Qurat Dar, Non-Prophet

 

BE NOT AFRAID

Take the blessing in thee mouth
& go. The scripture on tattered wings.
Every word peeling from the skin. 

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

Enough of the vacant angels,
the platitudes, the declawed gods. 

The trials I would endure to feel
the conviction of the trees.

I’m impressed by the meditative and exploratory “serious play” (what bpNichol termed it) of the full-length poetry debut by the former Mississauga Youth Poet Laureate Qurat 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 Responds to the Ring of Crushed Eggshells / I Put Around the Lettuce,” “A porcelain cage that / could spear you in its shattering. Ask yourself: / do the dervishes spin or spiral?” As judge Kazim Ali wrote to blurb the collection: “I loved Non-Prophet for so many reasons: this book speaks to my own experience and history, it addresses questions of spiritual and daily live (and for many of us, those two are inseparable), but perhaps most importantly, these are exciting and immediate poems that continue the great legacy of Claire Harris. As Harris did in her poems, Qurat Dar bravely confronts a cultural imperative to silence or acquiescence with refusal; more than refusal, but response.” Claire Harris (1937-2018), for those unaware, was an award-winning Canadian poet based in Calgary, born in Trinidad, and who emigrated to Canada in 1966. As her online entry at The Canadian Encyclopedia offers: “Using such verse techniques as contrasting prose and poetry on the page, or alternating journalistic prose with the voice of prophecy, Harris dramatizes and makes public the psychological struggles experienced by radicalized women who face oppression.”

Set in three sections of tight, first-person lyrics—“DUST,” “CLOT” and “BREATH”—the poems of Non-Prophet write from a foundation of faith, of spirituality, one that the author/narrator works to understand on her own terms, not simply replicating 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 one you never learned to speak.” Dar works to articulate and engage on her own terms, which feels a normal enough experience around growing up, but with the added factors of cultural touchstones that seem to contradict how she has been raised to think, feel and approach her own spirituality; the added cultural factors of one spiritual context into another, the cultural collision between the 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 cultural identity, attempting to find balance amid what feels like chaos. “On a bathroom floor 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 tile and trying to wash / out an hour’s worth of hairspray and backcomb, / to look presentable for people that I’ve forgotten, / or who’ve forgotten me, maybe both.”

Again, that title, loaded with meaning through double entendre; reminiscent of the play the late Judith Fitzgerald offered as an early title to a work on the subject Joan of Arc and Gilles de Rais, “D’Arc and de Rais” (sound it out, you’ll get there). The full work later appeared through Ottawa’s Oberon Press as 26 Ways Out of This World (1999), a title I didn’t think nearly as interesting. 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.”

Through Dar’s Non-Prophet, she articulates her own seriousness beneath such performative gestures, and a sense of spiritual through the everyday, as Manahil Bandukwala offers as part of her own blurb for the collection: “As we hurtle towards annihilation, Dar combines rich Islamic and Sufi mythology with deepfakes and Teams lights. The poems loop and circle through destruction and renewal, diaspora and home, worshipper and worshipped.” “I / see a thousand patient / fingers where others / see God.” Dar writes, as part of “Waiting for the Moon to Howl Back.” Or “The opposite of eulogy is a prophecy,” a poem (with such a striking title) that reads with such being and purpose, and a repeated declaration of presence that the narrator appears to be directing, first and foremost, to herself:

and the clouds whispered to me that you will outlive this.
You will pull the stars from the sky with your teeth. Spit
them out, grinning. Your mouth bloodied brilliant. White-
hot with flame. You have taken blows that could fell giants.
Kept a quiet survival tucked below your tongue. You will
do this as long as you live. But how you will live, darling!
Weaving dreams like flowers in your hair. Laughing until
your lungs burst to fireworks. Loving and dancing as clumsily
as you do fiercely. Yes, my blood says that it is so, and a
river would sooner stop than lie. Yes, the darkness will
recede. A wave pulling reluctantly from the shore. You will
outlive this. Yes, even this.