On Children by Kahlil Gibran and For Peshawar by Fatimah Asghar

ABOUT:

Deeksha Bhandarkar and I met in our MA English class. Both of us sharing Mysuru as our hometown, and Mysuru being the smallest place in the world, we grew up in the same literary backyard — attended the same story-telling sessions on Saturdays, watched the same plays, visited the same bookstores and had a bunch of mutual friends. But it was only in 2021 that our paths finally converged.

Sharing a passion for literature and a curiosity to explore more facets of it outside our postgraduate classrooms, we decided to pick a piece of literature each — we are starting with poetry — and swap our choices, having the other person interpret and discuss our pick, with a hope to gain new perspectives on writing we have loved individually.

Bookmarked is an ongoing, weekly series, we hope you enjoy it! Happy reading!

Deeksha Bhandarkar chose On Children by Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet, and Amulya Hiremath chose For Peshawar by Fatimah Asghar from If They Come For Us (One World Publications, 2018)

Deeksha: I think we should start with why we chose the poems we did?

Amulya: Perfect! You go first.

Deeksha: We had this poem when we were in 12th? I studied by myself at home because I took the exam privately. My dad and I had this scene for like the entire year where we used to avoid each other and this poem was so relatable to what was happening in my life. I remember taking a printout of this, after I first read it — I don’t think I had paid attention to any poetry before this — and pasted it in my personal diary, where I had written notes like ‘Do not imprison your child’. I truly understood poetry and mainly because these were the things I wanted to tell my dad but Gibran did it for me. It connected to me on a level where the first people who had to understand me, did not. It gave me the clarity that it’s okay to go against what your parents are telling you.

Amulya: Wow. You just narrated a deeply personal experience and mine just is I read this poem a couple of months ago and it horrified me enough for it to stay at the back of my mind and when you asked what my favourite poem is, this sprang up. I got this book at some point earlier in the year, I think I was cleaning my bookshelf and realised I hardly had any poetry books, especially since this was a form I was actively engaging in, both reading and writing, for the past year, so I really wanted to explore more. This was actually an Amazon recommendation, it popped up in frequently bought together or something and I had heard about Fatimah Asghar and wanted to know more. I was flipping through this book when I first got it and this is the opening poem, it’s very fragmented and spread out over like four pages but the very first line caught my attention.

Deeksha: I really feel like she’s done that to show what terrorism does to the society. It breaks the society. I remember reading about the 2014 Peshawar Army Public School attack. I was so scared. It’s an entirely different feeling to fear your own. I feel like my parents hugged me a little tighter the next day. I don’t know if you remember this,

Amulya: No, I actually don’t have a recollection of the attack.

Deeksha: I remember the attack and hearing about it and our school started a self-defence class for a week, as if we can fight the terrorists.

Amulya: Haha. I think it’s the line about them sending the kafan before the killings, that shook me so much.

Deeksha: Yeah. I think it’s a very systematic thing and you understand that when you’ve seen enough documentaries on terrorism. Violence just births more violence. The school targeted had children who belonged to army families and this act was believed to have done to both terrorise the government and to kill all the potential future army officers. But did this attack really stop people from joining the armed forces? I’m sure it did no such thing and people who were victims of this are still living with so much distress and pain caused from this act, still broken from this act of terrorism. Especially the officers in the front line who have to live with the fact that their kids were killed because of their profession.

Amulya: Yeah, and that’s such a huge weight to carry.

On Children

Amulya: So, what I found most interesting was Gibran not being considered a serious poet. Literary historians and critics wrote him off as sentimental and didn’t really include his works while talking about literature of the century. I think a lot of it stems from failing to understand the Middle Eastern aesthetics, like a lot of things lost in cultural translation.
I thought the poem was very prescriptive, to use the buzz word we learnt a couple weeks ago. He starts with a very sharp statement, “Your children are not your children” and ends it with a full stop, adding all the emphasis. But the part that stood out to me the most is “Life’s longing for itself.” I think it roots to life being continuous and not just spanning the time we spend alive. It also nicely parallels people creating their own selves, longing for their own preservation through their children. So, this idea of people physically extending themselves beyond their timeframe on earth and this more overarching idea of life just recreating itself this way over and over and repeating the same patterns for its own longevity.
Then it transitions into this important line that goes, “They come through you but not from you.”

