Muneera Pilgrim publishes debut poetry collection

Bristol born poet, spoken word performer, writer and broadcaster Muneera Pilgrim has made a name for herself on the international stage, making a TEDx Talk, and regular contributions to Radio 2’s Breakfast Show, the Guardian, Amaliah, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera. She was also one half of the first all-female Muslim hip-hop duo, Poetic Pilgrimage, who were subject to documentary Hip-Hop Hijabis.

Pilgrim has now launched her debut collection of poems – That Day She’ll Proclaim Her Chronicles, published by Burning Eye Books, hailed as “beautiful, gracious, devastating and mobilising all at once” but fellow poet and spoken word performer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan.

“Muneera writes in ways that are intimate and resonant at the same time, immersive and elusive,” continues Manzoor-Khan. “That Day She’ll Proclaim Her Chronicles both wakes you up, and makes you want to go out and grab something, or someone; to move and to love. This writing is brave and bottomless.”

Cover image of That Day She’ll Proclaim Her Chronicles – image: courtesy of Burning Eye Books

For Pilgrim herself, poetry affords her the space to elevate voices too often sidelined, or succumbing to misrepresentation. In her debut collection, she explores her own childhood, and interrogates ideas of gender, race, spirituality and family, set against the familiar streets of London and Bristol that have helped to shape her experience.

“I realise there is something very sacred in the normal things we do,” she says. “A mother canerowing her daughter’s hair in a world that does not appreciate black people and black features, is a mother protecting and dignifying her daughter in a tradition that has been passed down for centuries and has made it here today.

“That Day She’ll Proclaim Her Chronicles highlights everyday experiences of my childhood and the childhoods of so many young black girls and seeks beauty in the every day.”

From St Paul’s Festival and Opening to Black Cherry Lipstick and 19 Woodborough Street, the collection features multiple poems exploring themes and ideas related to belonging, identity, and the changing nature of Bristol in an age of gentrification.

Pilgrim spoke to Bristol 24/7 about the varied influences her home city has had on her. “It’s really difficult not to be shaped in some way by Bristol, particularly as a child of Jamaican migrants and growing up in the 80s in East Bristol.

I’ve been shaped by everything from eclectic and experimental forms of music, to different expressions of spirituality. From a value for community collectivity and ideas of resistance to early exposure to the legacy of colonial histories playing out in and impacting the lives of all.”

Bristol 24/7 is pleased to publish one of the poems in Pilgrim’s new collection, Unfinished Sympathy in full, below:

UNFINISHED SYMPATHY:
THROWBACK SUITE 2

Girls like me have become accustomed to being asked
where are you from,
where do you belong?
Where is home?
I’m seeking a place for this displaced soul to call home.
In sufi village called Medina Baye
lies my heart, but where is home?
If I’m to believe my birth certificate,
I would say it’s Bristol.
But I’ve been quizzed for so long
and so many times
I’m starting to doubt it.

I was born in Bristol in the eighties.
Posters of rasta babies,
African medallions
and pirate radio stations raised me.
The grey mist of riots never left the air;
blue strobing police sirens left me scared.
I would close my eyes and tense my body, statue-like,
until the gush of wind passed by me
and the wail from the sirens
which in my mind equalled violence
drifted by me like [blow].

I learnt from an early age
you didn’t have to commit a crime
when your skin tone stands out like mine;
just being in the wrong place at the wrong time
could mean you had the right face for that crime.
One of the ways that my community lived under
constant scrutiny.
I was born in Bristol in the eighties,
BS2 to be exact.

I heard my city speak in so many different ways,
so many things she tried to articulate under the cover of
shade.
One of the things she could clearly say was music.
Jamaican sound systems to acid jazz,
Pentecostal choirs to Roni Size,
Tricky, Portishead and Massive Attack:
my city had it all.

Bristol was rose reds, royal blues.
She was Black FM discos and frontline videos,
Inkworks and Malcolm X,
the older who remember the bamboo club,
Saturday mornings under hairdryers in Pamsita’s
waiting for hot combs to straighten the coils out of my hair.
She was Ivanhoe Campbell pumping Cutty Ranks on the radio,
eclipsed,
grown before her time,
force ripe and shapely,
naive and over-friendly,
ready to extend her hand to anyone who would take it.
Alice lost in a wonderland,
she hid her flaws.
Bristol was beautiful,
but she was also in the midst of a drug epidemic,
a sex epidemic, a keep poor folk poor while
legislators take more epidemic.
I was blind to the pain releasing through her pores;
the power of music had a louder call,
diverted us from all that was wrong and
pointed to something more joyous.
A city covered with dark corners and contradictions
found a beautiful means to cope.

As long as we never dared venture in the parts of town
where your skin could not be brown
because of the legacy of skinheads chasing you down.
So we stayed in our corner
under our stone and made a home
in places most people would not go.
We took pride in our cramped,
our dark, our damp,
in our damnation.
They damned us on TV, in newspapers.
Bushes are overgrown now,
needles on the floor,
elders getting mugged.
Maybe you should leave now,
and some of us did,
left what was once home,
but Black, brown folk are accustomed to doing so.
As we left others came in,
house prices started rising, rent started rising,
so those of us that wanted to stay could not afford to
anyway.
Then they discovered our dark was not so dim;
we are festivals and family gatherings,
entrepreneurs and business owners,
the ones who wake up at
4 am to go to work
before we go to our actual work in the morning,
problem solvers,
genius in our dialect,
genius in our intellect,
creators of culture,
rarely beneficiaries of that same culture.
When did we become so profitable?
How do you think Bristol got so mythic?
Legends were here, don’t you know?
And you are reaping from the seeds that we sowed.
Bristol was magical.
Unicorns had nothing on us,
and we are still here,
blooming in the underbelly of your mind.

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That Day She’ll Proclaim Her Chronicles by Muneera Pilgrim is out now, published by Burning Eye Books.

Main photo: David Shadwell

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