Rumuuz is a community of friends exploring and continuing the tradition of Urdu poetry in New York City. Our perspectives start in each other’s homes, where we meet on Thursdays for poetry discussions and writing workshops. In a city where written Urdu rarely appears and an era when writing faces increased automation, this zine represents an attempt not only to preserve Urdu poetics, but to think about its progression through analog mediums in community. Our contribution is as follows: a printed mix of Urdu and English poems, essays, short stories, and, relatedly, marginalia.
For our second issue, we invited writers to reflect on and play with the idea of the margin (حاشِیَہ). Beyond serving as a blank frame, margins have been the site of commentaries, criticisms, edits, follow-ons, and exegesis for a remarkable range of Urdu works. The space side-of-center has historically allowed for an interplay of ideas, facilitating dialectics and intertextuality. Looking beyond the margin’s physical definition, we asked: in our age, what role does exteriority play? Who is marginalized and who is empowered? What is central and what is tangential—within the world, this city, and our individual lives?
From an annotated foraging map of Prospect Park, to dispatches from Srinagar and Auckland, and even poems written on the banks of the Delaware River during our first annual writers’ retreat, these submissions came from every corner. Naseer Ahmed’s lyrical Aik Shehr Ka Haashiya depicts the subaltern living at the edges of society. In his satirical short story, Harris Chowdhary writes on the bizarre urban outskirts of Pakistan’s housing developments. Meher Babbar’s bilingual poem reflects on the interplay between the languages we think in. Elsewhere, blank margins become landscapes to be eclipsed, or redefined, in green as the parks of New York City. Surrounding all texts are marginalia: notes, references, metadata, translations and even personal reflections on what stood out to us. In this second offering, we share with you these poems written over the course of many shared Thursdays.