I S S U E  8

Editorial

Naush Sabah

One of the first poems I had published was called ‘Heredity’ and took its epigraph from a poem of the same name by Thomas Hardy. Tony Harrison also has a poem called ‘Heredity’. It begins: ‘How you became a poet’s a mystery. / Wherever did you get your talent from?’ In the next lines, Harrison credits the ‘wound of inarticulacy’ in his family—an uncle with a severe stammer and another who was mute—with his passion for poetry and grasping at the ‘identity of poet’. My own poem fixes on the idea of hereditary inarticulacy too and uses the colour green and an inability to describe or name green things as a motif. Perhaps my trying to name kinds of green in that poem has something to do with the mild colour-blindness I inherited from my father and have passed on to my son. Perhaps it has something to do with the awareness that my mother couldn’t attend school or learn to read and write because she grew up in impoverished rural Kashmir among nothing but the green—the trees of the ‘jangal’, sloping hills on all sides, Mangla Lake visible between them in the distance. She had a supply of green I couldn’t have imagined in my own childhood—within a generation, our family exchanged it for the grey concrete and cement of Sparkbrook, Birmingham. I’d been disinherited of green by both parents and as Woolf wrote, ‘Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father’. With Harrison, I see the image of a flesh wound sprouting an obstinate green sapling and with Woolf, of the ‘horrid little abortion’ of a poem, a poet, that an era and certain circumstances can produce.

I returned to Kashmir with my mother and father while assembling this issue of the journal. Before I went, I was in correspondence with the poet who opens the issue, Nabeela Ahmed, about her work in our mother tongue, Pahari, and she kindly gave me some sightseeing and shopping recommendations. While driving through the winding roads around Mangla Lake to get from New Mirpur City to Dadyal, I passed through the village where Zaffar Kunial’s father lives and sent Zaffar a video of the landscape, which he recognised from time spent there in childhood. When Sabba Khan’s graphic novel The Roles We Play won the Jhalak Prize in May, I was thrilled not only because it’s a brilliant book but because she depicts, in moving illustrations and words, that same landscape of Mirpur and some of the painful history of its people’s displacement. My own grandfather migrated here from Kashmir in 1951 and yet it’s only now in 2022, despite being the largest contingent of what’s officially the Pakistani diaspora, that we can look around and find perhaps a handful of writers who’ve come in some way out of that poor, rural, Kashmiri background making and taking their place in the literature of this country. In their work, I sense the obstinacy of an urban sapling—the green that grew in inner-city England—but also a productive self-consciousness, hesitancy, deep attention to language itself, its sounds and histories, to images and their symbolism. There’s a preoccupation too with place, with the greens of place, with the lost places of memory—the ghosts of hedges, swings on trees, their shade. The central image on Sabba Khan’s book cover is of a tree-like growth in the place of a woman’s torso, grief growing out of the wound of familial memory.

Sometimes the lost place, Kashmir, famously lush and green, lives as a ghost in England among our diaspora, its image superimposed onto England’s own pleasant green (we see it in the rolling landscape of Yorkshire), its culture transposed into England’s drab grey (we keep it on life-support in England’s inner-cities, often to our own detriment). ‘All turbans round here now, forget flat caps!’ laments Tony Harrison’s dad, in ‘Next Door’, as he double locks his own doors. He’s not so different to the turbaned dads as a character; many of them were bolting their doors from the inside too lest their daughters swap shalwar kameez for mini-skirts; they, too, didn’t want to be the last of the ‘old lot’. That impulse to survive, to preserve, to pass on gives their minoritised, displaced cultures a remarkable force and persistence no matter how unwelcome they’re made to feel in Birmingham or Yorkshire. In diaspora, culture becomes Hardy’s ‘years-heired feature’ ‘that heeds no call to die’, though it can ossify in foreign soil instead of evolving naturally as it is concurrently in its native land. For the sons and daughters of such dads there’s a complicated middleness or hybridity, halfness or mixedness, unwholeness or doubleness to contend with.

My mind superimposed Chakswari and Mirpur, like a mask, onto the pastoral painting that provides PBLJ8 with its cover image. It’s a Birmingham painting though, a Midlands landscape—one that has disappeared along with the pastoral in poetry since we reside now and think with the city or the ignorant suburb (to borrow a little from Fisher and Abse). When this journal was founded three years ago in the buildings around Eastside Park in Birmingham, I was thinking about the urban pastoral, of trying to regain some of the green we’d been disinherited from. I was thinking of the lyric tradition as our birthright, the natural inheritance of diaspora poets, where the mother might be Asia, the music of her poetries a lullaby in our ears, and the English canon our austere father who perhaps we feel held at a distance from but are nonetheless the children, the heirs, of. After all, poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. Woolf quotes in the same chapter from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch who in naming the great English poets notes their social privilege and observes: ‘It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that . . . the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’

