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This year, we wanted to showcase authors of all sorts here at Sakina Literary Society of the Arts, and give readers and writers a look behind the scenes at different Muslim authors' writing journeys. With this, we hoped to demystify the act (and art) of writing, to showcase the vast variety of Muslim authors and their works, and to encourage you to join them in their literary endeavours without fear. We start off our 2026 interviews with Nida Rashid, author of From You...to You, Post Parting, and HumDrums. You can find her on Instagram as @ennarre.
Did you always feel drawn to poetry? What got you into writing poetry?
Yes. I always felt drawn to tones and rhythm. Poetry appealed to me, ironically because of Quran recitation (in the Quran itself, it is repeated that the Quran is not mere poetry for entertainment). The calming tones, and various recitations led me to recognize how words can carry powerful meaning in their rhythm. When I discovered spoken word poetry on Youtube, I was completely mesmerized. Once, in high school, I had to present a biology project but had only 24 hours to come up with a presentation. I realized poems are easy to memorize, so I made a 3 minute spoken word poem about the topic. My science teacher was so impressed that science could be presented in an artistic form--I got an A. From then on, whenever I needed to remember a difficult topic--I wrote a poem. Who were some of the major influences/supports, real or fictional, in your creative writing journey? Sarah Kay - her spoken word on Youtube is what helped me gain confidence to speak my poems aloud. My friends - who would read my poems and tell me they felt something in reading it.
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When Cristóbal Colón (aka Christopher Colombus) a Spanish Jew, left Spain and landed in the islands of the Bahamas, he brought with him the oppression of the very empire that was oppressing his own people. Five centuries later, the ghost of that landing continues to haunt the world. The Haitian uprising, its revolution, and its final phase of emancipation is a blueprint of how freedom is won. A man who wakes up to his own oppression and that of others, who sees that death is inevitable but an honourable life is not necessarily given to you, who becomes fully awake to the reality of his purpose, is a man that must be feared. He--like Boukman, Toussaint Louverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines--cements his name in history, carries his nation forward, and is the rallying cry of all oppressed people.  "...[C.L.R James] cast doubt on the assumption that the revolution would take place first in Europe, in the advanced capitalist countries, and that this would act as a model and a catalyst for the later upheavals in the underdeveloped world. Secondly, there were clear indications that the lack of specially-trained leaders, a vanguard, did not hold back the movement of the San Domingo revolution." As this new century marches forward, the old beliefs, ideas and traditional behaviors are again questioned. Societies and communities finding themselves in an existential crisis. The decay that the last century became with its excessive materialism, anti-God, individualistic humanism-- coupled with a loss of religious, social, and political community, and the destruction of familial bonds--has created (especially in Westernized societies) an apathy that is more destructive to the human soul than any other state.
We have to understand this is by design. The state actors involved in the push for apathy do not fear the people. They know that even though people are aware that their livelihood, communities, and societies in general are not quite what they should be, and that every generation is becoming not only spiritually poor but materially poorer than the previous generation, most just shrug this malaise off and lose themselves in the next shiny thing. |
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