Inverse Journal

11/01/2026

Through narrative cohesiveness, a work of literature has the power to operate as a totality against a world set to fracture and fragment reality and, along with it, core notions of identity. This totalizing power of the literary text to disrupt the fragmentation of reality (orchestrated by power and authority) is core to the preservation of a Kashmiri identity, as observed in Leena A. Khan’s debut novel, Flames of the Cherry Tree (Daraja Press, 2025). Set “in pre-Partition Kashmir under Dogra rule,” the novel “follows a young Kashmiri girl coming of age amid political upheaval, social transformation, and the struggle to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor.” As a literary text, “rooted deeply in Kashmir’s history and collective memory”, the novel presents “a story about love, resilience, and the human cost of colonialism”. Inverse Journal has curated an additional information section for our readers as part of the presentation for this excerpt.

Through narrative cohesiveness, a work of literature has the power to operate as a totality against a world set to fracture and fragment reality and, along with it, core notions of identity. This

11/01/2026

Rabiya Fayaz presents a poem that embodies a sustained interrogation of selfhood, addressing the reader through a series of insistently ethical questions that unsettle inherited measures of knowledge, achievement, and respectability. Written in transliterated Urdu and presented here with corresponding Urdu and English translations, these verses foreground the tension between outward credentials—degrees, sermons, public speech, spectacle, rank and status—and the denunciation of an inward illiteracy towards the self, where silence, love ("ishq"), and autonomy remain unexamined.

These verses unfold through a rhetoric repetition with interrogations that function not merely as accusations alone but as a unified method that demands us to place philosophical pressure on our understanding of our existence purely grounded in social experience. In doing so, the poem sustains clarity in exposing how the “crowd” scripts identity while the individual mistakes such scripting as compliance with meaning and unquestioned normativity. By referring to concepts like honor, erudition, and divine love, the poem locates personal freedom as a moral and existential task, thereby insisting that dignity and existence are grounded in one’s personal courage to read oneself against the noise of collective approval.

Rabiya Fayaz presents a poem that embodies a sustained interrogation of selfhood, addressing the reader through a series of insistently ethical questions that unsettle inherited measures of knowledge,

04/01/2026

The quotidian can never cease to impress with great power the greater wonder that can emerge from everyday life and our lived experiences. These five poems by Carol Blaizy D’Souza move with subtle confidence across inner and outer geographies, often reflecting how travel and wandering also take place within us. Roads, hillsides, bazaars, traffic pauses give the sense that these poems are grounded in place (and sometimes in prosopopoeia), as their verses bloom from the everyday and open into reflection without necessitating revelation. What binds these verses is their attentiveness to the stillness and motion that occupy over lives and the sounds, images and voices that emerge when poetic observation puts everything—it sets its gaze upon—in slow motion. Such slow motion is the kind that allows us to appreciate the small things turned great and magnanimous through the poetic pause that consistently characterizes Carol’s poetry.

The quotidian can never cease to impress with great power the greater wonder that can emerge from everyday life and our lived experiences. These five poems by Carol Blaizy D’Souza move with subtle c

01/01/2026

As we say goodbye to another year, here are the few but important pieces by our contributors and community that shaped 2025 at Inverse Journal.

01/01/2026

In "The Curfewed Mind", G.M. Khan paints an intimate portrait of life lived under perpetual restriction in an unnamed place, in an undisclosed location, in a region that could practically be anywhere and about which there is no certainty whatsoever. The story that unfolds is not one about political events presented through headlines, but about how these unleash their slow, corrosive effect on the human psyche. Through Abdul’s quiet and passive desperation, G.M. Khan’s story shows how curfews do a lot more than just empty the streets—they hollow out time while killing ambition and diluting memory itself. The solemn voices in the radio, the family home, and a daily commute to work that ultimately leads to failure turn into symbols of a world where survival becomes an easy yet undesirable substitute for living. GM Khan's prose combines lyrical restraint characterized by a moral clarity that leads us to ask an unsettling and unavoidable question: what remains of a person when even hope is placed under lockdown?

In The Curfewed Mind, G.M. Khan paints an intimate portrait of life lived under perpetual restriction in an unnamed place, in an undisclosed location, in a region that could practically be anywhere

27/11/2025

Nigerian poet Annah Atane presents two poems that inhabit the horror of war and massacre where collective catastrophe is confronted with private mourning. These verses draw their imagery from slaughter, war, and the fragility of hope and the despair where memory is born from “butchery.” “Scalpels on a Sunday Hymn” traverses the sinister space of the slaughterhouse as the site where atrocity destroys innocence, where grief stands frigid, and where memory begins from wounds. The poem’s pastoral motifs are shrouded under the weight of brute force and violence, giving way to versification that is stunned yet compelled by what it must describe and name, sans pretense. In a similar tone, “Home of Crease” moves into the streets shaped by conflict, chasing a mother’s elegiac song that runs through a landscape where loss becomes an incision that cuts through lament and the endurance necessitated to speak. Both of these poems by Annah are marked by unsentimental grief that rejects spectacle, resisting the safe distance that is customary to imagery and metaphor, while maintaining the dignity of a poetic voice that enunciates through ruin as it approaches devastation with an unapologetic and unsettling clarity.

