Following the open call for submissions in April 2024, we’re delighted to announce the official selection, which will be published in an anthology by Renard Press in July 2024. (The list is sorted by title – you can search this page with ctrl/cmd + ‘F’ to find a name)…
Read on →
The following is a series of writing prompts, put together by Zainab Imran, following the prompt workshop Zainab ran in April 2024. Please use it, be inspired, and, when you’re ready, answer the open call.
Download as a PDF (right-click, save target as/save linked file as) here.
This session will look at portraits and creating poetry, both of the self and of how subjection and orientalism affect perceptions of racialised individuals, to illustrate a narrative outside of the subject’s mind and of the subject’s mind, as well as the interruptions and doubts that swerve from the image a poet is initially convincing us to see.
Free Write exercise:
5 minutes – just a quick exercise to get started. Listen out to the words I’ll be dropping to include and help shape the free write itself.
Self portrait poems:
Self-portrait in front of a small mirror – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU0xOUZJDls
I pay close attention to the shape of my eyes, how my eyelids slope down towards the ridge of my nose—that fold of skin, which I will learn is the epicanthic fold, no more an indicator of race than my stubby little fingers or the mole at the centre of my chest. Just different. I am making a self-portrait in front of a small mirror propped up on my pencil case. How can I know that when I put aside the mirror, as I must, to encounter the world with and through those eyes, there will be questions: where are you from? are you Korean? Speak Chinese? At seventeen, at Borders, I will say my books are for an English degree and the man behind the counter will grin, call me a bright boy, and though it may be nothing—as he says it, I see myself reflected in the glossy wall display behind him—I will feel accused. When I open my mouth in shops, though my voice shrinks into a weird RP, I will accept the illusion of the colonial elite, other in blood and colour but English in taste. The illusion will remain intact long after I am presumed foreign, after a stranger tells me to fuck off back home, after a barman—standing in front of a row of spirits, endlessly mirrored—asks for my ID, refuses to accept my name as my own. Will Harris? My nasal bridge which, being lower-rooted, draws a fold of skin over the corners of my eyes, marks me out—as it does these words—for special treatment. But I must, and will, put aside the mirror.
Edwin Lord Weeks (working in the 19th century)
Perceptions and objectification – the artist’s eye
How do we reclaim?
Zainab Imran is a poet, zine-maker and facilitator of British Pakistani heritage based in Scotland. Now completing her Creative Writing Masters at the University of St Andrews, he writes on a multitude of racial issues, with a particular focus on the diaspora and the hidden stories of women in the colonial struggle and post-colonial journeys to the West. In 2022, they were awarded the Royal Society of Literature and Sky Arts Award for Poetry as an emerging writer of colour, through which she was mentored by Jay Bernard, and was part of the Words a Stage 2.0 cohort with Apples and Snakes. Zainab is now working towards beginning his Creative Writing PhD and producing a dissertation of poetry retelling the Oresteia through the setting of India’s Partition.
The following is a series of writing prompts, put together by Rhiya Pau, following the prompt workshop she ran in April 2024. Please use it, be inspired, and, when you’re ready, answer the open call.
Download as a PDF (right-click, save target as/save linked file as) here.
How should we think about the bounds of solidarity?
Remember: “There’s no such thing as the voiceless. Only the deliberately silenced and the preferably unheard.” [Arundhati Roy]. Solidarity is not about speaking for people, it’s about supporting them, making space and platforming them.
“What is this greed of wanting more,
of baking four and twenty blackbirds in a pie
and expecting them to sing, when you know
that a twelve-year-old girl, who makes her living
picking chilies, has just died of exhaustion
walking home? And as you learn her name,
Jamalo, and are figuring out how to mourn
her, someone else will say, Look,
the flamingos have returned to Bombay.
Look how this carpet of pink brightens
the day. It’s the difficulty of reconciliation.
This with that. Jack and his box.
The continual threat of being startled.” [Tishani Doshi]
Writing in solidarity in a way that ties the specificity of our experiences to the universality of the movement, is an incredibly powerful approach. It’s a way of adding momentum. In a world where power is highly concentrated, sometimes all we have is momentum, volume, bodies, mass, to change our political trajectory, to be a force to be reckoned with (f = ma).
Solidarity often comes from a place of intense emotion and empathy, these emotions can be overwhelming and to the point of inaction and nihilism. Hannah Arendt draws the distinction between ‘there are no words’, and ‘I have no words’ – if I have no words, I am still there to regain them in the future, but where there are no more words, the violence of non-verbalisation is absolute. Where there are no more words there are no more things, there are no more worlds. Writing in solidarity is also a poetry of witness.
Poetry is all about emotion “a poem is a unit of feeling, that in its singular form makes you quiver” [Ankita Saxena]. The emotions that drive us to activism are very strong, they can be overwhelming, when we feel them entirely cerebrally. This next practice is one I’ve adapted from a friend Sunny Pfalzer. I find it helpful in processing my emotions somatically, and overriding my usual neural pathways when it comes to writing and language. It involves three ten minute sections, but feel free to adjust as you need to. I encourage you to read the full instructions before you begin.
Think about a cause you care about – something that worries you about the state of the world. Think about the last time you experienced emotions related to that cause, maybe an incident you experienced, a conversation about the cause, an article you read etc. Now think about how you would feel if that cause was entirely resolved, and all your worry and anxiety about it disappeared.
