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Note: This is the prose part of the paper for which I was supposed to write “To Lahore, the City I Left, And To the Person I Left it For.” In this part, I describe my reasons for making certain decisions in regards to the poem. I hope you all enjoy it.

My Choices in “To Lahore, the City I Left, And To the Person I Left it For.”

Since the fist time I read Li-young Lee’s poetry, it has captivated me. His is a very unique picture of immigrant experiences, not only related to acculturation, but also to love, its perils, its growth, its multicultural reach. When I read “This Room and Everything in It,” I was awed at the unlikely metaphors he used, the diction, and the thematic unraveling of his thoughts. Lee’s poem has a pleasurable and fascinating progression from “certain hard days ahead” to “Your sunken belly/is the daily cup/of milk I drank” to “And one day when I need/to tell myself something intelligent/ about love” to “it had something to do/with death…it had something/to do with love.”

It is difficult to encapsulate love, which some argue has become a cliched word in modern poetry, into new images. For Lee, the images are drawn from his whole life, his immigrant experience, lessons his father taught him, distances, a cup of milk, God, his past, his future. I find this intriguing because I relate to some of the emotions that cause such an array of repercussions in poetry. I, like Lee, will wake up and “go out into an American city” (Furious Versions), half-expecting to be woken by a farmer selling his vegetables on the street outside my house in Lahore, Pakistan. It is always a new awakening when I open my eyes to the quiet American hum of electric appliances, the smell of potpourri rather than freshly plucked jasmines placed on my bed by my mother, an artificial, coveted darkness made possible by thick IKEA curtains rather than sunlight filtering through bamboo blinds.

I value and respect the person I have become in America, the person America has made me, honest, forthright, intelligent, different, a misfit in the culture I left behind. I am too conservative for America, too liberal for Pakistan. I am forgetting Urdu and have not yet perfected English. When I am trying to make a point in a conversation, my accent resurfaces, thick on my tongue like molasses or freshly harvested honey. This is the immigrant experience, and we carry it like battle wounds, with pride. In recent years I have discovered that I do not truly belong to either culture. I am certainly more at ease with my American friends because they are willing to accept my eccentricities, once they have had some time to get used to them. The Pakistani community is not as forgiving. To them, I am a sell-out, giving up language and culture in order to be accepted in a foreign society. What they fail to understand is that I have not given up my language at all. I am here because of it; it is the tongue of my forefathers. It is just beginning to get rusty along the edges because I have not used it consistently for half a decade. Culture– well, I have abandoned it by choice. I began to think it had double-standards and vanity, but that is another discussion– I digress.

My inability to belong is what fuels my writing. I remember Pakistan. I remember its landscape and its landmarks. I remember its people who are no longer my people. To them I am a foreign bird, an English Madam, angrezi mem. Whereas Lee sees images of love in his beloved and the room that they share in “This Room and Everything in It,” I see Lahore, the city of my birth, the city I love as it is preserved in my memory. I see it in my dreams and sometimes I see it in the face of my fiance, for whom I left everything I loved, and flew coach class in a China Airlines flight to San Francisco. It has now been five and half years to the day I said my goodbyes. I haven’t seen my father in this time. I have seen his pictures. He has aged. I have heard his voice. It has aged also. He could never fill the void I left in his house, not just an empty room, but an entire lifetime packed in two suitcases, gone on a damp February morning in 2003. And so I see him in my picture of love, and the way he taught me what his father taught him. I am the first-born daughter of the first-born son of my grandfather, also the first-born. I have stories to tell, poems to write, to make “light and shade and dew” marry in a collage of words. This is where my poem comes from. From the city of lights, of noor, the light in my father’s name and in mine.

Lee also has strong family influences on his work. He talks about his father in several of his poems. He mentions places, cities, lovers, people. I refrain from naming specific places. If you notice, I have only named Ravi, the river that flows through Lahore, a vague marker, something an American reader won’t be certain of, while still managing to make sense of the reference. I made this choice because I want to share this poem with every person who may or may not be able to relate to my experiences. I want to put no boundaries on this poem. I have been dictated by boundaries, and I am powerless to retaliate. My poem will not be caged by imaginary lines defining countries, jurisdictions, distances. It should reach everyone. I added “Lahore” to the title as a tribute to the city I love, the city in which I discovered love, the city that ultimately fostered it. I named Ravi because of old fears and older loves. I loved Ravi, but I could never sail across it because of my hydrophobia. I brought attention to a mosque because it is the azaan I miss the most sometimes, the call for prayer, and men dressed in their Friday best walking towards salvation. These are images that are inherently mine, but can be easily understood by a reader belonging to any ethnic background. Maybe one day, I will go back to this poem and revise it, making it more authentically Pakistani or Lahori, but today is not that day. Today it is as much Lee’s poem as mine.