Research Information System
17th INTERNATIONAL IDEA CONFERENCE: STUDIES IN ENGLISH, Elazığ, Turkey, 7 - 09 May 2025, pp.112, (Summary Text)
Poems Interwreathed with Prayers:
Sanah Ahsan’s Tender Meditation on Queerness and Sacredness
Sanah Ahsan’s debut collection I cannot be good until you say it (2024) uncovers the sacredness within the grey areas of morality, promoting imagination and self-compassion as spaces of connection. This collection serves as a fearless call to prayer, challenging notions of goodness and divinity. Profoundly compassionate, Ahsan's multilingual verse resonates with vibrant musicality and heartfelt tenderness, transforming poetry into prayer and evoking a nurturing faith capable of offering the warmth of a mother's embrace. How do others' perceptions imprison us? How can we accept one another's chaos and embrace one another’s madness? Ahsan poses these questions that delve into the core of humanity to reveal the sacredness of our vulnerabilities. These poems honour the complexities of existence, creating sanctuaries for life’s messiness and the act of being present. Ahsan’s poetry intricately blends Quranic verses, psychology, and the hip-hop rhythms of their childhood to explore divinity within the body regarded as an enduring archive that defies erasure. Their poems navigate complex emotional, affective, and physical terrains, confronting whiteness, Islamophobia, homophobia, and intergenerational trauma. Within these lines, belief and doubt, morality and immorality, the tangible and the spiritual intertwine, reclaiming queer love as sacred. This paper intends to explore how queerness is interlaced with sacredness in Ahsan’s poems and to investigate how Quranic verses are woven into the tapestry of this collection of poems.
Keywords: Queerness, Sacredness, Desire, Faith, and Poems/Prayers