In this curated collection, five poets from Kashmir write about their homeland, variously chronicling the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, the communications blockade, the experience of childhood in militarised zones and the difficulty of bequeathing a brutal history to one’s children.
Organising the narrative of their struggle requires acts of imagination: Letters to those who haven’t been conceived yet, transcripts of conversations that will never come to pass, retellings of ancestral memories. One of the poets, Samia Mehraj, asks of school curricula in India: “Where was my history?” These poems are a small step in revising the erasure and denial of these stories in the mainstream.
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