Wearing My Mother's Heart

Performance poet Sophia Thakur offers a powerful new collection touching on intergenerational relationships, finding your voice, and what it means to be a woman.

In her heartfelt second poetry collection, Sophia Thakur takes us on an emotionally charged journey through the lives of women in the past and considers what it means to be a woman today. Exploring topics such as identity, race, politics, mental health, and self-love, she weaves together the voices of a grandmother, mother, and daughter and examines how previous generations have given us the freedom to speak out. Encompassing love from first crush to breakup, as well as the history that comes before us and the brave moments that make us, this collection will resonate with all young women as they approach the joys and pain of adulthood.A sense of being rooted, as well of searching, clearly comes through in this collection, as the author weaves together themes of love, belonging, race, and identity. . . . The evocative and poignant poetry explores the power a mother holds; art, censorship, and exploitation; and God, romance, love, and more. Memory, family, hope, and grief hold the poems together while they strongly excavate sociopolitical themes. Reading them is unsettling—and powerfully beautiful. A masterful, immersive read.
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Drawing on her Gambian and South Asian heritage, British performance poet Thakur pays tribute to the women in her life in her second poetry collection. . . At the center of the book. . . is the power of self-love and freedom of expression, topics that will especially resonate with young female readers. The format allows them to dip in and out as they wish and savor such stanzas as “A woman has always been / what it means to live,” which sums up Thakur’s touching look at modern women.
—Booklist

In poems that span cultures, generations, and locations—and are often written from the perspectives of her Gambian and Southeast Asian relatives—Thakur offers brief yet thoughtful meditations on her ancestors’ histories. . . . Through powerful polyphonic narration, Thakur presents profound exclamations of affection for the ever-deepening nature of mother-daughter relationships, while simultaneously grappling with how violence, imposed assimilation, and exclusion affect Black youth.
—Publishers Weekly

Spoken-word poet and London native Thakur speaks in living memory of tradition, family, and friendship, drawing from reflections on perseverance and resilience. . . . Many of the poems use the imagery of mirrors and reflections to describe ancestral lineage and the art of seeing through the eyes of one’s predecessors. Though not presented as strictly linear, later poems focus on mature love and evoke darker imagery, but the closing works reveal an opening to self-love, empathy, and thankfulness.
—School Library JournalSophia Thakur won her first poetry award at eighteen and since then has performed at Glastonbury Festival, the Stylist Remarkable Women Awards, and international conferences, and has given two TED Talks. She is a youth ambassador for the betterment of young Black girls and has worked with such charities as Cancer Research UK, as well as such brands as MTV, Samsung, and Nike. In 2019, she published her first collection of poems, Somebody Give This Heart a Pen, to critical acclaim. She lives in London.Introduction
My two grandmothers, while loving God, also each loved men who loved a different God. And in the Gambia, in 1965, if you were born to African, Christian fathers, you weren’t expected to fall in the kind of love that swapped your father’s last name for a Southeast Asian man’s. My grandmothers on both sides were powerless against the pull of their hearts and chose love over tradition, boldly and publicly falling in love with men outside of their religion. To them, love should always come first, before any career. Hearing their stories carves a space for compassion in today’s less forgiving society. My parents are fruit of a new seed planted in our family tree. They were born from the audacity of love.
   It is rare to look at a parent and find the right example and not just the right answers. I’ve never known someone to dedicate themselves to love and care as much as my mum does. At least, not since her own mum, my grandmother. They keep that in common—it’s a religion we are still guided by: this promise to each other.
   And now, after twenty-six years of studying my mother and grandmothers, I realize that my mouth mostly speaks from the abundance of their love. While recognizing the necessity of progress, it’s imperative to understand the stories that the women before us lived, to then understand why they think and reason as they do. Our experiences are vastly different.
Naturally, our opinions on love, race and womanhood clash hugely . . . but not our hearts. Our mothers’ hearts we still share.
   Their hearts have always been more powerful than any rule or rationale, but never more powerful than their religion. How they have worn many hearts at a time and still survived is precisely how they taught me about God. And with God, they taught me power, and with power, they opened my eyes to politics, and with politics, they showed me people . . . and from people, they gave me poetry. I hope that these poems bear that out as they lead you through reflections on family, identity, first love, grief, belief and resolution.

It took following their journeys
from Africa to London,
to understand why bravery was never a choice.
It was their only option, to survive.
I wear their hearts today, proudly . . .
Well,
at least I try

Grandma’s Forbidden Love
And if all our love can ever be, is this moment,
eternity sink into a second,
pull our pulses into one.
Kiss me until the war of our histories
wraps a white flag around our tongues
and the rules of tradition
surrender to the rules of love.

All We Need Is . . .
I had someone to face life with,
and that felt like all I’d ever need
to survive the hands of this world.

Halve a Heart, Half a Life
How is it possible that you have flooded into my life like this?
Before you, the todays and tomorrows lacked nothing,
the present was pleased, satisfied, whole, I thought.
 
Yet now I miss,
as if I was just delivered a heart
As if half of my brain has opened for the first time
and I am powerless but to think of how much sweeter
every tomorrow stands to be
now that I know you and know this love.

Even an Island Needs Two
For nine months, I filled my body with love
Stretched past my bones and became a home
I planted a heartbeat into the soil
Rained poems and prayers
Absorbed leaves into my bloodstream
Created a forest for you to come from
But you made a country of me,
Pushed entire seas between the plains of my skin
You taught my body to hold you
Stuffed my ears with your fingers and wrote a billion songs to your rhythm
Wrapped me in your tablature
and we heard the world sing of how you wait
to meet us one day.
 
You put a new song to my ears.
 
I learned to listen,
to be    still
 
and I heard love breathe.
 
I untied my skin into the air
and felt your trust in every passing centimeter.
 
I carried the earth on my hips
Shared skin with destiny
Saw the world for what it could be
Because if sex could be this, then you are already our miracle.
We held head and hands and spoke with God about you
Asked him for your father’s eyes for three hundred nights
And while mine closed, He watched over you
making room for you to become.
Cracked my life into two
One for me and one for love.
 
Look at how love can double us
How it reteaches us trust and time
How nine months can remind us
that union is the essence of life . . .
 
May we never forget
 
The traditions that hold
in hope of carrying us through
whatever the foreign world may put us through.

Dance—The Safe Return to Yourself
When we landed,
gold in our mouths,
our tales were cut off with our mother tongue,
but our feet were quick to refind our pulse.
So feel closely, how your body responds
to the sounds of similar souls,
 
and follow your rhythm back home.

If I Can No Longer Know Home, Let Me Know Heaven
We landed and our goals,
once Prophecies . . .
shrunk into only dreams.
God had never been more needed,
and so He arrived as a lifeline
that we thread through the darkness
to sew our own skyline to pray to.
 
If I can no longer know home,
let me know heaven.