It's publication day for A DANGEROUS CROSSING. The book is like a ship setting sail into the world, and I ran a contest using several of the most significant lines in the book. This one reflects the book distilled to its essence. And now as A Dangerous Crossing sets sail, I hope it will relieve the weight on my heart--the ever-present weight that was the reason I wrote it. I hope that the people who were courageous enough to speak to me about their experiences on all sides of the crisis will feel that the book treats their stories with clarity and respect. I hope that the book will make a difference to people's perceptions of the refugee crisis and the dire need of refugees around the world--particularly in Syria. I hope for a free Syria one day, with peace and dignity and freedom. I hope for an accounting at the Hague.
The Language of Secrets is due to be published in the UK very soon, and I thought I'd share the amazing job No Exit Press/Oldcastle Books does with the proofs for this series. Every time I see their brilliant design team at work, I'm taken aback that it's actually the same book that was published here in 2016. I love how the same work can inspire such different approaches. I also felt a little chill as though I was the one under INSET surveillance. That's how you know it's great work.
Secrets as a book is very much a tribute to my undergrad years when I was more focused on reading and writing poetry--the ability of poetry to communicate our fears and desires is one of the underlying themes of the book. Much of the poetry in Secrets, I discovered in the stacks of the University of Toronto's Robarts Library, sitting cross-legged on the floor, inhaling clouds of dust as I discovered names like Adonis, Mahmoud Darwish, and Nazik al-Malaika for the first time. There's also a little nod to past history when I was an occasional contributor to my university's newspaper and contributed poems like 'Haifa Dream', and a passionate but uninformed op-ed on the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan. Perhaps the thing that is dearest to me in the book is a scene where Esa is having a personal epiphany about his identity as a Muslim detective in and of the West. He thinks of this line: These Lebanese children are wreaths on bits of firebomb debris. This is the second line of a poem I wrote for a creative writing class in undergrad called 'Sestina of Lebanon'. We were asked to experiment with the form, which I got completely wrong, but the poem remains one of my favourites, opening with this pair of lines: Crimson coffee is the morning cup These Lebanese children are wreaths on bits of firebomb debris. Politics, poetry and secrets. These are the keys to this book. |
Ausma Zehanat KhanAuthor Archives
July 2020
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