Cerebration

Cracked Open: Shabnam Nadiya

Shabnam Nadiya is a Bangladeshi writer and translator settled in Philadelphia. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the 2019 Steinbeck Fellowship at the San Jose State University; a 2020 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant; and a 2022 PEN Presents grant. Her translation of Alam’s story “Milk” won the 2019 Himal Southasian Short Story Prize. Nadiya’s published translations include Mashiul Alam's The Meat Market: Ten Stories and a Novella (Westland, 2024), Leesa Gazi's novel Hellfire (Westland 2020, released in 2023 in the US by Amazon Crossing as Good Girls), Moinul Ahsan Saber’s novel The Mercenary (Seagull Books, 2018), and Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Beloved Rongomala (Westland Books, 2022). Her translations and writing have been widely published in journals and anthologies including Himal Southasian, the W.W. Norton collection Flash Fiction International, The Best Asian Poetry 2021-22, the New York Public Library's Pocket Poems series, The Offing, Joyland Magazine, Amazon’s Day One, Gulf Coast, and Copper Nickel.

Every day

I pretended things

were not broken

inside my skin

beneath my heart

Every day I cracked open

eggs

and slid them gently

onto hot, waiting oil

where they

crackling came to life

Every day

I let the strong white walls

of a house

turn a cage

(what could be)

into my home

What Deeds Remain: Shabnam Nadiya

It can come though at the crack of dawn

at the break of bones

in the dead of night and hope

A text, a memory, a word, a deed

seeks purchase in the crumbled earth

of love

Deeds are certificates of purchase pertaining to

the rough nature of the beast

of belonging; is it worth it

to be longing forever to walk into a well-lit room

well-appointed with conveniences such as gilt-edged chairs

and marble floors justly proportioned; there are guilt-trips offered

for free but none taken. Is it worth it—to belong?

what little she, as the daughter, is allowed

what little she, as the daughter, is granted

what little she, as the daughter, is

Deeds can survive death, sometimes in curling pages,

sometimes in the hearts of others. What you carry into the ground

is what you have been.

What is it like to walk on solid ground?

I cannot tell you.

I can tell you this:

love that demands

invisibility

is love not at all

So this, then, is how love dies:

in the pages of yellowing documents

through the wary lens of acceptable grief

So this is how love dies:

my blood is hunger

anger tongues my skin

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