Bookshelf Interview with Hafsah Bashir

© Manchester Literature Festival

Hafsah Aneela Bashir is a poet and spoken word artist. Hafsah’s debut collection The Celox And The Clot unapologetically examines the human condition, and the conflicts that arise within us. She has worked with Women Asylum Seekers Together to use creative agency as a means to highlight demands for basic human rights. Also part of a writing collective called Manchester Muslim Writers, she conducts poetry workshops within the community working with young people to develop understanding of identity and empowerment.

See her poetry performance at Manchester Literature Festival on Sunday 7th October, 4pm at International Anthony Burgess Foundation.

At Manchester Literature Festival, you will be giving a theatrical performance of your poems from your debut collection The Celox and the Clot; can you give us an indication of the themes you explore?

Mainly, if I was going to narrow it down, I would say my poems focus on relationships (my relationship with myself, private relationships and public relationships) and on love. In particular, the act of loving and how this is an inspiring and creative emotion. When the collection was published and I could look back through what I’ve written, it was really interesting to notice that the act of naming runs throughout. This was an idea that I have never consciously recognised as a recurring theme in my work, however, of course, to name something is to love. It’s a way of honouring something or someone, which is very important to me - to humanise in a world that often turns people into statistics.

You will be performing with Sarah Yaseen – a Sufi singer and songwriter; how do you feel about the performance, and how do you approach performance in general?

The process of writing and performing poetry has been such a long journey for me; when I first started out it was just me on stage performing a reading. I’ve actually known Sarah for years, way before we became artists, but we lost contact so it was really nice to come back together again having both started to express ourselves through performance. I think the first piece we performed together was for a poem I wrote about the four young boys who were murdered on the beach in Gaza. After seeing them in the news I had such a strong instinct to name them, to provide them with a story that was more than just their deaths. So I wrote a poem, and Sarah brought these words to life with a beautiful chorus and score, which was such a powerful accompaniment and it really took the poem to a different place. I think the connection between poetry and music works really well together and encourages the audience to access the emotions we want to convey.

You’ve said, “I started writing to make sense of the world around me, to capture memories in case at some point in my life, I’d forget what I had felt. I write to preserve the heart” – how old were you when you started to write?

I started reading first, and reading has always been really important to me. I grew up in London and was, undeniably, a bookworm. I’m a Muslim, South Asian woman and I was often unheard and overlooked in school, which led me to question where and how I fit into my place in the world. Very early on, I found the local library. Reading is so important to me because the act of reading allows more light into our lives; it allows us to understand so much of the environment around us. As a Muslim, reading also carries a spiritual connection for me as well because the first word Allah said to Prophet Muhammed was “Iqra”, or “read”. But also, discovering reading at a young age demonstrated to me just how powerful stories are; they can help us find our place in the world, as well as experience it through and with others. Therefore, I’m aware of the big responsibility artists carry in putting their stories out there.

In terms of starting to pick up the pen and write, I suppose I was a really angsty teen and so writing enabled me to process those thoughts and feelings. However, I didn’t share my poetry with anyone else until after having my children. I went back to university, and it was one of my tutors who encouraged me to show my work at a writing workshop. The first time I shared one of my poems really felt as if I was standing there naked: completely vulnerable. So, whilst I had always loved poetry, it was at that moment when I realised how important poetry can really be; you can hear or read a voice that isn’t necessarily your own, but it connects us all. Within that space is where we can hear ourselves the loudest. It was eye opening for me that my poetry connected with the people in that room. The journey really just started from there. I started to take myself a bit more seriously and tried to get past the imposters syndrome that we all tend to experience at some point. So this really has been a journey of about ten years in the making.

Do you think that without that little push from your tutor you may not have ever performed your work?

Yes, well this whole idea, this phenomenon of being granted permission and the fact that we wait for this permission; it takes years of experience for us to realise that we don’t need this permission. But growing up… I don’t know where that crept in. I was reading The Good Immigrant, a collection of essays edited by Nikesh Shukla, which is a fantastic book everyone should read, and there was an essay in there specifically that struck a cord with me. I think it was by Derren Chetty. He was a schoolteacher, talking about how important representation is in school. He wrote about how he would ask his students to write a story about anything they wanted, however, the main protagonist in these stories by the children would always be blond haired and blue eyed. It wasn’t until he actively encouraged them to write about the backgrounds that they came from and gave them that permission to do so, that those stories became much more rich and representative of the fabric of our society. I felt this was so important because I saw this so much in my own child; in his aspirations to be like a character on TV who looked absolutely nothing like him and was a far cry from where he comes from, because in his head that is what he sees as being valued.

You recently wrote and performed a monologue based on your grandmother’s experience of the India/Pakistan 1947 partition; could you share some of this with us?

I wrote the monologue as part of the Royal Exchange’s ‘Memories of Partition’ project. The brief was to use the 1947 Partition as inspiration to create a ten-minute piece. We had heard the story from my Nan growing up, and felt her pain and her trauma in our bones. My Nan was seventeen at the time of Partition. There was such trauma involved in this mass exodus of people moving from one side of the border to another, after the British decided to divide India in the way that they did without really thinking about the repercussions. The monologue are the stories of love and loss and courage. My Nan lost a lot of family members. She is now eighty-eight and when she found out I’d recreated her experiences into a monologue and people would be coming to watch, one of the things she said to me was: “I don’t know why you are asking me all these questions. Why do people want to know this now, who really wants to listen?”. The idea that she felt her story was of no value, when really it is of immense value as a piece of history that we don’t have access to was concerning for me.

