In the September of 2019, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan published her debut book of poetry, Postcolonial Banter. The book revolves around being British and Muslim. It asks whether this identity can be as simple as a hyphenated fact.
Five years down the line, with racist violence being unleashed on Muslims in Britain through late July and August, the book calls for a world that is radically different from the one we inhabit.
Postcolonial Banter is concerned with world-making as a response to the exclusion and death-making that create a hierarchy of human life– with Muslims somewhere near the bottom of this ladder.
The book begins with a poem that questions the power dynamics of performance. In getting to narrate, Suhaiymah asks, do we operate within worlds we create for ourselves, or do we fall back on racialised patterns of experience?
Performing poetry is tied up with the race relations of performer versus audience. Taking a step back and thinking about positionality and genre allows us to think about the political functions of the forms of art we choose– not just their content.
The book dwells on the dissociative nature of having a self that is constantly written, rewritten, and overwritten by white renderings:
“Didn’t you know white men invented everything?
I look in the mirror
and ask if I really know me if anyone does
because whose performance am I? and in what cage do I belong?”
Ways of Knowing and Archiving
In “Nana,” a poem about her grandfather, the poet dwells on the hope-giving features of death consciousness. In being subjected to loss throughout one’s life, closure is attained only by leaving the material world behind. Suhaiymah traces the traumas that can result in an affinity for death but also holds close an imagination of death as a “light-source” for the faithful. The poet speaks through alternate modes of knowing the world, she creates records of lives that exist along the margins of dominant narratives about topics of death and hope.
Suhaiymah thinks out loud about the tropes and stereotypes she wants to leave behind in telling the stories of Pakistani women, and locates herself in another tradition. She thinks about her mother and the kind of knowledge systems that exist outside the bound sterile walls of formal institutions:
“I do not know how to write us outside of fear, yet whispers and elisions and repeated mistakes
I wonder if our mothers promised they would not do the same.
I do not know how to write us outside of our mothers. How not to make reference to their spines and silences how to do it as more than a prelude to my own.”
In a poem titled “Where is my History?” Suhaiymah asks what gets to call itself an object of study, and whether these sources could ever be expansive archives. Could cataloguing women’s conversations and congregations be a part of what we call knowledge? What would the world look like if popular modes of legitimacy and history weren’t inventions of one race and gender?
Acts of Witnessing
In so many ways, the book is a love letter to all the brown women who have come before Suhaiymah. These are women who teach lessons in care and female companionship through word and deed. This book is also an act of seeing for girls who will not be witnessed except in the eyes of other Muslim women:
“Dearly beloved
this is for the women who’ve been spat at for their faith who’ve had
people cross the road over their faith
who’ve had buses filled with hate over their faith…”
Postcolonial Banter is a gift to Muslim women when we are sitting alone in a room full of chatter– spoken over, not spoken to, or spoken about. This book historicizes a melancholy that is not personal, one that was created over hundreds of years of race-making.
Suhaiymah’s book cuts through all the eyes that won’t meet yours to say, “I see you.”
