Postcolonial
Banter is Suhaiymah Manzoo-Khan’s debut collection. It features some of her most
well-known and widely performed poems as well as some never-seen-before
material. Her words are a disruption of comfort, a call to action, a
redistribution of knowledge and an outpouring of dissent. Whilst enraged and
devastated by the world she finds herself in, in many ways it is also the
mundane; hence, whilst political and complex in nature, her poetry is just the
‘banter’ of everyday life for her and others like her. Ranging from critiquing
the function of the nation-state and rejecting secularist visions of identity,
to reflecting on the difficulty of writing and penning responses to
conversations she wishes she’d had; Suhaiymah’s debut collection is ready and
raring to enter the world.