22-year-old Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan won second place at this year’s Roundhouse poetry slam for her powerful poem entitled This Is Not A Humanising Poem. In the piece, she declares that Muslims shouldn’t need to prove their humanity in the aftermath of an extremist attack.
Below is a snippet from the poem but do yourself a favor and just CLICK and watch it.
This will not be a “Muslims are like us” poem. I refuse to be respectable. Instead, love us when we’re lazy. Love us when we’re poor. Love us in our back-to-back council estate, depressed and washed and weeping. Love us high as kites, unemployed, joy riding, time wasting, failing at school. Love us filthy, without the right colour passports, without the right-sounding English.Love us when we aren’t athletes, when we don’t bake cakes. When we don’t offer our homes or free taxi rides after the event.If you need me to prove my humanity, I’m not the one that’s not human…. My mother texts me too after BBC news alerts. “Are you safe? Let me know you’re home okay.” And she means safe from the incident, yes, but also from the after effects.’
