THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The same world though we share; you and I; Separated do we remain by unfathomable, impenetrable veils of horror; The lines written by 16-year-old Jasmin Naur Hafiz in her poem ‘Let Me Cry for You’ based on the Syrian boy who was injured in an air strike, is a cry for the silenced, the intricacies of the world and the strange realities that weave one’s lives.
The poem is part of a collection of poems published in ‘The Refuge’ which was released by Congress MP Shashi Tharoor last week. And just like ‘Let Me Cry for You’, all the poems in ‘The Refuge’ talk about children, women and the deprived due to wars.
Speaking about the book, MP Shashi Tharoor said that ‘The Refuge’ is a vision of the world seen through the eyes of a young budding writer. “It is quite surprising to see how this young girl views the world,” he said.
In the forward, he continues. “I am impressed by the poems of Jasmin Naur Hafiz. It is a rare quality in one so young to feel such compassionate concern for the flotsam and jetsam of humanity, the wretched and dispossessed refugees, the homeless, the unfortunates displaced by war and conflicts.” He further says that her feel for the emotional power of language is also striking.
A student of Humanities at St Thomas Central School, she said that her first pieces of writing were one-line stories that she used to narrate as a toddler. It was at the age of eight that she started writing poems. These poems are published in her blog ‘Suruma Writes On’ which her father Dr Hafiz created for her when she was eight years old.
Jasmin has won several prizes and had presented the poem ‘Refugees, We Still Remain’ at the International conference on Refugees and Forced Immigration held at Turkey in September 2016.