Postcolonial Banter

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

• Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781912565245
• eBook ISBN: 9781912565788
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Postcolonial Banteris Suhaiymah Manzoo-Khan's debut collection. It features some of her most well-known and widely performed poems as well as some never-seen-before material. Her words are a disruption of comfort, a call to action, a redistribution of knowledge and an outpouring of dissent. Whilst enraged and devastated by the world she finds herself in, in many ways it is also the mundane; hence, whilst political and complex in nature, her poetry is just the 'banter' of everyday life for her and others like her. Ranging from critiquing the function of the nation-state and rejecting secularist visions of identity, to reflecting on the difficulty of writing and penning responses to conversations she wishes she'd had; Suhaiymah's debut collection is ready and raring to enter the world.

1

THIS POEM IS NOT FOR YOU

this poem is not for you

you can’t wear it on your forehead

it won’t look good in your profile picture

and I know you wish it was more colourful already

but I’m sorry

this poem is not for you

not like the last one

which wasn’t for you either

but you told me was no good

told me to stop speaking it

told me you’d hurt me if I didn’t

then took it behind my back, didn’t you?

told your friends how you wrote it

well this poem is not for you,

I remembered not to write it down this time

though you’re no novice to stealing thoughts themselves, remember?

that time you flashing-light siren whip-downed my door

cut out my tongue

and told me yours was better?

yeah

I never found where the old one went

so now my grandma can’t always understand

and my God I wish I could write poems for her instead of you

my God

in a different language

mere Allah

do you remember the boys from school?

how you’d tell me their art was mud dark pretension way

below a C?

and the girls in the changing rooms?

you’d say poems are for the empty legs and tanned-not-brown

shoulder blades

well, this poem is not for you

and it isn’t for your sister either actually

cos we’re not

despite you telling me how similar we are

every time I see her

she looks straight through me

and my grandmother told me as well you know

how they used to laugh

your sisters with the now pierced noses

told her only animals do that

and she’ll never forget that time you left us by the water’s edge

her hands were full of it

and you said drink

work hard

goodbye

so we tried to

but my God the salt

and we only had our hands didn’t we?

only had our hands

tell me, could you hear our shouts by then?

my mother was screaming “go back where you came from!”

but there was no re-wombing of the sea

so we’re here now

where I’m telling you

this poem is not for you

but the number of times I’ve said it

makes me doubt it

and if it is for you

then at least let me tell you

don’t you dare file it away some place

don’t you dare blink-nod it into the “race” draw

or “mm”-scrunch-eye it into the “colonialism” cupboard

don’t token-applaud it into the “feminism” lever-arch

I can see you doing it now

this poem is beyond you

it will never sit on your skin the way my colour sits on mine

you will never find it fallen down the floorboards after ten years

you will never study it at gcse

and most of all

you will never feel it pass between you and a stranger in a way

that says

I understand

I wrote this poem for the first heat of the Roundhouse Poetry Slam, 2017. It stemmed from my frustration with poetry slams themselves because the last big slam (competition) I had been a part of made me very aware that slam poets often perform our identities and trauma for an audience to consume. To my mind this often means an overemphasis on racial trauma for the sake of applause (and specifically white audiences) and I felt frustrated thinking about how this interaction reproduces many problematic dynamics of people of colour ‘performing’ for white voyeurism, approval and consumption. This poem explores these feelings, drawing a parallel to the way so many aspects of our identities are only approved/applauded once filtered through whiteness or consumed by the white gaze.

WHERE IS MY HISTORY?

My history is imprinted in the spaces between the ink printed on

pressed pages

My history is the screams shouting out through the silent slots in

syllabi

it is caged in glass cases said to be for its own safety by the

institutions which narrate it as their own

because my history lies in the choices not recorded

about which stories should be hoarded

and called archives

and my archives

are the chicken shops

the taxi stops

the backseats of rentals

and inside hems of headscarves

women’s conversations

women’s congregations

women’s contemplations

which you won’t find in your local heritage site

No, cos my history is the shame of your history

the body buried in the back garden with no gravestone

but in fact not so shameful, no

For it is also adorning your proudest buildings

the ones I’m searched before entering

as if my bringing something in would be disturbing

as if my things weren’t already coveted and stolen

sorry, read: salvaged and reallocated

to make up these museums in the first place

It’s almost as if History is less about what happened

than maintaining ideology

‘cos when you investigate a story

with half the participants absent

and don’t worry about the translation

want only to fit the narrative to the nation

then is it surprising that what’s surmised

is that my history is not?

That my past is ‘culture’ and ‘ancient kingdoms’

never ‘politics’ or ‘philosophy’

My ideas are ‘religion’ and ‘oriental’

‘tribes’, ‘norms’,...

Table of contents

• COVER
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
• CONTENTS
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT VERVE POETRY PRESS