Qurat Dar, Non-Prophet

 

BE NOT AFRAID

Take the blessing in theemouth
& go. The scriptureon tattered wings.
Every word peeling fromthe skin. 

Where is my levelled mountain,
my parted sea? I wish thelight would
moth toward me for once. 

Enough of the vacant angels,
the platitudes, the declawedgods. 

The trials I would endureto feel
the conviction of thetrees.

I’mimpressed by the meditative and exploratory “serious play” (what bpNichol termedit) of the full-length poetry debut by the former Mississauga Youth Poet LaureateQurat Dar, her Non-Prophet (Fredericton NB: Goose Lane Editions, 2025),winner of the inaugural Claire Harris Poetry Prize. “The sunlit dargah knows /no prayer but that of survival.” Dar writes, as part of the poem “Snail Respondsto the Ring of Crushed Eggshells / I Put Around the Lettuce,” “A porcelain cagethat / could spear you in its shattering. Ask yourself: / do the dervishes spinor spiral?” As judge Kazim Ali wrote to blurb the collection: “I loved Non-Prophetfor so many reasons: this book speaks to my own experience and history, itaddresses questions of spiritual and daily live (and for many of us, those twoare inseparable), but perhaps most importantly, these are exciting andimmediate poems that continue the great legacy of Claire Harris. As Harris didin her poems, Qurat Dar bravely confronts a cultural imperative to silence oracquiescence with refusal; more than refusal, but response.” Claire Harris (1937-2018),for those unaware, was an award-winning Canadian poet based in Calgary, born inTrinidad, and who emigrated to Canada in 1966. As her online entry at TheCanadian Encyclopedia offers: “Using such verse techniques as contrastingprose and poetry on the page, or alternating journalistic prose with the voiceof prophecy, Harris dramatizes and makes public the psychological strugglesexperienced by radicalized women who face oppression.”

Setin three sections of tight, first-person lyrics—“DUST,” “CLOT” and “BREATH”—thepoems of Non-Prophet write from a foundation of faith, of spirituality,one that the author/narrator works to understand on her own terms, not simplyreplicating or offering lip-service. “You were taught that to pray is to make /your mouth form sounds without meaning. / Reading suras like sheet music.Cradling / foreign words behind your teeth.” she writes, to close the poem “55:13,”“How fitting that your faith is just another language / you’re losing, or oneyou never learned to speak.” Dar works to articulate and engage on her ownterms, which feels a normal enough experience around growing up, but with theadded factors of cultural touchstones that seem to contradict how she has beenraised to think, feel and approach her own spirituality; the added culturalfactors of one spiritual context into another, the cultural collision betweenthe onslaught of western culture and anything else it deems outside. This is,as much as anything, a coming-of-age book around spiritual faith and culturalidentity, attempting to find balance amid what feels like chaos. “On a bathroomfloor somewhere in Lahore,” she writes, to open the poem “Ablution/Absolution,”“I’m trying to find the delicate balance between / trying not to soak the tileand trying to wash / out an hour’s worth of hairspray and backcomb, / to look presentablefor people that I’ve forgotten, / or who’ve forgotten me, maybe both.”

Again,that title, loaded with meaning through double entendre; reminiscent of theplay the late Judith Fitzgerald offered as an early title to a work on thesubject Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, “D’Arc and de Rais” (sound it out, you’llget there). The full work later appeared through Ottawa’s Oberon Press as 26Ways Out of This World (1999), a title I didn’t think nearly asinteresting. Curiously enough, Dar even offers her own Joan of Arc poem, “Joan,”that begins: “It could never have been me. A woman’s platform is always a pyre.”

ThroughDar’s Non-Prophet, she articulates her own seriousness beneath such performativegestures, and a sense of spiritual through the everyday, as Manahil Bandukwala offersas part of her own blurb for the collection: “As we hurtle towardsannihilation, Dar combines rich Islamic and Sufi mythology with deepfakes andTeams lights. The poems loop and circle through destruction and renewal, diasporaand home, worshipper and worshipped.” “I / see a thousand patient / fingerswhere others / see God.” Dar writes, as part of “Waiting for the Moon to HowlBack.” Or “The opposite of eulogy is a prophecy,” a poem (with such a strikingtitle) that reads with such being and purpose, and a repeated declaration of presencethat the narrator appears to be directing, first and foremost, to herself:

and the clouds whisperedto me that you will outlive this.
You will pull the starsfrom the sky with your teeth. Spit
them out, grinning. Your mouthbloodied brilliant. White-
hot with flame. You havetaken blows that could fell giants.
Kept a quiet survivaltucked below your tongue. You will
do this as long as youlive. But how you will live, darling!
Weaving dreams likeflowers in your hair. Laughing until
your lungs burst tofireworks. Loving and dancing as clumsily
as you do fiercely. Yes,my blood says that it is so, and a
river would sooner stopthan lie. Yes, the darkness will
recede. A wave pullingreluctantly from the shore. You will
outlive this. Yes, eventhis.