A introduction to an unsung third stanza
it's time to sing
Valentine’s day is tomorrow. This newsletter is a love letter, a safe space and a home I am building for my fellow Gulf Kids, who have always been in the luminal spaces between their geographical roots and the cities they lived in. It’ll be coming to you every Sunday night.
Before I get into that, let me introduce myself. My Name is Aathma. I am a Malayali writer from Abu Dhabi, who is now based in Dubai. I am tired of the whole “originally from Kerala but was born and brought up in Abu Dhabi” so I will not bore you with it. I am from Abu Dhabi. I hope somewhere in the process of my work, you will feel like it’s okay to claim your respective gulf cities. That’s one of the reasons this newsletter was created.
The newsletter is named “an unsung third stanza,” after a line from my favorite poem. The specific sentence it comes from is this:
The truth is every song of this country
Has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
Snaking underneath as we blindly sing
– Ada Limón, “A New National Anthem”, The Carrying (2018)
When I first read this poem two years ago, the line stayed with me since. I interpreted the line to be about stories omitted from the narratives constructed by the mainstream media and nation-states such as my own story, which is that of a child of immigrants to the UAE. It is not just my story but rather the story of thousands of youth across the UAE and the Arabian Gulf, many of whom have not seen stories of their cities or their lives written down or can name writers or artists who are like them. We are an unsung third stanza, sidelined whenever we ask “where are we?” In the narratives of the Arabian Gulf. I think it’s long overdue we sing by ourselves, with every speaker available to us so they hear our music.
So I made this newsletter a space for writings about being a gulf kid, for gulf kids, by a gulf kid (me). There is a layered story as to how I am the writer I am, which you will find as but a lot of comes down to me getting lucky at University. I met an older writer from Abu Dhabi who is teaching there now after my Acha gave me his book and my writing trajectory changed forever. As I met and befriended writers and artists who were Gulf kids themselves, that was when I realised two things:
I discovered I am not alone in wanting to write stories set in Abu Dhabi or poetry about my memories of trips to the corniche with friends or nonfiction thinking about our parent’s lives.
We were all starved for representation about living and being from UAE and the Arabian Gulf since we could comprehend reading for ourselves.
Gulf literature, academic or creative, does exist and it’s some fascinating stuff there. Finding that literature in my first year of university changed my life because it meant I too could be a writer and write about details that matter to my real life. I will always be grateful for my predecessors in Gulf Literature but right now, from my perspective, Gulf literature that is available now does not reach enough of us and frankly, have yet to catch up with the current realities of our lives and the different people that live here.
This newsletter is to carve out my own representation of what it means to be an immigrant child from the gulf in this time and age. I want it to be completely accessible to anyone so it can find the people who may need it, even if it’s only one person. I wish my seventeen year old self who would only write fantasy stories and dismiss realism because she felt her life was not worth writing about could see what she was capable of writing now. I am hoping people of all walks from the Gulf find their way here and they know there’s a set for them in the literary space. The newsletter will be about many things but at the end of it all, it is for my fellow gulf kids.
Sincerely,
Aathma