Shurma by L. Akhter
Shurma is a debut book of poetry from Bangladeshi Canadian poet L. Akhter, collecting poems written over a period of time since Akhter’s arrival as an immigrant in Canada as an adolescent to now. Exploring themes of love, colourism, queerness, and displacement; Akhter’s voice glimmers with tenderness and pain for the child she was and woman she has grown to be.
Exploring a myriad of freeform styles to invoke different emotions, there is a visceral impact to run on, block of text poems like “Middle school” and “700”, the latter of which features cross hatchings through the text. The anxiety, overwhelm, and pain experienced by Akhter in adolescence bring to stark reality the precariousness of girlhood, especially when it intersects with the identity of a dark skinned immigrant girl. Reading from the perspective of someone who is not only on the margins of white society but Bengali society as well was eye opening and touching. There is power in these stories being told, in speaking to the shame and dynamics of power our communities reproduce in displacement even as we face our own collective oppression.
Poems like “Hibiscus flowers” make stark the ties between ancestral threads of maternal love and the patriarchal knowledge of how your worth is dependent on your shade. Akhter says she is “unsalvageable, so [she] holds onto [her] wrath” and “[wraps her] love with it to keep it warm”, giving image to the way dark skinned and otherwise undesirable girls grow up making an armor from their anger and do not get the luxury of being soft and outwardly vulnerable, all the while keeping their warmth sheltered in the hopes of being safe enough to take the walls down someday.
“Time traveler” explores a delicate hope for the future that Akhter shares with us, dreaming of a stable future in which childrens’ innocence is protected and safety is a matter of course as she says “We have a pond by our house/ I made the kids learn how to float/…Our son’s between us, a waterlily made of our petals”. It’s unclear whether lines like “None of us die on the way to the hospital. The fish from the Padma river does not slowly poison us” are referring back to Akhter’s own history of family tragedy, but are powerful in underpinning the ways collective justice like environmental and reproductive justice, post-colonial justice, are all integral factors to the hopeful futures we imagine as people.
This collection shows the power of poetry in tying oppressive structures and the movements against them into one giant canvas, interwoven with love and sensuality, and touch and childhood exactly as they are in real life before theorization and abstraction turn everything into disparate fights. L. Akhter speaks directly to her family and community in questioning her treatment, wondering about their collective history, and forging a future ahead that is half fearful hope and half righteous fury. This collection of poetry cycles through memories, making sense of the past and relationships to self through metaphor and taking into account the wounds and blooms left by family, culture, and new country.
L. Akhter’s debut poetry collection can be purchased through this link. You can also follow her on instagram to stay updated on her upcoming fiction release, The Misfortunes of Lolita, public appearances, and new work.
