April 22, 2026

Week Four: Complicating Linguistic Traditions

by Layla Faraj

How can we reject, complicate, or interrogate otherwise unquestioned linguistic traditions? The two poems featured here detail a search for what lies hidden behind the words and letters we use. They are not necessarily pleading, transforming, or struggling; they are illuminating personal attachments to language and making invisible relationships, visible.

Celebrating the final week of National Poetry Month, the accompanied original prompts complete the thirty day poetry challenge.

Read more about Mizna’s Poetry Month Prompts and find all of the prompts here.

—Layla Faraj, NNAAC Fellow + Column Editor

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Translation

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Originally published in Mizna 16.1,

She asks: Why do you say Mama
when you
call me?

Six o’clock and I am tired.
And making dinner right now.
An Arab with a 5-year-old demanding
neat-and-tidy American answers.
I phone it in:
That’s just how Arabic works.

Translation is a complicated dance.
Mama is the word
that holds you in
even when you are walking around in the world
with your own name,
so that calling you to me
I discard the self and
respond to the name you gave me,
becoming the person you made me.

Mama is a time-traveling word,
a song to you and to my own mother,
so that whenever I reach out to you
she is there too.
And calling you I am once again
the daughter, tethered to her
just as I am
locked in this lifelong embrace
with you.

I call myself and my own mother and you
all three of us, in one breath,
writing this poem.

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the خ in my life

by k. Eltinaé

Originally published in Mizna 23.2, the Black SWANA issue

I am fine with forgetting that خ sound
tearing joyfully like pants or a body surrendering to sleep.
How many words are missing in my life
like goodness (خير) and destruction (خراب)
cucumbers (خيار) and choice (اختيار).
I am finally free of fear (خوف) and differences (اختالفات)
manners (اخالق) and bread (خبز).
I lose words like brother (أخ) and sister (أخت) ,
can no longer say I’ve had enough (خلاص)
in my own head without mixing identity with language.
In Khartoum (الخرطوم) they call me Arab.
Arab there equals light-skinned meaning free of slave ancestry.
In Arabia, I am too Black to be related to the prophet
but my name and language grant me a community
that calls me slave behind my back.
The Arabic word for shit
like my name begins with (خ)
which is why you can keep them both.

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Prompts for Final Nine Days: April 22-30, 2024

1. Write about a personal relationship that exists in another language.
2. Dissect a term of endearment.
3. Write through a moment of misunderstanding.
4. Conjure multiple generations.
5. Write about a moment where you were asked to explain yourself.
6. Write a poem dedicated to a sound that doesn’t exist in the English language. 
7. Write for/about the words missing in your life.
8. Write a poem in/to the language that inhibits or limits you.
9. Bring linguistic connections into another language, even if they become invisible in English.

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