Postcolonial Banter E-Book

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

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

Seitenzahl: 127

Beschreibung

Postcolonial Banteris Suhaiymah Manzoo-Khan's debut collection. It features some of her most well-known and widely performed poems as well as some never-seen-before material. Her words are a disruption of comfort, a call to action, a redistribution of knowledge and an outpouring of dissent. Whilst enraged and devastated by the world she finds herself in, in many ways it is also the mundane; hence, whilst political and complex in nature, her poetry is just the 'banter' of everyday life for her and others like her. Ranging from critiquing the function of the nation-state and rejecting secularist visions of identity, to reflecting on the difficulty of writing and penning responses to conversations she wishes she'd had; Suhaiymah's debut collection is ready and raring to enter the world.

Leseprobe

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is Muslim (someone who surrenders to the will of Allah), an educator, writer and spoken-word poet. She interrogates narratives around race/ism, Islamophobia, gender, feminism, state violence and decoloniality in Britain. She is the founder and author of the critical and educative blog, www.thebrownhijabi.com, and co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Verve, 2019). With a background studying History at Cambridge and Postcolonial Studies at SOAS, as well as a wider education from her mother and grandmother’s wisdoms, the epistemology of Islam, and work of women of colour and anti-systemic thinkers from across the world, Suhaiymah’s poetry is unapologetically political and deliberately unsettling. She isn’t interested in your guesses or analyses.

Suhaiymah’s poetry has over two million online views and since going viral as runner-up of the 2017 Roundhouse National Slam with her poem, This Is Not a Humanising Poem, she has performed on BBC Radio stations, at music festivals, in the US against Californian slam poets, across British Universities, on Sky TV, ITV, the Islam channel, Las Vegas, TEDxes, London poetry nights, mosques, protests outside the Home Office and in New York, Berlin, and Da Poetry Lounge in Los Angeles.

Postcolonial Banter is Suhaiymah’s debut collection. It features some of her most well-known and widely performed poems as well as some never-seen-before material. Her words are a disruption of comfort, a call to action, a redistribution of knowledge and an outpouring of dissent. Whilst enraged and devastated by the world she finds herself in, in many ways it is also the mundane; hence, whilst political and complex in nature, her poetry is just the ‘banter’ of everyday life for her and others like her. Ranging from critiquing the function of the nation-state and rejecting secularist visions of identity, to refecting on the difficulty of writing and penning responses to conversations she wishes she’d had; Suhaiymah’s debut collection is ready and raring to enter the world.

PUBLISHED BY VERVE POETRY PRESS

https://vervepoetrypress.com

[email protected]

All rights reserved

© 2019 Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

The right of Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan to be identified as the 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 SEP 2019

Printed and bound in the UK

by TJInternational, Padstow

ISBN: 978-1-912565-24-5

ePub ISBN: 978-1-912565-78-8

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Having spent the last eight years writing poems that were only ever read and spoken aloud by me, writing a collection that anybody can read as and where they want has been daunting. With spoken-word poetry there is always the chance to explain yourself, to clarify, to extend and contextualise to the audience – with page poetry that feels less true and therefore, scarier. However, to bridge the gap for myself I have included what I am calling ‘context boxes’ throughout this collection. These are boxes of information that explain some context about the poem or background information I think is important. I want the people I love and the people who these poems are for to enjoy these poems, they’re not just for self-proclaimed readers, poets and artists, so I hope the boxes make this collection more accessible; I’m not interested in writing poetry for people to puzzle over or feel intimidated by – I’d rather you puzzle over your reactions and responses. The boxes also sometimes include recommended readings, or places to find further information – please do use them as I’d like to think of this collection as an educative toolkit of sorts.

Thank you.

CONTENTS

1

This poem is not for you

Where is my history?

Paki

Nana

Nani

British-born

A prayer for you who jeer at the death of a baby whose teenage mother you feel did not show enough remorse

2

A story for ourselves this time

Voices roll over the charpai

The breaking branch

Death was smaller than I anticipated

3

Islamophobia 101

We did not bring this darkness upon ourselves

Recipe for a War on Terror

The best of the Muslims

4

Existing in big ways

Just a July

A poem that winds through Lewisham streets

For 2006

Theatres

Decentring diversity

5

Q: ‘What does it mean to be a Muslim woman?’

