When I was reading Naima Rashid’s poetry collection, Sum of Worlds (Yoda Press, 2024), some of the words I kept noting down were media, legacy, memory, anchor. The book came out when the Palestinian genocide had been underway for some time and I, along with so many others, had been watching it on my screen, feeling as if I were going insane, and certain poems in the collection echoed that feeling. Then there were poems that broke down the psyche, examined one’s relationship with the world, and there was so much that resonated.
Naima writes fiction as well as poetry. She is also a translator. Her work was longlisted for National Poetry Competition 2019 and Best Small Fictions 2022. Her other works include Naulakhi Kothi (Penguin Random House India 2023), Chicanes (Les Fugitives, 2023), and Defiance of the Rose (Oxford University Press, 2019). She is a collaborator with the UK-based translation collective, Shadow Heroes, which teaches young people to embrace all aspects of their linguistic and cultural heritage.
This poems in her latest book show her deftness with language as she moves from very pointed moments to larger ones, reflective of how we exist in this world.
FARAH ALI: The title, Sum of Worlds, evokes a feeling of vastness made carryable. These words make it bearable to have selves; instead of a feeling of scatteredness, there’s a feeling of gathering. How did you arrive at this title?
NAIMA RASHID: The book was an act of personal reckoning. Quite literally, a gathering of selves. Central to this was the need to make sense of, to embrace selves (perceived as) splintered through the filters of language, geography, and roles. For most of my life, I have lived in one country but called another language home. Questions of identity and belonging have always haunted me, overtly and internally. When I was in Pakistan and learning and teaching French, I often heard, “Who do you think you are? Were you born in Switzerland? Who around you is speaking French?” Similarly, living in the Middle East, teaching a language that I wasn’t born into meant that there were always questions of legitimacy. Ironically, when I left Pakistan, in a belated homecoming, I returned to Urdu and Punjabi like a woman possessed. For many years, I felt there was an artificial need to justify which was the ‘real’ language, the ‘real’ country I belonged to and what constituted that claim to authenticity. (Was it bloodline? Was it a passport? Was it a stamped piece of paper – a degree or a marriage certificate?) I realize now that it was a false disconnect. Home is the permanent in-betweenness, the never-quite-arriving, it’s the anchoring to something internal that goes beyond an external peg. I also know that is why I find translation so grounding.
FA: In what way?
NR: In translation, you are first a close reader, then a translator or meaning-maker. When you read the work closely, you have to read it beyond words, feel it in your bones, immerse yourself into the mood and the tilt of it so that when you hit a false note in your translation, a siren goes off in your mind. This exercise addresses meaning at a level that goes beyond any external skin.
Once you identify this kernel, in the translation, you recreate from this locus of understanding. As a translator, you make creative choices in the service of this essence. Well, I do. My meaning-making journey with my own life, the subject of this book, closely resembles this process. It was a deep dive within to find and free up the self beneath the skins that culture, religion, gender force us into wearing. What’s the raw bleeding tendon beneath those mounds? How do we face the self beyond its named and known exterior and learn to love it?
FA: Pain and illness are some of the things that the poems in this book acknowledge. ‘Migraine’ is full of beautiful imagery of noise and size; ‘Attempt at Apology’ speaks of the brokenness of the spirit. There is also reference to bodies being hurt elsewhere and seen through a form of media. These poems are as if hurt is being challenged, taken head on. Is poetry, for you, a more direct way of looking at pain than prose, which you also write?
NR: Poetry, for me, is the most visceral form of writing. It can be years before I’m able to write a poem that I know has birthed inside me. ‘Weave’, for example, was written more than ten years after the moment which cracked it open. At the time of its occurrence, I didn’t have the distance or the emotional resources to process it. You have to sit with your pain in a raw, unfiltered way. In prose, there is always some awareness and manoeuvring of structure to give distance between the writer and the subject.
There is no such buffer in poetry. It’s also why I need a much longer time to write a few poems but can write a lot more prose in the same time. The logistics of craft can be premeditated to some extent for prose but poetry is just throwing yourself in the deep end with no sight of the shore. You could bleed more, you could come out healed. There’s no knowing the jagged edges you’ll bruise against.
FA: There is an idea of the anchoring of the body throughout this book, sometimes stated explicitly and other times implied. In ‘Finishing’, the first line reads, “the body is anchored after a manic march”. And in your poem ‘Plasma’ I sensed that the TV acts as an anchor – the world seen through it is erupting in violence and trouble but the viewer is held in place by the presence of the screen. What do you think helps holds a body in place? Can imposed border lines of a nation do that to some degree, even as it comes at the expense of other ideas?
NR: When the first draft of the collection was ready in 2017, I was surprised to see how central the body was to many of the poems. Trauma and healing both pass through the body, we all know that, but I wasn’t conscious of how deeply the body was woven into how I was experiencing life and making sense of it.
In a way, the poems map a journey of how we receive and hold blows in the body. From ‘Garland’ to ‘Punjaban in Calvin Klein’, there is an arc that builds out from our first experience of being objectified as girls to a wholesome acceptance of our body. In ‘Garland’, the young girl is still carefree, we meet her at the threshold of puberty, just before she becomes aware of her body as object. Over time, she will internalize this gaze and a disconnect will ensue. In ‘Punjaban in Calvin Klein’, we see a resolution of these three layers – mind, body, place. That is the only trinity that can hold a body in place in my view. Before that, we are hurtling through life in a vertiginous freefall.
