Daljeet: This podcast contains themes that some listeners may find upsetting - listener discretion is advised. Welcome to Spoken Truth to Power, I'm your host, Daljeet, and in this episode two poets across borders will be performing their original spoken word pieces around the theme of intergenerational mental health. Shagufta Iqbal from the UK will perform her poem ‘Flooding’ and Megha Rao from India will perform her piece ‘Homegrown Blade’. Their performances will be followed by an in-depth discussion they had with me about the themes they've addressed in their work. So, sit back, relax and enjoy their beautiful performances.
Shagufta: Hi, I am Shagufta K Iqbal, I am the founder of The YoniVerse Poetry Collective and Kiota Bristol. I'm a writer, workshop facilitator and TEDx speaker. One of Asiana Magazine’s favourite British poets, my poetry collection ‘Jam Is For Girls, Girls Get Jam’ has been recommended by Nikesh Shukla as ‘a social political masterclass’. My poetry film ‘Borders’ has won several awards and it’s been screened across international film festivals.
I'm very, very passionate about using art and storytelling in all its forms to tell the most pressing stories that we face as humans. My work is concerned with looking at underrepresented narratives and how we can make global conversations include the experiences of overlooked communities, particularly on the discourse of climate change.
I'm currently writing my second poetry collection on the theme of food politics, of course, and a debut novel about human relationships and migration. I'm based part-time in London and part-time in Bristol and, I'm going to be sharing my poem ‘Flooding’.
Flooding
Milk, haldi, makyoum,
Today the smell of ambla teil
hangs in the bathroom
I am stood in front of the mirror
I tie my daughter’s hair
Pull strands into my fist
Spread the thickness of oil into the sky.
Here, let us farm harvest seasons
On other days
our feet are held angular against
The wildflower story of a rug
The sound of a drum
a double tap through our achilles.
Some mornings I swallow a rising sun
And the slickness of Punjab falls from my lips
Challo, utoah, nashtah koa,
But by evening my tongue suffers memory loss
By nightfall Punjab only peppers our sentences
Like salt pink stars I pour onto our meals
We want chavval not rice Mum,
Chavval
I make them chavval not rice,
Chavval
I fry onions
Soak my grandmothers kank
Into an ikea mixing bowl
Bubbles froth over a technique
that I no longer know.
She holds it in her hand with her sickle,
Corn stalks in the other hand,
This is where I become uprooted
Learn that it is women’s work too
My grandmother is the land,
I see her sat squat,
Her weight on her heels
Holding the earth between her toes
Behind her the sun dries chillies heaped like graves
A mountainous piling under the heat
These are the ones who feed the nation
before they feed themselves
And here I am struggling to take care of just myself
everyday I seem to forget to take in air
Four walls and inner city,
I try to germinate on windowsills
Under stained glass
But lockdown is a series of weeks
Left abandoned in a hot thick river
We wait for it to float onto a bankside
Where there is a border
As shallow as a paddy field
As invisible as a ghost
But tangible enough to
Separate our prayers.
Yet our bodies beat their hearts
And their truths are caught in our throats
And all the temples lie empty
And all the poetry speaks itself into silence
And our farmers are bleeding into the fields
And their lives are tossed into the air like grain
And you catch it like a stone,
And you swallow it whole
And it is a crack against your jaw
And I try to remind myself that Punjab is water
Punjab is water
But these days her tongue is dust and draught
She is the tired queue outside a foodbank
And there is a song on her lips
that is no longer a ghost
she is the pages of a prayer
that we keep calling out to
Kiton qubran wichon bol
Tey ajj kitab-e-ishaq daa
Koy agla warka phol
Ikk royi sii tee Punjab di
Tu likh likh maareyn wain
Ajj lakhaan teeyyan rondiyan
Tenu Waris Shah nu kain
Ve dard-mandaa de
Dardiya
Utt tak apna Punjab
Ajj bailey lashaan bichiyaan
Tey loaw di parhriya chenaab
Ajj Ankha Waris Shah Nu
Kiton qubran wichon bol
Tey ajj kitab-e-ishaq daa
Koy agla warka phol
Look,
Look, mum
In our living room
My children lift palms
Up, towards the sky
Look mum, it’s Bhangra,
The harvest dance.
As I watch my children
I sow myself
into the image of their limbs
that move like a small flood.
We plant ourselves into hope
Hold onto healing like my grandmother’s hands
Like a muscle memory,
like a cold river, an open wound.
Thank you for spending time to listen to my work and thoughts. I know it's been hard to engage with some of the big conversation this past year, it's not been easy for us as we've lost so many loved ones in such a short space of time. I guess the thing we take away from it all is the sense of holding onto these stories and the lives that these people have left behind, and to reexamine how we live our lives and how we value the ones that we love while they're still here with us.
And I guess more than anything this year, we know the true meaning of what it means to be held, to be kissed, to share intimacy with our families and our communities. I guess on that note, I'd say we've done pretty well. We've survived it.
Megha: Hi, I’m Megha Rao, I'm a spoken word poet and you can find out more about my art on my website megharao.in. So I'm currently working on my podcast, ‘Poems To Calm Down To’, which is also the number one poetry podcast in India, and I’m also working on my upcoming poetry book, ‘Feeding’. Yeah, that’s what it’s called, which will be published by HarperCollins this year. I live in Bombay and also in Kerala, because the first one is the city of my dreams and the other, my safe space. The title of the piece that I'm going to perform now is called ‘Homegrown Blade’.
‘Homegrown Blade’
Mother tells me the story of why
we don’t live in our village anymore,
it’s this old folklore
how after being exiled from her own family,
my great grandmother carried her daughters,
two on her hips and one on her back,
never once looking back
and walked all the way from Mangalore to Trivandrum,
almost covering a distance of six sixty kilometers and then some
and the only time she stopped in between
was when she needed strangers to be maps
or when she had her period cramps
now legend has it
my grandmother cut her own umbilical cord
hospitals weren’t things she could afford
and when her boy was stillborn,
she buried him on her own
and nobody ever talked about how she put up a big fight
showed up every night
with her breast milk
hoping she could console the baby crying in its grave
something she just couldn’t save
and the rest of them called her possessed and mad
because they weren’t up for someone who was just sad
and that’s why when my mother couldn’t get out of bed one day
everyone called her lazy and insane
because depression is for rich White people,
let that sink in little by little
because my mother had grown up brown and worrying about paying bills
deep down salivating over coloured television and foreign pencils,
there was no way in hell she could ever be broken
but here she was, weeping every day, so broken
the woman she used to be, her weight, her hair, her drive, all gone
it felt so wrong
singing the same lullabies our female ancestors sang
bracing herself for that frequent guilt pang
that if we trace back family trees
it’ll leave us with a sense of unease
because at some point, we disappoint
at some point, someone among us was the product
of normalized hushed up martial rape or child marriage
it’s not so easy to forget and turn that page
forget the first time my grandmother told
me about how she was only thirteen when my thirty-
year-old grandfather came looking for brides
thirteen when she traded textbooks for horoscopes,
school bags for suitcases, family for strangers
and voices for silences, absences for violences
forget the first time she said the only difference
between a procession heading towards a crematorium
and one walking towards a man’s house was
how much gold a corpse could wear
how much pain a girl could bear
but the day they taught us to be daughters,
we taught ourselves to be weapons, spot changing leopards
short haired gunfights, fundamental human rights
jumping around bonfires with our heartbreaks as chokers
never losing focus
right from the start we were collateral damage
the dowry was just a fine for all that extra baggage
sitting in my therapist’s room talking about how this boy in my class said women are hypersensitive and dramatic
emotional and fanatic
but I am the love child of women who rose from the hard earth
wearing the rain and the rock, the harsh dirt
the night is my blood,
and so mine is the story of blood.
They had to cut my mother up for me to get here
and they will have to cut me up too someday
for someone else to get here
I am the love child of women who wanted to stop
the baraat and ride away on their grooms’ horses
of dreams unfulfilled generation after generation
their hungry ghosts trapped in this dimension.
