Lecture: Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

In english

Suhaiymah’s work has explored and attempted to disrupt “common sense” narratives about violence and security which uphold deeply racist systems in our societies. Through her “breaking binaries” podcast she revealed the reasons that we rely on dichotomous ideas of good/bad people, immigrants, etc. Through her co-founding of the Nejma Collective, working in solidarity with Muslims in prison in the UK, she has also been able to work in collaborative and grassroots ways to directly address the everyday harm of the racist binaries of the security-industrial-complex. Suhaiymah uses multiple forms to spark imaginations and disrupt thought patterns, from poetry to prose to workshops. She believes deeply in transforming our modes of approaching justice and harm, rooting herself outside of a the strangulation of a secular imaginary and committing instead to the notion of a universal truth and justice. Suhaiymah tries to push herself and others to sit with discomfort, hold multiple thoughts at once, and dig deeper into our own intentions.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a poet and writer based in the UK whose work disrupts assumptions about history, race, violence and knowledge. She is the author of Tangled in Terror and the poetry collection Postcolonial Banter; a co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University; and a contributor to the anthologies Cut from the Same Cloth? and I Refuse to Condemn. Her writing has also featured in The Guardian and Al Jazeera, and her poetry has been viewed millions of times online. She is a co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a group of Muslims working in solidarity with people in prison. She is based in Leeds and is currently writing for theatre with her debut play, Peanut Butter and Blueberries on at the Kiln theatre in August 2024.