Begum by Zainab Imran

Zainab Imran – shortlisted for the 2024 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize in Poetry – examines the UK's rejection of Shamima Begum as a citizen, its repercussions reverberating through the narrator's life.

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open until 30 June 2025. Read the full guidelines and submit your work.

I.

The country is not letting go of her, no matter how much of her shadow remains, one of shame and haunting according to one news reader or other. How could they let her get away? Even as she is exiled from the world, leaving as quiet as a mother in the heavy hours of relief, for so many their exile is execution. This country isn’t what it used to be. One summer, we’d driven to British Columbia from Calgary, making a pilgrimage to my dadi’s grave beforehand. The only one of us to be planted there. The mountain air was filled with untaught wasp song. Coat buttons snapped as we ripped the ground clean of vegetation. We dragged out wisps of straw, the unkempt lavender. Grass as yellow as teeth. In the first picture I saw of her grave, there was a postcard expanse of blue cloudlessness and rows of unfulfilled, lumpy land behind my praying uncles. Cupped hands stained from spreading piles of earth. The headstone revealed her as simply ‘Begum’, the letters bright in blue Urdu. A name meaning ‘wife’. What difference does it make translated as a name or noun? Our men say a woman is only immortal when she is a mother. It cannot be right to imagine Shamima’s wedding cries, silenced by the certain sword of his hands and mouth. His tongue to hers, purging the devil English that spewed from it. The wasps stopped their vibrations and let us go.

II.

Some nights when I am cut off from myself, I listen for my own breathing. Wonder how out of sync it is with anyone else’s. How does Shamima do it? How does she breathe in a miscarried body, one that has carried children into crossfires? One thought ties itself to the bedpost. The thought of my pregnant mother, wandering the streets of Southall for a room and following the same breath she hears inside her. I only know those streets as an unborn dream, one that ends in a kind, Sikh couple’s flat. Woke. I haven’t woken like this for days. Waking to the news that she isn’t coming home, as far as we can tell. There was nothing they could do. What do you say to monolinguals who will decide the language of a brown girl’s body?

III.

‘This country is not letting go of me,’ she says. How many times have our children read that Armitage poem? I imagine a lorry piled with families dying to come home. I didn’t think you could put a price on remains. I used to tutor a Syrian boy a few houses down and once showed him the poem, all its bloody meaning and metaphor. The tossing of guts. Sharing the nightmare of a blood-shadow. He didn’t blink, just read the lines over and over to himself, his version of English the best it could be. His cheeks were thick and burning from unspoken language, my gums swollen from guilt and explanation. His mother told me that his father was shot right in the middle, a wound so wide he could’ve given birth to all their children again. And then I think, they won’t ever know what her name means. They left her to birth a child as the air raid sirens began. They won't let her go. They won't let her back in ­—

The 2025 Queen Mary Wasafiri New Writing Prize is open for submissions until 30 June. Submit here.

Image: Lavender by Henri-Edmond Cross