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 Gibraltar in the background, I pose sideways, wearing a Spanish Chrysanthemum claw in my hair, gitana style, taking a dare from my husband. The photo is from an August afternoon, captured in the sun’s manic glare. My shadow in profile, with the oversized flower behind my ear, mirrors the shape of…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Ami, my mother, does my hair, “Helen-of-Troy-style,” a high pony tail with strands wrapped around it on days there is extra time before school. She remembers the hairdo from an old movie which she talks about often, along with her other favorite The Taming of the Shrew with Liz Taylor. When…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi One autumn I’m suddenly taller than my mother. The euphoria of wearing her heels and blouses will, for an instant, distract me from the loss of inhabiting the innocence of a child’s body—the hundred scents and stains of tumbling on grass, the anthills and hot powdery breath of brick-walls climbed, the…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Oversized photography equipment. Tangled wires. In a corner, a dusky, crooked mirror. Ami takes us to the studio for our first passport photos. I am wearing a dress that reminds me of beets for its color and glassy smooth texture. The passport is for a visit to India. From her purse,…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “Taxi to Bethlehem, taxi to Jericho!” the man at a tourism kiosk is shouting, as I make my way from the tram to Jaffa Gate, known also as Hebron Gate, to Muslims as “Bab al Khalil,” or “door of the friend,” named after Hebron where the prophet Ibrahim/Abraham (Khalil al Allah…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair:” the witch sings to the blonde Rapunzel imprisoned in her tower. In a legend, Rudabeh, the dark-haired princess of Kabul lets her hair down like a rope for prince Zal to climb up to her tower. She…
Having before you an iced mango of a really good variety, and in perfect condition, slice off the upper piece as you would decapitate an egg, with this difference, that the mango must be sliced as it rests naturally on its side, lengthwise, and not be set up on end as an egg. Well, having sliced…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Less than a month ago, the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. The last attack of this kind took place in 1971, before I was born, and though tensions between the two countries have never ceased, even the family’s fragmented recollections of blackouts, travel restrictions and patriotic songs on the…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi No one knows if it was really in the state prison, the ruins of which are visible today outside the ancient Agora of Athens, that Socrates was kept during the final days before his execution, so many times has the area been destroyed and reconstructed— walking past it sends a chill…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “I’m on a roadside perch,” writes Ghalib in a letter, “lounging on a takht, enjoying the sunshine, writing this letter. The weather is cold…,” he continues, as he does in most letters, with a ticklish observation or a humble admission ending on a philosophical note, a comment tinged with great sadness…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “You start with a scarf…each 90-by-90-centimeter silk carré, printed in Lyon on twill made from thread created by the label’s own silkworms, holds a story. Since 1937, almost 2,500 original artworks have been produced, such as a 19th-century street scene from Ruedu Faubourg St.-Honore, the company’s home since 1880. The flora…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi In Tian Shan mountains of the legendary snow leopard, errant wisps of mist float with the speed of scurrying ghosts, there is a climbers’ cemetery, Himalayan Griffin vultures and golden eagles are often sighted, though my attention is completely arrested by a Blue whistling thrush alighting on a rock— its plumage,…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The most stunning memory of Swat valley that remains with me since my first visit as a child is the euphoria of the headstrong Darya e Swat, the luxuriously frothy river, like fresh milk churning and churning joyfully. That, and the first time I heard the pristine and full silence of…
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The danger in being the people’s poet is that the poet may end up being reduced to the limited capacity of his people’s reading, his message shrunken to reflect their superficial grasp of his poetry, his work bent out of shape, and the complexity, depth and subtlety critical to understanding it,…
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…