identity or "our body before we wake up"

A while ago, I taught a writing class on where we hide identity. Not just in our words as we craft identity on the page, but in our lives and within our cities. It’s in our architecture and urban planning, in our grandmother’s home cooked meals, the societal events large enough to shift cultures and every single person’s experiences. What I found most moving is that everyone in the class seemed to agree that “identity” was synonymous with “home,” and even now I’m deeply moved by their insights. 
Al-Aziz Al-Maqalih particularly sparks this discourse for me. Line by line, Yemenese identity is complexly crafted. From the opening, “I come from the land of qat,” identity becomes represented in what holds several stories in one object. Qat holds ritual, culture ceremony, harvest, land, trade, and more (all in one single word). 

I find what follows quite interesting, the take on time passing, a sense of the events that shifted culture and ways of life so much so that the narrator “still” lives a particularly way after being released from “yesterday’s prison.” How do you say, identity within identity, to relate to a particular part of place, like the past place that it was, but not the present, not with the people who lived place uninterrupted. Whether metaphor or not, to be imprisoned is characterized in isolation from your peers. It is to be put on another trajectory of time, to miss what alters landscapes, what will inevitably make even more difference between people. This poem is an ode to home, as it was remembered. 

I feel a similar tapped in energy in Al Mahmud’s poem. And almost imagine Al-Aziz Al-Maqalih is using prison as a metaphor (again, even if not) that then can be finished with Al Mahmud’s poem. This prison, this dissociation, this depression, this anything isolates a person from home, this deathsleep.  The emotions that charge this poem almost don’t have word, just the language he uses. When I read that Al Mahmud was Bengali, I thought of what events “shifted culture and ways of life” for the narrator, which becomes obvious to think of the Bangladesh Liberation War. 

There is this quote that I have written down in my journal from a childhood, which I kept thinking of. I remember it’s a part of ahadith (and I’ve seen different translations of it). “People are asleep, when they die, they awaken” (al-nas nizam fa-idhá mātú hadith hayāt al-dunyā). Of course, this more rooted in the lofty philosophical insights of my childhood rather a cultural or religious understanding. But these two pieces, I feel the specific reference to identity, which hopefully I explained above (the undercurrent of historical events, of trauma, of cities, home, etc). And then there are the general references of identity, which I find gets underneath my skin with each read. 

And that is the space that this quote came floating back, making me dig through my grandfather’s old suitcase to find the journal from over a decade ago. Again, outside of the specifics, what is the energy that we are tapping into when we reference the body post trauma? What space do we live in when we talk of identity that is in us but not in what’s around us? What courses through our body before we wake up?