Teacher’s journey through abuse culminates in book of poems

LITERATURE teacher, Bilkis Moola never anticipated writing a book of poems.

The former Durbanite told Berea Mail her anthology, Wounds and Wings – a lyrical slave through metaphor which will be released at la Bella Restaurant next Friday, 8 November was something that just happened.

“Poetry has always been something I’d loved as a teacher of English and literature. I enjoyed the structure, analytical nature and realised the healing that poetry brought me,” she said.

The subject and theme for many of her poems are related but not limited to her experience as a professional Muslim woman in an abusive relationship and subsequent divorce.

“The whole idea started as Facebook status posts of my feelings and descriptions and observations- I hardly considered them poems just status updates but got many good responses from friends and colleagues telling me to write them down,” she said.

It was only a year later after the finalisation of her divorce that she began constructing structured poems. “Having being in an abusive relationship I spent much time processing the scars, trauma and emotions associated with an abusive marriage. I had to regain my identity as a woman because such abuse alters your core personality,” she said.

Moola was an empowered woman who had completed a BA in English and Philosophy, had worked overseas and did not come from a restricted or oppressed background so had to come to terms with being a progressive muslim woman caught in the clash between being empowered and the quest for love and marriage.

Through her poetry she was able to personally heal through the theraputic writing of her feelings and thoughts.

Moola has returned to her home town of Volkstrust where she lives in a “quite rural and natural” environment. “William Wordsworth has inspired me with his idea of the human relationship to nature, described poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings that takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity. Personal restoration occurs in spaces of calm where healing may materialise,” she added.

“Both poetry as art and poetry for healing use the same tools and techniques: language, rhythm, metaphor, sound and image. Poetry as therapy emphasises the use of words for healing where the focus is on self-expression and growth of the individual.

In the end, the result is often the same. The word therapy, after all, comes from the Greek word therapeia meaning to nurse or cure through dance, song, poem and drama, that is the expressive arts,” she added.

“I’m not sure how my poems will be received but hope my classic critical poetry with contemporary issues of abuse, healing and nature would be well received in a world with depression, bipolar illness and other social issues happening around us. I want to inspire hope with my poems, not just for women. I try to capture what’s happening in the world. My poems are not intended to offend anyone but mobilise change,” she added.