An introduction to Tāriq Malik’s poetry book Blood of Stone (2024 Caitlin Press)

Foreword by Prabhjot Parmar

First introduced to Kotli Loharan—the ancestral home of Tāriq Malik—in his collection of short stories, Rainsongs of Kotli (2004), I was catapulted back to it in his book of poems Exit Wounds (2022). Speaking from his location in Canada as the “other,” Malik, in his poems, had traversed geographies, including that of Kotli, to explore emotive themes emerging from myriad experiences as a native, as a refugee, as a migrant, and as a citizen. Traumatic moments—experienced or linked to the title Exit Wounds, led readers from the moment of rupture in 1947 when the colonial “kleptomaniacs” divided land and its people to the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, leading to Malik and his family’s displacement. The poignancy of “Ammi-ji’s Letter to Keshaliya” showcased his personal and collective loss as a result of partition; the visual memory of enemy bootprints in “The Home Invaded” and the tugging of heartstrings with a list of mundane yet irreplaceable things in “What We Lost During Our Third War” highlighted Malik’s poetic prowess. The verbal and visual darkness on the page and the world in “Eidh in the Time of Covid” demonstrated his sensitivity to the immediate and the global.

At its heart, a sensorial feast, Blood of Stone, is a homage to Kotli Loharan. The spatial distance from home and temporal distance from personal and historical events melds into evocations of moments, people, structures, and events of Kotli and other geographies. A feature in Exit Wounds, the braiding of text and image in Blood of Stone also situates thematic elements such as home, memory, loss, friendship, love, and mobility alongside the sensory. Notwithstanding the sensorial distance and deprivation, the memory of smell underpins Malik’s poetry. It emanates from the selected images of the homes and streets of Kotli included in the text. Engaging the olfactory, the man from the clan of the “last lohars” [blacksmiths] (Exit Wounds) becomes another artisan who deftly weaves the warp and weft of a thread of myriad colours and experiences to create a visual of weaving, of a tapestry to set in motion an immersive sensorial experience meticulously presented in three parts: Kotli in distance, mid-way, and Kotli beyond ko-eth.

For readers, particularly those from South Asia or the tropics, the pull into Malik’s world begins with the smell of warm earth and rain in his preface photo essay, “kotli petrichor.” If exhilarating moments of “kittu plots bo kaata!” and “raba raba meen barsa” capture the Punjabi ethos, then through the symbols of colour appearing in titles or in lines such as “the ochre of blossoms / the silver of the moon,” Malik captivates the reader with his mastery over the visual. “Kotli Petrichor” is peppered with images of relics of a bygone era for which there is a considerable longing. Photographs of ruins and rubble serve as reminders of the past, but there is a life in which vines grow, and birds and insects find sustenance. The decaying architectural remnants have become nursery sites for non-human life that thrive without the threat of imminent violence and communal divides. Such symbolic metaphors elevate Malik’s poetry to philosophical reflections rooted in the personal and the political.

Like Exit Wounds, Malik brings readers to motifs of portals that offer the possibility of opening or parting for passage and mobility (in “Shared Wall”). Or, “In-between the portals of History” reminds of restrictions, sealed fates, and histories of people waiting to be unlocked; for example, the image of a padlock securing an old wooden door in Kotli whose residents with centuries of lineage in its soil have not returned home since 1947. Similarly, the three poems in “Monopoly of Ink” offer a forceful critique of exclusionary practices in publishing.

Malik’s poems capture the rural flavour that is often missing from poetry written in English, as most South Asian poets writing in English would be of urban origin. The rural idiom, the vocabulary that is either forgotten or seldom used thousands of miles away from Kotli, Pakistan, or India, would intrigue and delight readers.

For instance, the translated short poems “Kujian: Earthen Bowls,” “Pangurhe: The Cradle,” and “Patolay / Ragdolls.” South Asian readers, especially Punjabis, of a particular vintage would cherish the evocation of “takhati,” “bo-kaata,” and some of the other items rarely seen these days, especially in the diaspora in Canada. Others would be compelled to visualize the intimate, social, and communal conviviality. The beauty of Malik’s poems lies in their accessibility for readers of any background, not just South Asian. Having taught Exit Wounds at different levels in university, I have observed first-hand student excitement as they engaged with his poems. I am confident that students and other readers will embrace Blood of Stone as enthusiastically. Its range and depth will (re) introduce readers to poems anchored in geography, history, and culture that reflect on past and present using sensorial, botanical, and ornithic imagery and, at times, photographs.

Blood of Stone is, to borrow from Malik, “the spell of dream worlds / page by page.”