And I know poets before, and poets after
have written about grief as if it were a blue bruise,
but I am loud about my mania, my so-called screw loose
and so there are no quiet metaphors about healing softly
only epics about dragging my body out of the dark brutally
because mine is a story of women ancestors and their suppression
bursting out like a long forgotten siren call, with trumpets and percussion
mine is a story of fantastic festivals and lights
of mind-blowing dancing in neon tights
of strutting through trauma and turmoil like
I was a performer and my future self, the audience
a standing ovation is obvious
and I know some of us never made it here to tell this story
never had a safe space or their own territory
but I hope that for as long as they lived
despite the days of hollowness they survived
that through all that they still had days they felt so alive, so
outrageously, magically alive,
so fabulously, overwhelming alive
so magnificently, phenomenally alive
that the very sound of their pulse was hypnotizing enough
to lead the people who tried to kill them,
even for just a moment – to their graves
that the sound of their pulse was so gloriously beautiful
that it still echoes somewhere in this universe
watching out for me decade after decade
reminding me every day not to be afraid
because nothing can slay me –
I’m homegrown blade,
a legacy of grenade.
Thank you for staying on to the end. I just wanted to leave you with a small prayer. Last year was really, really harrowing for all of us, so I hope this one is full of hope, beauty and magical things for you. May there be wonders ahead, no matter how difficult the road gets, and may you always find joy and know that you have always, always, always deserved it. Have a good year.
Daljeet: Hello and welcome to Spoken Truth to Power podcast funded by Arts Council England. I'm your host, Daljeet, and today I'll be speaking with poets Shagufta Iqbal from the UK and Megha Rao from India, who are both commissioned by Culture Studio to explore the concepts of intergenerational, ancestral, and collective pain in their poetry pieces.
Daljeet: Hello girls!
Megha: Hi
Shagufta: Hi
Daljeet: I just wanted to introduce both of them and their wonderful work. So, Shagufta is the founder of The YoniVerse Poetry Collective and Kiota Bristol. She is an award-winning writer, workshop facilitator and TEDx speaker. Her poetry collection ‘Jam Is For Girls, Girls Get Jam’ has been recommended by Nikesh Shukla as ‘a social political masterclass’. Her poetry film ‘Borders’ has won several awards, and she’s currently writing her second poetry collection and debut novel. Welcome, Shagufta.
Shagufta: Hi, thank you for having me!
Daljeet: You’re very welcome, it’s lovely to have you.
Megha is a performance poet from Kerala and her work has been featured on platforms such as Penguin, Random House India, First Post, and she regularly trends at number one on Spotify Podcasts in India for her poetry podcast, ‘Poems To Calm You Down by Megha’ – and they are lovely poems, and they really did calm me down, Megha!
Megha: Thank you!
Daljeet: It’s a beautiful voice you have and lovely delivery in that podcast. Megha is a postgraduate in English Literature from the University of Nottingham and when she is not writing and performing, she facilitates workshops for young aspiring poets.
Megha, Shagufta, hello, and thank you so much for taking part in this project. How are you? How are you both today?
Shagufta: Good, thank you! Well, surviving.
Daljeet: Yeah, I know, it’s tricky, isn’t it? Because as we’re recording in the UK, we're still in the second lockdown-
Shagufta: Third lockdown!
Daljeet: Third lockdown, is it? I can't keep up!
Megha: Oh my god, that’s really stressful, for sure.
Daljeet: Yeah, I know. Especially because we have our children at home and we're kind of teachers as well, aren't we, Shagufta?
Shagufta: I’m Miss Trunchbull at the moment, yeah!
Daljeet: I’m Miss Trunchbull too! Oh, that’s funny. And Megha, how is it in India and Kerala? Do you have any restrictions?
Megha: Yes, surprisingly in Kerala the situation is worse compared to every other state. It started here, like, we were one of the earliest states to have COVID and then it just dropped a little and then again, shot back up. So, we are in a very tricky situation.
Daljeet: Yeah, let’s just hope for the best.
Megha: Taking it one day at a time actually.
Daljeet: Absolutely. I think for me, this podcast and this project in general, you know, has been a really nice distraction. I think that the work that you guys have created - it’s been wonderful to read - especially Shagufta, you've actually mentioned a lockdown in your poem, which was really, really lovely, the way you kind of connected that. So I just wanted to spend a few minutes talking about your pieces, just to give my view on what I thought about them and why I found them so wonderful.
I'll begin with Shagufta - as a mother, I love the way that your poem begins and ends with an image of motherhood. The way it connects the past of your ancestral land with your present life in lockdown with your children. Your poem, for me, perfectly captures that saying ‘personal is political’ because you explore earth politics, you explore borders and land through your own personal lens, through your own family structure, and specifically through your grandmother's story. I love the part where you say, ‘she holds it in her hand with her sickle, corn stalks in the other hand, this is where I become uprooted, learn that it is women’s work too, my grandmother is the land’, and the image that creates is incredibly powerful and evocative. It’s a really timely reminder of how important women farmers are, especially in light of current women farmers in India who are equally involved in fighting for farmers’ rights. So the fact that you've brought that to light and it's so visual, your poem, it was a beautiful, beautiful poem. Thank you so much for creating that for this podcast.
Shagufta: Thank you for your thoughts, it's really nice when you have that interaction and other people kind of respond to it and understand what you're talking about.
Daljeet: I think you’ve mentioned you write, in terms of your poem, you write a picture, which I thought was really beautiful.
Shagufta: Yeah! I end up having series of images or something very strong, almost like a memory, but it's not, based in my mind. And then my poetry process is about trying to write that image down into words, into a language. I don't always succeed, but sometimes I get there. I hope with this piece; it did get there.
Daljeet: Yeah, you did. You took me to the Punjab. You could hear the drums. I could feel the heat. There was real atmosphere in there, real sense of place, so thank you.
Shagufta, do you want to talk about the Punjabi part that you included because it is such an important part of your poem?
Shagufta: Yes, I think when I started writing poetry, I came to poetry from a very sort of English, from a European lens, having studied English Literature.
And then in my very sort of early twenties at university, I started looking at Punjabi poets Urdu poets listening to the Qawwali (form of music performed by Sufi’s to stimulate sense of spiritual closeness to god) songs that my parents were listening when I was growing up and listening to the poetry in those, and then trying to translate it into English. And I think there's a real process and I was struck by how the words and the order in which things were said, it resonated with me. Then when I found out that you had poets like Amrita Pritam and Sara Shagufta, Punjabi and Pakistani poets, female poets, growing up you always hear about Muhammad Iqbal, yes, who's amazing, but being a female poetess it makes you kind of feel like you're not the first and that you are a part of a community and there are giants behind you. So, it really gave me a sense of, yes, there are, there are other people who held this path for me. And what I particularly, in this piece I quote and reference and Amrita Pritam’s poem, who in her poem references Waris Shah’s poem, and what I really loved about that is that you Amrita Pritam, who is an Indian poet, referencing a Muslim poet, and just the kind of fluidity of identities.
And speaking to my grandparents, there was a real kind of sense of, you know, you were just, you weren’t Pakistani, or, you know, you had casts, you have Qaum (Arabic word for community of people who share a common language, ethnicity & culture), you have many sort of ways and barriers, but they weren't so rigid in many ways. And I think maybe I'm being naive and looking back in simplistic terms, but I felt like there's a real disconnect happening now where it's very much like you're on one side or the other. And actually, if you look at the poets and you look at the writing, you look at the literature, the stories, the songs, the dance, the food, it's just so intertwined.
Daljeet: Absolutely. I mean, I think that's beautiful, and I don't think you're being naive because in 2017, I worked on an oral history project with young people and one of the big themes that came out of that was, there are lots of memories and stories of people coexisting peacefully prior to partition. So when you talk about these things, you know, it's, I don't think you're being naïve, I think there really were there. There was this brotherhood and there was peaceful kind of living, you know, at that time, and partition kind of tore a lot of that up. And in fact, they played Amrita Pritam’s poem, which was directly referencing partition and there is a lot of pain in her work. I mean, I've never seen that before. So I was sitting in a room with young people who couldn't even understand the language, which was Punjabi, so they were not even south Asian, and the atmosphere was like a pin drop silence and they were young people. There was something in that room like there was pain, they could hear the pain even though they couldn't understand the words. And I found that really moving.