Often the histories we receive are very whitewashed, a sanitised version that we are taught in school; therefore, there were many times after we performed these monologues, we had people coming up to us after saying “We had no idea that any of this happened”. But the trauma of Partition is still being felt today for my Nan’s generation and the generations below that, therefore it does hold an important place in terms of British identity today. I’d say that these are the voices I’m interested in; those that we don’t get to hear in the mainstream. This comes back to art of naming, trying to bring the experiences of the people we wouldn’t ordinarily hear to the forefront (as well as my own, because there are a lot of very personal, intimate poems in there), so that we can understand the full extent of our human condition.

In your play, Cuts of the Cloth, you explore Muslim women and their relationship with cloth in a society obsessed with policing the female body; can you tell me a bit more about this?

Cuts of the Cloth is set in a dystopia, and is about the last Muslim woman. The play was developed and directed with my fellow co-director of Outside The Frame Arts, Nikki Mailer, who wrote and performed it, and its genesis began with the idea to provide an insight into Muslim women’s relationship with the hijab from a Muslim woman’s perspective because, for as far back as I can remember, Muslim women have been in the spotlight - yet they are nearly always often spoken for or spoken to. The policing of our bodies is constant; what do we wear, why do we wear it, we need to save them, we need to liberate them – without us hearing the voices of those Muslim women themselves. So the play set out to comment on that.

However, what we found - after conducting research and interviews - was that women’s relationships with the hijab were, and are, very closely tied to the ‘War on Terror’ and counter-terrorism strategies. In other words, there was no way of separating the surveillance of Muslim communities from the more personal experiences of Muslim women. So, it was almost as if the play had its own journey. The narrative we created was very much a commentary about the Prevent strategy, counter-terrorism, increased surveillance and the War on Terror alongside women’s relationship with the hijab. We performed this at Open Space festival in Oldham and what was really encouraging was that we had a lot of Muslim women coming up to us afterwards and saying they felt represented in a way that they felt they never had been before. As a writer, especially when writing about your own community, there is a lot of anxiety that comes with writing about these themes – you are critiquing community and you are bringing up issues that need to be discussed – but there is also a worry about how your story is going to be used; people may hijack it to conform to their own agenda. So the act of writing this felt like a huge responsibility. Now, Cuts of the Cloth has been selected for Push Festival, which will be performed in January at HOME, so that means it will be further developed and it’s very exciting that the journey of this play is continuing.

As well as being a successful performer and writer you are a mother of five; how does motherhood influence your work and do you – as Virginia Woolf said – do you need a room of your own or are you able to create in the midst of it all?

I am a mother of five and that experience in itself has enriched me and made me know myself like no other. And it’s an experience that is constantly evolving. You think you’ve nailed it, and then you realise how much there is still to discover about yourself through those relationships with your children. Khalil Gibran’s poem ‘On Children’ was so enlightening for me and you can find my comments on motherhood and the connections with this poem on The Poetry Exchange’s podcast. I feel being a mother has opened up a plethora of sentiments that add to this human condition we all write or read about. I definitely need a room of my own to create but actually we carry those rooms within us. It’s not a physical space to me, its in here all the time. The muse to write is often not around my home but outside in nature, while I’m driving, or walking, or if I encounter something unusual or unfamiliar in my everyday, or while sat in a boring meeting. I guess I create in the midst of it all, I find my little centre in the wonderful chaos of my world and allow what needs to come through.

We’d love you to now share your top five books for the bookshelf.

All About Love by Bell Hooks (2000)

This is a book that defines love and all the ways its been misunderstood in our society, how if we really allow love to be our guiding principle, it can bring positive changes to all aspects of our lives starting with self-love which is so important. With that we value ourselves and honour who we are. This year has been a very transitional year for me, both personally and professionally. At a time where I am looking at all my relationships much more closely, this book helped me unpack and re-evaluate what it means to give and receive love. I thoroughly recommend it.

The Good Immigrant edited by Nikesh Shukla (2016)

This is one of my most favourite books to date in its discussions of race and identity. A collection of 21 essays, by Black and Asian minority ethnic writers in the UK, I read this and could relate to so much of its content. Some books you read are timeless and others are pertinent to what is happening right now. I loved how these essays challenged and called out institutionalised racism, highlighted unconscious bias, deconstructed white privilege and specified the stereotyping that takes place all the time amongst other issues. It had me in stitches, deeply moved, concerned and hopeful all at once.

Teaching My Mother How To Give Birth by Warsan Shire (2011)

I was blown away the first time I read this bold and passionate poetry collection. Metaphor after metaphor, line after line, image after image kept inspiring me as I turned each page and I am still hard pressed to choose a favourite poem. I find her writing to be so arresting, simple yet deeply powerful.

When We Last Saw Your Father He was sitting in the hospital parking lot in a borrowed car, counting the windows of the building, guessing which one was glowing with his mistake.

The Forty Rules Of Love by Elif Shafaq (2009)

This was gifted to me by a dear friend a couple of years ago and I was hooked from the offset. I had just had a health scare and was going through a tough time having to spend a lot of time resting at home which given the type of person that I am, was very difficult for me to do. This book kept me going as it followed the paths of the 13th century poet Rumi and Shams of Tabriz together with the story of Ella, a Massachusetts housewife editing the book of an author called Aziz. The forty rules of love throughout the book intrigued me and I enjoyed the sense of spirituality it gave me. A must read.

‘Fourteenth Rule: Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?’

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou (1969)

Angelou is awe-inspiring and this is a memoir that really made me appreciate not only the quality of writing from an amazing woman but also the incredible resilience of the human spirit. Depicting her life story with graphic detail, one of the things I really related to most was Marguerite’s love of books and reading in much the same way that I was a bookworm at a very young age. Literature, poetry and stories saved me in the same way they provided refuge for Maya. The ability for books to help discover who we are and what we are in the grand scheme of things cannot be underestimated and this book must be on everyone’s bookshelf.