Muslim poet moves crowd by refusing to prove her humanity
22-year-old Suhaiymah Manzoor Khans This Is Not a Humanising Poem asks critical questions.
(Web Desk) -“Love us when we aren’t athletes; when we don’t bake cakes.
When we don’t offer our homes or free taxi rides after the ‘event’.
If you need me to prove my humanity, I’m not the one that’s not human.”
This is a poem by 22-year-old Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan, a poetess and blogger. In her recent poem narrated at Slam Poetry Competition, where poets read their works without any props, music or costumes, Khan stole the show during the recital of her poem This Is Not A Humanising Poem, leaving the crowds applauding.
She won second place for the poem at 2017’s Roundhouse poetry slam. She says that it is not her who needs to prove her humanity, instead those who seek her to prove hers.
A new generation of young Muslims is growing up in the recurring terrorist attacks that are fueling the rise of Islamophobia in the Western world. Khan’s poem focuses on the issue while taking on the human side, involving emotions and perceptions, of both sides of the complex equation.
She recites: “This will not be a ‘Muslims are like us’ poem.
I refuse to be respectable.
Instead, love us when we’re lazy. Love us when we’re poor.
Love us in our back-to-back council estate, depressed and washed and weeping. Love us high as kites, unemployed, joy riding, time wasting, failing at school.
Love us filthy, without the right colour passports, without the right-sounding English.”
Through her poem she also highlights not just the discrimination but the emotional agony of the community in the aftermath of terror attacks.
“My mother texts me, too, after BBC news alerts. “Are you safe? Let me know you’re home okay.
And she means safe from the incident, yes, but also from the after effects.”
This poem has also taken the internet by storm with it being viewed 1.5 million times on Facebook.
Suhaiymah Manzoor also writes a blog, the brown hijabi .
