I write about diaspora, intimacy, grief, growing up Guyanese in Queens and the way histories of oppression reveal themselves in unexpected, mundane and intimate moments. Follow me @marigoldtief.
I Write Best While Having and After a Good Cry
Former Open City Fellow Nadia Misir answers thirteen questions about her writing life.
reh-collec-shun or alphabet amnesia
you will forget how to speak. fuh-get how tuh speak
like we. how to switch b e t w e e n
we patwa and the English we receive from The Queen. when your grandfather dies you will pick three—no, tree—purple bruises from the fig tree in his backyard in queens. he recited shakespeare, sang country-western songs. you try desperately to pull his english back to shore. his IV line disappears in your dreams that night, the bruises turn into figs you both eat. bodies bear the fruit of the soul’s pains and yours is an eternal hunger, yours is a meh-belly-cyan-full-fas’-enough kind of hunger. we english
repeat movement until by Nadia Misir
"repeat movement until" was composed by Nadia Misir, who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens College. The poem gives elegiac voice to a wedding ring handed down in a family and evokes its experience with labor, with skin, with surfaces, with temperatures, with grandmothers and granddaughters, with death.
THEMES
Arts
AUDIO
ADDITIONAL METADATA
Date: 2020
Subject(s): The Things We Carried
Type: Audio
Source: Archival Creators Fellowship Program
Creator: Nadia Misir
PROVENANCE
Collection: Gaiutra Bahadur Fellowship Project
What Planting Tulips and Posting About it on Instagram Taught Me
If what I write becomes an extension of what I grieve, how can I also make room for joy? Last spring, I made a daily inventory of three things: one thing that brought me joy, something I mourned and what the Q37 smelled like. Grief was still the dominant filter that colored my days, so I tried something that I thought would produce a more tangible result. I planted tulips.
When Asked to Meditate Lyrically on the Relevance of Theory to Everyday Life
If theory is a schematic, is poetry also a kind of theory? Too often I mistake the ordinary for sublime.
Rising
They call it first oil. The date and time of birth are recorded. December 20, 2019, 9:34pm. Sagittarius sun, Libra moon, Leo rising. The headline: “‘It meant so much to me’ …EBD youth says on being the first to test Guyana’s oil.” The misguided optimism is not an exception despite the fact that first oil came without “necessary systems like a local content policy or a petroleum commission.” “Bittersweet,” the Guyana Times International calls it. We record the dates of things like disasters. December 20, 2019 is no different.
Notes on Visiting Cold Spring, Part 1
I’m not athletic, but I developed a love for a new sport in Cold Spring: postcard hunting. I purchased four—the oldest postmarked in 1937 and the youngest in 1985—for a dollar each. My favorite lines: it is impossible to move a big, delicate plant in a car and Richard, it is lonely at this lake.
Letter From Atlantic City
Atlantic City is where a sunny summer storefront came to die: WOW, HOLY CREPE!! OMELETTE CREPES SAVORY CREPES SWEET CREPES DRINKS FRUITS. It is a storefront that is sure of itself and its use of excited punctuation. I want to use two exclamation points, too. A red FOR RENT sign greeted us at the window. Abandoned storefronts make me think of abandoned words and letters, which makes me think of a discrepancy between what is written and what is real, between what was and what could have been.
Carnations and Cellophane
I have had to dislocate my faith, and how I imagined I was allowed to love and lust from patriarchal spaces like the mandirs I grew up attending on Sunday mornings—spaces where worshippers prayed with carnations and other flowers. I have grappled with these questions while watching television shows like Sex and the City—a show that I knew even as a high school student was problematic, was not about my New York, that did not reflect what I, or the women around me, looked like, or sounded like, but that still sparked moments of alternative imaginings of how and who I could love.
The Lonely Planet Guide to Diaspora: Part Two
I think diaspora is a mosquito that bites at your skin until it swells red, until you can’t help but scratch it raw. If clarity is a mosquito bite, then let the chemicals each mosquito plants in my blood be mixed with the names of the ancestors I seek. Let my skin swell red with their names, their love stories, their joys. Let me summon the spirits of the mosquito ancestors that bit at the flesh of my ancestors. My mother recognizes the bursts and shocks of green, the fruits and flowers, the greedy rain clouds that eat up the entire landscape of the country I saw when I was barely a year old.
The Lonely Planet Guide to Diaspora: Part One
Since the end of slavery and indenture in the country, Guyana’s history has become one of fraudulent elections and ethnic divide. But there is also a Guyana that is covered in rivers, creeks, and trenches, a Guyana that took up extra room in the kitchen when you were a child watching your grandmother clap hot roti over the sink, spinning stories about a place that was an empty memory for the first twenty-five years of your life.
I Wait In Line To Thread My Eyebrows On Liberty Avenue
Indian in looks, but not Indian enough, a Punjabi woman throws at me before shredding my eyebrows into shape. Languages are borders. For every anti-Black comment an aunty makes about Serena Williams or my curly hair I curse the sugar trade, the British, boats, maps and Sir Walter Raleigh. We are descended from enslaved Africans and indentured Indians yet we settled in two different boroughs along the border of race.
In Conversation with Nadia Misir: on Archives, Reclaiming Grammars, Poetry in Ordinary Moments, the Politics of Commutes, and Social Media — Sorjo Magazine
by Amanda Goonetilleke
I first saw Nadia perform at the first open mic I attended since moving to New York. I had never seen a brown woman on stage navigate the otherness and longing of diaspora. Since then, I’ve followed her generous Instagram posts where she muses on marigolds, finds line breaks in ocean waves, celebrates the found poetry in hookah menus, and finds spring in unexpected moments throughout the city.
When Asked to Meditate Lyrically on the Relevance of Theory to Everyday Life
If theory is a schematic, is poetry also a kind of theory? Too often I mistake the ordinary for sublime.
Rising
They call it first oil. The date and time of birth are recorded. December 20, 2019, 9:34pm. Sagittarius sun, Libra moon, Leo rising. The headline: “‘It meant so much to me’ …EBD youth says on being the first to test Guyana’s oil.”
The misguided optimism is not an exception despite the fact that first oil came without “necessary systems like a local content policy or a petroleum commission.” “Bittersweet,” the Guyana Times International calls it.
We record the dates of things like disasters. December 20, 2019 is no different.