‘School inspectors in England have been told to start asking young girls in primary school why they are wearing a hijab in order to ascertain if they are being sexualised’

Pick One

If a girl cries in a corridor and no one is there to see it was she even in pain?

Funeral of the authentic Muslim woman

Reclaim the night

Didn’t you know?

20 point manifesto for women living in genocidal times

Maybe I don’t

6

Straddling the / line

A virtue of disobedience

Bacon Banknotes Benjamins

P P P Prevent

British Values

This is not a humanising poem

Acknowledgements

Postcolonial Banter

1

THIS POEM IS NOT FOR YOU

this poem is not for you

you can’t wear it on your forehead

it won’t look good in your profile picture

and I know you wish it was more colourful already

but I’m sorry

this poem is not for you

not like the last one

which wasn’t for you either

but you told me was no good

told me to stop speaking it

told me you’d hurt me if I didn’t

then took it behind my back, didn’t you?

told your friends how you wrote it

well this poem is not for you,

I remembered not to write it down this time

though you’re no novice to stealing thoughts themselves, remember?

that time you flashing-light siren whip-downed my door

cut out my tongue

and told me yours was better?

yeah

I never found where the old one went

so now my grandma can’t always understand

and my God I wish I could write poems for her instead of you

my God

in a different language

mere Allah

do you remember the boys from school?

how you’d tell me their art was mud dark pretension way

below a C?

and the girls in the changing rooms?

you’d say poems are for the empty legs and tanned-not-brown

shoulder blades

well, this poem is not for you

and it isn’t for your sister either actually

cos we’re not

despite you telling me how similar we are

every time I see her

she looks straight through me

and my grandmother told me as well you know

how they used to laugh

your sisters with the now pierced noses

told her only animals do that

and she’ll never forget that time you left us by the water’s edge

her hands were full of it

and you said drink

work hard

goodbye

so we tried to

but my God the salt

and we only had our hands didn’t we?

only had our hands

tell me, could you hear our shouts by then?

my mother was screaming “go back where you came from!”

but there was no re-wombing of the sea

so we’re here now

where I’m telling you

this poem is not for you

but the number of times I’ve said it

makes me doubt it

and if it is for you

then at least let me tell you

don’t you dare file it away some place

don’t you dare blink-nod it into the “race” draw

or “mm”-scrunch-eye it into the “colonialism” cupboard

don’t token-applaud it into the “feminism” lever-arch

I can see you doing it now

this poem is beyond you

it will never sit on your skin the way my colour sits on mine

you will never find it fallen down the floorboards after ten years

you will never study it at gcse

and most of all

you will never feel it pass between you and a stranger in a way

that says

I understand

I wrote this poem for the first heat of the Roundhouse Poetry Slam, 2017. It stemmed from my frustration with poetry slams themselves because the last big slam (competition) I had been a part of made me very aware that slam poets often perform our identities and trauma for an audience to consume. To my mind this often means an overemphasis on racial trauma for the sake of applause (and specifically white audiences) and I felt frustrated thinking about how this interaction reproduces many problematic dynamics of people of colour ‘performing’ for white voyeurism, approval and consumption. This poem explores these feelings, drawing a parallel to the way so many aspects of our identities are only approved/applauded once filtered through whiteness or consumed by the white gaze.

WHERE IS MY HISTORY?

My history is imprinted in the spaces between the ink printed on

pressed pages

My history is the screams shouting out through the silent slots in

syllabi

it is caged in glass cases said to be for its own safety by the

institutions which narrate it as their own

because my history lies in the choices not recorded

about which stories should be hoarded

and called archives

and my archives

are the chicken shops

the taxi stops

the backseats of rentals

and inside hems of headscarves

women’s conversations

women’s congregations

women’s contemplations

which you won’t find in your local heritage site

No, cos my history is the shame of your history

the body buried in the back garden with no gravestone

but in fact not so shameful, no

For it is also adorning your proudest buildings

the ones I’m searched before entering

as if my bringing something in would be disturbing

as if my things weren’t already coveted and stolen

sorry, read: salvaged and reallocated

to make up these museums in the first place

It’s almost as if History is less about what happened

than maintaining ideology

‘cos when you investigate a story

with half the participants absent

and don’t worry about the translation

want only to fit the narrative to the nation

then is it surprising that what’s surmised

is that my history is not?

