Rupture Anthem

Rupture Anthem explores a journey of severance and belonging. The speaker of the poems traces vestiges of a lost home—her father’s migration to Jeddah during the 1970s oil boom, migrant labor abuse under the country’s restrictive kafala system, girlhood within the country’s strict religious mores, and finally, the family’s traumatic displacement from Saudi Arabia. Against this early severance, a repatriated speaker unscrambles an evasive citizenship in her native Lahore, Pakistan as she navigates its urban militarism and its violent patriarchy. This thwarted homecoming only motivates the speaker’s departure to diasporic America where she continues to weigh, against heightening liminality, the complicated nature of home, memory, familial life, feminist dignity and freedom. As the poems travel borders and psychic states, braiding memory with history, through lyric and documentary poems, Rupture Anthem suggests that empowerment—and belonging—lies in the ruptures we create through transformative acts of witness, dissent, love, bodily pleasure, and movement against the structural forces that silence.