How did you find the exercise? What did you find easy/difficult? Did you feel/think different things during different parts of the exercise? Did you feel like you were writing from a different place than usual? Did anything come up related to symbols of solidarity and SA culture?
Rhiya Pau’s debut collection, Routes (Arachne Press, 2022), commemorates fifty years since her family arrived in the UK, chronicling the migratory history of her ancestors and navigating the conflicts of identity that arise within the East African-Indian diaspora. Routes was awarded an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2022. Rhiya won the Creative Future Writers’ Award in 2021 and her poem ‘Salutation’ was highly commended in the 2023 Forward Prize. She has had work published in Wasafiri, The Liminal Transit Review, Token Magazine and the Off the Chest Anthology, among other places. Rhiya is also one half of ORIGINS Poetry Duo, who write and perform collective poetry that does away with “ownership” and “linearity” to decentralise and decolonise the traditional project of history.
Third Space was launched on the 2nd of April 2024, with an open call for submissions for consideration for an anthology of South Asian poetry, scheduled for publication with Renard Press in July 2024.
Today we are delighted to announce the judges on the project. They are:
Farhana Shaikh is a writer and publisher born in Leicester. She established Dahlia Books, a small press from the corner of her kitchen. Farhana won the Penguin/Travelex Next Great Travel Writer prize. She was longlisted for the Spread the Word Life Writing Prize for her memoir about growing up in 1980s Leicester. Her short play Risk was produced as part of Kali Theatre’s discovery programme and staged at Curve Leicester. Her first novel, No Place for a Young Woman, was longlisted in the Women’s Prize/CBC Creative #Discoveries2023. Farhana teaches marketing at De Montfort University and runs the Middle Way Mentoring project. She can be found on X/Twitter talking about books and writing @farhanashaikh.
Navkiran Kaur Mann is a writer and poet. She has performed for the Commonwealth Games in Dubai as part of the Queen’s Baton Relay, and for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Faith in Coventry Cathedral. Her poems have been displayed at London Bridge Railway Station through Apples and Snakes as well as the Pastoraal Informatiecentrum in Hasselt, Belgium. She is working on her first poetry collection. She is co-director of Thrive Poetry Festival, which develops and platforms under-represented artists in their mother tongue.
Dr Reshma Ruia is a Manchester-based British writer of Indian origin. She has a PhD and Master’s in Creative Writing from Manchester University. Her first novel, Something Black in the Lentil Soup, was described in the Sunday Times as ‘a gem of straight-faced comedy’. She has published a poetry collection, A Dinner Party in the Home Counties, which won the 2019 Word Masala Award, and a short story collection, Mrs Pinto Drives to Happiness, shortlisted for the 2022 Eastern Eye ACTA Awards. Her new novel, Still Lives, won the 2023 Diverse Book Readers’ Choice Award and is longlisted for the 2023 People’s Book Award. Reshma’s work has appeared in anthologies and journals, and has been commissioned by the BBC, the University of Cumbria and Manchester Literature Festival. She is the co-founder of The Whole Kahani – a writers’ collective of British South Asian writers. Born in India and brought up in Italy, her writing explores the preoccupation of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging. You can find her on her website, reshmaruia.com, and on Twitter/X @ReshmaRuia.
Gita Ralleigh is a poet, writer and doctor born to Indian immigrant parents in London. She teaches creative writing to science undergraduates at Imperial College and has an MA in Creative Writing and an MSc in Medical Humanities. Her poetry books are A Terrible Thing (Bad Betty Press, 2020) and Siren (Broken Sleep Books, 2022). She is a member of the Kinara poetry collective and a trustee of literary charity Spread The Word. Her debut children’s novel The Destiny of Minou Moonshine was published by Zephyr/Bloomsbury in July 2023 and her second, The Voyage of Sam Singh, is forthcoming in July 2024. You can find her on Twitter as @storyvilled and on Instagram as @gita_ralleigh.
11th April 2024
My parents brought me to the UK in 1965, as a three-year-old, and we lived in Southall – known then as ‘Little India’, as many immigrants from the subcontinent had initially moved there. This was a happy time. I was part of a warm Sikh community, going to the Gurdwara every Saturday, playing with other brown children, shopping in South Asian stores, and watching Hindi films at the cinema. In 1971, when I was nine, my parents moved to Hastings. There were only a couple of other South Asian families in the town, and for the first time I realised that I was ‘brown’. The years in Southall, luckily, had given me a strong sense of identity, but now I had a sense of being an outsider.
The thirteenth century poet Rumi wrote, ‘The wound is the place where the Light enters you.’ In 2020, around the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, I found this out for myself, when someone I had known for a long time openly attacked me on Facebook when I spoke about colonial history in India, accusing me of being illiterate and posting ‘counterculture crap’. I felt isolated. I received no support from people who saw the post – which hurt me. I was shocked and upset, and for a while I stopped going to my studio.
I had recently found a mentor, and he believed my version of the story without question, even though he barely knew me, and offered me his unconditional support. The day after this conversation, which I can only describe as profoundly healing, I wrote my first poem in forty-four years. I have not stopped writing since.
The light that came from the wound is my poetry. It has enhanced my practice and allowed me to communicate on so many more levels. As I spoke up about what had happened through my poems, and as more and more people who I hadn’t previously known stepped up and shared their stories, I realised how important it is to create a safe, inclusive, compassionate space. This is what the Third Space project is about, and I hope you will join me in it.
by Suman Gujral,
April 2024
