Kiana Rawji has made the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize longlist for Origin.

The winner of the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and have the opportunity to attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The shortlist will be announced on Nov. 5 and the winner will be announced on Nov. 12.

Kiana Rawji is a Harvard College student concentrating in film, history and literature. As an Ismaili Muslim with Kenyan roots and Indian heritage, themes of identity, migration and diversity drive her work. A developing filmmaker, Kiana recently received a Calgary Arts development project grant for a documentary on essential immigrant workers. Her two TEDx talks promoting pluralism and the understanding of Islam helped earn her the 2017 Cadillac Fairview Youth of Distinction Award for advocacy. Kiana sees writing, filmmaking and public speaking as powerful tools to engage with social justice issues and tell diverse stories of human resilience.

"What we carry in our blood."

"When people ask me, 'Where are you from?' and I say Canada, I often get a skeptical glance and sometimes even a follow up, 'No, but… where are you really from?' This poem is in part, my attempt to answer that question (though more for myself than for those who ask it of me). I wanted to write something that expressed how wrong it feels to say that I am from any one single place. I figured I would write a history set at sea — that transitory, in-between space that is the one place connecting the various lands part of my family's past.

"I come from a line of wanderers who crossed many oceans and never really knew what land belonged to them or to which land they belonged. In this poem, I sought to interrogate and complicate the very concept of a 'homeland.' I also wanted to engage with the notion of intergenerational trauma, which I have studied in several classes in college; I have long yearned to find a way to visualize and visceralize that invisible but insidious form of violence that lives in blood. If intergenerational trauma defies the linearity and logic of both time and space, I decided I wanted to paint a personal history that did the same."

This is just the beginning.

As I stand here,
watching waves course between shores
like blood,

I think maybe there is a reason
that my skin is Indian brown
but my veins are Indianocean blue.

And I do not know why I am at sea,
what brought me to this vessel
and where I am going

but then maybe I never knew,
maybe I was born here,

maybe the salt in my tears
is proof that my body was made
from the salt in the sea,

maybe ocean is my origin.

The winner of the 2020 CBC Poetry Prize will receive $6,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts, have their work published on CBC Books and attend a two-week writing residency at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity. Four finalists will each receive $1,000 from the Canada Council for the Arts and have their work published on CBC Books.

The 2021 CBC Nonfiction Prize will open in January. The 2021 CBC Poetry Prize will open in April.