Poetry as Reclamation: Rewriting the Body, the Land, and the Self

My father died under mysterious circumstances, but he had always told me that he wanted me to become a journalist because, he said, journalists are brave. Even during the curfews in Kashmir—the new normal of the 1990s when I was a little girl—he would tell me that only journalists could move around freely and ask everyone the hard questions.

(Poetry, Passion, and Physics.)

He was a well-known musician, and journalists often interviewed him. He loved seeing his name and his music in the newspapers. Maybe that’s why, when he died the way he did, I knew I had to be brave too—as if his premonition had become my reality.

The truth of that time, and of my life, was to tell the world what had really happened to him. The Indian police claimed he fell from a train. But what about the body? Why were we never given it? Why wasn’t it kept in the morgue? They said the police had cremated him too quickly—by “mistake.” India never admitted that the police had killed him.

The truth needed to be told—not only about his death but also about the rumors that followed, the suggestion that I had been raped by the police. The urgency to speak never left me, yet it was almost impossible to say out loud. Long days of silence followed, filled with fragments of thought and feeling that had no direction. Poetry finally gave them one. It gave me a way to tell the story and release what I felt—raw and unprocessed, like the fragments that make up PTSD itself. Poetry offered rhythm instead of order, breath instead of restraint.

When I began writing about that fateful night when my father disappeared—we were traveling together on a train—I didn’t yet know I was beginning a book of poems. Later, the police claimed they had cremated his body, though we never received it. All we were given was a photograph of his mutilated face, his clothes, slippers, and the ring from his finger. I understood that these gestures were meant to close the case and destroy evidence. He was Muslim and circumcised, yet they claimed a postmortem had been performed at a hospital whose morgue records were later destroyed. So many lies, so many layers of deceit meant to erase what had really happened.

Those facts lived inside me for years—too vivid, too brutal, and too raw to write down in prose. Every time I tried, the sentences felt like barbed wires. The feelings were unprocessed, cascading through me. I didn’t want structure; I wanted release. Without realizing it, while obsessing over the need to tell the truth—to expose what had happened to my father—I began writing poems instead. The poems carried what prose could not. Though I began the memoir in my head right after his death and formally started writing it in 2011, I finished the poetry collection first. It had always been living inside me.

A lot of what I could not say when my father was alive—and in the immediate aftermath of his death—found its voice in this book. During those years, I struggled with PTSD and the social pressures of being a woman in a culture overshadowed by military presence and fear. Men, even those in our own families, became more protective, choosing silence for women rather than letting them speak for themselves. My father was different. He understood those pressures but still allowed me to do as I willed. In this book, I finally said everything I could not then.

The poems also carry the courage it took to walk into courthouses, to confront Indian police officials about killing my father, even when doing so meant risking my own safety. Writing about that—about confronting the system, about the lies, about being a woman who refused to remain quiet—was its own act of reclamation. Through these pages, I have reclaimed my body, my story, and my right to exist without fear. I hope these words will become an inspiration for other women who have endured silence, suppression, or loss of any kind.

There was a time when people speculated that I might have been raped by the police—that this was why my father was killed. Maybe they said that because Kashmiri women have long faced violence from Indian forces. I wanted to speak up, but I stayed silent. That was in 2003. Now, in 2025, these poems have become my way of speaking at last. They have helped me regain the voice that fear had taken away.

My father was a musician, and poetry has always felt close to that world of rhythm and sound. It comes to me effortlessly, unlike prose, which I must think my way through. Even my mentors used to say my prose was poetic. I remember one of them, Jerry Prentice, telling me back in 2010 that I was a poet, even though I hadn’t yet written a verse. He was right.

I grew up surrounded by rhythm—my father rehearsing every morning and evening, teaching his students on weekends, composing new songs. I loved listening to him sing whenever he was home; it never felt like enough. Now, poetry gives me a small piece of that solace—not the same as my father’s music, but something of its pulse. Even in prose, I listen for music. I can’t stop revising until I hear it. But in poetry, I rarely need to revise. The rhythm arrives already whole.

I used the Qasida as a form because it connected me to my culture. I reimagined it, though—shaped it into something that could hold a woman’s voice, a woman’s witnessing. Everything in these poems has been felt and lived.

Writing about my culture is always difficult, especially for a global audience. Many times, we must explain every word, every cultural nuance, even when literal translation can never capture the depth of meaning. Poetry allows me to escape that burden; it accepts ambiguity and nuance. Yet, I also don’t want readers to lose the truth or misunderstand it—especially about my father’s death. So I sometimes include English explanations alongside Kashmiri words. That became my bridge between worlds: one poem speaking to both sides of my identity.

This duality—of language, of belonging—is inseparable from who I am. It complicates and completes me. I often long to listen to Kashmiri music, though it brings both joy and ache. The other day, at the gym after a long day, I played Kashmiri songs on Spotify sung by new voices from home. I felt a sudden calm and silence, an unexplainable stillness that was both happiness and grief. I saw my father’s face as he rehearsed, teaching his students, composing, and asking me what I wanted to hear. He always knew—it was Setha Yazkael Az Laez Zaer Saazas—not literally “playing the guitar,” but “plucking the string of rhythm.” He used to play the harmonium, its steady hum rising under his voice, shaping the air with tenderness.

As I stepped down from the elliptical and pulled a pair of dumbbells from the rack, I repeated to myself with each rep that I had finally done it—I had finished my poetry book, told the truth, told the world what they tried to bury. The memory of his music—the rhythm, the breath between notes—was suddenly in the room with me. I realized that what I have written carries that same pulse, a continuation of his song, a rhythm of both grief and survival.

When I imagine my father now, I see him beside me, smiling as he plays and sings—his harmonium breathing with him, his voice soft and sure. I can still picture the way he used to feed me with his own hands, his eyes full of love and pride. I think about how, even without knowing it, he gave me the courage to speak. Writing this book feels like saying thank you to him—for the faith he had in me, for teaching me that bravery isn’t loud or visible, but in continuing to tell the truth, even when the world doesn’t want to hear it.

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