An Interview with Fawzia Muradali Kane
An Interview with Fawzia Muradali Kane
I was the coward. The others were calm. They knew what they had to do. Our cousin Zen was there, she had done this before. Zen is a happy person. She made us giggle in the waiting room, while the funeral director was telling us everybody have a sense they will pass about say maybe 40 days before. Even if they go by accident, he said, and if you see somebody talking to the dead like normal, then you know it ain’t going to be long now. Our mother had lain on her sickbed, calling out for us to open the gate for my uncle and them to come in.
—Fawzia Muradali Kane, “Washing the Body,” Guaracara
Fawzia Muradali Kane, a Trinidadian architect and poet, was born on the eve of Trinidad and Tobago’s independence. After receiving a government scholarship, she moved to the United Kingdom to study architecture. She then returned to Trinidad, and she worked for some years as an architect before moving to London. Muradali Kane has been writing for over a decade. Her alt poetry collection Tantie Diablesse was longlisted for the 2012 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and her long sequence Houses of the Dead was published by Thamesis in 2014 as an illustrated pamphlet. Her poem “Kaieteur Falls” was shortlisted for the 2017 Montreal International Poetry Prize. Muradali Kane won the City of Stories for Westminster, London, in 2018 for her short story “Anguilla City” and second prize in the UK-based Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition in 2023 for her prose poem “Eric.” Her most recent work, a collection of poems titled Guaracara, published this year by Carcanet Press, has been making literary waves.1
Guaracara landed in Fiona Sampson’s best recent poetry roundup in The Guardian.2 The collection of poems is said to trace Muradali Kane’s ancestral legacy as an Indo-Trinidadian growing up in Marabella, navigating political changes and the strangeness of the polio epidemic. The Guaracara river, Muradali Kane’s inspiration, is approximately thirty kilometers long and separates Marabella from the nation’s oil refinery center, Pointe-à-Pierre. The river, heavily polluted by agricultural, residential, and industrial refinery waste, springs out of the Central Range, draining into the Gulf of Paria; thus from the center to the heart, this river most foul runs. For me, Muradali Kane’s poems are like a ballad of life, taking you through moments where you experience an ebb and flow of not opposing emotions but something else, something more profoundly and earnestly integrated yet distinct. Muradali Kane’s poetry provokes you, incites you to grip tightly at her words, at the feelings they evoke. But something quiet tells you that you should not. It whispers to you, to let it all flow through and over you. Having experienced this, I wanted to speak with Muradali Kane myself, to explore a little bit of the “behind the scenes” of such provocative work. And she graciously agreed to an online interview with me on Sunday 20 July 2025.
Shrinagar Francis: I’m always interested in the concept of naming. Can you share a little about what inspired some of the names of your poems?
Fawzia Muradali Kane: I sometimes have a title or a phrase in mind that may end up being the first line of the poem; it becomes a generative title. Once the poem is finished, chances are it’s deleted or has been absorbed into the poem. Then I give the poem a new name.
SF: A number of your poems follow the form of prose poems. What is it about this form that you are inclined toward?
FMK: Though the form has been generally well received in the poetry press, I’ve faced some criticism in the UK mainstream press about whether my pieces are poems when writing prose poems. Because some critics here believe “strong rhymes, strong formality” are what make a poem. And I would reject that. To me, a poem is the rhythm you hear when you read it, or hear it read. Prose poems for me echo Trini Creole poetic speech, lots of internal rhymes, so important to the soundscape, that may not work in strict prose—unless it’s been spoken as dialogue or monologue. The form lends an essence of storytelling to the poem that transcends the standard form and allows the poetic work to evolve.
SF: How does your writing reflect or turn back on your professional career as an architect?
FMK: In architecture, you have to be precise not just with the information provided for the built form but also with how the instructions are given. For example, on the building site, what is written must be followed. There’s an awareness in technical writing, after all, that what you build goes beyond physical comfort; there are life-and-death implications. And I think I carry that precision of thought into the poetry. I mean, it takes somebody else to read and to say whether this is so, but I try to be as precise as possible. So even when I’m writing a piece of prose poetry, I spend a lot of time with the precision of what is being written.
SF: There seems to be duality in these poems, where fluid states of being are quietly and sometimes not so quietly represented. Did you intend this?
FMK: Now that you say it, I see it. Putting this together, the theme of death, dying, crossing over, contemplation, mourning, and bereavement was, I can say, influenced in some way by the passings of my parents and the way each chose to go, with strength and dignity. My father, especially, who passed peacefully in prayer. My mother, however, fought her illness to her last breath.
SF: Of all your poems, which speaks for you more than any other?
FMK: “Guaracara.” It’s one of the most powerful I’ve written. The poem speaks to and reflects on a crucial part of my early life. And I’m hesitant to say “formative,” but it was. My father was a senior staff member at Texaco and a strong union supporter; he felt that his children should live by and uphold his principles. So we lived on Ramnanan Street, Marabella, near the Old Train Line, where it ran along the Gulf of Paria coast. And I loved it. I loved it. We ran in the streets; we did all manner of things. We could walk into anybody’s house, and any other child could walk into ours, and they did!
SF: Which is your baby more so than the others, and why?
FMK: “Gulf of Paria.” I have a deep love for this poem because there is a mix of poignant and painful memories associated with it: the 2019 overturn of the boat full of Venezuelan refugees on their way to Trinidad, and the fact that the poem was written at Cropper 2019. The poem also refers to a forgotten part of Caribbean history, the whaling industry, which was a huge commercial enterprise running concurrently with the enslaved sugar plantation inland. The language is deliberate and sparse, yet I hope the wealth of references it contains—even modern fossil fuel pollution—is recognized.
