Fragments of a Fugitive Poem

by Poorna Swami and Amshu Chukki

Installation Views and Performance Excerpts

“Are you that poet?”

How unfortunate you’ve gotten mixed up in all this.”

A police officer interrogates a woman accused of sedition. It is 1981, Karachi. The woman responds.

“I am alone

And I see a yellow desert

…

Sand, only sand for miles

Or maybe acacia trees

With large red flowers

Blooming like blotches of blood”

Shortly after, Fahmida Riaz, a poet and dissident, left dictatorship Pakistan for New Delhi, India. She took her poem, titled “Won’t You Look at the Whole Moon?”, with her. Across the border, this Urdu poem about artmaking, state repression, and shifting landscapes of belonging was published in Hindi, while Fahmida remained in India for the next seven years to escape capital punishment. In between, friends smuggled her poem back to Pakistan and published it in Urdu. Like her poem, she remained untethered, between homes and languages, constantly questioning where freedom lay and what it looked like. Again and again, she says, “Main chali ja rahi hoon” “I am going away”, without ever completing the thought.

Fragments of a Fugitive Poem speculates that Fahmida’s poem has continued to rove ever since, crossing borders and historical periods in search of resolution. Through multi-channel video, immersive soundscapes, and live performance, the work maps sites across Delhi, Karachi, and Bombay that mark Riaz’s story, imagining how she might encounter these spaces today. A rose garden in Delhi, the shorelines of Karachi and Bombay fading into each other, a cricket match at a roadside eatery, the Embassy of Palestine, Ghalib’s grave, sites of protest that have been disappeared. At every location, we hear the voices of passersby responding to prompts from Riaz’s poem, reflecting on what home and freedom mean to them. Each person lends a new verse to Riaz’s text, becoming a poet in their own right. The sea and desert—leitmotifs in Riaz’s poetry—emerge as metaphors for exile and rootedness, separation and solidarity. In one corner, rare archival audio from Riaz’s exile years is reworked into a screenplay-like text, inviting viewers to wander the space, to choose their own paths through these collaged meditations on freedom—its absences, intimacies, and futures yet to be imagined.

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Fragments of a Fugitive Poem was created for the Tenth Anniversary celebrations of G5A (Mumbai) in response to the theme of “Freedom”. The project emerges from archival research, interviews, and fieldwork across New Delhi, Mumbai, and Karachi.

Credits

Concept and Visual Design: Poorna Swami and Amshu Chukki

Video: Amshu Chukki (Delhi, Mumbai) and Hadi Khatri (Karachi)

Additional Video: Poorna Swami (Delhi)

Video Editing: Amshu Chukki

Sound Design: Spitting Image

Text: Fahmida Riaz

Translation and Additional Text: Poorna Swami

Narration: Tehmeena Firdous

Choreography: Poorna Swami

Performance: Dipna Daryanani, Poorna Swami, Pardafash

Light Design: Bharavi