The Intertwinement of Silence and Language: A Conversation with Zehra Naqvi

It is always a fascinating experience for me to be in conversation with poets.

It is always a fascinating experience for me to be in conversation with poets. With poetry, there is less rigidity about structures of language which creates so much space for exploration—both in crafting a poem but also, in receiving it as a reader.

As much of poetry is subjective and feels abstract, for me to pick up a poetry collection, there must be something in its description that resonates with me at an emotional or spiritual level. When I came across the synopsis of The Knot of My Tongue by Zehra Naqvi, I related very much to the central concept of the collection: the experience of losing the ability to express oneself, to speak. Perhaps there was a part of me that wanted to heal from the compounded silencing in my own experiences. How did all the characters in the collection learn to speak again? What could I learn from them? Could silence in some situations be a remedy?

I also find it fascinating when historical characters and stories are integrated in stories told in the present, and when we stretch the dominant cultural paradigms through which we understand poetry, for sometimes alternative forms can capture diverse experiences/stories more authentically.

As I read Zehra's poems, I felt multiple access points into my being open up. There is capacity in this collection to reach great depths of aloneness in the reader—to be seen, heard, healed in some way. I was left both speechless and eager to discuss.

Although Zehra and I worked on this interview over email due to differing time zones and family responsibilities, there was an organic unfolding of questions and answers. Part of this, I believe, speaks to the power of The Knot of My Tongue to explore what it sought out to explore.


Sumaiya Matin: Congratulations on publishing The Knot of My Tongue! This is a huge accomplishment. Before we delve into this collection, I’d love to know—when were you first called to poetry?

Zehra Naqvi: The first poem I wrote was probably a very short noha for a women’s Muharram majlis hosted at my childhood home in Karachi. I might have been six years old. I had written it in Romanized Urdu. A noha is recited in a call and response style. The reciter sings out the verse and the gathering (or a chorus of reciters) repeats it back. Usually, people recite nohas composed by well-known noha-khawans and do not recite their own compositions. But I wanted to write my own.

I ended up getting stage fright when my turn came, so my mother, who had accompanied me to the front of the room, ended up reciting my noha (for my mother’s sake, I hope it was clear to the gathering that a six-year-old had written those verses). The marsiyas and nohas of the Urdu majlis were my formative introduction to poetry—elegiac, oral, and communal.

Sumaiya Matin: How do you start the process of writing a new poem?

Zehra Naqvi: Each poem is different. Generally, I have to be in a certain state of mind to be able to receive poems. While there’s always an element of spontaneity, I have to actively create the conditions to allow for a poem to occur. This can look like reading poetry, taking walks, immersing myself in the materials that I want to use for a poem, or just sitting down before the page with the intention to write. Usually, a poem begins with an image or a line, and then finds its own form. Sometimes it’s a question, or something else entirely—like an impulse.

There are a couple poems in the collection that I wrote during morning writing sessions with a friend at a coffee shop in Toronto. If I hadn’t set that time apart to write, these poems might not have come into existence. I also find that writing one poem often leads to more. That once I’m actively practicing that muscle, there’s less effort required and I don’t always have to be intentional—lines will come to me while walking, showering, when I’m drifting to sleep. There are also phases when I cannot write new poems and I have to know when to submit to the silence and wait.

SM: Speaking of lines that come to you, would you be able to speak about the genesis of The Knot of My Tongue?

ZN: I began putting this collection together after experiencing a sudden loss of vocabulary and extreme difficulty in putting sentences together—in writing and in conversation. Something about syntax and grammar stopped working for me. I slowly recovered, but I became fascinated by the way language and silence are so intertwined. Silence shapes and gives language meaning. And silence is often born out of rupture and moments of aloneness. The central speaker of many of the poems in the collection has gone through physically traumatic experiences which result in the rupture of self, language, memory and time. Linearity collapses. Everything bleeds into each other.

I had initially thought I would write a creative non-fiction essay, but I found poetry to be better at holding fragmentation and silence. I wanted to explore losing and finding language from multiple overlapping angles—loss of language as a result of colonial violence, patriarchal violence, displacement, grief.

I was also interested in stories and experiences beyond my own. That’s how language works. It is a shared phenomenon. It is inherited. When we engage in language, we dip into shared sounds, images, stories, conversations, tradition, community, collective memories. We enter intergenerational time. With this collection, I wanted to find language for the loss of language.

