Author Note: Manahil Bandukwala
Manahil Bandukwala is the author of the poem “I Wait in an Airport Line with Dionne Brand” in The Puritan Issue 48, Winter 2020. As part of our author notes series, she talks about what went into making the poem.
“I wait in an airport line with Dionne Brand” started out as an assignment I had to turn in for a poetry class I took in Fall 2019. We were already a small class (it being poetry and all), and an even smaller number of people showed up. No surprise—even in an English program, poetry is confusing, intimidating, unexciting. I was the only poet in that class. Still, as the semester progressed, our class grew into a space of “yes, this is what I liked about this poem.”
One of our assignments was to write a response to poems we read each week, and this response could take the form of a poem. For the topic of postcolonial poetry, the lines from Dionne Brand’s poem, “Inventory” stuck out to me—“the militant consumption of everything” and “the eagerness to be all the same.”
I think a lot about passports and privilege. Another professor told us how writer Salman Rushdie said the most important book in his life was his passport. Getting my Canadian passport a year and a half ago—a goal achieved, a safeguard, a security net that, should something happen in the world, this passport would keep me safe.
An excerpt from my assignment: Brand’s poem takes place in a transit space. Transit spaces like airports and train stations put this notion of being neither here nor there into tangible terms.
I think a lot about postcolonialism. Of the continuing “post” in Kashmir, in Palestine, in so many parts of the world. When I started that class, Kashmir was under full curfew, and as I write this author’s note, only miniscule parts of the curfew have lifted. Poems on refugee and exile written 50 years ago still read so immediate right now.
In this class we spent a full lecture feeling like we’d barely scratched the surface of “The Glass Essay” by Anne Carson. Talked about the power and necessity of poetry through Warsan Shire’s “home.” Saw the world pulled together through the climate crisis in the collaborative video poem, “Rise,” by Kathy Jetnit-Kijiner and Aka Niviana.
And mostly, I think a lot about borders. What are borders but colonial constructions? “I wait in an airport line with Dionne Brand” grew out of this. The construction of borders and how strictly they are policed across the world. Who created them? Who enforces them? How does a national border legitimately keep citizens “safe”? And does this notion of “safe” even exist?
Manahil Bandukwala is an Ottawa-based writer, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of two chapbooks, Paper Doll (2019) and Pipe Rose (2018). She is on the editorial team of Canthius, a feminist literary magazine, and is Coordinating Editor for Arc Poetry Magazine. She was long-listed for the 2019 CBC Poetry Prize, and was the 2019 winner of Room Magazine’s Emerging Writer Award. Follow her multidisciplinary folklore project, Reth Aur Reghistan, on sculpturalstorytelling.com.