The Knot of My Tongue

For readers of Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come for Us, here is a searing debut work of emotional honesty about the search for language and self.

I knew it was time to build what could carry, what could find the high point

to name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me

At the heart of The Knot of My Tongue is a speaker trying to find language and selfhood following devastating personal rupture. She excavates and redefines voices from Islamic traditions, Urdu poetry, and intergenerational women’s stories in an attempt to break through her silence and say what cannot be said.

Employing a variety of poetic forms, Zehra Naqvi’s intimate, searching poems take us across generations, continents, and empires to examine the loss of expression occurring at and after moments of displacement—due to migration, colonization, or intimate partner violence.

Weaving between the past and the present, and brilliantly blending the personal and the communal, memory and myth, theology and tradition, the poems in this collection ask: what do different kinds of violence—slow and immediate, public and private—do to our ability to communicate? And what happens to us, to our bodies, and sense of self when we have been rendered silent? Ultimately providing a striking example of the power of speaking through loss and a singular, radiant vision of what recovery and survival can look like.