Qaf’s People

“If there is a mother country and a father country / if an ocean, or some seas, or river after river after river / breathe between your right side and your left / you’re from Qaf,” offers Governor General Award-winning writer Sadiqa de Meijer in, Qaf’s People, an elegant and ambitious exploration of mixed-race identity, diaspora, and the precarities of belonging, set in an imagined landscape drawn from Islamic mythology. Here, “a seedling body wearing a smock or backwards old // dress shirt makes a map.” Here, the Netherlands, Kenya, and Canada overlap, and “we love where we are from without a flag.” Within de Meijer’s skillful poems, history’s many tributaries converge, their confluence offering new ways of understanding the complexities of lives lived across and through continents, languages, and cultures. Qaf’s People is a book rich with inquisitive beauty and interrogative poise.