Nigerian poet Annah Atane presents two poems that inhabit the horror of war and massacre where collective catastrophe is confronted with private mourning. These verses draw their imagery from

15/11/2025

Srijani Dutta presents a series of twenty one works entitled "Nature and Observation". In this series, the artist looks at birds, sunsets, dawns, trees, forests, water bodies and everything that can be found in nature and transferred from view into imagination and from imagination into picturesque memory.

Srijani Dutta presents a series of twenty one works entitled "Nature and Observation". In this series, the artist looks at birds, sunsets, dawns, trees, forests, water bodies and everything

14/11/2025

All the way from Malang, Indonesia, Fendy S. Tulodo presents the story of a young Kashmiri boy named Q who writes and collects his rap lyrics in a manual “for surviving his streets.” The story blends reflection, details about Kashmiri culture from the perspective of a visitor, and the quiet revelation of how powerful Hip Hop music has become as a means of creative expression in the Valley of Kashmir.

All the way from Malang, Indonesia, Fendy S. Tulodo presents the story of a young Kashmiri boy named Q who writes and collects his rap lyrics in a manual “for surviving his streets.” The story ble

18/10/2025

At the crossroads where the quotidian, the fantastic and the mystical meet, Junaid Ahmed Ahangar presents two poems that, in one way or another, collectively dive into the interplay between imagination, memory and ethical reflection. The first poem, “Pilgrim Blues”, is the stage for a surreal lucid dreamlike pilgrimage where the poetic voice encounters figures from folklore, literature and biblical narrative who teach compassion, moral vigilance and remind the reader that great pilgrimages can take place deep within. The second poem, “Like Waiting”, moves across a series of precise and fairly paradoxical similes that reflect our human fragility and the intensity that can be found in loss, devotion and aesthetic perception. Together, these two poems bring forth a poetics that attempts to find equilibrium between imaginative audacity, creative introspection and ethical attentiveness. A poet’s note is also published herein with permission from the poet.

At the crossroads where the quotidian, the fantastic and the mystical meet, Junaid Ahmed Ahangar presents two poems that, in one way or another, collectively dive into the interplay between

18/10/2025

In this essay, Fariz Gulzar Mir brings forth a philosophical inquiry into the nature of the “complex phenomenon” that is love by considering its metaphysical and pragmatic dimensions. Through a variety of citations and references, the author engages with Ibn Arabi’s ontological take on wahdat al-wujud (the Unity of Being) and its articulation in Rumi’s mystic poetics to arrive at an examination of love as a generative principle that allows the Being to disclose itself through transcendence. On the other hand, Fariz presents the pragmatic dimension of love that is explicated through the immanence of action based on the ethical and the performative to foster care and relationality concretized within human experience.

By considering the transcendental and immanent nature of love, this essay problematizes the “categorical confusion” that emerges when love is approached primarily as ideal (transcendent) abstraction or inversely, as utilitarian (immanent) pragmatism. The author’s proposition in dealing with such a conundrum leads to the formulation of a hybrid approach to love through what he calls “transcendence-in-immanence”—which gives way to the restoration of a philosophical balance within the discourse of love. For readers of Roland Barthes’ “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments”, this essay provides a refreshing take on love as arising from absence or non-being, fragmentation and impossibility of absolute/total knowledge, love as a speech-act, and Barthes’ concept of “intermittence” (the oscillation between absence and presence).

In this essay, Fariz Gulzar Mir brings forth a philosophical inquiry into the nature of the “complex phenomenon” that is love by considering its metaphysical and pragmatic dimensions. Through a var

12/10/2025

Peace Ogunjemilua brings forth two poems that—according to the young Nigerian poet and graphic artist—“revisit the childhood lessons” from “an African home, where the voice of a child grows” to acquire “the wisdom of an adult.” The first poem, “Biomimicry” draws from the bond of human experience with the majesty of nature to explore personal “growth, surrender, and renewal.” “Memoir”, the second poem, draws “from a Yoruba proverb” and traces a boy’s misstep into “disobedience” that is resolved with “the stern yet loving corrections of his parents.” The verses in these two poems are rooted in cultural wisdom that is woven by a deep sensibility found in the imagery that the poet brings to light while exploring lessons from life reinforced by the intimacy of familial support in times of vulnerability that eventually becomes resilience.

Peace Ogunjemilua brings forth two poems that—according to the young Nigerian poet and graphic artist—“revisit the childhood lessons” from “an African home, where the voice of a child grows” to

12/10/2025

Urvashi Janiani explores the deep impact that musicmaking and songwriting has had on the Indian film industry, particularly in the case of Amar Singh Chamkila. The critically acclaimed Emmy-nominated film is driven almost entirely by a musical score and a repertoire of songs that are perfectly aligned with the plot and action that move the story along, as Urvashi elaborates. In this piece featured in the Music and Film sections of Inverse Journal, the young Indian writer reflects on growing up in a country that has a longstanding tradition of bringing music into film. Along the way, she walks us through the musical landscape of "Amar Singh Chamkila", lending greater value to its impressive soundtrack that made the film a complete success.

Urvashi Janiani explores the deep impact that musicmaking and songwriting has had on the Indian film industry, particularly in the case of Amar Singh Chamkila. The critically acclaimed Emmy-nominated