Editorial: Poetry – ULR Issue 14, Witness

Poetry with a Gun to My Head

By the Periyar river, I paused my work, telling myself it was for field research, for a book, for Christmas, but really it was to breathe. On its banks, I watched the river move with an almost careless ease, carrying whatever came its way. The water was green and dense, stippled with plastic, driftwood, organic refuse, and things I could not name from the surface. Beneath that surface lay centuries. Trade routes, migrations, floods, prayers, bodies, human grief silted to its depths. The river has witnessed history longer than any archive, and every hundred years or so, when the pressure becomes unbearable, it overflows, reclaiming veins and arteries that once belonged to it, now hardened by concrete. It pours itself into dry places that still remember how to hold water. The river knows how to see, how to store, how to narrate, uphold a restraint and then, how to let go.

Witnessing is often mistaken for looking, as though it were only a matter of steady eyes and moral will. But witnessing is unstable and deeply sensual. It is shaped by where one stands, how close one is, what one risks, and what one desires. There is the intimate witness, who learns how love gives the body shape and how its withdrawal feels like erasure. There is the bodily witness, marked by gender, exhaustion, fear, and injury, whose silence or posture records violence more accurately than speech ever could. There is the everyday witness, attentive to smells, birds, dust, license plates, fragments so ordinary they are easily dismissed, yet quietly storing history as it happens. There is the inherited witness, carrying memory through language and song, speaking for places and people no longer able to speak. And there is the ethical witness, who resists closure, who understands that too much explanation can itself become a form of harm.

The poems in this issue of Usawa do not ask for approval. They do not invite comfort or offer refuge. They ask to be read and endured. Written under historical, political, bodily, and ethical pressure, they insist that poetry is not an escape from force but one of its most faithful records. A poem like “With a gun to my head” is not metaphor here. It is a condition. Language is produced where choice narrows, where attention sharpens, where forgetting is no longer possible.

Witnessing in these poems begins privately, in the body, before it enters the public world. Desire, jealousy, sleeplessness act as early warning systems. A lover tastes honey from another man’s mouth and cannot tell their shadows apart. A self exists only within another’s gaze and vanishes when that gaze moves on. A quiet death. These moments show how erasure begins gently, how disappearance often arrives long before violence announces itself.

Attention settles on the ordinary and refuses to release it. License plates. Birds circling disturbed ground. Flowers whose names will not stay. Hair spreading across sweat-darkened sheets. Memory flickers and falters. This is not nostalgia. It is thinking under pressure. To witness here is to accept fragments, to allow the world to remain unresolved, to understand that clarity is not always ethical.

Bodies return again and again as evidence. A person stands frozen in a socially acceptable posture, phone in hand, pain absorbed into etiquette. Elsewhere, bodies are shaped by borders and flight, by the danger of fleeing in female form. The poems do not explain these bodies. They register them. That restraint matters. It refuses the violence of interpretation disguised as understanding.

Displacement moves quietly through these pages. Sindh survives as dust and scent. Lahore appears in birds and on riverbanks. Home becomes something spoken carefully, in fragments, in rules. Say home, but do not name it. Say never when you dream of return. Witnessing becomes a way to survive through language.

Sound matters as much as sight. Sirens, songs, dialects, and mispronounced names worm into the ear and stay there. Even as we struggle to witness, we become the last speakers of damp decades, carrying voices shaped by rain, loss, and time. Who will listen remains uncertain. Poetry offers no safety. Like the Periyar, I came to understand, it offers attention. It flows without spectacle, holding what is given to it. In that seemingly nonchalant movement, a lifetime passes before our eyes. And then poetry moves through what remains, precise and delicate, rich and exacting, teaching us how to stay with what we have seen.