ISBN:
9781772013573
Pages: 280 pp
Pub. Date:
September 14 2021
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.625"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Non-Fiction / HIS058000
A moving, poetic correspondence written during the ongoing military occupation of Kashmir.
The City That Is Leaving Forever is a unique instant-message exchange between Kashmir and Vancouver spanning more than five years in the lives of two Kashmiri Muslim women poets. As India’s military carries out extrajudicial killings and imposes a lengthy curfew in Srinagar, the authors describe daily hardships and small pleasures, share drafts of their poems, discuss multilingual poetics, and contrast the anguish of exile with life under lockdown. Their conversation expands during periods of intensifying conflict and personal loss, bearing witness to the harsh tolls (including depression and attempted suicide) exacted by patriarchy and state violence. The correspondence becomes a rigorously feminist record of two poets thinking through trauma together and creating new work in solidarity with emerging freedom struggles across the globe, “a book like a cluster of thorns with some few fragrant petals caught in them.”
The City That Is Leaving Forever is a unique twenty-first-century time capsule: an instant-message exchange between Kashmir and British Columbia spanning more than five years in the lives of two Muslim Kashmiri women poets. In 2016, as India’s military carries out extrajudicial killings and imposes a lengthy curfew in Srinagar, Kurd is forced to cancel her family trip to Kashmir. Syed and Kurd confide in each other as the weeks and months pass, working through drafts of new poems, reading each other’s work, discussing multilingual poetics, the challenges of translation, and the contrasts of daily life in their two cities. The result is a rigorously feminist record of thinking through trauma as it unfolds and a document of life under military lockdown, “a book like a cluster of thorns with some few fragrant petals caught in them.”