A dog’s chance, little hope, and the wound of inarticulacy are the best some have for a start in literature. It may not be enough to produce ‘great writings’ but perhaps it can still make something unexpected, sharp, and new—like this journal. A poem I wrote for Magma includes two false memories from childhood: one of my mother reading to herself from a prayer book (she couldn’t) and one of my father reading a bedtime story to me (he didn’t). Perhaps I invented them out of need. There weren’t books in my childhood home, so I don’t have many real memories involving them outside of school; the one that does stick in my mind is of a hardback I borrowed from the library as a young teen called Here Comes a Candle to Light You to Bed (by Maggie Prince). My dad found it lying in the lounge and threw it across the room, telling me I wasn’t to read fiction. When, many years later, I told my mom I was starting a part-time MA in Creative Writing, she disapproved and discouraged me from enrolling. Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father. It was during the MA that I had the idea for Poetry Birmingham. It started, I think, with a dog’s chance. What value it has now and what it has achieved since is for our readers to judge.

The sand between two concrete slabs doesn’t seem very fertile ground for growth and a sapling that takes root there is more likely to be scraped out by wire brush than nurtured. A mask and a double are sometimes necessary to eke out an individual creative existence, to branch out into something new, to move beyond the stifling weight of expectation, tradition, and consensus. To work and write with a sense of integrity, honesty, and openness, a highly developed sense of resilience to reproach is perhaps a distinct advantage. My dear friend Gerry Cambridge often reminds me that a journal is its editor. For a little magazine, run by one person rather than a larger organisation or committee, that is true enough. It’s the editor’s tastes, interests, vision, idiosyncrasies, temperament, and so on that colour their commissioning and editing; it’s their work that keeps it alive at all and when they cease doing their work, the journal ceases to exist. Nonetheless, an editor can only publish what they’re given by writers. Sparking a match and holding it to kindling are not the same as being the wood that burns to warm the hands reaching out.

This third-anniversary issue of the journal is our longest yet and it pleases me to have the writers with whom I co-founded the journal—Suna
Afshan, Adrian B. Earle, and Olivia Hodgson—back in its pages alongside the writers who work with me on it now: Ibrahim Hirsi and Sana Goyal. It gives me greater pleasure still to publish a significant new essay by Gregory Leadbetter, whose poems and writing on poetry are some of the most remarkable being published in this country today and deserve far wider attention and acclaim. I consider it a matter of providence to have found myself in Greg’s poetry seminar and it is apt now to be finishing this editorial on Father’s Day. Here’s a poem to mark the occasion:

Fathering

Better to have a whore for a daughter than a writer—
she’d sell only her own flesh at least and not the whole family’s.
Better to have died before seeing my first born become you—
what use an education or the ability to read if it leads one this astray?
Better the faith and dignity of the ignorant villager back home
than the godless, worldly, beghairati of this country.
Better the oppression of four walls where you were fed and safe
than the freedom of girls I’d taxi from Broad St on a Saturday night,
off their heads, out of their senses, being fondled by strangers,
being sick over themselves, prisoners to their own impulses like animals.
We didn’t come here to lose all shame and lose our religion,
to exchange that green heaven for this grey hell,
to earn damnation with wealth, to lose truth in modernity,
but those are the things you’re bent upon, determined to do.
What do you remember of anything? What do you know of our days?
I was fatherless at sixteen and when my mother died you knew so little
of grief that you laughed seeing me cry out in anguish on the phone.
I left my mother—Amma—and land and found myself jailed by immigration.
What do you know of the hatreds I endured from my own, from strangers—
and against what immeasurable solitudes and silences I stored up love
for you? Half-stories, one-sided, faded fragments are the best you have
and even those you tell with a serpent’s tongue and yourself at the centre,
an anecdote of my worst minutes over thousands of hours of placid patience.
If you had to tell them your own worst, they’d have an empty page for a poem.
Just your smaller infractions then: the bills for hundreds that we couldn’t pay,
the laziness, the arguments, the secret phone, bunking off college, all the lies.
Every day we were there, fathering and mothering you, and only that.
All the things you hate were my love, my devotion an inconvenience.
All the resentment and disrespect for giving you decades and hours,
for ferrying you to and fro, from that door to this, for the tears we cried
in front of you and alone, for every meal you ate, each cooked from scratch,
for every garment your mother washed by hand—back cracked over the bath—
for the way my heart clogged each artery, filled each chamber, for you all,
everything inside me blocked up and stuck in worry, in despair
over the way we lost you so utterly—some of you to these streets,
some of you to this country, some of you to yourselves—even now
each thought a fear for you, a prayer—Ya Rabb, guide them—and this pain
that I never seek an audience for, never tell as a story, never hold over you.
None of that is a spectacle, a plinth of bodies for the idol of your art.

19/06/22