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Blank social work genogram template word4/18/2024 And so I think that Urdu poetry feels so inaccessible to me in a certain way, because it’s like a whole different elevated language that I can admire and be in awe of, but not really access. I don’t think I would be a poet at all, if not for the Quran. And Quranic Arabic specifically has so much mystery imbued into it. And then Arabic, of course, is the language of my faith. So Farida Khanum, for example, is a really big influence on some of the more musical elements in my work. And then it’s also where I think I was first exposed to poetry in the form of ghazals because my dad just loves music, and I grew up listening to Urdu ghazals in the car. I’m a native Urdu speaker, my parents are Pakistani immigrants, and so Urdu is my first language and the language of my home. I’m very curious about what each of those languages means to you? And then what happens when you bring them all together on the page in a poem? Or what happens when you experience different permutations of those languages alongside each other? Theophanies is a multilingual collection and you weave together Arabic, English, and Urdu in the poems. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity. I spoke with Ali this past December about Theophanies, and we discussed a range of topics, from embodiment, names and naming, to the limitations of language and more. And in doing so, she pushes them forward to new heights. Rather than being positioned as either for or against traditions, Ali writes from within them. But that description, too, feels too narrow to capture the care and curiosity with which she writes. And as she grapples with questions of faith and womanhood on the page, and pushes the formal boundaries a poem can take, it’s tempting to view her collection as a critique or evaluation of the cultural and spiritual traditions she comes from. In doing so, she creates a collection that feels like a symphony: with each read through, different component parts of the orchestra reveal themselves with greater depth and insight. Capacious, layered, and tinged with the sublime, Ali’s poems weave together scripture, questions of lineage and inheritance, and the embodied experiences of being a South Asian Muslim woman. I was again thinking about this resistance to easy categorization while reading Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut poetry collection, Theophanies. Coming out of the gates too quickly and pronouncing judgments about the world, and then placing those judgments into neat, definitive categories strips us of the chance to wade in matters that are ambivalent and ambiguous to consider and then reconsider our ideas and conclusions and to not just be receptive to change, but to acknowledge and welcome its inevitability. One of the risks of prematurely making claims is that doing so can shut the door to curiosity. So instead of being prideful, a more honest conception of self-knowledge is one that is grounded in gratitude, appreciation, and awareness of our own contingencies.Īs the years have gone by, I’ve considered the wisdom behind this teaching in areas other than self-knowledge. They betray the fact that so much of what we claim about ourselves can be better understood as a Divine endowment to us. One reason for this caution-particularly when it comes to making claims about oneself-is that claims are often rooted in the ego. Very early in my spiritual education, I was taught by my elders to be cautious about making claims.
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