#12 From Kashmir to Cashmere: To Long and Belong

In this episode, we are joined by a special guest—Nafeesa Syeed, a writer whose lyrical, deeply personal piece 'A Kashmiri in Cashmere' traces a journey across landscapes, names, and the weight of memory.

We have a conversation about her beautifully crafted essay—one that begins in the Pacific Northwest but stretches all the way to the valleys of Kashmir. (Her essay appears in The Markaz Review’s 50th Issue: Returning Home, https://themarkaz.org/a-kashmiri-in-cashmere/)

In this conversation, we explore the emotional terrain of displacement, the silent echoes of occupation, and the unsettling irony of how the name Cashmere—meant to conjure beauty—rests on land taken from the Wenatchi (P’Squosa) people. A name of one occupied people, laid over land stolen from another.

She explores how Kashmir and Cashmere intersect silently through place-naming, memory, and the weight of erasure. What happens when a name becomes detached from its people? When romanticization overwrites reality?

Nafeesa draws the hidden connections between unmarked graves, missing girls, half-widows, and the deep mental health scars of war. She reflects on how colonial imaginations once saw only Kashmir’s roses and mountains—while ignoring its people’s suffering.

From Judge Chase’s settler vision of natural beauty to Edith Crace-Calvert’s letters from Kashmir to Cashmere in the 1920s, Nafeesa weaves history, memory, and love—telling the story of what it means to long and belong.