Erasure I and Erasure VI
“Erasure I” and “Erasure VI” are part of the collection Poets Resist, Refuse, and Find a Way Through. Read the introduction to the collection here.
Song of the First Spring
My two erasure poems below are the first and sixth selections from Song of the First Spring, a series of six poems born out of iterative blackouts of the Treaty of Amritsar. Through this agreement, signed on March 16, 1846, the British East India Company “sold” Kashmir to Gulab Singh, a despotic Dogra ruler, for 7.5 million (Nanakshahi) rupees.
Article 10 of the treaty—a starting point for this series—required that the Dogra ruler, in recognition of British supremacy, “present annually to the British Government one horse, twelve shawl goats of an approved breed (six male and six female), and three pairs of Cashmere shawls.” In 1884, instead of 12 goats, it was agreed that the ruler would present 10 pounds of natural pashm, 4 pounds of black wool, 4 pounds of gray wool, 4 pounds of white wool, and 1 pound of “each of the three best qualities of white yarn.”
This series came to life when Jagdeep Raina, an artist born in Ontario, Canada, with roots in Kashmir, invited me to respond to his exhibition Destroyer at the Art Gallery of Burlington in 2024. The erasures are conceived as sites of refusal and of imagining liberatory futures.
The sixth erasure overlays a photo of a 19th-century embroidered “map-shawl” of Srinagar, the summer capital of Kashmir and Jammu. This map-shawl, itself inscribed by acts of erasure and extraction, is part of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s South & South East Asia Collection, where it is attributed to an “unknown” artist/maker. The notation erases the decades of labor that went into its making. Moreover, the contexts of British colonialism, including its extractive relation to “Cashmere” shawls and “shawl goats,” and the ongoing colonialism, militarism, and extraction in Kashmir, remain absent.
Uzma Falak was born and raised in Srinagar, Kashmir. She is a doctoral student in anthropology at the University of Heidelberg and a lecturer at the University of Tübingen. Her academic work, poetry, essays, and reportage have appeared in several publications, such as English Language Notes, Anthropology and Humanism, The Baffler, and collections such as Poetry as Evidence, Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War, Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak?, among others. In 2017, she won an honorable mention in the Society for Humanistic Anthropology’s Ethnographic Poetry Award. Her writings, visual and sound work have been showcased at several galleries, festivals, universities, and theaters such as the Tate Modern Exchange, Rizq Art Initiative, Art Gallery of Guelph, Rice Cinema, among others. Recently, she was an artist-in-residence at Melbourne’s Liquid Architecture as part of the cohort Capture All: A Sonic Investigation, focused on exploring sound/listening as resources of power, capture, and extraction. Falak is the 2025 SAPIENS digital poet-in-resident.