Megha, I'm going to come onto your poem. Shagufta, your poem was called ‘Flooding’ and I love the title as well – should’ve introduced it with your title! Megha, your poem ‘Homegrown Blade’, I love that, I love the title first of all, ‘Homegrown Blade’, and I loved it. So empowering, you know, it begins in such an empowering way.
Now your poem, I found so moving and personal, it was sad, but it was also, like I said, empowering and uplifting. Your performance was beautiful and you can really hear the empathy that you have for the journey that your grandmother had to endure as a result of a land dispute. What I really took away from your piece was how the journey that your grandmother made, gave you inner strength and made you resilient and brave, and you capture these in words that gave me goosebumps. So you say, ‘but the day they taught us to be daughters, we taught ourselves to be weapons, spot changing leopards, short haired gunfights, fundamental human rights, jumping around bonfires with our heartbreaks as chokers’. I was like, I mean, I literally get a feeling in my knees when I read that.
So this message of women's empowerment really resonates because it comes from such a personal space from you, you know, because you can really illustrate how the journey of your grandmother has shaped you into a strong and self-assured woman.
Megha: Yeah. I mean, I've always believed that if it's something, if you're writing, it has to be honest work and also not to really stray into anyone else’s lane. This particular piece is deeply, deeply personal for me. I think a lot of people until now did not understand or believe in intergenerational trauma, or historical, or collective suffering, collective suffering, until the pandemic happened. Right. For me, I think I knew, I first found out about transgenerational trauma from a Parsi friend who spoke to me about, you know, their persecution, fire temples being destroyed, and how they had lost a cultural heritage. And she said that she heard about these stories from her grandmother, and then after that she had nightmares about the events that she had never even been physically present in.
So, yeah, and I, the first time we spoke about it, I was so confused because I had my own share of trauma, I experienced PTSD through bullying. So when I heard about this, I thought, okay, that is really strange because as someone who knows enough about trauma, I should be knowing about this, but then you said that and I thought about it. And that's when I realised, you know, so many families carry trauma that they don't even recognize, they haven't even spoken about. I traced my roots, I looked back and some of the stories that I heard after that, that I paid attention to when my mother spoke, when my grandmother spoke, I realized these women have just been through so much, like my mother talks about how her grandmother had walked all the way from this small village in Karnataka to Kerala, to the tip of Kerala, because they were jobless because the king here had promised them work.
She talks about how her own grandmother had to cut her umbilical cord, because there was nobody around to do that for her.
Daljeet: It's so sad.
Megha: It's so painful, yeah.
Daljeet: I can't even imagine what suffering, you know, she must have gone through. You went and retraced some of the journeys?
Megha: Yeah. I asked actually, I started asking and I started opening my ears, I started listening. Before then I used to be very focused on my own personal trauma, but you know, I remember sitting in my therapist’s office and she looks at me and she just says, ‘there's so much shame on your face, I don't even know why’, and I think, yeah, that's true. I don't know what I'm feeling, the shame for this guilt for, but there's just so much of it, again, that has no name, no place. It has nothing to do with my own trauma. It's just random shame, random guilt. Where's this emotion coming from? And then I read this interview by Emily Cohen, she's an author, she's a second generation Holocaust survivor, and she talks about how it's important to stop the cycle of transmission - how a lot of victims of intergenerational trauma think that it's their duty to suffer almost as an honor to what their ancestors went through.
So the first thing to do is to tell ourselves that our ancestors want a good life for us, they don't want us to suffer, and I think that's where the shame comes from. It comes from the oppression, it comes from knowing you couldn't protect your ancestors, although that makes no sense, but it comes from there.
Yeah. It's like children, right? Like if you can't protect your children, you feel so much of guilt, even though you were not in that place, even though you wouldn't even have heard of it until later, but you just look at yourself and think, ‘okay, I did not build a safe space for my family’, and I think that's how I felt when I heard about these stories.
Daljeet: Yeah, I think the, you know what you say, it's so true that you do feel that guilt. You can't hold anyone directly responsible because they're not alive today, but still we carry some of that pain, especially because some of the things still continue, don't they? In terms of the way women are still treated in the world, or, you know, the patriarchal systems still oppress women. So when you see a continuation of those things, that is also the issue, and that's why we come back to these things because it's a reminder of things that are not fixed in the world and we have to continue to kind of battle.
But the fact that you took this journey and that you retraced this journey, and you really went and investigated and explored your past, that's incredible. I think that must have been amazing for you, to grow not just as a person, but also as an artist.
Megha: I really want to document stories that had to do with me and my past. And my past isn’t just about my life, it’s about what people in family went through. I'm not saying that that's mine to own or take, but I think that, I think their stories need to be heard. I think it's important to acknowledge their trauma no matter what, because when they were around, they did not have the time or space or even the privilege to be completely broken by it, to be mentally ill or, I mean, rather than just spawned or acknowledged their trauma. So I think it was just important for me to take that journey.
Daljeet: That's exactly how I feel. Yeah, I think a lot of people feel like that, you don't personally know them, but there is this connection with people that you've not even met.
Shagufta: I think also just listening to Megha read her work when we had a sort of sharing of work, the hope and the healing and the optimism really is a great counterbalance between reading that there is this trauma, there's this collective pain. And yet, there is definitely something that we can take away and grow from, it doesn't have to be a continuous cycle. And I think when I first read Megha’s poem, I thought, ‘oh my goodness, this is just such a like kind of call to arms, to celebrate and embrace life’ and I loved that. I think also as a parent reading something like that, it kind of is really uplifting. So I know about the pain in Megha's poem and the history of it, but there's just so much light as well in that piece.
Daljeet: And also it shows how you've taken from it to become this independent, you know, strong minded, creative force…
Megha: It just felt really essential to, instead of immortalizing their pain, I want to immortalize their courage. I think that's the kind of approach I was taking with it.
Daljeet: Yeah, I think you're reclaiming the narrative, aren't you?
Megha: Yeah, exactly.
Daljeet: So Shagufta, you speak a lot about, your poem is about Punjab and you take us to the land and we can visualize everything about Punjab. Do you want to talk a little bit about your understanding of Punjabi culture?
Shagufta: I have been looking more and more at Punjabi culture since becoming a parent - I've got to pass down some knowledge and I'm thinking, ‘do I have enough knowledge to pass down to my children? How do I introduce them to Punjab before I take them to Punjab?’. It was something that really struck me, even when I was writing the poem about my grandmother.
And I've always known Punjabi culture as being quite unemotional, as being quite rough, as being quite tough love, and I think it refers back to this idea that we, you know, we are part of the land and the land can sometimes be very unforgiving, but it was also very giving in other ways. And I think when I write about my grandmother, I think people expect more sentimentality when you think of grandparents, you think of kisses and hugs. But actually, you know, I had grandparents in Punjab who were farmers who were at the field and the way they express love and emotion, sometimes being brought up in Britain, it was a very different way of communicating love. And I think in the last year, you know, with lockdown, it's been really difficult for people to express love and express sentimentality and I think we really realized how important things like touch, or hugs, or kisses are.
So I think that’s something that really struck me in the last year, and in my writing I was very aware of the way in which we communicate love in, maybe it's just my family, but in Punjabi households I think it can sometimes be really, it's a difficult thing to understand. I remember when I even first started hugging or kissing my mom, it was a big deal. We don't normally do that. We normally just, we survive and we get on with things and we do the things that are really important and everything else comes secondary to that.
Daljeet: Now, you were both provided an identical brief to make a poem about intergenerational pain and despite not knowing each other, you've both ended up exploring quite similar themes and your work is strongly linked to your grandmothers.
Shagufta: So it's really interesting because we were sort of set a brief and it's more about collective pain, and collective trauma, and healing, mental health and wellbeing, so that was kind of in my mind. And I just naturally ended up writing about my grandmother, and then when I read Megha’s piece, it was also the story about her grandmother, and I think it was really interesting to see that. I think it goes back to how naturally we embody stories of our ancestors.
