The Knot of My Tongue

The brilliant debut from a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.The Knot of My Tongue flows through poetic and prose forms, traversing continents, generations, and empires to examine the loss of speech and language occurring at and after moments of violence and rupture, from migration and colonial violence to intimate partner violence. Following a cast of characters from personal memory, family history, and Islamic traditions, at instances where they have either been rendered silent or found ways to speak forward and through experiences of loss—a father struggling to speak as an immigrant in Canada; a grandmother as she loses her children and her home after the 1947 Partition; the Quranic story of Hajar, abandoned in the desert without water.The poems investigate both slow and immediate violence, what makes some go silent and others become louder in the face of loss? What do different kinds of violence—public and private—do to our ability to express and communicate? And what happens to us, to our bodies, and to our sense of self, when we are not able to communicate, when we have been rendered silent? In the aftermath of such moments, where and how do we turn and find expression?

The brilliant debut from a winner of the 2021 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers.The Knot of My Tongue flows through poetic and prose forms, traversing continents, generations, and empires to examine the loss of speech and language occurring at and after moments of violence and rupture, from migration and colonial violence to intimate partner violence. Following a cast of characters from personal memory, family history, and Islamic traditions, at instances where they have either been rendered silent or found ways to speak forward and through experiences of loss—a father struggling to speak as an immigrant in Canada; a grandmother as she loses her children and her home after the 1947 Partition; the Quranic story of Hajar, abandoned in the desert without water.The poems investigate both slow and immediate violence, what makes some go silent and others become louder in the face of loss? What do different kinds of violence—public and private—do to our ability to express and communicate? And what happens to us, to our bodies, and to our sense of self, when we are not able to communicate, when we have been rendered silent? In the aftermath of such moments, where and how do we turn and find expression?