Tanzila Ahmed & Neelanjana Banerjee
Winter 2023 | Poetry
Sorshe Phul
Poetry by Tanzila Ahmed & Neelanjana Banerjee collab
Photos by Wajiha Ibrahim-Shaikh
This series is inspired by the the mustard flowers
that bloom in California every spring, and the
Bengalis love for all things mustard.
July 2023
The Gloomy Road
The Road
by Neelanjana Banerjee
Two girls
stand on a dirt road
sorshe phul
surround them
snails clinging to the stalks
beetles burrowing into the California dirt
down down down
down down down
on the other side of the world
who would we still be
two women
standing on a road
but now the road torn down the middle
partitioned
by colonialism
fundamentalism
hate
borders drawn in blood & mangrove leaves
only the flowers remember
the sound of laughter
in the fields
Meghna Whispers
By Tanzila Ahmed
In the whispers of the swaying mustard covered hills
shaded by the morning meghna
our ears catch the secret,
the murmurs of laughter,
the silenced scream.
The thicket of mustard stalks will become
a fire hazard when brittle in the future
the scattered seeds warding off evils of the past
we stand in the present
wondering what we should save first
Who is calling at us?
Sari’s Mission
Sari Blowing
By Neelanjana Banerjee
the fabric
& the way
it wraps around our
breasts & hips & thighs
a transformation
the wind that tugs
at our hair, the edges of
these silks
is our ancestors
we hear them laugh
even the rabbits and coyote
listening from their burrows
they hear it, too
Exotic Missions
By Tanzila Ahmed
I wonder
if the Spanish Father
who scattered seeds
on the path to the missionaries
knew that
Hindu goddesses and
Muslim princesses
decked in gold and saris
would hike up the California superblooms
with husbands holding camera phones
to recreate
romantic twirling Bollywood song and dance numbers
while sunburnt hikers with camelbaks look on.
Jamdani and silk, gold trimmed
decolonization through adornment
wind whispers
through jhumkas
and hair
Mustard Bodied
Mustard Flowers
By Neelanjana Banerjee
i.
invasive species
supposedly sowed alongside
the violence of colonizers
a golden road from Mission to Mission
these ancient fireladders
growing tall and robust
to cover the bones, all the bones
ii.
what it does to us is
epigenetic
`
hemispheric
a celebration of spring / basanti
A Bollywood dance sequence, Shah Rukh’s
hair bigger than ours has ever been
Kajol’s white dupatta blowing and blowing in the wind
but never picking up any dirt
how many times can you kiss the skin
there
just below one’s ear
without dropping all of your seeds
iii.
our mothers as girls
their mothers before
and on and on
bells jingling on their ankles as they followed
each other into the mustard fields
shorshe phul uteche, jabe? Cholona? Forca lagebe? Foto foto
yellow reflected in their eyes
across their cheeks
the stalks so tall,
perfect for secrets to be shared
from sister to cousin to friend
Spring always a reminder of
what can begin
Again.
In My Body
By Tanzila Ahmed
The epigenetics of mustard flowers
exists in our soul
at an atomic level
Did she
or the mother before
or the mother before that
spin in joyous circles too,
or is this a cellular memory
from the future?
I only ever saw my Nani with furrowed brows
and not a wrinkle of a smile
or a sunlight twinkle in her eye.
she would never have
danced
not like this.
mustard colored drenched
with no shame in the world.
so who taught me joy
like this
was at a cellular level, mine too?
Tanzila “Taz” Ahmed is a political strategist, storyteller, and artist based in Los Angeles. She creates at the intersection of counternarratives and culture-shifting as a South Asian American Muslim 2nd-gen woman. She’s turned out over 500,000 Asian American voters, recorded her #GoodMuslimBadMuslim podcast at the White House and makes #MuslimVDay cards annually. Her essays are published in the anthologies Pretty Bitches, Whiter, Good Girls Marry Doctors, Love Inshallah, and numerous online publications. In Spring 2019 she was UCLA’s Activist-in-Residence at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy and in 2016 received an award from President Obama’s White House as a Champion of Change in Art and Storytelling.
Neelanjana Banerjee's fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely in journals and anthologies like Prairie Schooner, Weird Sister, Virginia Quarterly Review, PANK Magazine, The Rumpus, Mothers Before: Stories and Portraits of Our Mothers As We Never Saw Them (Abrams Image, 2020), Good Girls Mary Doctors: South Asian Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion (Aunt Lute Books, September 2016), and many other places. She is a co-editor of Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 2010), and The Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes and Shifts of Los Angeles (Tia Chucha Press, 2016). She has an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Oberlin College. She has had residencies at Hedgebrook, the Blue Mountain Center, and Dorland Mountain Arts, and received scholarships to attend the David Henry Hwang Writers Institute and the Squaw Valley Writers Workshop. Her journalism has appeared on Teen Vogue, The Aerogram, The Center for Asian American Media Blog, LA Review of Books, Alternet, WordRiot, Colorlines, Fiction Writers Review and more. She is based in Los Angeles, where she is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, and teaches writing and publishing in the Asian American Studies Department at UCLA and through private writing workshops.