Discrimination seems to be a key theme in ‘Ausländerin’; how much has this been part of your experience studying abroad in Germany and how has this shaped your poetry?
As someone whose faith can be instantly identified on account of the hijab on her head, I did unfortunately experience mild forms of discrimination. Perhaps it seems presumptuous of me to isolate my overtly Muslim identity as the reason for this discrimination instead of other factors such as race or ethnicity (i.e “looking different”). In my experience however, the discriminatory encounters were of an Islamophobic nature and as Claire Chambers wrote in a recent piece , Islamophobia does not work in isolation of other factors such as ethnicity, class, race or gender but rather these factors collude and overlap in particularly complex ways and shape the language and praxis of Islamophobia.
However, I would like to emphasize that I have also faced discrimination in Pakistan. So, in a sense, discrimination has been a constant in my life which remains unaltered regardless of my physical location, although certainly the forms and intensity of it vary. For instance, you would be surprised to know that people in my immediate social circle in Pakistan have highly ambivalent notions about the practice of veiling. Whereas in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, this ambivalence usually manifested itself as a curious question, an offhand remark or an uncomfortably long stare, in Pakistan I found myself directly reproached for my personal clothing choices.
Certainly these experiences shape the themes of my poems but, on a deeper level, they motivate me to keep writing, to search harder for the right idiom, the appropriate metaphor, the tone, to speak insistently.
I don’t really have a specific audience in my mind when I write. My choice of language is dictated by convenience more than anything else. For me English is, for better or for worse, the language I am most comfortable writing in. Moreover, I do not feel that I necessarily need to write in Urdu to have access to a Pakistani readership. Many people in Pakistan are raised bilingually and have appropriated english to make it their own – a Pakistani variety of English. I use code-switching and code-mixing in some of my poems to reflect the way English is written and spoken in Pakistan and by doing this, I hope I am able to connect with a Pakistani readership. I do not feel compelled to write in “standard English” because English can no longer be seen as the language of the British monarch, the so-called “Queen’s English” or the property of a particular nation-state. Post-colonial critics, Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, for instance, explore the ways in which the colonial hegemony of “standard English” is contested by authors from former colonies through the deployment of varieties of English, englishes, within their literary texts.
Rosario Freire is a Junior Poetry Editor for the magazine.