I think what I really love is the work is so frank and it's so honest. And I think when I first read through it, I remember thinking, ‘wow, this is such a big, powerful, strong story’, and yet Megha somehow manages to intertwine, really intimate, small feelings of being human in such a big story. I think that's the kind of thing that really blew me away. And I remember sitting there and thinking, ‘Oh, this is really, really good writing. I need to go back and edit my work!’.
Daljeet: Isn't that wonderful to have that kind of, you know, to have that reaction, that's wonderful.
Megha: Yeah! I mean, the first time that Shagufta and I spoke, we were talking about this in particular, I just said, ‘Okay, listen, before we discuss any poem at all, I just want you to know that I really love this transition where, you know, you had two languages in the same poem’. And I think the transition, first of all, was really smooth, and at the same time, I loved the fact that she had an accent. And I think that was the one thing that she felt really insecure about, vulnerable about, but she said, ‘Okay, I was feeling weird because I don't know if I was saying the words right’. But I said, ‘I don’t understand Punjabi, but still having the accent just reveals so much about identity, about the diaspora, about the shifts’. It just tells so much, and I think that just made the piece more genuine, more honest, more raw and real to me.
There was this one line that I really, really thought was so beautiful. It goes, ‘lockdown is a series of weeks, left abandoned in a hot thick river’. I think that was something I could relate to a lot because, for me, the lockdown has been up and down. It's been confusing and this just made so much sense, but it was also like wrapped in a very pretty way without making it seem like a very horrible place to be in. So I think it connected the beauty of poetry, and so I really, really love that line.
Daljeet: I love that too. I love the fact that because we are the, Shagufta and I are the diaspora, the south Asian diaspora, there are times when I sit and I think about India, for whatever reason, I'm thinking about my family and then I'm back here, you know, obviously physically I'm here. So the poem kind of captures that back and forth thing that we have in our minds, you know, and I thought it was beautiful. It’s so visual.
So, Shagufta and Megha, you've both spoken about your grandmothers. I would love to know a little bit more about them, what they were like as people and a little bit about their backstory. Shagufta, would you like to start?
Shagufta: Sure. So it's interesting, I didn't know my paternal grandmother very well at all. I grew up in the UK, and you know, growing up in the eighties and the nineties, you didn't go back and forth regularly. In those days it was quite expensive to get a whole family back to Pakistan. So, I grew up with my maternal grandmother who I knew really well. When we did get to Pakistan, we would go for quite a long period of time. I remember going for the first time, I think I was very young, and I was there for six months, and the second time I went, I was there for a year. So we got to live with my grandmother and spend time with her, and despite spending so much time I have very little memory of her, the memories I do have of her, are of her working. She's always in my mind when I think of her, she is working, and she was very abrupt and to the point, and as children we struggled to connect with her because she was very, I think a practical woman, she’s had three children. And so I think they became, to me it seemed like quite unfeeling people, and the way they thought it was just very different to the way I thought.
And I just, I'm always struck by that. But the things I do know about my grandmother is - despite not being one to have lots of conversations, she was quite a quiet person - she had a lot of confidence and she lived by her own rules, which is really interesting and I think it sort of feeds into some of the way myself and my sisters are. We also live by own rules in some ways; the fact that I've become a poet says a lot about that!
Yeah, she fascinates me because I don't know much about her and to many people she’s an enigma. I think when you have people who are quite quiet and not extroverted, and don't talk about their feelings, their emotions, their life, or their pain and their suffering, there is an aura of mystery around that person. But then I hear little bits and pieces from other people from my mum, from family members, and then you're trying to put all these pieces of a puzzle together and trying to make a whole human being, and I think that's a really overwhelming sometimes experience.
There's a way and an image I see of her, and then I'll hear a story of how she, I mean, she was quite a fierce woman. There were times where, you know, in Pakistan especially there's a lot of issues around zameen (land) and land and people did Kabza (take forceful possession/control) of zameen and she's the kind of person who would roll her sleeves up and she'd get involved in the fight.
Daljeet: That’s fantastic, isn’t it?
Megha: Wow, that’s fierce, really, really, fierce.
Daljeet: Can you explain to our listeners what Kabza is?
Shagufta: It’s this idea of who owns what land, and people are constantly kind of arguing and bickering over ownership of land or encroaching onto other people's land. Especially when you have people who are in the job and Punjab or Mirpur, which is where we are from. The Dam migration, many people migrated, so they have land left behind by fathers, grandfathers, that's been unclaimed or it's difficult to claim because you're in a different country. What I watched recently, I think it's Sam Masud, maybe I'm incorrect about the director, but he did the film called ‘My Pure Land’ which deals with similar issues. Watching that it struck a chord and I thought, ‘ah, okay, for me, it's difficult to imagine this grandmother who barely speaks to be so fiercely possessive of her people and her land’, then seeing that film you understand how important land is. Land’s like another child, it's another family member, it's not just, ‘oh, it's a farm, a business’, it's part of your ancestry, your history, it links you to your past and your future.
Daljeet: Land gives you like, I think the reason why there is so much disruption in India is because there is that risk of that autonomy being taken away.
Shagufta: We were not directly affected by partition in terms of my family, but partition obviously reached every corner of India and Pakistan. So as a family we didn't lose land or we weren’t displaced through that, so the land has actually managed to stay within our family for many, many generations. And I think it's really important because it links us back to, you know, grandparents maybe ten generations ago.
Daljeet: In my family, because we were affected by partition, you know, we were from the Pakistan side, the Sialkot side of Pakistan, so my family's roots in the Indian side have only been there for one generation. The rest of the, the remaining roots, you know, like you can trace yours ten generations back, are now in officially in another country. So it's just incredible, the way that land connects you back so far, and you can trace so much back through that, isn't it, which is fascinating. I know you've also spoken a little bit about landowner politics and the privilege of owning land.
Shagufta: I think it's something that I sort of realized much later on, but I think, again, I'm watching films that are sort of triggering really interesting thoughts to process in my mind. I was watching recently, is it ‘White Tiger’? It sheds light on an interesting topic. But I think being landowners, there's so many intersectionalities, there's so many hierarchies of power and power imbalance, and empowerment. We’re talking about how the land feeds you and give you security, but in other ways, you also end up exploiting. Where do you sit in all of that? I think that sort of brings me back to this idea of, you know, what I think of my Punjabi family, they're very stoic in their feelings because there is a harshness and harsh reality in the way in which the land must be served for it to serve you. Who benefits from that and how do they benefit?
You know, Daljeet and I were talking about as well, the idea of you, you know, you don't really see female farmers, but you know, they pay a huge role in farming. In fact, my first poetry collection ‘Jam Is For Girls, Girls Get Jam’ is in reference to that because – I know I’m getting off topic by talking about another poem - but the collection that I wrote is about this fact that, you know, we’re Punjabi, we come from Punjab, and growing up the men used to be given the best bit of meat and the best bit of food. I don't know whether that’s just a Punjabi thing, or my family thing, but to the sons it’s like, ‘eat your meat’.
Megha: And they get to eat first, right?
Daljeet: Absolutely! I have witnessed this in my own family, I have seen this. Even if I’m with my own family, my husband will get the first Roti (Indian Flatbread)!
Shagufta: So when we came to the UK, my parents would always say something along the lines of, you know, we’d have fried eggs for breakfast, and they’d be like, ‘in Pakistan you’d get the jam for breakfast’. And I remember being really young and thinking, ‘I’m so angry about this, I need to be a feminist! Why do I get jam and not fried eggs for breakfast?’. Because obviously growing up, when I went to Pakistan I saw my grandmother working in the field, so the women are doing really tough labor as well, it's not just that it's men going out there.
Megha: And I'm sure they do that, and then go back home and cook for the family. Double work!
Daljeet: But isn't that what we're doing? For many women not much has changed, we are still working and looking after our children globally. It's not even just a south Asian issue, and the pandemic has hit women disproportionately, and there's so many women in England, in Britain, that are giving up their jobs. You're absolutely right, and good on you for making a poem about jam. God, that really stayed with you! It’s brilliant. You also spoke a little bit about your grandmother’s, which I found really fascinating, her relationship with her husband?
