Paisley E-Book

Rakhshan Rizwan

• Herausgeber: The Emma Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Serie: The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlets
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 25

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Rakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.

Leseprobe

PAISLEY

OTHERTITLESFROMTHEEMMAPRESS

POETRYPAMPHLETS

Dragonish, by Emma Simon

Pisanki, by Zosia Kuczyńska

Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real, by Padraig Regan

SHORTSTORYPAMPHLETS

First fox, by Leanne Radojkovich

Postcard Stories, by Jan Carson

The Secret Box, by Daina Tabūna

POETRYANTHOLOGIES

Urban Myths and Legends: Poems about Transformations

The Emma Press Anthology of the Sea

This Is Not Your Final Form: Poems about Birmingham

The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts

THEEMMAPRESSPICKS

DISSOLVE to: L.A., by James Trevelyan

Meat Songs, by Jack Nicholls

Bezdelki, by Carol Rumens

Birmingham Jazz Incarnation, by Simon Turner

POETRYBOOKSFORCHILDREN

Watcher of the Skies: Poems about Space and Aliens

Moon Juice, by Kate Wakeling

The Noisy Classroom, by Ieva Flamingo

POETRYANDARTSQUARES

AWOL, by John Fuller and Andrew Wynn Owen,

illustrated by Emma Wright

Now You Can Look, by Julia Bird, illustrated by Anna Vaivare

For Samee, Farzana and Rizwan

THEEMMAPRESS

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by the Emma Press Ltd

Poems copyright © Rakhshan Rizwan 2017

Introduction copyright © Leila Aboulela 2017

All rights reserved.

The right of Rakhshan Rizwan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

ISBN 978-1-910139-78-3

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Charlesworth Press, Wakefield.

The Emma Press

theemmapress.com

[email protected]

Birmingham, UK

INTRODUCTION

We live in a time of relentless border crossing. Migration into Europe from Asia and Africa is not new but, as a subject, it has gathered urgency these past few years. In the news, there is one contentious story after another, the tone often strident and self-righteous. Poets, though, speak in a different way. They capture images, cadence and the swirl of thoughts in the mind. They understand that the country left behind has not really been left behind. It is still there, hovering, carried in the migrant’s skin, infused in the family’s memories and patterns of living.

For a poet, language comes first. But which language: the old or the new, the mother tongue or the one learnt at school? In Partition, language is learnt while still in the womb. While reading a letter from her mother, the ‘unborn child kicks the quaint figures of speech and sucks the cloying Urdu with its small, webbed hands’. In Speech Therapy, the mother tongue was served ‘with milk and warm skin’. The narrator contrasts this with the command to learn German and integrate – ‘You prescribe your language to me like anti-depressants’ – and describes its intrusion in the mouth as ‘burning asphalt’.

And yet the new adopted country is not always to blame. In Noon