Adeeba Shahid Talukder is a Pakistani American poet, singer, and translator of Urdu and Persian poetry. She is the author of What Is Not Beautiful (Glass Poetry Press, 2018) and her book Shahr-e-jaanaan: The City of the Beloved, forthcoming through Tupelo Press, is a winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize. Adeeba holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and is a Poets House 2017 Emerging Poets Fellow.
Artist’s Statement
As a Pakistani-American and neurodiverse poet, I am, at different times, both included in and excluded from my understanding of Self. My own thoughts elude me, though I have spent many years scrutinizing and pulling at their threads. My work resides in the Urdu poetic tradition but in the English language. My poems are still trying to understand themselves. So naturally, I have received criticism for my poems’ lack of “access.” It is the curse of being “other”— a rejection by those who hold power, but also their impatient curiosity.
To understand the perversity of many readers’ obsession with access, consider predominant Western attitudes towards Eastern countries, then consider, for instance, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted his imaginings of undressed Muslim women in The Turkish Bath (1862). From this dimension, the idea of access is vaguely colonialist and orientalist, where reading a poem becomes an act of conquest, and the intent goes from honest engagement to intellectual domination. When the reader begins to feel themselves deficient in this regard, it becomes a “sour grapes” situation, where the inaccessibility of a poem proves it lesser.
What if we were to interrogate our motives behind reading poetry? To quell the desire for control and humble ourselves before each poem? What if we were to restrain ourselves from “[tying] a poem to a chair with rope/ and [torturing] a confession out of it”?
Subh-e-firaaq:
Morning of Separation
You’re a saint, the mountain carver
told the lonely Shireen. More even
than stone.
He carved for her,
almost
a stream of milk. Then threw
himself off.
Fell, his limbs
with the leaves he clutched.
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Exotica: Three Poems
Ambrosia
He is a glass cup
in her hands;
she pours
wine, honey, and lime-
light. A thing
of beauty;
Conquest
he steals
a glance or two,
begins to stare—
she is the shape
of a woman. His
eyes are steel.
She blushes.
He moves closer,
demands her
secrets.
Domination
A cure for lust.
_________________________________________
On Beauty
When I was 19, I trembled
to meet men’s eyes.
Scarf, burqa, black
eyeliner. I was more
than Muslim,
more than beautiful,
more than sexual.
They wanted to know
what they could not
see.
~ ~
The cruel beloved of Urdu
poetry slays her lovers
with glances, leaves them
to languish, rubbing
their foreheads
in her doorstep’s dust. In this
intricacy is power:
I cannot lift
a suitcase, which means
I will never have to.
~ ~
James once wrote me poems
as Majnoon,
as the nightingale, as the prey.
I was engaged. Together,
we witnessed the snow consume
all of Ann Arbor,
picked it up in fistfuls, tossed
it up in the dark,
watched it fall like a spell.
He vowed to profess Islam,
as long as you know you’re the only god
I’ll ever worship.
~ ~
We cannot exist for long
at high energy levels.
Something, somewhere,
will collapse.
The beloved must remain
cruel, or this collapse
is all the more inevitable.
~ ~
You’re crazy, I’d say.
Not crazy, he would reply. Mad.
Mad— say, as a moth.
(He had read my poems.)
Like Patty Boyd,
I became Laila. I wrote
back. It lasted, perhaps,
a month.
~ ~
You see, these were not his
stories, nor Eric Clapton’s.
He did not know the
meaning of fanaa. He could not.
~ ~
The rose is still
as the nightingale sings.
As Majnoon howls
into the vast desert, Laila lies
on her bed, withering
in her own beauty.
As the moth circles the candle
in ecstasy, she is burning
herself down.
~ ~
Perhaps there is no
such thing as the evil eye,
or such a thing as God
in love.
Why, then, do the children
throw stones at Majnoon,
at the swan in Glencoe Lake?
How is it that I cannot see a trace
of beauty in the clear water?
~ ~
The lake thaws
and the winds gentle the grass,
but there is nothing in the air
to reach out and touch.
If I hadn’t told him, during an episode:
You are my everything—
if I hadn’t told him:
you’ll never understand, you’re white—
would he revolve around me,
beat his wings until I vanish?
~ ~
____________________________________
January 9th, 2008
What they call mania
is a mind
brilliant in darkness.
In you, Manhattan blinks.
No one hears your terror
at the East River,
how it beats
its head upon the rocks.
When you dethroned god
you saw the world
too vast, too heavy
to hold, and to learn this
was to learn wrath.
In these white rooms,
no one comes
to mourn your death,
then rebirth.
God, awake all night:
rest, rest.
You are weary,
and the world turns without you.
_________________________________________
Throne
God dissolves
your matter:
water and clay.
look how he crushes
your temple to dust,
builds Himself
upon its ruins.
do not despair;
you were made
for this.
prostrate, let
your tears
soften
your sound.
reflect: the spring,
the moon,
the chain of night
and day,
the gazelles’
torn flesh,
the water,
the water
as it falls into being.
in this sea, His dome — blue,
vast—is all
your worth.
so hold out your palms
like a beggar’s bowl,
hold firm above you
His calm heaven,
above your mind of breaking
branches, your mind
of cold mud.
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