Shagufta: Yeah, so that’s my maternal grandmother, so my maternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather migrated to the UK. He came in the sixties and then my grandmother followed after. I think they were one of the first love stories I've actually seen in my community. I think we've grown up with a lot of arranged marriages, and particularly after migration where people were getting married to support families back at home with visa and migration. So looking back on that relationship between my maternal grandfather and grandmother, whenever I see them, I always imagined them together, rarely were they apart.
Daljeet: Isn't that beautiful?
Megha: That's so lovely. And I mean, it must be of those rare stories.
Shagufta: Growing up and being around other south Asian friends, we talk about not seeing enough love marriages or seeing harmony between relationships because we have so many arranged marriages. It was my kind of like, ‘yes, they exist!’, you know, this whole ‘men are trash’ hashtag is not completely true! In my close vicinity that shows me that there is partnership, and love, and compassion, and kindness, between two people – it’s one of the first love stories.
Daljeet: Megha, shall we move on to your grandmother's story? Would you like to talk a little bit about her backstory of displacement over a land dispute in south India?
Megha: So she walked 660 kilometers - I know that sounds, yeah, that sounds really crazy, because the first time my mother told me about that, I thought, ‘wait, that's not possible?’. But then she explained it to me, at that time people walked, and then either they took a bullock cart, but in a lot of places they wouldn't be able to go on one because it's all these forest areas and the roads were not good, so she walked. But she stopped, she stopped at houses, I think at that time community was so much more beautiful, like people would just let you into their houses when you needed a place for rest. They'd let you stay for a day or two before you moved on with your journey. I think now that we've got the internet, I don't know if we have time to speak to our neighbors even, but at that time community was really, really strong.
So she walked all the way from this place called Udupi (city in the state of Karnatka, India), and then she walked all the way to Trivandrum from there, which is the tip of Kerala, because she and her husband were told that they could get work in the temple. So they came and my great grandfather was an actor, he was a performer, but he died really early. He died when he was 30. So then what happened was they had a lot of daughters and my grandmother was like second in line, so they married her off. She was 13, 14, and they married her off to my grandfather. He was 30 at the time. I don't think she wanted to get married but what happened was that everyone in her family, they were like crying and she didn't know what to do, and her mother was like, ‘please just get married, there'll be one less mouth to feed’. Then she just said, ‘yes’. So even before she knew how to be an adult, I think she just got married. So that's her story.
When I hear her speak about it she just says it in a very, you know, she doesn't say it sadly, she just says it like it's just another story, like just another event in her life. But I think about it and I think, ‘wow’, I cannot imagine myself in that place, even during a time like that. I cannot imagine it. It sounds scary.
Daljeet: I can't even imagine - to have that responsibility to make their families whole situation better, how traumatic that must've been for her.
Megha: But, you know, like I said, I don't think she could afford to be sick from that. I don't think she had the space to be hurt by all that. I think she just had to get on with life as soon as possible, get to work, learn how to cook, have a kid and, you know, the first time she did have a kid, she was young. I think she was 15, 16. In those times. I'm sure the minute you get married, they ask you to have a baby and you try to have a baby. Her first child was stillborn. She never talks about that, but when my mother once told me about it, I was like, ‘oh wait, she had a kid before you?’ and my mother said, ‘yeah, she did, but that kid didn't make it’. And I think if that had happened to me, I would talk about it for years and years, and I'd still be sad about it, but I think she just couldn't. I mean, she definitely was, she held it inside and she just had to keep going. I don't think she could just stay in that time, space, and think about it and talk about it and worry about it. She just had, you know, she had to move on. She had to give birth to more kids and she had to cook for them. She had to do stuff. So yeah, there was really no space for trauma, even though there was so much trauma.
Daljeet: It's really sad, and I think this brings me on to the next point, which is this idea of privilege, the privilege to use your voice as a woman to express trauma, both of you have spoken about that. So Megha you've written in your poem, and I know some of us never made it here to tell this story and never had a safe space or their own territory.
Megha: Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it's important to have that balance without really stealing her narrative, but also at the same time being a representation for something she couldn't talk about. So I definitely spoke to them, I told them, ‘okay, this is happening’. They got excited and that really broke my heart because I was like, ‘I’m talking about your pain, I don’t know if you understand what I’m doing, I don't know if this is something to get excited about’. But I think even knowing that a part of their life has been in another place, in another person's heart, in their voice, that just made her, I don't know, it just gave her some peace. I don't know what exactly I was trying to achieve, but I think I just had to make sure that I was not taking away her voice, but also talking about her, telling her story because that's a very important story. I think it is not something that should get lost in history.
Daljeet: And I think there's another point actually, which this relates to you speak in your poem, you say, ‘sitting in my therapist’s room talking about how this boy in my class said women are hypersensitive and dramatic, emotional and fanatic’. I thought to myself, it's interesting because we're talking about privilege, but there's also an issue of how it still continues generations and generations later, the way women's pain is labeled, you know, and the way that women, even in here in Britain, there used to be press articles, calling women ‘mad cows’, and I dunno, derogatory language and belittling women's psychological pain. I thought it was interesting in your piece, you've kind of bought that aspect in, and actually Shagufta, you've done the same. So this is why I think it's really interesting how you've both done similar things, you've written Shagufta, regarding lockdown survival, you've written, ‘and here I am struggling to take care of just myself, every day I seem to forget to take in air, four walls and inner city’. Your whole line about the therapist is really important because it shows in a way not much has really changed. In some ways it has changed because here you are a poet, a feminist, and you've got a voice.
Megha: Yeah, but in other ways. When I'm sad and I'm making a fuss about it, I'm branded hysterical, right? Like, why? If a man does it, that doesn't happen. Like, I mean, there are consequences for damaging someone, right? If you hurt someone they're allowed to be angry, they're allowed to be sad. Like I remember in college when there were these two boys who were kind of harassing this girl I knew verbally, and I stepped in and I started, you know, yelling at them and then I walk off, and then they go and tell one of my friends, they tell her that, you know, ‘why is Megha being so bad, so cruel to us?’. And then they say, ‘you know what, if she goes on with this, if she keeps trying to get back at us for our behavior, then she's going to get acid on her face’. This was not direct because they didn't say to me, but they said it to my best friend, and why wouldn't I believe her? I know that they said it to her, because they said it. And I was so surprised because this was not one of those local men who would do such a thing, this was a boy who wanted to become a journalist, this was a boy whose father was a professor. And I was like, ‘wow, I don't know where this is coming from’, and in that moment I was angry, but I was also terrified. I went and told my department head and he said, ‘no, no, he won't do it, don't worry’, and he was trying to pacify me, but that just made me more furious because I was like, ‘what do you know about the fear?’. I mean, I locked myself in my room for the next one week because I was scared and I felt so ashamed and guilty for feeling that fear, because I thought, well, Megha you write poems about, you know, being a feminist, you write powerful stuff, and here you are locked inside your room because by the end of the day, it's still a man's world.
Daljeet: It just highlights that if we, if you are feeling that as a young woman right now, if you're experiencing that now, imagine how much things would have been worse for your grandmother during that time in her generation. If women are still, if the pain of women is still belittled, and we’re always made out to be frantic or negative, or angry, or whatever labels that are put on.
Megha: I don't think my grandmothers had the opportunity to find out their own identities. Like I know with a lot of education and self-exploration, I figured out I'm a feminist. I had, you know, conversations with other friends who opened my mind to all of this, about my rights. I read poetry about my rights. But with my grandmothers, I think they were married off at such an early age and sent off to another patriarchal setting that, you know, when you're constantly being told that you're a weaker thing, you're the lesser being, that’s so much of gaslighting. That's so much of manipulation, right? Society manipulates you into thinking that you are smaller and at some point, what if you believe it because you don't have anybody else telling you that that's wrong? And even if you think that's wrong, if everyone around you says, ‘no, this is the way you're supposed to be’, you end up getting suppressed.
