The Knot of My Tongue: Prose and Poems by Zehra Naqvi

The Knot of My Tongue: Prose and Poems is a complex and rewarding read that has drawn me back to the poems repeatedly. With each reading I uncover yet another layer, and marvel afresh at how carefully this book is put together.

Marsiya are elegiac poems written to commemorate the valour of Hussein ibn Ali at the Battle of Karbala that took place on 10 Muharram in the year 68 AH in the Islamic calendar (680 CE in the Western calendar). Historically, marsiya were a popular verse-form in Lucknow, a city in what is now the State of Uttar Pradesh, India; it is also significant as a site of resistance, first as the epicentre of the Indian Rebellion of 1857, then as part of the 1916 Lucknow Pact, an agreement of co-operation between the Indian Congress and the Muslim League to demand political autonomy in India. Among the supporters of the pact was Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who would eventually become an ardent supporter of Pakistani independence and the country’s first governor-general after Partition in 1947. Lucknow was also a stronghold for supporters of the Khilafat Movement (1919–1922), which voiced political opposition to British efforts to dismantle the Ottoman Empire.

This wide-ranging and potted history of an elegiac tradition and the political world it exists in offers important background to some of the major themes and tropes that haunt this collection, for language, faith, the city of Lucknow, and migration (both forced and voluntary) lie at the heart of many of Zehra Naqvi’s poems.

The opening piece, “Majlis” (lit: lounge, but here also more generally a storytelling session), frames the collection beautifully, as it tells of the preparation for an epic recital of the story of the Battle of Karbala, in which the storyteller “speaks the dead into being.” Very quickly after that, the difficulties inherent in telling a story that encompasses the heartache of exile, enforced migration, the loss of language and the effort of finding it again, and the moments of sadness that come with living in a language that is not your own, become apparent.

The first few poems start and restart, constantly faltering in search of the right word or beginning. “Let us begin again” Naqvi writes, as she returns repeatedly to the Flood (“Deluge,” in the language of the Qur’an). In this time of her retelling, she informs the reader,

…all things wash ashore, polythene bags and dying whales, slave ships and nuclear warheads,

anthrax spores and mammoth bones, forgotten names and forgotten bodies reveal themselves anew.

The stories she foregrounds in her epic retelling are not the heroism of Hussein or other men, but the stories of the women who are often forgotten

When she finally does tell the story of Nuh (Noah), it is not his story that gets told, but that of a female speaker experiencing the approaching rain. An integral part of the several “new beginnings” is how it allows the author to tell and retell the stories of the mostly unnamed women of the Qur’an. The stories she foregrounds in her epic retelling are not the heroism of Hussein or other men, but the stories of the women who are often forgotten—Maryam, Hajar, Fatimah, Zainab, Begum Harzat Mahal…

Do not let the faltering start delude you. Naqvi is acutely aware of her own omissions and parodies herself constantly, calling to mind the opening of Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination (1972; trans. 1981): “This therefore would not have been a book … Let us begin again.” Yet in “Lines” she writes, “what if I don’t want to be postmodern—what if / I don’t want fragments but flow—” The fragmentation continues throughout, for this is the life of a refugee or an immigrant. In other poems, she relies on homophones and anagrams to tear language apart and recast it, make it new in ways that foreground the many violences of this world in which “all things wash ashore”: “hunger” is an anagram for “gun her”; “use” is an anagram for “sue.”

In “Tongue” (another central metaphor in the book), she extols the uses of her tongue: defiance, silence, rage, wailing. She continues by saying “what happens to my body is what happens to my tongue.” The poems in The Knot in My Tongue speak of the poet’s defiance, her anger, about the abuses her body is forced to endure not just as a woman but as an immigrant cut off from large portions of her history, including her language. There is a content tension between the power of words to defy, but also to submit.

The language of The Knot of My Tongue is sumptuous and the external allusions are manifold. The thrill of discovery awaits the reader on almost every page. The poems fold back on each other, both in structure and content, in thought-provoking ways. It is easy, on a first read, to overlook the deep history embedded in the poems, but uncovering the layers on subsequent re-readings is a joy.

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.

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart (March 26, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 96 pages
ISBN: 9780771014932

Peter Midgley

Peter Midgley is a bilingual writer and editor from Edmonton. Over the course of thirty years, he has worked as a freelance editor, festival director, university lecturer, managing editor, acquisitions editor, clerk of court, bartender, actor, janitor, and door-to-door salesman. This experience has given him enough material for more than a dozen books. His latest book, let us not think of them as barbarians (NeWest Press), was shortlisted for the Stephan G. Stephansson Award in 2019.

Peter Midgley

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