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Poems as Livable Worlds: A Conversation with Afshan D'souza-Lodhi and Jay Bernard

2020; Autonomous University of Barcelona; Issue: 26 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1344/lectora2020.26.24

2013-9470

Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Elisabeth Massana,

Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies

Sometimes the best projects emerge out of serendipitous encounters.It was, indeed, serendipity which allows us to bring you the following conversation.Recorded involuntarily and transcribed thoroughly, the following text is a testimony of an encounter between poets Afshan D'souza-Lodhi and Jay Bernard and a community of scholars and students, during a time when gatherings in rooms were not marked by the laws of social distancing.During our conversation, Jay and Afshan speak to us about languages and mother tongues, queer identities, love and desire, activisms and the archive, affect, politics and the role of literature.Through their answers, as well as the poems that accompany them, we become witnesses to the power of words to create alternative realities, ones that are more livable, gentle and embracing of nonnormativity.Afshan D'souza-Lodhi is a queer Muslim writer born in Dubai to Indian and Pakistani parents and currently living in Manchester.She writes theatre and poetry, as well as non-fiction, and works with young and emerging artists.Together with her work as an artist -she's been a resident at the Royal Exchange Theatre and the Manchester Literature Festival, and has worked with Eclipse Theatre, Tamasha Theatre Company and Paul Burston's Polari-Afshan is a member of Northern Police Monitoring Project, an independent campaigning and advocacy organization that challenges police harassment and violence.Afshan's work centres on the experience of women of South Asian heritage, be it in the context of the Indo-Pakistani Partition in the theatre piece Santi & Naz (2020, The Vault), or the everyday life in an all-female-run halal butcher shop in the radio play Chop Chop (2019, BBC Radio).In her short play Lesborist Tapes (2015) -later made into a short film for Channel 4 called An Act of Terror (2018)-Afshan dismantles the trope of the Muslim terrorist against the idea of sexually terrorizing the West and explores the relationship between capitalism, patriarchy, religion and sexuality in the context of the War on Terror.Her short essay "Hijabi (R)evolution" was included in the collection It's Not About the Burqa (2019), and in it Afshan reflects upon her own relationship with Islam and the Hijab as a young queer Muslim growing up in the West, in a context of growing Islamophobia.Her latest poetry collection,