SM: As you’re sharing this, I’m recalling that in previous interviews, you mentioned that the title The Knot of My Tongue was influenced by the story of Prophet Musa, or Moses, who had a speech impediment. In the Supplication of Musa, he asks God to remove the knot from his tongue. I’m curious about how you connect or relate to this story as an artist.

That’s how language works. It is a shared phenomenon. It is inherited. When we engage in language, we dip into shared sounds, images, stories, conversations, tradition, community, collective memories. We enter intergenerational time.

ZN: Part of Musa’s struggle is also overcoming fear and intimidation before the powerful Pharaoh. The Supplication of Musa also refers to the tightness of his chest, his racing heart, the need for reassurance and courage. He seeks power from a source that is more powerful than the oppressor. I, too, have needed courage beyond myself. In the gaps of language due to violence, due to migration, due to the double silencing of Islamophobia, I don’t know how to rely on myself completely for strength and healing. I have found comfort in accessing language that is already out there to strengthen these gaps. Musa’s supplication is an example of such language.

The stories of Karbala are another example. For me, the courage to express comes from the Creator or something greater than ourselves. And sometimes you have to feel powerless or entirely alone in the world to experience that special grace that exists all around us. That’s the place where I find language.

SM: There is a spirituality in this collection that really resonates with me. As the reader, I was a witness to but also a participant in the abrupt silences, and the filling in of those moments with stories that arrived with particular forces of their own. There was a sense of surrendering to the poems.

What I also find fascinating about this collection is that the reader is taken on a journey through multiple historical contexts, geographical locations, as well as inner terrains. The intricate weaving of these various contexts demonstrates the capacity of language to connect and overcome mental and physical divisions. Would you be able to speak more on this?

ZN: I believe we all make sense of the world through a multitude of overlapping timelines and places. We move through experiences carrying multiple histories and geographies with us—the stories we’ve been told since childhood—religious, mythological, family histories. All of these things shape us, they become part of our memory. These non-linear inner terrains melt into each other and shape our desires, our languages, our sense of being. Other people’s experiences inform our own.

My strongest childhood memories are not necessarily memories about me, but of listening to and inhabiting stories told to me by my elders—my grandmother, my parents, elders at the mosque—stories about Lucknow, Karachi, stories from the Quran, stories about Karbala. All these characters shaped my world and my vocabulary. Language isn’t restricted to a singular space or moment in historical time. When the self is wrenched apart, these are the things that are set adrift. And perhaps that is what you try to gather and inspect in the aftermath.

SM: I believe your exploration of non-Western forms helped facilitate that sense of immersion I experienced while being taken on the journey across various terrains. I love that you’ve incorporated aspects of the ghazal and marsiyas and nohas and included Quranic references and translations. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this practice of blending poetic forms and devices that deviate from the mainstream and classical Western styles of poetry.

What was this process like for you? Are there other poets who have attempted the same, that have inspired you? Where do you see this exploration sitting in the broader Canadian literary landscape?

ZN: Thank you for noticing this. I wanted to write in forms that were orally familiar to me. I had to translate that familiarity onto the page. You have to train your Anglicized writing to hear and speak through your own languages, your own particular soundscapes and forms on the English page. I learned a lot by reading Agha Shahid Ali. His ghazals beautifully capture the cadences and sounds of Urdu, Persian, and Arabic literary traditions. There’s passion in his lines that feel very Urdu to me. The contemporary mainstream aesthetic is one of restraint and withholding, which is not the case with the Urdu marsiya. I was moved to find how, Shahid too, turns to Karbala and Zainab in his elegiac poems about his mother’s death and the journey back to Kashmir in his collection Rooms Are Never Finished: “In every home, although Muharram was not here, / Zainab wailed. Only Karbala could frame our grief.”

There’s a long lineage of writers from colonized places breaking open the possibilities of the English language and making it carry non-European sounds and forms. Indigenous writers, Black writers, diasporic writers. Toni Morrison, when asked about accessing memory from ancestors in her writing, responded that even though her whole education had been to dismiss such ways of knowing, when she began to write, that’s where she had to go: “That’s where the information was, that’s where the images were, that’s where the language, the colour came—in these folktales, attitudes, the normal, easy acceptance of signs.”

SM: Speaking of the long lineage of writers who are opening up the possibilities of the English language, it was fascinating to read the notes and references section of your collection. It really demonstrated how our own art is often a conversation with other artists and works, and how rarely, our subconscious creates in isolation. I’d love for you to speak more on this—what or who do you see your work, and you as an artist, in conversation with?

