Ayesha Raees Unpacks Life’s Greatest Unknowns in ‘Coining A Wishing Tower’

No straight path leads from a question to its unknown answer. But, as humans, we take the journey anyway. As writers, the journey is dubbed a fantasy. 

Ayesha Raees' debut hybrid epic, Coining A Wishing Tower, is about a cat and a moon desperately in love with a Godfish whose love belongs to a sun; a House Mouse whose days are spent practicing rituals in a decaying Wishing Tower; and a young woman searching for answers in a mosque, her mother's voice, or her father's car. Separated yet intertwined, the stories of these characters culminate in Raees' exquisitely fantastical attempt to process lingering questions in her own life.

Raised in Lahore, Pakistan, Raees spent most of her adolescence ebbing between states of change and adaptation. Her father served as an engineer in the country's military, which meant that her family was forced to move every two years. As Raees fluctuated between new homes, schools and environments, feelings of displacement began to make her question the idea of permanence. 

"I started realizing my permanence is not really coming from physical places as much as coming from people. Yet then those people are also not [permanent]," Raees said. 

Raees continued to question the idea of permanence through her years as an undergraduate student at Bennington College in Vermont; however, this time, the location wasn't so much the catalyst as was expression. How can a Muslim woman of color, whose life is a compilation of stories rather than a single narrative, authentically express herself through a single artform? Raees found that permanent, fixed forms of expression couldn't encompass the kind of multi-faceted perspectives, ideas, and artistry that she and many other women of color possess. For Raees, poetry served as a solution. 

"I ended up taking a poetry class and honestly, I'm so grateful. It was kind of like a destiny or fate kind of feeling,” Raees said. “And I think it just really resonates with people who are either marginalized or grew up kind of in an unnormal way, so I felt like poetry had so many forms and so many possibilites and can sort of reasonably saying one thing, but also be interpreted in different ways.”

And as Raees continued to hone her craft, she realized that poetry, despite its boundless nature, could also be expanded upon beyond its Westernized, pen-to-paper structure. 

"A lot of times in poetry culture, poems are often written on paper towards publication and competitions. Whereas in South Asia, poetry is a big part of community and gathering. The ghazal and other forms of Urdu poetry, or South Asian poetry, are mostly sung to music or expressed in ways that are not just written or in a book form," Raees said, adding, "You may be a person who doesn't know how to write or read, but you can be a poet. You can always sing; you can always express it in other ways.”

It makes sense, then, that Raees considers herself "a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms." In the same way that Raees is a hybrid being, works like "Time Rests, Exhausted, In Memory" are also hybrid, combining words, cinematography and music into a single piece of art. Like Raees, the whole can only be complete by recognizing and embracing its various parts. 

"I think it’s about the possibilities, right? For example, if I want to express something about the beauty of nature, I have an idea about what kind of pointed form would fit it the best," Raees said. "Sometimes I would think, 'Hey, I have this narrative thing that I've written, but I don't think this is really a poem.' It doesn't feel poetic in nature and I can call it a poem; I don't think it belongs on the paper in the way it's written."

The same goes for her latest hybrid work, Coining a Wishing Tower. Winner of the Platypus Press' 2020 Broken River Prize, Coining a Wishing Tower is embedded with both prose and poetry, song and narration. It is Raees own reckoning with the idea of permanence, particularly how it relates to the people and places we love, preconceived notions about the faiths bestowed upon us and the reasons why we are alive. By allowing us to enter a world of her own imagination, Raees shows us the journey to the unknown is just that – a journey. We may never find the answer, but maybe that's the point. 

And if any line in the work rings truest to this, it is when the young woman says to her father, “the bare minimum to life is to just live.”

Coining a Wishing Tower is set to release in March 2022. Preorder is available at Platypus Press.