What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?: What Does It Mean to Be a Muslim Writer?

For Immigrant Parents

Your father doesn’t appear

Your father doesn’t appear

in poems because it’s

your mother’s hands that feed

hungry mouths, your mother bouncing babies

on one knee, nudging bedroom

doors closed with the other. This poem

is for your father. White hair

sprouts out as he lies on the couch, in a dream

where your dream pans out because

he lived between two households so your mother

could give you remnants of home in

the kitchen, as everything she touches

makes it all okay again. This poem is for your

mother, whose voice whispers like a qul

before you lock the door behind you. You sit

solidly between two bodies, your sisters, one

grown up too fast, the other still growing,

you somewhere in the middle. Life follows

patterns. Step into an immigrant house. Fathers

are absent because they need to be.

 

About the author

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Ottawa and Mississauga, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.