ZN: I agree—writing is a relational act. Making sense of grief, loss, of finding language for our darkest and most despairing moments occurs not just through finding the right words to articulate ourselves, but by turning to art, literature, poetry, stories that give voice to our unspoken experiences. With this collection, I was not necessarily trying to write something new but returning to the stories that had existed before me—of women who felt alone, who were abandoned or silenced, who survived violence. Rather than trying to be original, I wanted to resurface these stories. I needed to hear them, their voices. I was in conversation with oral stories about Karbala, stories from the Quran, myths featuring women survivors, as well as poets and writers like Mohja Kahf, M. NourbeSe Philip, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Leah Horlick, Safia Elhillo, Fatimah Asghar, and Urdu poets such as Kishwar Naheed and Fehmida Riaz.

I wanted to be in conversation with writers who could give me language for the double silencing I experienced both as a woman and as a Muslim growing up in a highly Islamophobic country. I’m protective about my community, and I hesitated to speak about patriarchal violence because I belong to an already demonized identity. Violence against women has been weaponized to justify imperialist wars against Muslims for centuries, to demonize Muslim men, to invade our homelands, rip apart our communities, despite the fact that instances of violence against women is a phenomenon prevalent within most societies, including Euro-American. Gayatri Spivak writes about “white men saving brown women from brown men” in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Islamophobia further marginalizes and silences Muslim women and gender minorities.

With this collection, I was not necessarily trying to write something new but returning to the stories that had existed before me—of women who felt alone, who were abandoned or silenced, who survived violence. Rather than trying to be original, I wanted to resurface these stories. I needed to hear them, their voices.

I also really resonated with the way Leah Horlick in For Your Own Good and Carmen Maria Machado in In The Dream House describe the fear and shame around writing about violence within queer relationships. It feels more difficult to speak up because you also want to protect your marginalized community. I also thought a lot about Audre Lorde’s poem “Who Said It Was Simple” where she writes: “But I who am bound by my mirror / as well as my bed / see causes in colour / as well as sex / and sit here wondering / which me will survive / all these liberations.”

SM: That is so incredibly refreshing—turning to stories that already exist, to give language to unspoken experiences—as opposed to looking to create something new. The way you incorporated the stories of religious historical figures and contexts gave me, as the reader, a certain immediacy, intimacy, and relatability to what may often feel inaccessible. This to me, was incredibly healing. There was an essence of Rahm/womb/mercy/love. Would you be able to speak more on this and how the concept of Rahm influenced your writing of the poems?

ZN: My friend and teacher Seemi Ghazi first pointed out to me that the name of God, ar-Rahman, comes from the root word “rhm,” which means womb. This invocation of a Creator who is maternal, merciful, a source of safety and a nurturer of life is the only kind of Creator that makes sense to me. In many Islamic stories, you see how Allah and Allah’s creation turn to protect the marginalized, the ones abandoned or alone. The orphan, the single mother, the vagrant, the prisoner. A spring gushes forth, a tree rises, the ocean folds over, insects and animals come forth to protect. It’s a very communicative world—witnessing, responding and reacting to suffering. I’d like to believe in a Creator who speaks through the ants, the spiders, the rivers, the womb, who you find in moments of both heartbreak and joy, in moments of aloneness and moments of gratitude.

SM: I couldn’t agree with you more—that it indeed is a communicative world. The Knot of My Tongue prompted me to take a moment and pay attention to even the most minute, undetectable reverberations from the living, moving world around me.

Sometimes the exploration of religious themes or linguistic diversity within a poem may be intimidating because without context, readers may be divided from the essence of a poem. Furthermore, so much can get lost in translation. How did you navigate nuance?

ZN: This was a concern I had from the beginning. I want my work to feel accessible, and yet I always want to be true to the integrity of a poem—to write it in the “true” way. Canisia Lubrin, my poetry editor at McClelland & Stewart, helped me see that if you have to explain the poem in order for it to function, then the poem isn’t working. In order for a poem to be successful, it needs to function on multiple registers. One shouldn’t have to understand all the references in a poem to fully experience it. There’s sound, rhythm, image, and resonance that a poem creates. I have to let the poem live its own life with its reader.

There are also some lines in the book I was afraid of including because I felt if taken out of context, they could be misconstrued and misused. And now that the book is out there, it actually happened once, and it hurt me to see my words read in this way. I don’t have an easy answer to this. Literature is open to interpretation and sometimes that includes misinterpretation. A writer has to learn to sit with that.