Daljeet: Well, it just shows how much work there still needs to be done. Right? In terms of respecting women, it's sad though.
Shagufta, you've also spoken about privilege, I think you've spoken a little bit about, when we’ve spoken before, about how your mother, like most south Asian women - I think we're similar age of our mother's generation working in the UK, I think I might be older than you, but you know, you get my point - that most south Asian women who were working, you know, working women in the UK a couple of decades ago, people like that basically had to carry on and they had no time to process their feelings or they did not have space. They just had to get on with things. There's a hint of that concept of privilege in your work, so you've written about lockdown survival, you’ve spoken about your grandmother and then in reference to yourself and your present life, you're saying, ‘and here I am struggling to take care of just myself, every day I seem to forget to take in air, four walls and inner city’, and I thought that was really beautiful.
Shagufta: I think it's such a complex conversation that my stance might shift at times, but I feel that when I'm talking about privilege in terms of mental health, I agree with Megha first and foremost, I am in a position where I'm able to say, ‘I’m not in a good mental health space today’. I can say that to friends at times, I can say that to family. Whereas I remember growing up, there are certain family members who would suffer a trauma, or I'd say ‘do you know what, maybe you need…’ and they’d say, ‘no, I’m not going to counselling, that’s for weak people, for people who are insane’. There was a real stigma around saying that you have a mental health issue, and that's something I grew up with. I remember myself, I wasn't, it wasn't until after I had my son that I felt comfortable in saying, ‘do you know what? I'm suffering from depression’, and it seemed like it was an okay time to say that because everyone was like, ‘oh, maybe she's got baby blues’ – that kind of makes it cutesy, or makes it less kind of severe. I remember suffering with mental health up and down throughout my lifetime. I think many of us do, but we just don’t talk about it.
And I remember being in a situation where, I think at the time I was going through a divorce, and I remember speaking to somebody about, ‘oh, how difficult my life is etc.’, when you are in that situation. They turned around and said, ‘oh, but you know, wow, let's look at our grandmothers, and let’s look at our mothers, and how difficult their lives were, and yet they survived’. It kind of almost made me feel like my trauma and my difficulty is nothing in comparison, and I think it kind of almost gaslights and it goes back to what Megha was saying in that because they've suffered, we must now also suffer and we suck it up. I remember thinking, ‘no, that wasn't fair on them, but this is not fair on me’, and maybe it’s not the same extreme, but it should not be happening either way. It's not about who gets the best of the worst bunch. It's about saying, ‘do you know what? We need to break this cycle?’, we need to say, ‘this is not acceptable, this is not allowed, this should not be enabled to happen’.
Megha: It doesn't make sense to compare trauma anyway. It really doesn't make sense to compare trauma or to categorise this as the bigger issue of the smaller, there's no such thing like that. Everyone's individual traumas are equally - I can’t even say equally because that's just not the right word - it's an individual experience, right? So I don't think anyone else gets a say on that.
Daljeet: Our grandmothers didn't have that space to either talk about it or to get treatment. But if we do have that space and we do have that time and we do have that kind of education, like you speak Megha, you've read, you've got an education, you've read lots of alternative narratives, which means you’re not believing the dominant kind of way women should be behave or be perceived. We should be using those resources to get better. Surely that's good for all women, you know? Because I wanted to create work around this topic because ultimately that's what I want to do as a creator, you know, explore how we can break the cycle. What do we do? And I think the first step is to have these conversations, to create art around various topics which are not spoken about; silence is a massive issue in south Asian communities. I think when you guys come along and you create these poems, that's kind of going against that grain of silence, which is embedded within our communities. So, that's a really positive step.
Daljeet: So, Megha, how do you think we can heal and move on from ancestral trauma?
Megha: I think it begins with acknowledging it and then of course seeking professional treatment, because so much of this is passed down. I mean, I know it seems like it's been passed down through stories, but so much of it has also been passed down through genetic damage from everything that's happened.
I think treatment-wise, I do believe that culturally specific treatment would be very helpful, but yeah, I think, I don't know if a lot of people would have heard of it and I know that a lot of families are yet to acknowledge their own intergenerational trauma. So I mean, like even today, how many parents are okay, knowing that their child is going for therapy? Not specifically for intergenerational trauma, but just for something, for depression, for some mental illness? Hearing that someone's going for therapy, that just makes them, you know, like the first time I told my parents that I was going for therapy, they said, ‘you are too young for that’, and they said, ‘what problems would you have?’. My parents are good parents, but also I think at that point I realised I did see their flaws and I thought, ‘okay, I think this is something that I need to figure out then’, because for a while, they almost felt angry the first time I told them, they're like, ‘wait, nothing's wrong with you?’. They were in denial for sure.
But yeah, I think culturally specific treatment, parent-child interaction therapies, that will definitely stop the cycle of transmission. I think it's important to have a sort of narrative exposure to reframe the entire experience so that you have your own version of what happened. You rewrite everything and you own your narrative, I think that's just so important. So yeah, definitely seeking professional help, but also having a therapist who understands the community you come from, who gives therapy that's culturally specific because so much of this trauma has to do with your own community. The suppression of someone in your community has so much to do with culture, and I think that's just so important. I think that's where we start healing.
Daljeet: With regards to India, I've read a few articles where people that come from the Dalit community have talked about how they need people within the system who are from their own community, because they feel that only the oppressed can understand the pain of the oppressed. Now, obviously, it's a very different issue, caste issue, but it's a really important point. And I think this point is really, really important to the UK, and I'd imagine other countries where the south Asian diaspora is residing, that we need culturally specific therapies, because in this country the narrative, the history, which is kind of focused upon, is very different to our histories from the global south.
For example, I was speaking to a lady called Rima Lamba and she's a psychologist in the UK, she actually specializes in intergenerational trauma. She mentioned that she became interested in this subject as well, because she was noticing that when people were coming to her, especially south Asian women were coming to her and talking about things, just getting therapy, a lot of ancestral themes were coming out. So, it's actually in therapy that a lot of these ancestral themes come out it seems. That's a really interesting point you've made.
Shagufta, you've spoken, your piece is interesting because your work analyzes bigger political issues of earth politics through the framework of your own family. You examine the issue of land and borders through a personal lens. You talk specifically about kind of the destruction of land in Punjab at the moment, which is a really timely issue. So, can you talk a little bit more about that? I suppose my question is, healing in terms of that really is more applicable to your work.
Shagufta: I'm going to start by talking in relation to what you and Megha were just saying because I was listening and it’s really interesting, because I think in many ways we’re really fortunate to have so much information about mental health. The conversation is changing around mental health and how we are accepting it and saying, ‘what can we do next?’. But in many ways I feel like there's things that we've lost along the way, and that comes back to our relationship with the land. I think there are things that my grandmother's generation did, where they understood what they were eating, what they were putting on their skin, like the healing effects of haldi (Turmeric), and you know, how they would grow their own food. My grandmother, when she came to the UK, they used to grow their own potatoes and tomatoes and now they just buy everything from the supermarket. So there's a different way of being healthy that they were able to do, which connects with our mental health, because I feel like living in urban environments has a really negative impact on our mental wellbeing. I think as human beings, we weren't made to be in this environment, to be in this situation. There are things that we are medicating ourselves with in a response to the environment that we're living in, rather than addressing the environment that we are living in, and that brings me back to the conversation around climate injustice and what we're doing to the earth, and how we are poisoning the earth, but how that in turn is poisoning us. I think I really want to have these conversations because I think a lot of the climate justice movement, in the UK particularly, is very white. It’s led by the global north; the impact is huge on the global south.
So when I talk about healing, I'm referring not just to ourselves. And I think this was in the brief - it's not about individual healing, it's not about going to a spa weekend, and that’s the commodification of our health needs. And so capitalism, I think is really destroying our mental health, it's destroying our relationship with the planet, with land, with how we are treating our bodies. I think when I talk about healing, I'm talking about our relationship to land, I'm talking about our relationship to other human beings, because, you know, I think that the last year we've seen a real increase in suicide rates. I think the isolation and loneliness that we're feeling in major cities and urban communities, it's huge. It's hard when we are social beings, we are meant to be with communities, we're meant to know our neighbors in ways that Megha was saying when her grandmother walked down, you would spend one or two days at some kind person's house. In this day and age, if I need to go to the bathroom or my kids need to go to the bathroom, we would have to drive back home because there's no way we're knocking on somebody's door and saying ‘look, we desperately need X, Y or Z’.
