Description
Fine honour, and surely you merited it.
— Keki N Daruwalla, praising the poet receiving the WE (Women-Empowered India) Gifted Poet Award
‘I am always/ going home/ and still waiting for the day / when I will be/ coming home.’ These lines in a way sum up Rukhaya’s dilemma as a poet and a human being. These poems return again and again to some basic concerns: displacement, exile, homelessness, the tyranny of the majority and the othering of the minority, authoritarian oppression, the anxieties of the post-truth age, the torment of being a woman in a violent patriarchal society. They bear the scars of an unhappy existence on a planet of pain and make no compromises with that agonising, if transient, existence. — K Satchidanandan
I am sure a new generation of readers will respond to Rukhaya’s intimate voice with great enthusiasm. There is much here that announces the arrival of a very talented writer who is committed to poetry. Over to the readers, for the pleasures of poetry. — EV Ramakrishnan
To witness the spectacle of how she survives ‘the spaces between words,’ you must read Rukhaya’s poems with a burning patience. But let me caution you about the catheretic effects of her poems; it’s not poetry; it’s her hijab, ‘window to the world’! — Ashwani Kumar
Dr Rukhaya Mohammad Kunhi is an award-winning poet and critic who has been published in national and international anthologies and journals. She has won accolades in writing including ones from the New Book Society of India, Storymirror.com, and the Forgotten Writers’ Foundation, Egypt. She is the recipient of the Reuel International Prize for Criticism 2016, for the most promising upcoming critic. In 2016, she was listed as IWI’s Incredible Women Writers of India. She was catalogued among the best late Indian 20th century essayists like Arun Shourie, MJ Akbar, Pankaj Mishra, Arundhati Roy, Amit Chaudhuri, AK Ramanujan, among others, by the Humanities Institute, USA. In 2020, she was awarded the Women-Empowered India (WE) Gifted Poet Award: Powerful Emergent Voice. In 2021, she was awarded the Reuel International Prize for Poetry. In 2022, Rukhaya was listed among 100 Inspiring Muslim Women of Kerala, as part of Rising Beyond The Ceiling, a global initiative. She has her own website www.rukhaya.com where she provides resources for students and scholars all over the world.
Reviews
Yaseen Anwer in The Medium
The power of the writing in Lost Canvas lies in the capacity to address difficult truths, in the stubbornness of advocacy as practice. Rukhaya’s poetry embodies both the personal and political, ‘where the personal becomes political, and political personal,’ offering a voice to the marginalized and questioning societal structures that perpetuate exclusion and oppression. She draws from both free verse and structured poetry, demonstrating an ease of rhythm accompanied by rich metaphor and imagery, rendering her voice accessible poetically and intellectually, as her poetry proves to be rich in intellectual offerings. Lost Canvas is a strong testament to the value of activist poetry, in the context of reflecting through socio-political issues at multifarious levels; and at the same time, the holding of individualistic personal narratives.
Wani Nazir reviews Lost Canvas by Rukhaya Mohammad Kunhi in Setu
Forget about all the highbrow literary jargon—Rukaya M K’s Lost Canvas is a straight-up gut punch. There is nothing sugar-coated here. No lovesick diary scribbles, no delicate confessions. No. This is raw, it is brutally honest, and it is all about juggling two worlds, drowning in questions of “Where do I fit?” and the never-ending mess of womanhood in a place that is supposed to be free, but honestly? Feels more like a maze of unwritten rules. Her poems? Damn, they hit hard. Each one feels like a snapshot—some cracked, some so sharp they draw blood, but every single one feels real in the way a midnight breakdown does. Rukaya’s tearing open old wounds, letting the ugliness ooze out, and trying to stitch it all back together. You end up holding a piece of her soul, splintered and bleeding onto the page.
From the Book
Haiku
Eyes closed I can see
always with you beside me,
apple of my Eyes.
And that I cherish
you called me your Shadow, to
follow I relish.
I drenched myself so
much in the rain of your loss
that it’s summer now.
I love my loss more
Because what loss teaches man,
a gain never can.
Carcinogenic
A wall caving in slowly
life to a standstill.
Reality show
called Death, live telecast free.
No wild-card entry.
Black Widow
In the cacophony of emptiness
they called her the white widow:
not only widowed, but divorced —
from the seven ensigns of life
as children whispered about
her feet turning in at night.
She never took it literally
when he avowed he would be
in jural
her sleeping partner.
She had asked him only for aid-
but he gave it to her self-lessly in plural.
Now she injected the blight
to anybody who took to
the thronging blanket of contagion
adulterating the land at night.
Now, if you asked for the white widow,
nobody would know —
for now,
she was the Black Widow.
The Last Guest
Rarely he did inform
but today he barged in.
Stories end. Memories begin.
An audio cassette lies limp
with tape strewn all around
while remembrances play
songs evergreen.
A gramophone jerks
at an indecisive point
and never plays.
Life rises to a tempo
and then falls to small thud
mellowing several lives.
An end that embeds
new beginnings,
A demise that makes
one live life more fully,
A sleep that awakens.
Epilogue: Reflections
Though this nebula looks like winter, here are interstellar nurseries — stars are born here every day. My life that at one point seemed like massive clouds were actually places where galaxies resided. Though eventually, as I lose mass, I will be energised by other stars, and then turn — a reflection nebula.