SM: Thank you for speaking about this—the discomfort of sitting with one’s work being misinterpreted/misunderstood post publication. Who do you see as the main audience for this poetry collection?

ZN: Books have a way of finding all kinds of audiences so I wouldn’t want to restrict this book to a particular audience. However, while writing the collection, I had some of my closest friends in mind—a group of South Asian Muslim women I had been living with while studying at Oxford. Many of these poems grew out of our conversations. I needed to feel a sense of safety and intimacy in writing the poems. I did not want to have to explain myself or censor myself in fear of the Islamophobic gaze. I wanted to write and speak as I would write and speak to fellow Muslim women. But I do not think this collection is restricted to Muslim women.

SM: I’m going to insert a question here about structure, as I think structure can have such a powerful impact on delivering to the intention of a collection or how a collection is absorbed by a reader. The Knot of My Tongue is divided into five sections, and each section includes poems that are sculpted with varying organization of line breaks, punctuation, and pauses. What was your thought process in deciding how to section the overall collection? What aided your approach in structuring each individual poem?

ZN: I wanted there to be a narrative arc to the collection, but it wasn’t immediately clear to me how to create that arc. Canisia also helped me in tightening the collection and guided me toward finding its form and structure.

I began to see the entire collection as a kind of river—the opening section beginning tightly at the mountain. Each section in the middle is a tributary extending out into different directions. The epigraphs and untitled prose sections at the beginning of each section gesture toward the questions and concerns of the section in relation to language—colonial violence, the intersectionality of patriarchal and colonial violence in a marginalized community, loss of self, community, friendship, and ritual. The last section widens into a kind of delta with its sections about pilgrimage collapsing different moments and histories together. Here, I wanted the lines to be longer, flowing, full sentences. However, each individual poem determined its own form based on what it was trying to do and what it needed to be—quick and compact, contemplative and spaced out, conversational and direct, or languid and slow.

SM: We’ve discussed this process you underwent finding language for the loss of language. I’d like to zone in on loss or erasure of language as byproduct of displacement and/or migration, as well as the desire to preserve and honour language.

In the book, you explore, through poetry, how language was/is continually being erased, and specifically with the migration of your family for two generations. For example, in your poem “forgetting urdu,” which won Room Magazine's 2016 poetry contest, you write:

rinse and repeat. rinse and repeat. rid and repeat. how do i write rebellion when i can no longer read it? the barbed wire of Angrezi wound around by tongue bleeds words that are not my own. there is amnesia in my fingers as they trace …

As a Bangladeshi Canadian, I can certainly relate to the erasure of and desire to preserve language. In my own literary memoir, The Shaytan Bride, I write about migration from India to East Pakistan during Partition, which you also explore in your poems, the 1971 Liberation War (which led to the creation of the separate country of Bangladesh), and later, emigration to Canada. The displacement that comes with migration often leaves one grieving and searching.

I’d say that, ironically, you have preserved language and heritage through the act of writing and giving words to the wordless. I would love to know your thoughts on this—what is the relationship between your act of writing this collection and the larger legacy of migration in your family, which were accompanied, to an extent, by loss of tradition and language?

ZN: So many communities have faced and continue to face tremendous loss of life, language, place, culture due colonial violence. But what do we do in the aftermath? There’s no going back to what you had before exactly how you had it. So, you fight for what remains, you build from what you have left, you honour and remember the past, even if you cannot fully return to it.

When I go back to Karachi, it is difficult to imagine the neighbourhood as it was in my childhood. Most of my cousins and aunts and uncles have moved away amidst the multiple waves of political and economic crises. If I were to go back to Lucknow, I wouldn’t know it. I have watched many diasporic migrants longing for the past, nostalgic for a time when they were rooted. But they also plant themselves again where they are and where it is possible. Many of us do that by forging new communities from the old places, of finding our tongues through new, hybrid languages. There may be a loss of language, but we are not without language. There might be loss of traditions, but we are not without tradition.

So many communities have faced and continue to face tremendous loss of life, language, place, culture due colonial violence. But what do we do in the aftermath? There’s no going back to what you had before exactly how you had it. So, you fight for what remains, you build from what you have left, you honour and remember the past, even if you cannot fully return to it.

Writing some of these poems was an act of emplacement, of creating a place for myself on the page. This is what I left, this is what I remember, this is what has been passed down to me. I want to honour it through the language I have and create something that is alive to the present and leaves room for an after.

SM: One of the communities currently struggling with displacement are Palestinians. With all that’s happening in Gaza, what barriers and opportunities do you see for us, as poets, writers, or readers of poetry in finding language to respond to the suffering we are noticing on a global scale?

