Untitled: or The Gauze of P@l*st$ne
Updated: Aug 19
Usman T. Malik
The award-winning author pens down a moving poem about one of the worst genocides in history. The poem is accompanied by artwork from Samreen Asghar.
You watch them pray
over their loved ones’ graves
it’s Eid
(from the Arabic عَادَ & عَیَّد
‘to assemble in return’
they say,
they who’ve never had to leave)
You watch them,
burnt skeletal torsos & flayed limbs
gather in grief over their irrevocable dead
bowed, like half-felled olive trees
& it overwhelms you
the complicity & the living’s guilt
indifference & the difference
in how the world treats them when
“We’ll stay”, they say, their maddening mule-stupidity
enraging the civilized:
how dare they stay unto death.
Every breath they give
to the smoke and rubble of that dusty
ancient whore G@z*
the gauze of P&l^st!ne
that shrivels in shredded hands
makes us look bad
Oh won’t someone think of us
children of one genocide
now tramping and hoofing
over the bulldozed dead of another
Usman T. Malik’s short fiction has been reprinted in more than a dozen best of the year anthologies including The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series. His debut novel A Dark and Narrow House will be out from Putnam/Penguin Random House (US) and Titan Books (UK) in the spring of 2027. He is the co-founder of the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which, since 2016, has been nurturing Pakistani-origin writers of speculative fiction.
Samreen Asghar is a Pakistani contemporary visual artist, researcher and educator whose practice reinterprets the rich legacy of South Asian miniature painting through a contemporary lens. Drawing inspiration from various school of arts, she creates layered visual narratives that examine ecological consciousness, cultural memory and the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds.
With over two decades of professional artistic practice, Asghar has established a strong national and international presence through seven solo exhibitions, three two-person exhibitions and more than eighty group exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited at the CICA Museum (South Korea), the World Bank, the Embassy of Sweden, the Bahrain Art Center, the Omani Society for Fine Arts and numerous leading art galleries across Pakistan. She has also completed more than 1,000 commissioned artworks for private, corporate, and institutional collections, while undertaking collaborative community-based creative projects that highlight the transformative potential of art. Asghar serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Design at COMSATS University Islamabad.
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