About Me — Hamza M.
from shrapnel to sonnets, a life in literature
When I was 9 years old, my father and I decided to plant a mango tree outside our house. But with every hole that we dug, we unearthed shrapnel and rusty bullet shells. That day, I realized that my hometown was rich in exotic metals despite the sterility of its stories.
Sandwiched between the Northern highlands of Waziristan and the River Kurram, my hometown, experienced the insurgency that pervaded the region between the military and the Taliban the most.
Surprisingly, I felt that the tremors of the war were felt most by my mango trees. Deep into the afternoon, alone, as I played in the shade of the tree, with every passing explosion, a succulent mango, sometimes unripe, would descend into our courtyard and crack open.
To this day, I sense a close affinity with that mango tree because it stood against the tyranny that reverberated in the province and became a symbol of resistance. It was enough to inculcate an aesthetic sensitivity in me and taught me how to retain it amidst chaos and adversity.
Earlier in my childhood, I was sent to a Madrassa (a religious school to memorize the Holy Book), a common custom in every Muslim household to introduce children to their religious roots. It proved detrimental because the madrassa culture was exclusionary for a kid like me who asked innocent questions about the common set of beliefs and practices that resulted from them.
Not only was this an unfruitful expedition, but I was also regarded as a misfit, a sort of outcast, as my family, among few, belonged to the Saraiki ethnicity and was regarded as a misfit by my madrassa fellows and the kids on the street for residing in a Pashtun neighborhood.
A common sight for me was the stone pelting I would receive when I went about my way, and with every stone hurled, they would call me names. All of this crystallized in my imagination quite differently because I had heard and read stories of the prophets that they also got the same treatment from their people.
Drawing comfort as a toddler growing amidst all this, I sought refuge in the stories and poems, all under the shade of the mango trees.
However, my ethnic dilemma — being born into a Saraiki family, learning Pashto on the street, English in school, Urdu with my father, and Persian from my teachers — saved me a lot of trouble because I could now easily blend in with people on the university campus. My affinity to learn languages also stems from the shared aesthetic values, I believe, we as humans share course through the veins and arteries of our collective literature.
To look at my world through an aesthetic prism assured my interest in literature, and later to pursue it as an undergraduate degree that now aims at a PhD in Cultural Studies and Theology.
It was through all my experiences and encounters with poems and heartbreaks that I could make sense of what lurked beyond the rustle of the trees, as literature was a soft hand made out of metaphor, sound, and meaning on whose ethereal wings I could rise up from the rubble and keep resisting.
I write to see the world from the shadow of a mango tree.
