Kaveh Akbar Shares Poems From Seven Countries Affected by Trump's Unlawful Ban

Over the weekend, Kaveh Akbar collected and tweeted out work from poets from the seven countries affected by the alarming, disturbing, and immoral EO issued this weekend. The poems are now readable all together at PBS NewsHour. Elizabeth Flock writes:

The poetry Akbar shared includes work from Khaled Mattawa, a Libyan poet born in Benghazi who emigrated to the U.S. as a teenager, Ladan Osman, who was born in Somalia and raised in Columbus, Ohio, and Safia Elhillo, a poet born in the U.S. to Sudanese parents, but who didn’t move to the U.S. until the year 2000.

Akbar said he was inspired to tweet Monday morning while reading the poetry of Persian poet Majid Naficy, and wondering what his life would be like without having read Naficy’s work. Naficy, who was born and raised in Iran, fled to the U.S. after Ayatollah Khomeini established theocratic rule in Iran in 1979, an experience that appears in Naficy’s poetry. His poem, “Allowance,” begins with the lines: “When creeping out of his tight skin / He suffers pain / And the world becomes small for him.”

“I was struck by how I was the very, very lucky beneficiary of this sort of gorgeousness and beauty,” Akbar said. “And how my person would be diminished from a lack of access to these sort of voices.”

Many more of Khaled Mattawa's poems can be found here at the Poetry Foundation. And find more at PBS NewsHour. And to explore more poetry from the Muslim faith and Islamic culture, Becca Klaver compiled this sampler in 2010.