Sanna Wani on Crafting a Poetics of Daughterhood

Sanna Wani is a writer who frequently draws inspiration from her personal experiences in her work. The connection between her creative practice and her life is often interwoven, with one influencing the other. When asked how daughterhood influences her understanding of herself as a poet, Wani struggles to provide a concise answer. The daughterhood is deeply intertwined with her sense of self, but it is also distinct and unique.

Wani is currently working on a story about a daughter navigating the complexities of her relationship with her family. The father is absent, mourning his deceased mother, while the daughter faces the absence of siblings but has a large extended family. This plot is not just a description of events, but rather an exploration of the emotional core of the narrative, the driving force behind the story.

The label "woman" has always felt restrictive to Wani, whereas "daughter" carries no such heaviness. To be a daughter implies a sense of duty, a labor of love, a practice of attention, and a relation of care. It is a vocation, a commitment to someone else's life. While writing the story, Wani spent time untangling the various aspects of daughterhood, both the daughter she once was and the daughter she is becoming. The relationship between the two is both a schism and an echo, a dance of influence and impact.

Wani's father often reminds her, "Betiyan wafadar hoti hain," meaning daughters are loyal. However, Wani is questioning the source and nature of this loyalty. Is it a duty or a promise? What are the boundaries and expectations, and how are they being challenged or broken? What were her own expectations for a good life, and how do they compare to her parents' desires for her?

In her collection of poems, Wani reflects on the cost of closure, acknowledging that there is often friction between one's identity and their background. In her own version of this story, she must grapple with the failure and success of her narrative. She finds comfort in the understanding that those who connect with her work will appreciate it, while those who do not will find it irrelevant.

Wani is inspired by Edouard Glissant's concept of the right to opacity, which allows for individual and cultural silence and non-transparency.

Wani acknowledges that she will not make her family's conflict transparent or explain her own shortcomings or their mistakes. She refuses to be a vessel of morality or a representation of Western narratives about love, freedom, duty, and shame. Instead, she wrote about it in her own way, as a means of creating a personal language and protecting her own feelings and experiences.

Inspired by Audre Lorde's belief that poetry coins the language to express and demand change, Wani uses poetry to scrutinize her life and form a poetics of daughterhood that is uniquely hers.