ZN: There are certainly limits to language and to writing. A poem cannot rebuild a bombed home or stop an airstrike. There are material actions required of us all, including writers—bodies on the ground resisting, boycotting, and divesting. I’m quite inspired by grassroots movements led by writers and artists such as Crips for eSims for Gaza and Workshops 4 Gaza that are directly and materially supporting Palestinians in Gaza.

At the time, a key component of colonial violence is political language that manufactures consent for genocide—prevaricating language, dehumanizing language, evasive language, language that obfuscates, lies, strips words of their meaning, defends the indefensible, spreads propaganda and jingoism. As writers, our work is then to combat such destructive language with language that restores meaning to language—language that is truthful, courageous, clear, and reflects reality. Language that defends what must be defended and amplifies the voices being silenced. There’s a reason the Israeli military has long been targeting Palestinian journalists and writers. Language that holds the colonizer accountable and that reveals the truth is immensely powerful.

SM: Thank you for highlighting this. As writers, we have agency, as does the language we choose to use.

I noticed that you have two degrees in migration studies and social anthropology. How does this background influence your writing, and particularly in The Knot of My Tongue?

ZN: I think it has been the other way around—my concerns as a writer influenced my desire to pursue these degrees. The questions I have as an academic are closely tied to my questions as a poet. What does it mean to belong or not belong? What are the forces at play that shape the movement, migration, and mobility of human and more-than human life? When I pursued the migration studies degree after my Bachelor’s in English and Creative Writing, I was frustrated by how slow and removed literary studies felt from the urgent crises facing migrants. I thought I wanted to go into policy, to be more directly involved. I found, however, how bureaucratic and limited the policy world can be. Policymakers often have to pander to populist sentiment. I realized how key cultural work is to birthing the world I want to see. The arts shape how societies think, our values, what we care about, what matters. They inform policies. I found myself coming full circle, and realized that writing truthfully might be the most useful thing I could personally offer.

At the time, a key component of colonial violence is political language that manufactures consent for genocide—prevaricating language, dehumanizing language, evasive language, language that obfuscates, lies, strips words of their meaning, defends the indefensible, spreads propaganda and jingoism. As writers, our work is then to combat such destructive language with language that restores meaning to language—language that is truthful, courageous, clear, and reflects reality.

SM: Before we wrap up, I imagine many readers, especially those looking to publish, may be interested in learning about your overall publishing journey. What did that look like?

ZN: Full of uncertainty, anxiety, and immense gratitude. I wrote the first draft of the collection immediately after graduating from Oxford. I had this limited pot of savings from freelance work and from my scholarship, and I decided to just give myself the time to write this book. It was difficult to find myself outside of the security of an institution. I was fortunate that the opening section of the book won the Bronwen Wallace Award. That was a huge break. It brought attention to my work and led to the publishing deal.

McClelland & Stewart had been my dream publisher but I had been too terrified to send my draft in. Canisia encouraged me to submit. I remember the first conversation I had with her, and I was just amazed at how well she understood where I was trying to go with the collection, what I was struggling with, and her suggestions for how to go about improving the manuscript. I immediately knew I wanted to learn from her. I loved working with her and the entire team at M&S. I really lucked out. Even after signing the contract, I kept thinking they might change their mind. To this day, I pinch myself a little to make sure it’s real.

SM: What is next for you?

ZN: I am at work on my second book. It’s a prose project and heading in directions that are quite outside of my realm of expertise, so I’ve had the chance of doing research into disciplines and topics previously unfamiliar to me, which I’m really enjoying.

About the authors

Sumaiya Matin is a writer living in Alberta, Canada. She is the author of the literary memoir The Shaytan Bride: A Bangladeshi Canadian Memoir of Desire and Faith (Dundurn Press, 2021). A Master of Fine Arts (in Creative Writing) candidate at the University of British Columbia, Sumaiya is passionate about exploring the intersection of literature and mental health. Follow her writing journey on her website or on Instagram @sumaiya.matin.

Zehra Naqvi is a Karachi-born writer raised on unceded Coast Salish Territories (Vancouver, BC). She is a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers awarded by the Writers’ Trust of Canada. Her poem “forgetting urdu” was the winner of Room’s 2016 Poetry Contest. Zehra has written and edited for various publications internationally. She holds two MSc degrees in migration studies and social anthropology from Oxford University where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar. The Knot of My Tongue is her debut poetry collection.