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

Two Poems

In the streets of Al Nasiriyah / or was it Al Nassriyah?

Iftah Ya Simsim

In the streets of Al Nasiriyah

or was it Al Nassriyah?

Nasriyaah?

Bhai jaan, do you remember the bougainvillea vine

escaping our spiked garden wall?

The only son in the family

after maghrib you walked to the corner store

for freshly baked bread

What was it called Bhai jaan?

I forget

honeyed whole wheat

soft and warm like Ammi’s face on the days she chose to smile

They chased you as you ran home

the same boys hurled stones at us

with the righteousness of the permitted

“Hindi baba go home!”

Bhai jaan, I still wonder

who is Hindi Baba?

Did they mean Hindu babu?

Or bibi?

I imagine her as one of many nannies

beating wings against a marble drenched House of Saud

days spent living just outside the frame

a body with temporary papers

never quite in focus

Does she send back remittance payments

wrapped in endearments to her children?

meri pyari beti meri jaan

Do they screen her mail?

redact truth

continue to claim she’s “part of the family”

Bhai jaan, wasn’t there an Oum Kalthoum ballad

about a woman lost?

Or was it Fairuz?

Remember how they always played those old songs on TV

between Arabic Sesame Street

Iftah ya Simsim abwabak, nahn-ul-atfaal…

and the evening news

which never mentioned the Filipina maids

found dead at a construction site in downtown Riyadh

or the stoning of that woman in chop chop square

we stumbled across when shopping in the souk

I can’t understand the songs anymore Bhai jaan

despite Mrs. Leila’s daily school beatings

the letter ayn still wants to catch in my throat

my tongue a rebellion against the Arabic they forced us to learn

Bhai jaan

memories ghost by

trailing faint traces of blossoms

from the orange tree in the corner

I cannot remember when exile became home


Name Her Churail

Churail near a hill station. Churail in the jungle. Churail in the forest. Churail on a lonely path. A road in the dark. No one around for miles. Accosts a man. Accosts every man. Accosts every pious man. Is every man pious? Is maleness piety? Churail on a deserted path. A road forsaken by morality. Baarish suffocating the horizon. A pious man walks innocently down a road. Surrounded by the quiet bones of the night. Suddenly, a churail accosts him. A churail with breasts bared and heaving. Miles of bloodied nails clawing the air. Hair writhing and slithering. Reshmi zulfein running wildly into the sky. Red silk sari ripped to shreds. Eyes full of hunger and fury. There on the deserted road in the jungli darkness she allegedly accosts a pious man. A man who comes across a woman simply standing in the middle of a lonely street and names her, Churail.