Deeksha: I think the concept of freedom and not belonging to anyone but coming from the Universe is workable because who does the Universe belong to? Nobody. If used properly, the concept freedom can only work when it is not anybody’s to give or receive. Like you said, you only get to be a part of this experience, but it’s not yours to keep.

Amulya: Yeah. That makes sense. Like you’re just put in that system as a participant. And this shows that there isn’t necessarily a starting or an ending point. We’re just cyclic.
I want to talk about this idea of possession that is so ingrained in us. We are so obsessed with owning stuff, sometimes even people, everything, if you think about it. Gibran very clearly goes against the concept of parents wanting to own their children and their lives, by extension. Just because they exist as a result of you and co-exist in your space does not mean you get to control their lives.
And when he says, “You can’t give them your thought,” he means thoughts, which are formed on the basis of experiences and knowledge differ from person to person and blindly imposing your reality on them only restricts their growth. We learn a lot from experiences and not just from hand-me-down knowledge. I think you can relate to this on a personal level.

Deeksha: Yeah, you don’t have to be an engineer if you don’t want to.

Amulya: Exactly, and those cases where parents sort of hand down their dreams to the kids, like I couldn’t be this, so you go down that road for me.
I am now going to skip the next few parts where he is just reiterating the same idea and go to his comparison of child, parent and, I’m going to word it as, the Creator, to an arrow, bow and the Archer.
I think the analogy here is wonderful. He’s implying that the farther the bows bend, that much farther the arrow goes — making parents do the hard work and actually holds them responsible. And then, after preaching for several lines about what parents should know, he brings in the Archer and pins the entire responsibility of charting a child’s course on this character. Gives Him the aim and this goes back to the whole game that our life is predestined by somebody higher.
This part is so interesting to me because for so long he’s gone on about how kids should be whatever they want to be, and must be given all the freedom etc., but now he pines in with well, I’ve already charted their life’s course, where they are going to land, based on my archery skills, because of course, the bow bends based on my strength and will? There really is no control in practice, but theoretically, this is the ideal way for a parent to be.
So, yeah that’s my pretty fragmented, not literary enough interpretation of this poem.

Deeksha: This poem is open to interpretation in so many different ways, like you can’t just talk about one thing.

Amulya: Yeah. It’s just one of those poems where the more you read it, the deeper it gets. And every time you read it, you come up with a different meaning.

For Peshawar

Deeksha: I want to start off by looking at the poet herself first. If you look at her nationality online, it says “Pakistani-Kashmiri-American”. The first thought I got when I read that was where does she feel at home. I’ve had this conversation with friends, especially the second generation, where they did not choose to be in that country. They belong there but they don’t feel at home there because they are not accepted there. Fatimah here has seen that kind of displacement.

Amulya: Yeah, I think her parents fled to Lahore during the Partition and then moved on to the US. She interjects her book with several poems titled Partition and you can clearly see it’s a subject that deeply impacts her writing.

Deeksha: Just the beginning lines where she says, “Every year I manage to live on this earth / I collect more questions than answers.” I think Asghar leads us to a land of questions where we cannot find answers yet, but delivers us with a strength to ask more questions. Like be more vocal about the questions, knowing you won’t get any answers. What can justify killing children. We say how is it humanly possible but humans do it anyway.
In the lines where she compares roses to the kafan and the thorns as the attack in itself. I really like the imagery she uses where she is like basically comparing these two things together. It’s so interesting for me.

Amulya: Yeah. There is also this interesting line which reads, “In my dreams, the children are still alive.” I want to draw parallels to Gibran here but let’s get to that a little later.