Megha: And I'm sure that must be like, I'm sure that comes across rude in this era, as well, right? Like if you do that, first of all, you're scared, people are scared, right? People are scared if they're going to be robbed, they scared if someone's invading their privacy. So, I mean, it's difficult to ask a stranger for that, but yeah, I'm really happy that there was a time when you could do that, long ago.
Shagufta: And I think there are places in the world where you still can do that. So I think this is really unhealthy that we see ourselves as individuals, I think capitalism really wants us to see us as individuals. So there are things that are in the previous generation, the idea of sometimes an extended family can be very suffocating, but right now, if I lived in extended family setup, when I go to Punjab and spend time with my family, one of my aunts, she's a school teacher, she has very young children and I remember thinking, ‘how does she balance when she’s got no daycare?’, and she's like, ‘oh it’s fine, my sister-in-law look after the kids while I'm gone’. Then when she goes shopping or she does X, Y, and Z, they’ll say, ‘Oh I'll have the kids’, and there's this sharing, this unloading with other people and not feeling like you are a burden. I think that is part of our healing, because I think we see ourselves as just these individuals - it's just me, it's just my life, it's just my trauma, and if I don't deal with it on my own, I'm a failure. It stops us or prevents us from asking for help.
Daljeet: Shagufta, you spoke about motherhood the last time we spoke, and I think you made a really interesting point which stayed with me, which was having to teach identity. So Shagufta, as south Asian diaspora, we may be the last generation that have memories of other lands which shaped our identity. So for me personally, it was long period of time I spent in India, summers in Punjab. Do you think, Shagufta, that our memories of these lands will shape the identity of our children?
Shagufta: Yeah, I guess so, but also, I’m so disconnected from the land because going and being a visitor, spending small periods of time in Punjab or Kashmir, it's not enough to be able to take on identities. So I’m definitely British Asian, I’m definitely somebody who puts an ‘-ing’ at the end of a Punjabi word. When my sister would say, ‘are you making roti?’, “yeah I am Gunning the atta” (Gun = kneading dough, atta = flour: the added ING at the end of Gun is a hybridsation of Punjabi & English and a term uniquely used by British Asians), so we mixed up languages. I think what I'm teaching them is definitely a hybrid, and it's forcing me to try and teach myself more about Punjabi culture, Punjabi dance, food, and make the children proud of being Punjabi.
It’s really interesting to see the difference between the different gender responses. My girl responds to Punjabi culture in a much more positive way than my boy. I think it's because she gets to wear bangles and Mehndi (henna patterns on hands) and bindi’s and, you know, Pranda (Punjabi hair ornament made of multicolored silk threads and decorated with floral designs and ornamental tassels ) in her hair, so it's much more exciting for her. Whereas I think for my son, it's not as cool. So he is, I think, trying to find ways that he could be interested in it is an education for me.
In the mornings we try to speak Punjabi, so in the poem I talk about-
Daljeet: Oh, that’s really lovely. I need to do a bit more of that, to be honest.
Shagufta: I think I'm going to turn it around because in the mornings I'm the most moody and I'm like ‘get up, get changed, brush your teeth!’, and so they only know Punjabi as a series of instructions. So maybe Punjabi in the afternoons when we’re relaxed is better.
Daljeet: It’s a good idea though.
Shagufta: It's something that even in the poem, when I talk about, I bring the Punjabi into the poem, when I was reading to Megha I was so aware of the fact that I have an accent. So my version of what I'm teaching, I suppose, is still diluted. Even now, if I go to Punjab, Mirpur (Pakistan) is called ‘Little England’, you know, you can buy Kellogg’s Cornflakes in Mirpur, it’s very, very English. So what am I trying to teach? Am I trying to teach them something that’s stuck in the past, or am I trying to teach them Punjab as it is today? I think the best thing for me, I always think, is immersing yourself in that culture. So I think until the children are old enough for them to go and spend time in Punjab, they'll never really get a sense of what it is.
Daljeet: Yeah, that was my question. Have they been? And like, you've got image of the land, and the people, and the culture is obviously, it kind of comes from that, right? So when you express your culture through food and language and clothes, you have a direct memory of the land, whereas they don't.
Shagufta: I mean, my thing was always, I'm not going to take my children to Punjab or Pakistan until they're potty trained because I’d have to deal with nappies in that heat, but also so they’re old enough for them to understand and take in where they are. The holidays are when you get a chance to really go, and it's really hot in Punjab at that time of year, and we're looking at July/August, so I haven't taken my children to Pakistan. Also, I’m a single parent mum. So, for me to take them to my village, what village do they go to? Because I'm in Azad Kashmir (area of the Pakistani-administered sector of the Kashmir region), or do they go to Pakistan where their dad's side is from? How do we divide that up? It's something I haven't thought of so far.
Daljeet: The villages that I grew up and kind of spent time in, my grandmother's village, that's derelict now. There are empty houses and I know you've spoken about empty Kothis, empty houses in the Azad Kashmir (area of the Pakistani-administered sector of the Kashmir region), so I think really, I’m kind of answering my own question, but it's also about teaching children how the landscape has changed and how, you know, teaching them about the migration. There’s a really big story, isn't there?
Shagufta: But also, it can be exciting. Whenever I was taken to Pakistan, I would just go to the village, and so all I knew about Pakistan was the village. I could tell you inside about that village because we would spend so much time there. And occasionally I think we spent, we went to Murree (Murree is a mountain resort town within the Rawalpindi District of Punjab, Pakistan) once and to Islamabad (City in Pakistan), obviously here and there, because we would have never been to Lahore (City in Pakistan). When we talk about Pakistan, it's a new nation, but actually go back to the Indus valley civilization, look how far back it goes and look how connected we are to a place bigger than just this one village or one space. That’s exciting!
Daljeet: There's so much to learn, there's so many things to talk about. Indus valley civilization fascinates me so much because we hear a lot about the Greek civilizations and all of that, but we all need to learn a bit more about the Indus valley civilization as well. It’s fascinating, the little bits I’ve read so far.
Megha, you've also mentioned about, you know, you've talked about land, not in this poem, but in general, we've talked about land and the way you think it links with identity. You have a lot of empathy, I know, with people that have roots in a different country.
Megha: Yes. Yes. So it’s very complicated, actually. So I grew up, for the first ten years of my life, I was in Singapore. I was a small baby when my parents took me there because they were working there, and then in my fifth grade we moved back to Kerala, but I didn't really complete my fifth grade. So halfway through my fifth grade I had to be moved back because my father had promised his parents that he would come back and take care of them when they were old, so we came back and I didn't know the language at all. I had to learn Malyalam (language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala) and it was confusing, but it was also very interesting experience. I remember the first time I walked into class and this little boy comes up to me and calls me ‘Madonna” which means foreigner, it’s like a slang, I think. It’s one of those, I don't know what, it was just meant in a very degrading way, at least that's how it felt as a kid. Then I was like, ‘okay, I don't understand your language, I have to learn it’. The culture shock was really something, because I remember in Singapore, I was like studying in all these AC classrooms and suddenly I shift to a very poor government school where the roof is leaking, I mean I came from a place of privilege to something that was not. And suddenly I understand the importance of uniforms because I realized that if there were no uniforms, rich kids would wear fancy clothes and poor kids would wear the same clothing every single day. I remember seeing kids who have owned only one set of uniform. I remember them going back home and washing it and drying it and wearing it again the next day.
