At Writing Home, I and Nadia who is my teacher, inspiration, and someone who shares home with me in language and our love for mountains came to the station to remind me of some very important things about writing, homesickness, kinship and nurturing. 

I am certain the world is only there to alienate us from ourselves. It surely isn’t made for us but it is also incapable of accommodating the beauty of the nuances our cultures and identities bring. It is their lack and never us and no matter how far we are from home and our people, we carry home in us. It fortifies and guides us. Everything that we create speaks and sounds of our homes. 

Nadia and I over and over again come to realize that we have remembered home in our bodies and through the various languages that we speak we travel back in memory. 

Nadia with tunes from South Asian artists like Vidya Vox, Hassan and Roshaan, Abida Parveen and Naseebo Lal immerse me in our love for the soil we share, India and Pakistan, one soil and spirit despite being torn apart by the british raj. The superhero Kamala Khan from Ms. Marvel also becomes our topic of discussion recalling magic and mythology in our culture. And the pining to know what made us and what we are. 

Nadia Niaz is the founder and editor of the Australian Multilingual Writing Project, an online journal publishing creative work that weaves together multiple languages. Her poetry has appeared in Rabbit, Not Very Quiet, Peril, and other national and international publications.

Nadia received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Cultural Studies from the University of Melbourne and has taught creative writing to everyone from pre-schoolers to postgraduates. Her creative and academic work explores multilingual creative expression, the practicalities and politics of translation, language use among third culture kids and other globally mobile cohorts, and the idea of ‘belonging’ in multiple contexts.

The podcast begins with I Sing x Peera Ho by Nadia Niaz a poem that was published in The Polyglot's 'Unfaithful' issue.

Links to Nadia's works-

https://australianmultilingualwriting.org/

https://www.insanityworks.org/nadia-creative

https://www.kingsartistrun.org.au/program/these-words/

Playlist

1. Kuttaunadan Punjayile by Vidya Vox 

2. Doobne De (reprise) by Hassan and Roshan

Follow Nadia on @NadiaNiaz (Twitter and Instagram)