The Jewel on the Left Side of Your Chest

#FreeGulfisha

I have watched this brief video, around ten minutes long, many, many times. Perhaps you should too. Young student-activist Gulfisha Fatima has been jailed for five years without trial. Her bail petition has been pending for three years. Her next hearing is on April 16. In a moving poem from jail she writes about the importance of such dates in her life.

Here is the original that was penned in her prison cell:

While granting bail to Gulfisha’s co-accused in 2021, the court had ruled that “the police had blurred the lines between the right to protest and terrorism.” It is also a sad reality of India today that in riots when most of the victims are Muslim, those that the state perversely puts in jail afterwards are also Muslim. Tyranny raises its sword against its most eloquent enemies: we must exercise our right to speak the truth. Many voices are joined in a protest against Gulfisha’s unjust incarceration.

I teach literature in prison, and have learned from what inmates write in my classes. Here is a poem by Reginald Dwayne Betts:

The title of this post comes from a poem by the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet entitled “Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison.” Hikmet, one of the great poets of the world and a dissenter, served a total of seventeen years in Turkish prisons and another thirteen in exile. I want to draw your attention to these lines but also want to assert that those who protest, who raise their voices against oppression, are truly the ones who are the jewels on the left side of our chests. They bring us life where we would have only death and lies. #FreeGulfisha