So seeing all this, seeing this made me really made me feel like, first of all, I do feel so grateful for the privilege, but also I saw it and I thought, ‘okay, I need to call myself out on so many things and I need to do something about this, I need to do something about this’ and that awakened a lot of things in me that directed me to words, writing, connecting philosophies and ideologies in life. That definitely shaped me a lot. Then after that point, I realized that I'm not from Kerala because you know, you go to school in Kerala, and I had already mastered the language, I learned Malyalam (language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala) really fast, but by then the kids would be like, ‘but you don’t look like a Malyali (The Malayali people, originate from the present-day state of Kerala in India) And then I think, ‘okay, if I don't look like someone from Kerala, then where am I from?’. I go back to my mum and I asked her, and she’s like, ‘you’re not from Kerala, you’re from a different state, you’re from Karnataka (Karnataka is a state in the south western region of India. It is the largest state in South India) you’re from this place called Udupi (city in the Indian state of Karnataka), and that’s how I find out about my grandparents and how they had to move. For a little kid, it really messes up your perception of identity, I guess, because now I was not sure who I was. I didn't know where I was from. I didn't know what to tell people when they asked me where I was from. Even now when people ask me, I say, ‘it's really complicated’ because I identify a lot with Kerala culture, but there’s also so much of culture that I have taken up from my own ancestors who were from Udupi (City in the Indian state of Kerala) But if I go back to Udupi right now - I've only been there like two or three times in my life – if I go back there, I don't really know anyone, like people know me because they know that I'm so-and-so's daughter, or so-and-so's granddaughter, but I don't know that much, like probably heard about them, but still there's no connection, there's no relationship.
Daljeet: But I think coming back to India, you mentioned, it's really helped to kind of solidify and shape your identity. So you speak about how it made you a self-assured person, and I think that's a lovely thing to have taken away from. Finally, what you emerged into as a person is lovely.
Daljeet: Megha and Shagufta, could you talk about one thing that you’ve learned from each other?
Shagufta: I think Megha is very generous and giving in her work. When I sat down and read the work, I thought there was so much of herself that she has poured into this, and I think maybe I approach my work with some distance. I prefer to write things in retrospect as well, so it gives me time to process and maybe see from the point of view of an outsider. But I think what Megha does is really, it's really brave. I think when I read that work, I realized I want to put more of myself into my writing
Megha: With Shagufta’s work, I think because I'm always surrounded by a lot of spoken word pieces, this was so new and experimental for me reading her work. First of all, I love how the language suddenly changes. It's sharp, but it's also very smooth. I know that sounds like a paradox, but it’s just so beautiful. And I also want to talk about her performance. I loved it because it stood out for me because I think I've always approached performance in a very explosive sort of way, and there was a very nurturing calmness in Shagufta’s voice when she was performing it. Despite it being one of those very powerful pieces, which in my head I had imagined, ‘okay, this is going to be like one of those loud shouting, you know, like chaos everywhere kind of piece’, but when she performed it, she just, I don't think anyone could have performed it the way she did for sure, because it just put things into perspective.
There was power, there was calm, there was vulnerability, there was beauty, but there was also a very specific direction action that she was going in. It just sounded like she was very sure about what she was talking about, and I think that was just really, really wonderful.
Shagufta: I’m so thankful that you've introduced us. I think it was really fascinating to just, I think also Megha comes to English as her first language, but the nuances and the points of reference were very different from my own, and I think it was just really fascinating to come across and read that in depth. So, thank you Daljeet.
Megha: Thank you, Daljeet!
Daljeet: No, no, thank you. Thank you to both of you.
Shagufta: And I loved it because, like I said, I enjoy reading work that comes with different cultural nuances. I think a lot of the time when I'm reading British stuff, there’s a lot of stereotypes, based around stereotypes or clichés, but you get a particular frame of reference to a particular culture. Reading Megha’s work, it was really magical and she bought to light things that I've never considered or thought about, and so that was fascinating. But also I think when you’re an artist, when you are a writer, you are working in isolation and we are compounded by now lockdown. So to have someone to bounce ideas off of, to read that work and see how they've approached something that I've also come to, it was really, it added a warmth and added a comfort to my way of writing. I think it's something that, as artists we are deprived of, and we really need those spaces to be able to work with others, to grow our own work, and also get a sense of empathy when we're approaching stories.
Daljeet: It's like being a creative kind of companionship in a way, isn't it? Because everything's been so kind of, it’s been so difficult to talk to people and all of that, so I suppose, I'd imagine, it's been nice to kind of connect in that way. And what about you, Megha?
Megha: Yeah, I think, in an ordinary nine to five job, you connect with your colleagues over work. You talk about it, ‘I like this’, ‘this is a hobby’, and you know, you talk about work, ‘this needs to be done’, and all that. But I think when it comes to art or in the creative industry, so many emotions are involved, right? Like when Shagufta and I were talking and discussing our pieces, there was so many themes. The themes, they had so much depth. We were talking about things that we were connected to, things that moved us, things that, you know, made us undone, things that we were passionate about, and things that we were also talking about wounds. We were talking about everything that made us who we are. I think that's really interesting. And I think that, you know, discussing that, discussing politics, we're not, we're not just sitting in a room discussing politics, we're not just going to work and talking about, ‘Hey, how was your day?’, we are actually talking about so many relevant things and we're also bringing the emotion into this. I think that just creates connection, despite the fact that we are artists across the borders, it just creates a really strong bond. I have never even met her like face to face, I already feel like she's a sister to me because of everything that we've been through collectively. I think that's where collective trauma comes into play. Like I know that this is not how we should have met, because of collective trauma, but at the same time, I am glad I met you.
Daljeet: So, I mean, for me personally, I've always been fascinated, you read a poem or you hear a performance and that’s kind of it, right? You either watch it on stage, or you watch multiple performances, or you watch it on your phone, and then you shut it down. What I was really interested in exploring, as creating this kind of podcast was, I wanted to hear from you and I wanted you to talk to each other, because I wanted to explore another dimension beyond that piece of work.
Finally, Shagufta and Megha, could you leave the audience with a couple of poets that you admire, and whose work you would recommend for them to read, which will help uplift them during these challenging times?
Shagufta: A lot of my poets are contemporary poets, but I do love Warsan Shire, I love her work. She was a Young People’s Laureate for London, a young, Somali woman. I think Beyonce’s album was based on lots of her poetry. She is incredible. Um, I love Sharon Olds. I love Mona Arshi, I think she's a very good writer, she writes in a very delicate and precise way. I've got her poetry collection; it’s called ‘Small Hands’. I would also recommend ‘Mama Amazonica’ which is by the writer Pascale Petit, who writes about mental health and climate change, and writes really beautifully, like surrealist poetry. It’s like dreaming when you read her work, so I love that. I’ll finally finish with a Syrian poet called Ghayath Almadhoun, and he's got a poem on YouTube called ‘The Celebration’, it's quite a graphic poem but it's stunning. Again, his point of reference is Syrian culture, Syrian poetry.
Daljeet: Megha?
Megha: Yeah, contemporary poets - I really love Ocean Vuong, an amazing poet. But I've also been reading Mahmoud Darwish, who's an amazing poet, and I think his collection, the collection I'm reading right now, is called ‘In the Presence of Absence’. It’s such a lovely title, and it’s an even more beautiful book. Apart from that, I also really love Louise Gluck. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature last year, or this year? Yeah, last year, 2020, I think, or 2021? Okay, I'm really confused, but I'm going to look that up! So these are the poets that I think that people should be reading right now.
Daljeet: Yeah, definitely. I think it's poetry so important, isn't it? It's such a lovely, it's a lovely form of art to consume.
Megha: I mean, to a lot of people it's survival, right? So that makes it powerful, really powerful.
Daljeet: Yeah, there’s very pure ideas in poetry that are distilled, in a very short kind of way. It’s like taking a dose of it at once really quickly, massive ideas condensed into tiny, carefully constructed words, and it can really hit your heart, and your poems did that, both of them. I hope the listeners feel the same, your performances are amazing. It'd be great to hear what people think of your work as well. We'd love to hear feedback and we'd love to hear from listeners about what they've enjoyed about the pieces, and what they've learned from the pieces. That'd be amazing as well. Thank you so much to both of you, Shagufta and Megha.
Megha: Thank you, Daljeet.
Shagufta: Thank you.
Daljeet: Thank you for being part of the project. Thank you for your time today, I really appreciate it, all the best.
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