Zareefa Jan, the illiterate poet who invented her own writing to preserve her work

In the province of Bandipora, in the Indian state of Kashmir, lives a 65-year-old poet who has never gone to school, who can neither read nor write, and who claims to have created her own alphabet to write her poetry.

Her name is Zareefa Jan and she says that her initiation into poetry took place a few years after her marriage, when she was in her thirties. She had gone to fetch water from a nearby stream, when she claims that she has lost all sense of the world around her and has fallen into a kind of trance. When he came to himself he had lost his cup, but he also felt like a completely different person.

This is what he told journalist Rouf Fida in an article published in VIce, as he shared a sheet of paper with pencil scribbles of various circles. Each had small differences, some were larger, others were not so perfectly circular, some were closer to each other, there were also those that seemed to be highlighted over and over again.

The circles are arranged in a line, when Zareefa writes them, he does so from right to left, as it is written in Urdu and Kashmir, the native language of the province where this poet lives.

She speaks her language perfectly, but since she did not go to school and no one taught her properly, she can neither write nor read it.

“No one in the world can read these lines except my mother”, he said to Vice, Shafaat Lone, Zareefa’s son.

These lines are the coded language that Zareefa created, developed as a way to archive his poetry.

“This is my language, the language of circles”, he said proudly. “I have developed it over the years.”

Zareefa practices Sufism, a mystical form of Islam, an unorthodox school of practice that focuses more on the esoteric aspects of religious life, and in which Sufis strive to have direct personal experiences with God.

She says that after the experience at the well, a “heron” came out of her mouth.

A “heron” is a poem or an ode originating in Arabic poetry and its theme generally concerns love, desire and loss.

“Until then, I had no idea what poetry was because I had never read it. But since then I have written hundreds of poems and gazals “Zareefa said.

Here are a few lines from one of his poems:

“Panie soaraan aam yawuniyey

Lalwuniyey thovtham to.

Yawun myon chambi dulwuniyey

Yi chu samsara napaidaar.

(I did not destroy my youth like a fire kept feeding me. My youth is insignificant in the transient world) “.

Since he felt the call of poetry, Zareefa wrote over 300 pieces, the vast majority of them are “herons”.

She writes in Kashmir, a language that has fallen into disuse even in its place of origin. This is one of the reasons he hid his gift from his family for a long time. Your children, for example, if they went to school, They speak Urdu and English, but do not understand the dialect of their poetry.

When she finally decided to share her poems, she impressed her family and her husband with their quality. However, the language remained a barrier.

Much of his work has been lost in oblivion, and that is why he ended up perfecting his own alphabet, which, although he is the only one who can interpret it, serves to record his work.

Zareefa’s family intends to collect these texts and publish them in a book. where people can appreciate the language created by the poet, and clearly, his translation.

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