"For Iqbal Bano, twelve years after her demise"

after Franny Choi

Shlagha Borah

Shlagha Borah (she) is a poet, researcher, and freelance writer from Assam, India. Her work has been published in TTTxPenguin, Livewire, Aainanagar, GroundXero, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of Pink Freud, a student-led collective working towards making mental health accessible in India. She is currently working as Associate Poetry Editor at Doubleback Review and Editor-in-chief at Shabd Aaweg.

“This poem is a response piece to ‘Hum Dekhenge,’ a protest song written by Faiz Ahmad Faiz and sung by Iqbal Bano. This song was a symbol of dissent over many decades—during the Partition, during several regional movements, and more recently, during state-sponsored violence in Kashmir and Assam owing to Section 370 and to CAA-NRC respectively. Iqbal’s voice lives on through us.”

your voice (that which makes me hum
and weep and sombre, that which turns
the heat of my fingers soft on the keyboard,
that loves, loves and loves until giving
feels like grieving and we remember how much
they have taken away, that which
our sisters sing to hope to resent to protest
to be angry to be kind and that which
warns us these scoundrels want to kill us
so we must keep singing) transcends poetry