A teacher once told this Hamilton poet he 'wasn't the best at English.' Now he's a PEN Canada award winner

Poet and author Fareh Malik, the recent 2022 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award winner, was always fascinated by verbal and oral storytelling, and he's been actively involved in "spoken word" since high school.

"I didn't know that I wanted to be a writer until recently, but I always knew that I wanted to be an artist," Malik told CBC Hamilton on Sunday.

Malik, 28, was born in Toronto, grew up in Oshawa, and moved to Hamilton in 2012 to attend McMaster University. He now calls this city home. 

He describes himself as "an artist who likes to partake in activism and helping out in the community," and "a semi-professional dancer" for nearly 10 years.

"I feel a lot of things and I tend to not express them very well, so [dancing is] the one thing that always really helped me in expressing [what I feel]," he said.

While he spent his earlier years dancing, Malik is more recently known for being a writer — something he finds funny.

"It's just funny because even in high school, my English teacher told me that I wasn't the best at English," he said with a chuckle.

Malik says it was during the lockdowns in the earlier period of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he "was deprived of going into dance studios," that he started to focus more on poetry. 

He says writing poetry enables him to reach people very directly.

"What I aim to do with my artistry now is just really try to make a difference in people who are going through negative circumstances," Malik said.

"My work has to do a lot about, you know, racialization, racism, Islamophobia, all these negative things that we see in our community and how to deal with and overcome those things.

"I try not to harp on the negative aspects of these things, but I do like to highlight their negative nature, because it gives us a pathway to move toward positivity and move toward reconciling these things," he said.

One of Malik's poems — Aftershock — addresses "the tremors … that take place in your family lineage, even years after a trauma has been resolved." 

Another poem — After 911, The War Spilled Into Our Hometowns And Made Us Grow Up Too Fast, And My Homie Sister Don't Wear Her Hijab No More — zeroes in on Islamophobia.