“Nanima” – Alysha Mohamaed

https://arcpoetry.ca/2020/08/17/nanima-by-alysha-mohamed/

As a personal response, I both emulated and crafted a poem originating from Alysha Mohamed’s poem, Nanima. Here, I used the first sentence from various stanzas of the poem and emulated stanzas that revolved around the ‘vibe’ that the sentence created.

*10,000 kilometers is the approximate distance from Pakistan, my home country, and Canada.

*Also, the “…the reward of Fajr prayer.” can be further explained if the reader simply googles “The reward of Fajr prayer.”

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10,000 kilometers.

 

My inheritance from my grandmother:

Soft-spoken Urdu and a magnanimous mother who would sacrifice all she had for me

Tonguing foreign words, trying so hard to speak the mother tongue now, trying so hard to inherit at least a few more pieces of my grandmother. She smiles, I smile. She laughs, I laugh. She cries, I cry. 

I wish I had embraced my language like I do now. I wish I had held on to it instead of trying to retrieve it. Prevention really is the best cure. 

 

Fresh puris in the morning, the soft, sour smell permeated throughout the house, through wooden walls and cement ceilings. 

Dada always had seconds. Always, when they were crafted from nana’s precise, yet careful leather hands. She sat me down, her hands busy. One hand running through prayer beads, the other hand massaging my young, puri-soft fingers. 

The tasbih would constantly weave in and out of her fingers, her tongue matching the pace with remembrances of the All-mighty. I would sit down next to her, holding churiyah in my little hands and unconsciously imitating her.

I now held a tasbih in my fingers, struggling, trying to recall the way the prayer beads flowed in-between her fingers, trying now, consciously, to do the same.

 

She gave me other things too.

Eyes deep brown, displaying the struggles of binding together two very different lifestyles. One, with 50 degree summers and tight-knit families, the other with -40 degree winters and loosely-linked friendships.

She also gave me her nose, broad yet somehow narrow. Broad like the green cricket fields where Pakistani’s across the country came together in hopes of winning the ICC. Narrow like the paths that led to the local Masjid at the corner of almost every street.

I have dreams now. Dreams where I reverse-age and sit beside Nanima, playing with her dupatta in my once small, soft hands.

 

Sometimes, I think about these gems and value them as if they were worth the reward of Fajr prayer.

Other times, I refuse to believe they ever existed in me, distancing myself from them, running 10,000 kilometers away.

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“We Shoot Children Too, Don’t We?” – Dan Almagor

https://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0403/S00141/poem-we-shoot-children-too-dont-we.htm

As my personal response to this poem, I had simply reflected on how I felt after reading this (prior to the sudden increase in violence), and I have now edited it to be a more updated version but still containing the same ideas that I had written down a few months ago.

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I simply don’t know how this could happen. Or maybe I do know but can’t seem to wrap my head around it. There are millions around the globe who shiver at the very thought of the Holocaust, and to be honest, so do I. The same goes for numerous tragic events in history and each time we wonder how it occurred and why nobody stood up during those times. Such events shouldn’t have ever had a place in our history books, and many people still wonder how on earth the nations of the world allowed this to happen under their noses.

This is how.

The same way the Holocaust happened within a (then) superpower’s borders, the Israeli ‘colonization’ of Palestine is ocurring now. This time, it’s happening in Palestine’s own land backed by the U.S. I doubt I need to go into much detail about how or why this is happenening, it’s obvious. I’ll leave this for you, the reader, to think about along with this image on the right which shows Palestine’s own slowly being land being taken away, which by the way, was a place that welcomed Jews after the oppression they faced in Europe.

 

 

 

The main thing I can’t seem to understand is why the United Nations turns its head the other way when situations like this arise. Moreover, these are warcrimes being comitted. War photographers, journalists, hospitals, COVID clinics, and children are under heavy fire of bullets and bombs yet the U.N. is more absorbed with matters of relatively no importance. When complete families are being wiped out and children are mercilessely murdered and dragged out of mosques and homes, what could possibly be of more importance?

 

I have kept myself updated on almost everything that’s taking place in Palestine; however, I haven’t yet seen any country or organization actuvely make an effort to stop this oppression. Furthermore, I’m more disappointed by hypocritical Islamic countries who make huge efforts to enforce Islamic laws and unneccesarily restrict women’s rights but don’t move a finger when it they see their ‘brothers in religion’ being killed. Islam also blatantly opposes oppression in every form no matter who it’s against but apparently these countries turn a blind eye to these situations.

All in all, the temporary ceasefire does not seem to be a cease of fire for Israeli forces who attacked a Palestinian mosque hours after the ceasefire was declared, but hopefully the violence finally decreases to a minimum so that children living in those areas aren’t awaken anymore in the middle of the night to see missile-made artificial sunsets or their neighbours house blown to rubble.

 

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Bibliography:

• https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/05/the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-is-likely-to-get-even-worse.html
• https://socialistorganizer.org/2017/08/10/1947-the-fourth-international-against-the-partition-of-palestine/
• https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/07/692088371/living-near-your-grandmother-has-evolutionary-benefits
• https://www.cdm.org/mother-tongue/
• https://electronicintifada.net/content/children-ptsd-and-future-palestine/452