Moshudat Bello is the featured writer for the January / Jumada al-thanni Featured Writers Series on The Muslim Write. She is the third featured writer for the series. Read her poems: “Habibi” and “Al-Mawt.”
The Muslim Write: How did you discover you were a poet?
Moshudat Bello: Poetry began for me when nothing else made sense except the screaming silence. When many painful emotions deposited their venoms in my heart, threatening my soul and ephemeral existence, I found solace in a pen and a paper.
Poetry came to me in the regalia of solace when grief dressed me in a dark apparels & took me to unimaginable places, places where my realities are massacred and withdrawn like they never existed. Places where my world were broken by untruth and smoldered by tears.
Poetry gave me the confidence I needed to name myself, to let out my pains as I scribble and bid them an everlasting farewell. Poetry was like a power bequeathed to me at the cinarium of illiteracy.
The Muslim Write: How do you begin a poem and how does it develop?
Moshudat Bello: Poems come to me like divine inspirations, like dreams. I write mostly on pain, grief, love and the society, sometimes. When I write, I always feel unburdened like a camel unsaddled of load. I write best when I’m sad. I usually begin my poems with no prior preparations, I just pick my pen and write and the words flow. The flow is usually unrestricted by the language and style. My poems begin like a seed, nourished with devices until it fully becomes.
The Muslim Write: What poet(s) do you continually go back to?
Moshudat Bello: Mahmoud Darwish
The Muslim Write: Have your ideas of what poetry is changed since you began writing poems?
Moshudat Bello: I’ve never for once gotten a perfect word to describe poetry in entirety. Poetry itself has emerged undefined with words, the meaning and definitions keep changing in line with the emergence of modern poetic geniuses. Poetry freeze words into snowballs of profound meanings. Poetry intoxicates, it arouses, it saddens, it shocks, it infuriates.
The Muslim Write: Do you have a writing group or community you share your work awith? (Who are they?)
Moshudat Bello: My facebook page is the greatest community I’ve ever had, on that space. I’ve been privileged to rub mind with great minds, with poetic gurus and have also had the opportunity to be mentored by the likes of Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Yusuf Uthman Adekola, Abdulwaasiu Otuoze, Olorundare Ishola, Ibrahim Suffy King. I’m so glad to have that community & with them my works are far from being better.
The Muslim Write: What are you reading now?
Moshudat Bello: One of the wonderful birthday gifts I got from Sir Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, a book by John Bayley titled IRIS (A memoir of Iris Murdoch).
The Muslim Write: Thanks so much for your time.
The Muslim Write 