Besharam
Author: Nafeesa Hamid
Genre: Poetry
Publisher: Verve Poetry Press
Year: September 2018
Formats: Paperback
Blurb: Besharam - Nafeesa Hamid’s glorious debut collection – asks this and many other questions. When does a girl become a woman? When does her world allow her to become a woman? And what kind of woman should she be? The answers aren’t readily forthcoming.
As she treads the shifting line between woman and daughter, between Pakistan and the West, between conservative Islam and liberal, Nafeesa has almost had to find a new language to try to communicate the difficulties of her situation. And what a language! At times hard and pointed, at other times wonderfully and colourfully evocative, erupting with femininity, empowerment and rebellion. It is this language that makes Besharam such a pleasure to read in spite of the pain it contains. This really is a magical first book of poetry.Besharam contains guest poems from Birmingham poets Mina Mekic, Yasmina Silva and Zeddie
Sample -How men are made
Perhaps this is how men are made
Perhaps he was more man than fist
Perhaps she closed her eyes
Instead of glaring into his like an insolent child
Perhaps she sunk her knuckles into the leathery skin of sofa
Rather than his face.
The Ramadan calendar is four years out of date and still no one will take it down.
In a freeze frame we all look bored more than we do tense, more than we do scared, more than we do broken.
In awkward angles (because this is a freeze frame)
we are waiting for him to kick her balloon belly,
waiting for her to scream, fall to floor, crawl towards door,
waiting for someone to stop them,
waiting to wake up,
waiting for God to answer all the prayers we made up
in the madness,
waiting for my brother to cry but still look like man
in his five year old skin
because real men watch, they don’t walk
waiting for her to bruise,
keep asking for more – her mouth wide awake in this frame
she will not shut up
waiting for him to tell us he is a hard-working man,
hard-working father and husband –
he is not monster.
He is my father.
Perhaps this is how men are made.