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16-19 Creative – First PlaceNatalie Perman, Withington Girls’ School: 'do you remember' in response to 'Do You Speak Persian?'do you remember?in response to Kaveh Akbar’s ‘Do You Speak Persian?’my great grandmother spent years peeling cabbages boiling broth that steamed the house white with grief. when she arrived in america the streets breathed smoke and people cut words like steak which dripped raw blood intocavernous mouths:swallowing words like food. she couldn’t speak their language but she began to copy soundsof foreign laughter like the clink of wine glassesand and that and what and how in cracksof pavement in new york. she forgot how to pronounce the sounds of her childhood so she spoke only yiddish: she had idioms about onions bought tchotchke for the neighbour’s children and then her own.my grandmother says she was a little meshuggeneh(although she was mishpucha, family, of course) she never recovered from travellingalone to the united states at age 13knowing her family were dead. when she shaved horseradish for pesachand the walls would sweat with the sharp smell but her eyes were always dryshe said to my mother that it was her tongue- her tongue which crawled out of her mouthand made strange soundsverbs and vowels that tasted soursince she lost her tongue she couldn’t remember who she was anymorewords like peeled kroyt down the drain. Reflective commentary:Kaveh Akbar’s poem ‘Do You Speak Persian’ begins and ends with night; I decided to begin and end with cabbages, one of the few words I know in Yiddish (kroyt). Akbar’s poem intertwines language with his heritage as Persian, I intertwined mine as an Ashkenazi Jew with equally faltering knowledge of the language of my family, which oscillated between Russian, Ukrainian, Yiddish, Hebrew and English.In Akbar’s poem we are invited to lose ourselves in the Persian language, without knowledge of the phrases he uses. As such, I decided to tell the story of my great-grandmother, who lost part of her identity when she forgot how to speak her native tongue, Russian, and took on another, English. Akbar’s image of swallowing words moved me to focus on my great-grandmother’s life through the imagery of food, cabbages and the kitchen. I left my Yiddish unexplained as Akbar left his Persian, although the words are quite well-known, as are Akbar’s Persian phrases: “Delam barat tang shodeh”, I miss you, and “Shab bekheir”, good night.In Akbar’s poem I sensed the urgency of the need to hold onto words before we lose them, to treasure words, to take care of them. Akbar’s exploration of the struggle of language, being an immigrant or “other” in a new place and learning a new language yet forgetting your own, represented in the beautiful futility of a star travelling light years only to “die in the back of an eye” seemed to me to express grief, longing, loss, hopelessness, but also the need to reconnect and find new meanings. This poem serves as an ode to my great-grandmother and her search for language but also an ode to grief, and the people whose words get lost in their lives. 16-19 Creative – Highly CommendedAidan Tulloch, Thirsk School and Sixth Form College: 'Lament in A Minor for Fiddle and Great Skua' in response to 'Do You Speak Persian?'Lament in A Minor for Fiddle and Great SkuaYou were a decrescendo, not an end stop.You faded, and withered,sneaking out at half time,your ripple cushioned on the riverbank.'s nam faicinn sluagh agus taighean suas ann I see people, housesgum fasainn suaimhneach mar bha mi òg I am happy, youngThe wind over the shore like a verb,The thrift in the heugh, as nouns are,and lives that are conjunctions, waiting forfossils of words to be excavated from birds, sea noise, road signs,surnames.We must protect the Gaelic language sing white papers,punch drunk on statistics, singing censuses to royalty-free bagpipes, no monolingual speakers since 1971 orrestricted to the Outer Hebrides orfifty seven thousand—And escape. To wheretops of trees exhale and grieve against the hundred tundra greys of a Northern sky,and that comforting languageless sibilance, that will still be there at night,and a crisp, cold mist that gives way, and gives life.Reflective commentaryLanguages are ensigns. We wave them with our voiceboxes, screaming ‘this is my heritage, this is my identity’ each time we speak. In Do You Speak Persian? Akbar deftly articulates the guilt of neglecting your mother tongue, crafting an almost metonymic conceit, where a societally-driven detour to English represents an overall separation from Iranian roots. Is this the cost of modern speed? Akbar’s individual story compelled me to investigate a parallel narrative in my own heritage. With a Scottish ancestry that lingers in my surname, I feel embroiled in the tragic demise of the Scottish Gaelic language. So rich in poetry and song, yet powerless against the candid simplicity of global English.Like Akbar, snippets of the vernacular are presented to the reader, enhancing the authenticity of the bicultural poetic experience, but also inviting audiences to briefly experience life in an exotic land. But I