That my past is ‘culture’ and ‘ancient kingdoms’

never ‘politics’ or ‘philosophy’

My ideas are ‘religion’ and ‘oriental’

‘tribes’, ‘norms’, and alternative remedies

whilst yours are universal teleologies

and superior methodologies

No, it’s no surprise my past is passed over

and pushed into the peripheries

despite being palpable in every premise of what gives Britain history

‘cos to find it would be to remember

that if Britain is tudors and victorians

it’s also Slavers and Plantations

the Colonies and the Colonised

To find my past would be to remember that

every object in the museum

that is said to be objectively seen

was plundered and stripped of value

for the perusal of researchers and big purses

to spectate and win awards

Whilst those of us who are still seen as ‘backwards’

who don’t get the time or space to explore artefacts

are in fact the outcome of their unnarrated relations

to colonial plunder and false salvation

So when you ask where my past is,

ask instead

what yours is without mine?

This poem was written as a commission piece for the launch of the ‘Don’t Settle’ project looking at how local history is narrated with young people in Birmingham, 2019. The main question of the launch night was where is my past? which this poem was a response to. As a History student with interest in thinking about what counts as history, or as valuable knowledge, I loved writing this poem. The poem grapples with the question of where my past is on three different levels.

On one level, ‘where’ my past is is a question of where it is in what is called the subject of History. E.G. my past is missing from textbooks, curriculums and documentary and other recordings of History in the sense that if the history of e.g. Pakistan’s creation is told, it is told through the eyes of diplomats, South Asian elites and Britons with their own assumptions and political goals. Or in the case of migration, the history of Pakistani migrants to the UK is told as part of the history of ‘migration’ which obscures the role of British colonialism and the commonwealth in that migration. It also often obscures the place of women – who are not only excluded from ‘migrant’ histories but also ‘women’s history’ (for being migrants), and larger ‘British history’, too. Such placement of my history is an outcome of the decisions that go into selecting what is an historical document and what is not – e.g. what piece of evidence is an important part of the story of ‘The Past’ and what piece of evidence is not: what is a scribble on a piece of paper and what is a ‘source’, what is an oral history and what is a story told by a grandma? The decisions that make some sources/stories about the past more ‘valid’ are not accidental but always political – the stories we tell about the past are stories we are trying to consolidate about the present. So, for example, if we suggest that ‘the history of South Asia’ is a history mainly of colonisation and ‘civilising’, we privilege sources from diplomats and literate elites, but if we decide it is a history of e.g. rural women’s everyday lives and subversion of oppressive external and internal forces, we would have to find a different way to think about sources and narratives – what don’t they say? What is absent? Why?

On the second level, ‘where’ my past is is a question of artefacts and archives. It is well known that British colonial plundering means that places like ‘the British Museum’ are full of art, treasures and artefacts from around the world. Having them in that museum frames them as ‘British’ without placing them in the historical context of how they came to be in Britain – e.g. colonisation and conquest. In another context such objects would have a different narration and reveal a different history. Sources are never neutral and their meanings are never objective.

On the final level, ‘where’ my past is ideologically is that it is often placed outside of ‘history’ and instead into ‘alternative’ disciplines of ‘religion’ or ‘non-European’ history even though Europe makes no sense without ‘global history’. Again, this is political. What we name things is an act of deciding what value they have and also a decision about whether or not we will face up to their present-day implications. If we say Britain’s history is only that of Tudors and Victorians (devoid of the slavery and colonisation which was essential to those eras) then we suggest that there is absolutely no connection and thus no reason why people of colour are in Britain today – the context is erased and therefore present day exclusion is justified by historical exclusion.

Suggested reading:

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, 2000.

Ramon Grosfoguel, ‘Decolonising Post-colonial Studies and Paradigms of Political Economy,’ 2011.

Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In Defense of the Fragment’, 1992.

Lola Olufemi, Odelia Younge, Waithera Sebatindira, Suhaiymah

Manzoor-Khan,