Paisley

Rakhshan Rizwan's debut collection simmers with a poised, driving anger. Drawing on the rich visual and material culture of her home region, Rizwan unpacks and offers critical comment on the vexed issues of class, linguistic and cultural identity – particularly for women – in the context of Pakistan and South Asia. She writes about the hypocrisy of the men who claim to worship women, the nuances of using Urdu or Hindi, and the many contradictions of the city of her birth, Lahore. As well as startling free verse, Rizwan's many accomplished ghazals both explore and demonstrate her fascination with multilingualism, code-switching, displacement and belonging. The poems in Paisley are an unflinchingly feminist assault on received ideas about womanhood which present the reader with often-uncomfortable truths.



Rakhshan Rizwan works as an Acquisitions Editor. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University. Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (The Emma Press, 2017) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award and the Michael Marks Poetry Prize. Her collection of children's poetry, My Sneezes are Perfect (The Emma Press, 2021) documents the difficulties of moving countries, and living through a pandemic from the perspective of a young child. Her book Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure, and the Local Cosmopolitan (Routledge, 2020) looks at how Kashmiri authors use innovative languages of happiness to do human rights advocacy. Her writing has appeared in Aaduna, Nimrod, Postcolonial Text and Blue Lyra Review, among others. She is on the editorial team of the children's poetry journal Tyger Tyger Magazine. She is from Lahore, Pakistan, has lived in Germany and the Netherlands, and currently lives in the Bay Area of North California, US.



"A striking debut collection which evokes the rich culture and history of Rizwan’s native Lahore. Themes of belonging, migration and displacement abound, as Rizwan examines the split linguistic self of the migrant: “My voice is the mirror that breaks in Urdu”. The patterns of her homeland are ever-present: “in a new country, let us dream of different paisleys”. Combining free verse and complex ghazals, this is a powerful exploration of the role of women in Pakistan and beyond." - Poetry Book Society, Winter Bulletin 2017



"The collection as a whole, however, is a serious instigator of thought. It will certainly appeal to a Western audience so that they can see what integration means to those that that they want to integrate and what kinds of things their ethnic minority brothers and sisters from the Sub-Continent are experiencing and thinking about." Suneel Mehmi, Contemporary Small Press



"...this young poet is not afraid to do her own bit of undigging. In her title poem, she uses a ghazal form in which every couplet rhymes ‘paisley’ with ‘paisley’. The word is repeated so many times that all shreds of former association disappear in a furious blizzard of repetition. There is fierce energy here, and uncompromising intensity. I see the paisley symbol for the first time in my life. "



The physical shape (and taste) of language, as well as its abstract resonances, takes on a new significance. This is seen perhaps most clearly in Rizwan’s assured use of the ghazal in poems such as ‘Urdu/ Hindi’ and ‘Speech Therapy’, where the form lends itself particularly well to Paisley’s overarching dialectic.