Daddy Writer To Be - Lotee and Shath

My poetry book War/Torn started out as my chapbook project while I was attending Simon Fraser University.

 I took the course English 472 – Advanced Creative Writing with the incredible Jordan Scott. I had not taken English 372 prior which was a prerequisite. I had submitted poems that were lyrical because I had perceived poetry as such. Luckily, Jordan allowed me to take the class and it had changed my life and the way I wrote poetry forever.

 The course challenged my poetics. I knew I wanted to write poems that illustrated different kinds of wars: war between one vs self, one vs family, one vs religion, one vs culture. It entailed a linguistic war that highlighted my hyphenated identities, my partner’s hyphenated identities.

I was languageless, a term I learned about while reading Fred Wah’s poetry. The term essentially meant being lost in-between two very different languages. Arabic and English were very different. Arabic is written from right to left and English is written from left to write. Arabic can have one word that would have so many meanings. Also, I left Iraq at the age of 11, so my Arabic would have been forgotten, but I made sure not to erase my birth language and my life there.

 I listen mostly to Arabic music and I read and write fluently in Arabic. My parents also spoke Arabic at home growing up, so I never lost the language.  

Since I grew up in Canada, I spent over 20 years of my life here and I consider Canada my home now. I speak and write fluent in English also. Being fluent in two languages  is also the barrier that stands in my way sometimes. Trying to navigate through the languages can be difficult. Sometimes I think in Arabic. Sometimes I think in English and so forth.

 Linguistically, I did a lot of code switching throughout War/Torn, my poetry book, which is published by amazing publishers Book*Hug Press. They gave me total artistic freedom and I had a lot of Arabic in the book. We agreed to include a glossary at the end of the book to help readers understand the poems better.

 There were two terms that were prominent in the poetry book and they were Lotee & Shath. Lotee originates from the biblical story of Lut. God sent Lut to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as a prophet and He commanded Lut to preach to their inhabitants on monotheism and also these sinful, lustful acts such as homosexuality.

 Lotee is a derogatory term for gay in Arabic. Shath is the second term I use throughout the book and that means queer in Arabic but it’s used negatively.

 I am both Lotee & Shath. I knew while I was writing War/Torn that someday I would be a father with my husband. I wrote this book as a vessel to show the conflicting identities within me.

 I wrote this book, in hopes that one day, if I were to have a child and when they were old enough, that they would read the poetry book to get a glimpse of what their writer daddy went through just to be authentic and love their other daddy Tarn.

 With love, it came with a price, a price that I had to pay. Yet, there were no regrets. I am the Lotee that loved the Khusrah, which means gay in Punjabi. A man and man and a baby.

 As a daddy writer to be, I hope that one day, our child Malek will read my poetry book War/Torn and will realize that his daddies love him unconditionally.