Hajer Requiq
Iman
I wrote “Iman” as a reflection on the intersections of love and faith, on the question of how one can experience religion without being religious. I think we are oftentimes struggling to define divinity because we are confining it to a strictly theological framework or obfuscating it with grand notions and abstractions. “Iman” came as a response to these traditional tendencies, as a way of reconceptualizing faith. Inspired by my own mother, I soon came to the realization that God can be felt in a concrete form, that His once enigmatic presence can be demystified through a smile or a touch from someone you love. Such a conception of faith is essential to the speaker in my poem because it provides her with a sense of reassurance against a background of war and destruction. It was equally important for me to show that faith often operates within the parameters of doubt, despair, and soul-searching. My objective here is to depict the search for self as a winding journey that inevitably departs from a state of loss. Religion, or motherly love in this case, acts as an anchor point, as the pier to which the speaker can moor her shifting world.
After Nour Kamel
Faith is shaped like my mother, like her knuckles
when she kneads dough in the kitchen.
The neighbours’ children come for pastries
and fight over the largest loaf of hope.
On Sundays, she makes a lamb roast, bakes potatoes,
calls every child by name and, every time, it sounds like love.
I don’t know much about religion, but I believe in my mother.
I’ve forgotten every prayer for protection except her face.
Some days, she asks me shou fih ya binti?
and I point to the sky (the dislocated limb): It hurts me.
It hurts me right there.
I don’t know any words in Arabic for pain outside of one’s body:
the sore sky, for example, or my mother’s chapped knee,
so how do I tell it?
Since the first explosion, I’ve been burning my tongue on prayer,
on the Quran, on the 7,563 Ahadith.
There is no meaning beyond my mother’s name, her tablespoon of honey,
her way of making things look like this is going to be okay.
I’m sure there is still some God left in our pantry,
but only my mother seems to know where to find Him,
how to grind supplications into a soft mush for our teeth.
I’ve found that the easiest way to be religious is to love and be loved back.
Allah is wherever my mother is placing her hands:
on the kitchen counter, on the sibha, on my shoulder.
I kiss her forehead, and I cannot tell whether this is flesh or divinity.
Everything I know to be holy she has touched or brushed in passing.
Even this not-quite-ours city sits at her feet and bends both knees,
hurling stones at our sorrow.
In my mother’s mouth, Beirut is recited like repentance,
like sorry you had to go through that.
I wish I could be more of a Muslim. I wish I could stop misspeaking my faith
as an apology, as passing condolences for all that is gone.
At dawn, mother wakes me for fajr, and when the clock strikes seven,
I am back to bed, only my body isn’t there.
How do I say that kind of absence?
I want to pray more, supplicate more, but listen up close —
Language has a spine, and just like ours, it is crushing.
Now that she hears the cracks, mother rubs tallow into my mouth,
oils every sound and syllable, begs me to paraphrase fracture
into a structure that God will answer.
We are both praying.
We are both praying for the daughter she wants back.
Hajer Requiq is an emerging female poet from Tunisia who holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Sfax. She was twice picked as a semi-finalist in the Button Poetry Chapbook Contest for the years 2022 and 2023. Most recently, she has been selected as a finalist in the 2025 Lucky Jefferson Poetry Contest. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Lunch Ticket, Poetry Ireland, and Fahmidan Journal, among others. Requiq also writes Arabic poetry, which has been featured in Iraq Palm, Al Oma Al Thaqafia, Uruk Newspaper, and elsewhere. You can read her work at facebook.com/Hajer.Rq.
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