1. How would you describe Knotted Grief?
A record of personal and political loss. Complex because it involves the abstract relationship with the intimacy of losing somebody on one hand, and the sense of despair one feels when an entire people that form the idea of a nation are ‘lost’ and things spiral downwards.
2. What drew you to write these poems?
I have always read poetry and turned to it for solace in times of loss or despair. The loss could be personal, for someone or something I loved or cared about. Or it could be political. I could be mourning a way of life, of thought, of being. I could be mourning a place.
During the pandemic, loss was everywhere, in me and around me. And I turned to not reading but writing poetry, to carve my own hope out of a world not known by many of the poets I was reading.
The only way out is hope. Grief leads to hope in the end. No one is alone. Perhaps that is what I was trying to tell myself. And am now telling my readers through my book.
3. Tell us a bit about the experience of writing this book.
I wrote this book over many years. The long poem entitled Kashmiriyat goes back over six years, maybe longer, and then the rest mostly from August 2019 after our government lock-downed Kashmir, cut off the internet and suspended a dailyness that citizens are entitled to. And of course, one lost people close to you – in this case, two mothers.
4. What prompted you to start writing and when did you start?
No clue what the ‘prompt’ was. I am a man of words, like so many others. I write every day, for over nine years now, regardless of how the day pans out. Fragments, longer pieces, poetry and poetic prose, short texts because of the ‘interruption’ a day brings.
5. One thing you’ve learned the hard way when it comes to writing?
Stay with it. Every single day. Like ‘practice’ as in Riyaz, a term that we use for musicians who do hours and hours of practice every day with no thought of concert or public performances. So yes, writing for the sake of writing.
6. Where do you write?
Anywhere and everywhere. In my head and on my laptop. Sometimes in aeroplanes.
7. Favourite bookshop anywhere in the world?
Seminary Co-op, Chicago.
Knotted Grief is now available in bookshops across Australia and New Zealand or buy it online here.
