The Sanniah Experience (TSE)

© The Sanniah Experience! (TSE) By Sanniah Hassan "I am not in control of my muse. My muse does all the work." Ray Bradbury As a kid, I never used to like the art of reading or the people who love to read. Basically, I detested reading because I had not found my favorite book! As I grew up, I heard so many stories from my father, my brother, my mother, and even my grandmothers. I always used to envy how they could so easily fall into place in a conversation with each other and even other people.  As a kid, their conversations were the height of intellect for me. If I would try to imitate them I would be turned away... not by my father, not by my mother but, by my grandmother and my brother. Not because they did not want me to read but because they could not fathom how someone could not like to read. As the years passed and I bloomed into my own "person", my love for reading (and writing) awakened from a deep slumber and I rea...

© The Sanniah Experience! (TSE)  An Analysis of Taufiq Rafat's Poetry By Sanniah Hassan  Everything in this world is symbolic of the human race, objects, or ideas representative of a phenomenon. It is no different with water be it in literature or real life. As humans, we take water to mean something or the other at all times whether literal or figurative, regardless of the geographical or mental constraints. Writers through the years have always been somewhat intrigued by it as a source of survival, of life et cetera. They have always used it as a step toward progress or a foreshadowing of hard times, from Donne to Hemingway, from Shamsie to Hosseini, writers cannot help but be amazed at it. Similarly, Taufiq Rafat a remarkable South Asian poet is no different. He beautifully takes the image of water and employs it in his poetry to create nothing short of art. This essay strives to discuss whether Rafat’s use of ‘water’ in his works is that of a friend or a foe. Ha...

What is life? One day you are born and another day you die. Life is fickle! Nothing in this world is permanent. We must all return to our creator one day.  And so, I was reminded this weekend.  A friend of the family lost his mother; a young boy hardly seventeen lost his mother; a barely bloomed school-girl said farewell to her beloved, father... and so I was reminded of when I faced a loss of my own.  Barely thirteen I had to face the world head-on and say goodbye to the days of innocence. For when my father passed away in the dying hours of a fateful day in February of 2006; I realized that life never stops for those that pass us by. What Shakespeare said hundreds of years ago holds more truth than meets the eye.  ...all the men and women are merely players! Yes, people are but players, playing their parts and departing from the stage of life onto the backstage of their afterlives.  SO, it happen...