decided to take this one step further… in the fourth stanza, the italicised snippets are not of Scottish Gaelic, but of bureaucratic legalese. They represent the series of tepid government action that has repeatedly feigned solidarity with Scotland’s Celtic history. I wanted to reinforce the sad truth that so much linguistic study and policy is sterile, overly scientific, and bereft of the vigour of culture and heritage.And, at the end, we seek solace. As Akbar yearns for such universal comforts as ‘the moon’ and ‘the night,’ I look upwards. To the trees, so powerful, and so uncluttered, and yet so unhuman. Separated from the ephemeral caprices of language, and heritage, providing a wholesome carnal sanctuary that elevates the poem to a higher plain. Perhaps readers will be able to consider their own dilemmas around heritage and background, and join me in enjoying the robust support of trees and mist.16-19 Creative – Highly CommendedMahira Mannan, Haggerston School: for ‘Poem’ in response to ‘dinosaurs in the hood’ while we’re at it, let’s make another film called A Happy Constellation.Me before You meets Dangal meets the The Confirmation. it should start off with an asian girl, doing something that isn’t her maths homework. let the asian girl be special. let’s have a scene where fair and lovely isn’t her best friend; she’s painting self-portraits with her eyes closed because she’s that good. this time round, don’t let Scarlett Johansson steal the lead role, i repeat this protagonist is not white, she’s asian and she’s in the spotlight, she’s nobody’s shadow, she’s not a comedic punch line this time ‘round. we’ll have an all asian cast, all different colours, shapes, sizes, from all around the world, i want kids exchanging jelebi for kimchi, tsuivan for ras malai and all that’s inbetween. she’ll ride her bike and put her earphones in, asian girls belong on tumblr too. but don’t get her wrong, she’s great at driving too but her love for the environment is stronger; her mother on the other hand, [we’ll make a short segway here], is a retired formula 1 driver, now she kicks ass in political matters, deliberating with the local council. it’s all for one and one for all. we’ll have kpop as background music, it’ll be loud and clear alright. we’ll let them know that bts no longer stands for their overused behind the scenes but rather bangtan sonyeondan, that while they mock music of other languages, they’re shitting on artists who have broken into the west with a full korean album. no. 1 on the billboard 200 chart, people. we did that. i’m sure their only-english-speaking asses will quiet down for a moment. and they’re laughing at bollywood now, i hear. how convenient. i hope they know Priyanka Chopra’s net worth before they come for her with their racist misery. to be frank, i don’t’ care, i want us to keep the drama, i want the motions before her first kiss to last a thousand scenes, i want thunder in the background when the antagonist [read: caucasian man] appears. but mostly i want that asian girl to know that she has hopes and dreams far beyond that tiny domestic bubble, that she has a culture, an identity she needs to take full-fledged control of before they take more it away. i want this movie to be a big fuck you to this popular trope of asian erasure. if i can’t have the million dollar budget, if i have to film this damn film on an iphone 8, none of that matters as long as an asian girl can finally mentary: Danez Smith’s ‘Dinosaurs in the Hood’, touched the expanse my heart. I felt as though it was the very words, wishes of some of my black friends – they would have loved to watch this film. In all honesty, at first, all my mind could fathom was Black Panther, a film finally giving the black community what they wanted; I couldn’t help but think that ‘Dinosaur’s in the Hood’ was Smith’s very own Black Panther. And so when I tried to respond, I tried to encompass the mindset of my black friends and by that I mean, convey the felicity they felt towards Black Panther and in this case what they would have felt towards ‘Dinosaurs in the Hood’ had it been real. But as you could imagine, that did not work out all. But with a blank page, reading over Smith’s words again, I thought to myself: why do I have to pretend? Why would I need to be a Victoria, a Rachel an Ajoke when films have been desperately erasing Asian cultures? And so I envisioned all the clichés and overused tropes of Asian characters I could think of and like Smith, turned them of their head. I tried to encapsulate a similar sort of dry humour that Smith expresses, through sardonic phrases, blunt rebuttals – I even tried to mimic the ‘fragmented’ structure of the poem that somehow makes it whole, cyclical even; which fits perfectly with Smith’s last sentence that I also tried to use in a similar fashion. In short, my poem tried to possess the same purpose in which I adorned ‘Dinosaurs in the Hood’ with: a film that my people would want to see. Smith’s poem screams one resolute message to me; whether you’re off the mark or not, someone has got to say it. ................
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