Mona Arshi: A Journey of Poetry and Grief

Mona Arshi was a human rights lawyer for Liberty but became an award-winning poet and novelist. Her works have been published in The Times, The Times of India, The Guardian, Granta, and on the London Underground. Not only was her work published in these organisations but ‘Dear Big Gods’, her second collection, was also published by Liverpool University Press. Additionally, she recently published a novel, that she wrote by accident, in 2021 titled ‘Somebody Loves You’.

Poetry has always been a part of Mona’s life, even when she was working as a human rights lawyer poetry helped her feel less alone. During difficult times in her life poetry was with Mona and she was able to happen upon language in a different way. With these difficult times, Mona became more invested in writing poetry and took several courses and eventually earned her Master’s at the University of East Anglia.

When did language fail her?

One of the times when it seemed as though language had failed Mona was when her younger brother had passed away. After the initial shock had faded after hearing the news from a coroner, she travelled back home to tell her mother the news. When Mona had to tell her mother the news she struggled to find the words to tell her in English.

From this experience, Mona discovered that there are times when language fails us when we need it most. In multiple languages, there are no words to describe how we are feeling, whilst in others, there is an exact word that resonates with emotion. However, these words are unable to be translated into other languages.

For Mona English is her acquired language, while Punjabi is her mother tongue. Until the age of five or six she spoke pure Punjabi, when she started to attend school English was the language she spoke and wrote in. When she had to tell her mother the news there was a conflict in language. She experienced an inner turmoil between her mother tongue and acquired language, in the end she used both of them.

How is grief dealt with in South Asian cultures?

In South Asian culture and Western cultures, there are different ways of handling grief. For South Asian cultures grief is not necessarily a process but they do not close it off as much as they do in Western cultures. Mona was grieving for her brother, these wise women had come to her home to bereave. These women had kept them fed, and took care of everything when Mona struggled to do so.

When we are experiencing grief, we are aware of the emotional aspect of it, but there is also a physical impact. Before we truly experience loss or grief we are, in a way, innocent. Once you have experienced loss or grief you become aware of who has and hasn’t experienced it. There is a type of change we go through, it is almost as though we have an emotional armour that we are unable to see but we are aware of emotionally and physically when it is gone.

What was Mona’s journey with grief and poetry?

Part of being a poet is being able to acutely listen to what is going on inside of you and around you. Being able to listen to what your body is telling you, what the environment and people around you are saying, and articulating it into words is what being a poet is all about.

After the loss, Mona experienced she had to attend to her grief and that meant being honest with herself and in her writing. Grief had in a way changed how Mona thinks about life and this is difficult. Experiencing loss and having to write about it as a poet can be complex in that you try to write something that can help others and it becomes something beautiful, but there is a type of guilt that comes with it.

How are South Asian women treated when experiencing grief?

In Bollywood, there is a film centred around Rudaali. The Rudaali is a custom in Rajasthan that entails hiring women from a lower caste to be professional mourners to weep for the death of a higher caste man. These women express and cry for the deceased when the people who have experienced the loss are frozen in their grief. This is simply one-way grief is handled in South Asian cultures, but for women who experience the loss, it is harsher.

With widows in South Asian culture they wear white and their behaviour is policied in society. From the moment your husband dies, it seems as though your life is over. You are assigned to wear nothing but white to show society that you are a widow, it is almost as though it becomes your very identity. In addition to wearing white, women who were widowed became ostracised from society, they could not attend weddings as they were seen as a form of bad luck for the newlywed couple.

Grief is treated as a strange and inhumane emotion that many do not experience, this is far from the truth. Grief is something we all experience at some point in our lives when we deal with loss. It can be the loss of a loved one, loss of innocence, loss of a home, or loss of something we did not have. We carry grief with us and almost become paralysed by it in the beginning. Grief makes us change our perspective, not only in everyday life but also in our own perspective regarding ourselves.

LISTEN TO MONA ARSHI’S STORY AND ADVICE ON MASALA PODCAST: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6eJseuhP7SFr5J8rMyjpTn?si=SFiJ15QxQZa4vcmzlMdnzg&utm_source=copy-link

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