Imposed border lines of a nation can be alienating and can subject a body to even more trauma. I’m thinking of Bashan Singh in ‘Toba Tek Singh’ by Manto and our generation of elders who experienced the tyranny of forcibly drawn lines in their bones without having the vocabulary to express it. Whereas a borderless existence can be quite freeing and grounding. Look at digital nomads; they live by nomadism as a credo. They camp in a country for some months then move on without any attachment or regret, setting up home with equal ease in a new place. I like to think they go through life with a translator’s heart.
FA: TV is a welcome distraction in these poems, but it’s a distraction laden with guilt for the person using this technology to view the use of other technologies that wreak bodily harm elsewhere. Is there also an element of feeling like we’re participating as witnesses? Is there any usefulness in that feeling?
NR: I thought a lot about how the meaning of television, and of broadcast media in general, changes in different phases of our lives. What does it mean when we are not in our own country and watching news about our countries through that medium? How do we process the violence and the hurt, the endless bad news? And how does that change our relationship with the place we left behind? On the one hand, it keeps us connected. Familiarity of language is very soothing when you are far from home but on the other hand, it keeps us in a state of alarm and dread.
We are witnessing but we are also being witnessed. Others also perceive us through the medium of an image that is built through the media they consume. As expats, we are always up against a preconceived image of how the media has portrayed us. I would face micro-agressions of people always ‘greeting’ me with the latest bad news about, say a bomb blast in Pakistan, and using it to set the tone for future interactions, reducing my existence to a single occurrence beyond my control.
I wrote ‘Life’s a soap on my television screen’ with Geo TV for expats in mind but sadly, it’s a poem that applies to our collective coping with the Palestine situation or the world at large. I have never wanted more for a poem to become irrelevant but it doesn’t look likely any time soon. ‘Plasma’ also touches on how we use screens to escape real connections with real human beings. The performed life on screens is a poor substitute for real life where decisions involve more commitment than pressing buttons on a remote and having a slew of channels on command.
FA: The idea from the title carries over into the poem ‘Continents Breaking’ in the lines “(You don’t pack smart when you’re a land mass coming loose.)” and “I fail to nip and tuck the geography of the self”. And this seems to be along the theme of legacy and memory in a body/mind itself. There is a sense of connectedness of body and mind with the earth. Again, there is a duality of breaking apart and anchoring, that one’s shattering or erosion are taking place while one is firmly upon the earth, even as masses of the earth itself are slowly moving away from each other. Was this a conscious exploration of connectedness, or was it something that became more apparent as the book took form?
NR: I am obsessed with the body as a historical site, a palimpsest. It’s the playground where our battles with our self and the world play out. This collection was a quest to locate the still point of belonging at the nexus of body, mind and place. Writing these poems revealed to me in a powerful way how the body keeps score. You hear it but the real import of the phrase only kicks in when you make the treck within. Yes, the body is a repository of legacy and memory. In poems of loss like ‘Messages’, ‘Resident Ghost’, ‘Syntax of Missing’, ‘When you went to the waters’, I question how much of our presence (and, therefore, legacy) is physicality. When a person is no more, either in the world or in our lives, is physicality the only dimension which is relevant? So much of that person lingers with us in other ways. A part of them is grafted on to our minds and bodies forever. We carry them with us into our daily moments of living. When someone passes, is more of them absent than present? What are we mourning, and is there even a need to mourn?
FA: When structuring the book did you think about creating sections or some other way of marking parts of it separate from other parts?
NR: Sequence and curation are important for a poetry collection. I appreciate this as a reader of poetry so I did start off believing that there should be some sophisticated structuring. However, some drafts into the book, I realized that any such ordering would be contrived to this particular project since the way experiences made sense was so round-about, topsy turvy, if not completely unpredictable. The last poem was added after the manuscript had gone through the first edit with the publisher. I couldn’t muster the courage to write it and share it but I’m glad I did. In a way, it’s the perfect endnote because it’s the truest to life. You can’t impose any neatness upon the process of healing.
FA: You work with multiple languages and and you write both poetry and prose. I really like the sense of expansion that this gives, of allowing yourself to flow in and out of structures. You have also translated poetry and prose. Is there something that compels you to translate?
NR: I do indeed create and translate fluidly between genres and languages. I’ve never thought of myself as a short story writer or a poet or novelist. Genre is irrelevant. If I have something worth saying, I’ll say it in the form that best suits the matter and if it’s a form I’m not fluent in yet, I will learn it. I recognize seasonal fluency in genres which is directly proportionate (for me, so far) to the proximity with the genre. When I work on a poetry translation, I develop fluency in poetry. When I translate novels, it feels easier to write to the scale of a novel in my own writing.
If you extract translation from the strict meaning of making meaning cross over between languages and take it to mean more widely the exercise of making meaning across different phases of your life or from the chaos of lived experience to the (relative) neatness or formal rigour of literature, you are essentially translating – reading your life closely, finding the pulse, finding the high points, the gaps, then stringing together through the alchemy of literature something that honours that node of truth in a form that has its own structure. Sum of Worlds is about my life, and it loosely echoes an arc of personal discovery, but its structure is its own. It is ordered to mirror the original journey but the moments of my life didn’t correspond to the Table of Contents in the book. It’s a translation of life into poetry.
Farah Ali is the writer of the novels Telegraphy (2026) and The River, The Town, and the short-story collection People Want to Live.