Book Review: Postcolonial Banter by Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan – Writing That Reaches Home

Postcolonial Banter has been one of the most inspiring reads for me in the last one year. My own writing during my thesis at the University of Bristol, has been highly influenced by the structure and usage of language, as well as the targeting of social issues, in the book.

Painting: The Yellow Books by Vincent Van Gogh. Source: Dandelion Chandelier website.

The British-Pakistani educator, writer and spoken word poet’s debut collection, that features some of her most well-known and widely performed poems, illustrates the everyday life of a colonized brown woman in an Islamophobic world.

Khan’s poems interrogate race/ism, gender, feminism, state violence and decolonisation in Britain. She has been an activist and educator on these social issues and identity for five years. The book concludes with her viral poem from 2017, ‘This is not a Humanising Poem’, that has over 2 million views online.

This collection uses day-to-day things like familial characters, indigenous household materials, and food, to deal with subjects such as culture loss, hypervigilance, prejudice, racism, and war; emphasizing on how disproportionately normalized these miseries are. That’s how ‘Banter’ entered the book title.

Through the walls and windows of her home where the streetlight cameras are pointed, through the racial slurs that her brother learns at school, through the terrorizing of people for admittance of crime, she deals with Islamophobia she and her people are subjected to. Her poem, ‘The Best of Muslim’, talks of how Muslims are dehumanized and expected to be less of themselves to be considered good.

Khan hones her culture through multilingualism with words and retro songs of Urdu. She uses descriptive narratives to show her grandmother “unwrap giggles from children’s lips” and her desire for old women to fall I love with her.

Khan’s poetry is unapologetic, subjective and challenging the flawed social and political paradigms. With her first poem, ‘This poem is not for you’, she establishes that this book is written as a means of personal expression and not for the receiver’s empathy. She instead calls for a change in the system.

Selected poems share commission details and context as notes. I feel in some places it acts redundant as the piece already acts as the medium of expression.

Here's the book cover:

I highly recommend the book to budding poets interested in social poetry. I hope you enjoy the read.

For the love of art,

Charuvi