Instabard: Canadian Muslim Poetry in the Age of Social Media
New voices in literature merit examination, especially when they are using modern mediums to express novel ideas in skillful ways. A Google search of Canadian Muslim literature quickly reveals that this literary niche is populated by familiar faces saying familiar things in familiar ways. A deeper exploration yields the same conclusion: this area has varied little with relation to authorship and subject matter in the past decade. There are, despite this seemingly bleak account, a chorus of fresh voices who translate their faith; romance; activism and angst into verse and publish it online. Once they post, a significant and engaged readership enthusiastically expresses admiration in whatever feedback apparatus the platform in question allows.
Uma Samari’s voice hits a note that many of her contemporaries’ voices do not. She is a Black Canadian Muslim poet born in Canada, raised between Quebec and Alberta. Her mother is from Belize and her father is from Ghana. Samari writes about blackness, love, colonialism, belonging, womanhood, God, Islamic practice, self-love, and nationalism, to name just several of the wide-ranging topics her poetry navigates. She uses the microblogging website, Tumblr; the social networking website, Facebook; the audio distributing website, SoundCloud; and the mobile photo-sharing app, Instagram to publish her poetry.
My paper will meditate exclusively upon Uma Samari’s poetry. Firstly, it will examine her publication methodology vis-à-vis different social media platforms. In short this means investigating the rationale Samari employs in publishing a poem on one platform over the next and the implications of these decisions. Second, I will explore how Canadian Muslim writers and readers function in these online literary spaces and what this looks like in Samari’s view as an active participant of this community. Finally, the paper will conclude with an explication of a selection of Samari’s poems that address blackness, womanhood, and Muslimness as she experiences them.