SF: Which poems hold the greatest secrets you’ll probably never divulge?
FMK: “When we were 10, we saw a boy burst into flames” and “What things have I witnessed.” These two. These two. A lot is said in these related poems, yet there’s a lot I’ve held back. Partly to protect the affected families, and partly to protect my mental health as someone who, as a child, witnessed this type of disaster.
SF: If you could stretch these poems across your life, which do you think would fit each particular phase of your life?
FMK: Before the age of ten, “Guaracara.” From the age of ten to eighteen, I’d say “Nine Finger Milo”; it holds memories of a time before the light pollution of offshore oil rigs, of hanging around with the other kids, my brother, and cousins, and night fishing in a little river in Mayaro. Between eighteen to twenty-eight, “College Reunion at the Mercato Metropolitano,” set after but it stirs up images of my architecture college years. For my thirties, I’d say “I go send for you” and “My great great-grandmother calls to me,” and my forties and onward, “Washing the Body,” a poem about dealing with my mother’s death, something not unexpected yet still devastating when it happens.
SF: I want to engage with a couple of your poems specifically. Tell me a bit about “Let us Mourn the Death of King Sugar” and its relevance.
FMK: Originally, when I’d created the Tantie Diablesse, who was three hundred years old, it was she who was recounting history to King Sugar. As a note, it’s interesting how they named the sugar industry as King. But with this new iteration, it worked better for me with King Sugar giving the overview of the history of that industry. I used the Stations of the Cross as a device, a chronological device, but not just chronology, not just a timeline, but as an emotional journey, from inception, to condemnation, to punishment, to death, to supposed resurrection. All this reflects the historic changes the islands endured. The politically motivated killing of key identity-forming industries, the language and linguistic transformations and additions through generations as we changed hands.
SF: Give us a little insight into the poem “Carnival of Small Creatures,” after the Guyanese poet and activist Martin Carter, known for his poems of protest and revolution.
FMK: Yes, Martin Carter’s poem “This Is the Dark Time, My Love.” The form is from a project conceived by [the Nigerian-British poet and playwright] Inua Ellams called “After Hours,” and the poem itself incorporates the philosophies echoed in the works of the Lebanese poet Zeima Hashem that “the tyrant is always afraid of the poet,” and in the belief of my late friend Roger Turton, a Trinbagonian architect, that Carnival is to do with the “loss of self.”3 The poem talks a little bit about that, where Carnival is becoming more so a show about the body and the self and the individual, and less about the beauty of the collective revolution, idea, and the art, that subtle gap between a community art gallery and a fine art gallery. The poem also touches on ideas of the expendability of particular types of bodies and the atmosphere of murderous intent, also a powerful motif in Carter’s poem.
SF: It is a somewhat strange thing sometimes, this island living. Could you reflect on this idea a bit with respect to where you now live?
FMK: I have never lost the awareness that I am on an island, even here in Britain, and I’ll tell you why. When I first came up here, I discovered that if I did not see or get near the sea for about three months, my head would start going a bit loopy. Strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the fact is that the water is my mental anchor. The sight and scent of the sea have a calming effect on me. The tidal rhythms and the transformation of its power, from giant waves that pound to foamy trickles as it stretches along the coasts. Its constancy of change in colors and depths—all these are imbued in our Caribbean souls, wherever we are on this planet.
SF: How do you now relate to Trinidad and Tobago as a writer, individual, and architect?
FMK: Home is home. That’s it, home is home. I’m currently working on a sequence of poems based on my time in Japan recently, titled “Itoshima Kishikan,” which pays homage to the southern coastal rural village Itoshima, where I stayed. The title combines concepts of the two kanji characters for Itoshima, 糸島, and the three-compound kanji for kishikan, 既視感. The Japanese kishikan, the word closest to déjà vu, includes the concepts of perishment, longing, and emotion when seeing. English doesn’t have an equivalent word to describe this, although the Welsh word hiraeth comes to mind and may be closest. These words refer to a deep sense of longing for a lost place, and this sequence of poems explores how “foreign” landscapes can evoke feelings of your far-away home. Perhaps my writing is becoming a circular congruity, where the further away I am from Trinidad, the emotional growth and knowledge I gain ends up directing me back to where it all began.
SF: Thank you so much, Fawzia. Is there anything you want to share or reflect on?
FMK: Forgetting and being forgotten. That’s a huge part of the thing about remembering Trinidad and Tobago for me. One of my friends, who is Mexican, told me that there are three types of death: one, when the soul leaves the body; two, when the soul leaves the earth; and three, and worst of all, when no one is left to remember. Thinking about this, and the parts of Trinidad that are existing less and less in real life and more in memory. The homes, the physical thing, the people, there’s an erasure. Physical erasure. Even the home I grew up in is now gone. Gone to somebody else but gone in the way I knew it. So there’s that question, isn’t there? What change is coming?
Shrinagar Francis is a writer, an independent researcher, and an anthropologist based in Trinidad and Tobago. A graduate of the University of London, School of African and Asian Studies, since 2018 she has published several nonfiction short essays on the cultural history of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as several academic essays on its culinary food culture.
[1] See Carcanet Press, “Fawzia Muradali Kane Guaracara Book Launch,” YouTube, 9 July 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OwtHoOY_aw (accessed 21 August 2025).
[2] Fiona Sampson, “The Best Recent Poetry—Review Roundup,” Guardian, 4 July 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/04/the-best-recent-poetry-review-roundup.
[3] Zeina Hashem Beck, “Broken Ghazal: Speak Arabic,” Washington Square Review, no 39 (Spring 2017), https://www.washingtonsquarereview.com/zeina-hashem-beck.