Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of poetry collections "Kohl and Chalk" and "Baker of Tarifa." Her latest work, "Ghazal Cosmopolitan," is a book of essays and poems exploring the culture and craft of the ghazal form. Winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry, the Nazim Hikmet Prize and multiple Pushcart nominations, Zeest Hashmi's poetry has been translated into Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu, and has appeared in anthologies and journals worldwide, most recently in McSweeney's "In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth." She has taught in the MFA program at San Diego State University as a writer-in-residence and her work has been included in the Language Arts curriculum for grades 7-12 (Asian American and Pacific Islander women poets) as well as college courses in Creative Writing and the Humanities.
Website: http://shadabhashmi.com
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi My earliest encounter with English poetry drew a subliminal connection with the Irish poets, a connection I could not easily pinpoint as a student of literature in Lahore, Pakistan, but one that re-emerged with striking clarity on my first visit to Ireland. Seeing fragments of poetry adorning hotel walls, ceilings of…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi And there was evening– you were born (raging like a lioness). A monsoon evening– the window wide and the world awash. With this, the window in the story of my first hours on earth, my mother conjures a desire for perspective and possibility. I will grow up seeing the veins of…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi On particularly tough days of my first Ramadan in college, I had vivid dreams of Peshawar, my hometown. Eager to succeed as an international student, I would never have confessed to being homesick but for my Psychology course “Sleep and Dreaming” which required a dream journal. “It’s mid-day,” I noted in…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Writing lives in the gut, like the good bacteria and the bad; it carries on an endless flirtation, an infuriating, nagging conversation with the gut’s long-married partner, the psyche. From time to time, it may traverse its underground-cityscape of anxiety, nostalgia, compulsion, its contradictory pull between instinct and fact-checking, its love-hate…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Deema Shehabi & Kazim Ali As a Pakistani writer who grew up during the Soviet war in bordering Afghanistan, and one who has never known a time when Muslim-populated cities across the globe were not under attack, I insist on defining my “Muslim-ness” outside the gallery of war, turning away from…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The author as a student at Kinnaird College I began writing poetry on a campus of red-brick corridors, ancient oaks, belligerent crows, and sharp-witted, lively women who thrived on critical thinking— Kinnaird college, in Lahore, Pakistan. In my earliest writing, I seem to have tested truths, grappled with the abstract, as…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The ancient bricks of the mosque’s roof slowly loosen and slide apart, letting in a sudden, high torrent of water that nearly drowns me before becoming a mist of green, garden-filtered light: a recurring dream after my first visit to Cordoba, Spain, years ago. I would remain haunted afterwards by the…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi On the M2 bus to the East side, a man heaves as he steps in with his walker. I have yet to open the box that has the Sufi nai you brought me. When the man attempts to sit down, he has trouble balancing. I have yet to open that box…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The ghost that lurks around the old Bombay Company bookshelf is the ghost of an elliptical future, trailing the past like a spectacular, burning, comet-tail. It is the wispy energy of my own half-dreamed, half-written book that hovers over the rows of books I use for research, mostly works of history…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Trying to name the peculiar sweetness of Spanish sunlight in winter (lemon soufflé? saffron ice cream? malai qulfi?) before touchdown in Granada, I feel the small plane shake, then gently glide into descent. I’m reminded of a poem of mine in which a character has a dream of flying over the…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi As the election season seemed more and more like being trapped in a carnival where the uncanny is orchestrated to play up primal fears, we witnessed language itself veering off into the realm of the irrational— not only because statements did not reflect facts or reflected only partial facts, or arguments…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi We are at the Original Pancake House. Walking through these double doors, a life-size mirror is always the first to meet me, but I am never shocked by the reflection as I am now. Does the wallpaper seem more ivory than before? Are the white tablecloths casting a glare? Am I…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi One point six miles from the Pacific, the house with the terra cotta fountain and the carob tree, on Crescent Point Road. You all came home in rear-facing car seats, swaddled in blankets and matching caps, different colors, different years, but from the same hospital, about ten miles away from here.…
by Shadab Zeesht Hashmi Okra, mint and chilies grow in the back and marigolds and roses in the front yard; they’re in my peripheral vision as I bike and study. The seeing is important. Before my grandmother began teaching me and before I owned a student desk with wheels, I didn’t care much for Math.…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi At the end of the story, in its final pages, is a queen. Not the pious despot Isabella of Castille who is about to command the Inquisition, or the embittered, vengeful Sultana Aixa la Horra who is inciting war within the house of Nasrid, but the queen who is obscured from…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Photo by Ayesha Bokhari. A breathless list of what you’re likely to see fifteen minutes before sunset on my Iftaar table: fruit chaat, a sweet and spicy fruit salad made mostly of apples from my yard, bananas, grapes, orange or lemon juice, chick peas, sometimes guavas and pomegranate seeds, dahi baray,…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi At an Australian cricket club in Manhattan so dimly lit that I lift the nearest tea light so I can see the menu, I feel oddly at home; it is likely the haze of cultural nostalgia in these surroundings. As a Pakistani I grew up with cricket though I’m not much…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi At the end of the story, in its final pages, is a queen. Her name is Morayma. Refusing to be erased or memorialized, she is an inexhaustible figure in a book I long finished, a book of poems tracing the history of Al Andalus. I am in Granada again; after all…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi My first encounter with the ghazal had to have happened at home where my parents played ghazal LPs on their Phillips record player, along with Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Harry Belafonte and Edith Piaf. The ghazal entered my consciousness first as music, accessible only to the extent that Edith Piaf was accessible; through…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi From the outside, Lorca’s summer house in Granada reminds me of childhood laughter, something he vowed never to lose: doors and windows painted promise-green, white walls, sunlight sliding like a child on snow, belly down. On my way here, I’ve seen tomatoes nearly as big as cantaloupes in a shop not…