Deeksha: So, this attack in the news was described as “Six men calmly walk into a classroom as they fire” and this bunch of kids just sitting next to each other see men openly fire around them. Every sentence in this poem makes us count our blessings like, even though we are hurt or lonely or sad, we’re alive. What did we do to deserve this and they, that? Her tone is almost like promising a toffee to a kid before bedtime, like there is a fifty percent chance you’re not going to get it but here the toffee is life.

Amulya: You’re pinning so much hope on these promises.

Deeksha: And hope is a really beautiful thing that everybody needs to enjoy. After reading this poem, I realized it’s a privilege to even get to be heartbroken but these kids didn’t even get to feel that.
Whenever I think about the Partition, it feels like my own mother is split into two. Like, which half do I choose? Which half is more my mother than the other? It led to one of the greatest migrations in human history. Asghar has said that Parition will always be a thing that matters to her and influences her. She once said and I quote, “When your people have gone through such historical violence, you cannot shake it.”
When she wrote the line in the poem, “My uncle gifts me his earliest memory: / a parking lot full of corpses / with no kafan to hide their eyes”, she is talking about the Partition in all its severity. So many people died during that time with no burial or any respects paid and worst of all they were killed by their own.
In all of mankind, there has always been violence which has been birthed by further violence. I wondered if these survivors are the carriers of this violence. The survivors are taught in their nests about the bad men waiting to kill them. Every year, the name changes, but the kafan remains the same. The partition only broke the country in half, like I said, which part do you feel more at home? There are relatives on both sides. Who do you decide to trust, who do you choose to stay in touch with, who do you choose to kill and which friends do you continue to keep? The grass is not greener on either side. And this fear of everything continues to be ingrained in us from generations.

Amulya: Absolutely. I think it’s beautiful the way you put the kafan remains the same and it also neatly corresponds to how Asghar also ends the poem — preparing to wrap our own bodies in the white linen.

Parallels Between the Poems —

Deeksha: So, when I sat to work on what we have chosen, I felt like there is a huge connection between the two poems we’ve picked and it wasn’t a conscious decision so it’s definitely a coincidence.

Amulya: Oh yeah. Now that I think about it.

Deeksha: Both poems talk about children in a sense. Gibran and Asghar, though they belong to different eras, they’re meeting and playing in the same backyard and talking about what is happening to kids. And children are sometimes hardly spoken about. If we can bring them together,

Amulya: We should definitely bring them together.

Deeksha: Interestingly, both Asghar and Gibran are immigrants writing in the US. She moved at a young age and Kahlil Gibran though, he was not a child when he moved, he also lost his mother and had to go through a different kind of hardship. I feel like both of them in a way feel they have some unfinished business in their childhood and that shows in their poetry. I think this is one perspective we can look into, to know where these people are coming from and to draw a parallel between the two poets.

Amulya: Yeah, and I think both of them have this Islamic aesthetic in their writings which, unfortunately for Gibran, went unappreciated during his time but Asghar now has a platform for her voice. 

Deeksha: I think Kahlil Gibran would’ve done way better in this era because people are now in position to at least try to understand, even if it is for a trend or whatever. There is this opportunity to put forward your voice, even if you aren’t from a Euro-centric background.

Amulya: Yeah, and now we also have accessible platforms to both read and write poetry.

Deeksha: Another interesting thing is the setting of both the poems, one is school and the other is home and both of them are supposed to be the safest place for the children and in both the poems we see that is not the case. In Asghar’s we see kids being killed, and in Gibran’s, in a way, the dreams of the kids are being killed.

Amulya: And I think in Gibran’s, he is also talking about the children living and surviving and he’s talking about a lot of life and this is in contrast to Asghar’s For Peshawar because in hers, the kids only live on in her dreams.
I also think it’s interesting how both of them are immigrants in the US writing.

Deeksha: Yeah, there are so many parallels to draw between these two poems. I think we’ve done that.  

Amulya: I am so glad you happened upon that because that is an angle I didn’t see coming.  

Deeksha: Do you think this is a good end?

Amulya: I think so!

We would love to hear from you! Let us know your thoughts, interpretations and anything in between in the comments below!