Post 5: Nayyirah Waheed

Nayyirah Instagram

Nayyirah Waheed is an African American bisexual poet, an author of two books salt.(2013) and Nejma(2015), and is dubbed the most famous poet on Instagram. Waheed shares her experiences and life stories through her poetry. She writes about love, life, race, feminism and identity. Waheed’s way of storytelling is one that I admire deeply and one that I haven’t seen before. She is able to tell her story through a few lines and is able to garner such raw emotions in her readers. However not everyone thought that Waheed’s writing style was exquisite. When trying to publish her first book she was rejected over and over again because her poems didn’t  follow the “proper” format of poems or rhyming schemes. Swat Daftur says it best when she states “With salt., Waheed was upsetting the proverbial apple cart: standard practices, grammatical rules, accepted styles — the very idea of poetry. With no capital letters, an erratic use of full stops, and almost no other punctuation, Waheed was using a kind of bare-boned, stark style that hardly ran over a few lines, and sometimes just a single one, broken and arranged on the page in a way that became rhythm itself — “where/ you/ are./ is not/ who/ you are”.”  This type of writing creates a bend in the universe. Waheed uses her experiences to create stories that do not follow the same standard of poetry we use, in order to change the system we are so accustomed to. This type of change is vital to our collective storytelling because as Audre Lorde said “For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it” (Lorde  43) By Waheed changing the style of her poetry so that it does not follow the same rhyming schemes and patterns of the norm she becomes hypercritical of a writing system that tries to delegitimize her experiences as an African American bisexual woman.

Nayyirah's Instagram 

The first poem of Waheed's that we will focus on is this one to the side.  Waheed here is talking about the male body and what she wants for them. The poem immediately challenges our socialized understanding of masculinity and patriarchy as a whole. As we all know feminism is not just about giving women more rights rather it is a system that wants to get rid of the burdens of patriarchy on both sides. There are two aspects of the poem that I want to discuss. The first is when she says “more women in their hearts/ than/ on their hands.” Waheed is able to so easily bring issues of taboo into her poems without disrupting the poem rather the issue of domestic violence adds even more depth to her poem. The other aspect of the poem that I want to focus on is the repetition of the word more and the use of the word less to sign of the poem. Waheed is strategic in her word placement, the word more is used throughout the poem to bring in more socially recognized traits of femininity. The ending of the poem in less pushes the reader to recognize that less is coming from somewhere that is opposite of more. If more refers to femininity than less refers to musicality. We can even further push this and say that the man is less of a man because he does not have more of the traits that allow him to be human. Waheed’s ability to so intricately place such messages in her poem is what makes her presence so significant.

The second poem we will look at is found in the video to side. This is Waheed reading the poem aloud and it is about her experience as an an African-American woman. There is one part of the poem that resonates with me very much and that is when she say’s the following “and loving this way you are yet this love is bittersweet/as others do not value nor understand your composition/and/call your treasure trash/call you deviant/call you everything but the truth” This part reminded me of what Harris Perry had said about the black women standing in this crooked room not knowing which way is up. Perry further on states “If the group itself is misunderstood, then to the extent that one is seen as a part of this group, that seeing is inaccurate. inaccurate recognition is painful not only to the psyche but also to the political self, the citizen self.” (38 perry) Through this quote and though Waheed's poem we see that the impacts of racism on the psyche is one that is so detrimental to one's identity formation that we don’t even realize. It is only after understanding that this way of thinking does not need to define who you are are we able to break free from internally racializing ourselves.  Although Perry and Waheed are specifically talking about African Americans I resonate with their statement because I have found myself questioning identity as a muslim woman. This is also another aspect that I have found in Waheed’s poetry, the ability to relate to individuals of marginalized groups.  
Overall we can say that Waheed is not only able to captivate audiences because of her nuances and writing styles but because her stories are ones that they have wanted to hear and are needed in to order justify their existence.

Another one: Nayyirah's Instagram 

Last one, I promise  ;) : Nayyirah's Instagram 

Works Cited

Daftuar, Swati. “A poem for your soul.” The Hindu, 30 July 2016, www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/A-poem-for-your-soul/article14517162.ece

Harris-Perry, Melissa V. “Crooked Room.” Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America, Yale University Press, 2013, p. 38.

Lorde, Audre. The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action. 1977, p. 43.