORD

Our names give us away.

For the most part, they explain who our fathers are. And their fathers. And their fathers’ fathers.

In the steady passing down of names through generations, our mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers’ mothers are gradually erased. Women are gradually erased.

*

These poems form a collective ode to the mother line. This line is cloudy, complex and often contradictory. The women who came before me passed on their fear and their fearlessness, their loving and their rage, their hunger and their shame.

Our mothers, and our mother lines are sacred – even as we forge new routes, friendships, relationships, mothers linger on the sides, hearing us become them: our routines only theirs to thank for, our spices, our blends and even our greedy tongues.

Even as it is obscured and often forgotten, the mother line is allencompassing, inescapable.

*

My forever inspiration Zeina Hashem Beck writes:

“Though we weren’t a revolution,

we were at least a questioning”

The same could be said for the collective “we” of the poems in Mother | Line. The poems here do not promise revolution, but they are at least an interrogation, a linguistic archaeology.

I have always been a questioner. The first poem I remember writing was on outer space – my first line in purple felt-tip, read something like:

“I wonder why the sky is so blue?”

I have long left behind questions on space for astrophysicists. But I have kept coming back to questions on identity and the micro-histories that combine to create us. Questions like the ones I ask Nani, who has tirelessly served another her whole marital life –

“Where are you looking in that red sari, gone brown?”

“Why don’t you bring a girl close to your chest and call her daughter?”

“O won’t you tell me you loved? Tell me you loved equally.”

Through asking questions, we pose challenges. Through asking questions, we gradually chip away at stigma. All revolutions begin, and are cradled within, a question. Through asking questions, we speak out.

*

In one of my favourite poems of all time, Jameson Fitzpatrick writes:

“I thought I could become a writer

and it was political that I could imagine it”

Writing this collection involved embracing the things I have inherited from my (grand)mothers, and also embracing the privileges that create a vast gulf between my experiences and theirs, and the experiences of the large majority of women living in the world today.

It is a privilege to have imagined this book into being, to have had the freedoms, the tools, the resources to do so.

*

To all the women silenced and suffocated by relationships, families, destinies, this book is for you.

To those exiled from “society” for speaking their minds, and to those who suffer by “society” for never speaking it, this book is for you.

To the girls pulled out of school, and the girls pulled out of their mother’s wombs, this book is for you.

To all the people who grow up not fitting the roles, requirements, duties of their genders, and to those who are compelled to resist against them, this book is for you.

To all the warrior writers who came before me and alerted me to the possibilities of language to make social change, this book is for you.

*

Our names give us away.

My name, Ankita, means “someone who leaves a mark”. My mother likes to remind me of this time and again. “I am tired of holding you” she says to us, “go make something / of your lives”.

To my extraordinary mother, who gives me oceans for dinner, who gives me the world –

Here is me making something.

Here is my mark.

This book, each and every word, is for you.

Mother | Line

Anti-Manifesto

after Zeina Hashem Beck

Stop writing about women.

Stop writing about breasts and motherhood.

Stop writing about rage and trauma and decades of migrations.

Stop telling the story of how your ancestors barricaded their bodies with glass.

Stop writing about girls who marry at dawn and are raped by midday.

Stop finding dimensions to silence.