This is my sixth and final posting for the APIA Poetry and Interview Series. I am grateful to the Best American Poetry for offering this platform on your blog—thank you. I am ending with Tarfia Faizullah, a fast-rising star and author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press), a devastating book, one I’ve read many times though it’s still hot off the presses.
Tarfia will be reading in New York City with me, along with two of this week's featured APIA poets, Cathy Linh Che and R.A. Villanueva, this Friday, May 30th, 8PM at the Asian American Writers Workshop (110-112 W 27th Street, Suite 600) as part of a debut piñata ball. This reading/dance party will serve as my book release launch for Mad Honey Symposium—it’s a celebration of Cathy Linh Che’s Split, Tarfia Faizullah’s Seam, and R.A. Villanueva’s Reliquaria, all collections published this year, the year of the horse. If you’re in New York City, be sure to make it out! There will be piñatas, dancing, snacks, beautiful people, and celebration. 8PM at Asian American Writers Workshop. Tarfia is traveling for this, so don’t miss it! Details and information for tickets (it’s free) are here.
Tarfia Faizullah is the Pushcart Prize winning author of Seam (SIU 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in Oxford American, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2013, and elsewhere. Honors include scholarships from Kundiman, the Fulbright Foundation, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center. She is the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry at University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
The following poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages”, exemplifies how Faizullah manipulates lines of verse so that her language expunges the boundaries of time. More than this, “Register of Eliminated Villages” speaks of a gaping absence, the result of violence—a violence of omission that begins right from its unsettling epigraph. The scaffolding in this poem is unique—in the opening, the speaker declares: “my life is beginning/without me”. In the wakefulness of a long night, in the intimate space of being next to a lover, the speaker experiences a kind of return—time and space wavers between her present self and her inchoate self. And it is this inchoate self that re-experiences the intimate space of her parents: “Mother turns to Father//in the cold room they share,/offers her hands to his spine.” The simultaneity of the speaker’s mother and the speaker in these private spaces is remarkable for its seamlessness, for the way it mirrors and doubles—the reader actually experiences both moments not as separate moments but as the same moment—at the same time.
The poem turns, also, to the simultaneity of recorded history and unrecorded absence: “Frontline only counted each/town destroyed: three/hundred ninety-seven of them.//Who counts dolls, hand-/stitched, facedown in dirt?” The poet goes on to list: cadaver, bone, belongings, pots, the amputated hands of thieves—the human experiences, lost objects that were not recorded. 397 towns: 397 is the number that prevents the speaker from sleeping. 397 is the number that tells no stories, that erases the stories. In effect, the presence of the speaker’s manifold selves in this poem stands in for absence of another kind. The speaker keeps counting—into her own memory, the pages of the Qu’ran, loops back to the moment between her mother and father, and indeed, we are roused to the fact that “the register,/I know, is real and beautiful”, as experienced and embodied in the doubling of time, the presence of absence. Tarfia Faizullah’s poems are as indelible as they are brutal, and they interrogate our own conceptions of history and the present. Get your copy of Seam here.
Register of Eliminated Villages
“I have a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in
Northern Iraq…it’s a very decorative, pretty thing…”
–Kanan Makiya, Frontline, 2002
Somewhere in this insomniac night
my life is beginning
without me. In Northern Iraq,
it is high noon, the sun there
perched over fields shriven
with lilies, the petals of orange
poppies red with a light
that a gauze of gray sparrows
glides through over sheaves
of bone too stubborn to burn,
all that is left of those razed
towns. Mother turns to Father
in the cold room they share,
offers her hands to his spine.
I curl inside her, a silver
bangle illuminated by candle’s
flame. I curl beside you, lay
my head close to the vellum
of your smooth back, try
again to sleep. Count to 1,000,
you suggest. Count to two.
Three. As someone must count
hacked date trees, hollowed
hills paved into gardens, though
the scholar on tonight’s
Frontline only counted each
town destroyed: three
hundred ninety-seven of them.
Who counts dolls, hand-
stitched, facedown in dirt?
Count to five. Six. Count
cadaver, bone, belongings: pots,
spun from red clay. Who
will count the amputated
hands of thieves? Mother
presses a hand to me. Inside
her, I thrash, a stalk of wheat
blistered by storm. Sleep comes,
brief as it is bright. I startle
awake, turn to you. The register,
I know, is real and beautiful,
filled with the names of the dead,
strokes of sharp pencil etched
elegantly into thick pages. Father
presses an ear to Mother’s
belly. I am wide awake. Count
to seven. Eight. Nine. You
murmur, turn to me. Someone
must be counting hours
spent weaving lace the color
of moonlight for a young girl’s
dowry. I do not have
the right to count hours,
girls, dowries—only the skin-
thin pages of the Qur’an
I once cut a hollow into, condoms
I stored there, cigarettes.
Count each minute I waited
for my parents to fall
asleep. Count nights I sat alone
on the curb, held smoke
inside my mouth, released
whorls of it into the air.
Father leaves Mother asleep
on her side, the crocus
of my fetus nestled inside her.
I draw the thin sheet
over us. Father reaches
for the Qur’an, thumbs through
page after illuminated page,
runs a fingertip beneath
each line of verse, looks everywhere
for the promise of my name.
first published in Passages North
Interview
Who are you? What are you all about?
A changeling. I don’t always know, but sometimes I feel close. Some days, comic books and smoothies and loud music. Others, stacks of poems and the silences of rooms I pass through briefly.
Tell me about your current or most recent project. How did you transform it from its genesis to its current form?
I’m working on a second manuscript, Register of Eliminated Villages. I followed the threads of the first few poems. They wandered off into other poems, other worlds that terrify and thrill me. At the moment, it’s an unwieldy stack of 95 pages that begins with Dissociation and ends with Discipline.
Tell me what you get excited about, in terms of your poetry and your work. What have you discovered in the process of shaping and forming your manuscript(s)? What has shaped, challenged, or invigorated your poetic practice?
I’m excited about the ways in which poems can be simultaneously clear and mysterious. How they can linger, swerve, dissipate, crash, soften. How they can be wild within formal constraints. How they can be both ancient and new.
Poets outside the West don't seem as concerned about whether poetry is dead or not. They know they can be imprisoned for writing poetry because they can save others from participating in a machine that ensures our self-destruction. We live in a world of drones, privacy violations, and attempts to minimize the rights of others. What invigorates my practice is the awareness that we are all in danger of being endangered and in danger of losing empathy for each other and ourselves. I still believe that poems are many-roomed buildings where we can share our vulnerabilities vividly.
Who are your influences? If you could map a poetic lineage, how would it look? Or the opposite: whose work do you admire and come back to, but contrasts from your own work?
My poetic lineage is as varied as it is broad, and crosses the borders of many cultures. It also depends on what I’m mulling over or whose poems are on my radar. Co-editing the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press with Jamaal May always gives me the chance to encounter new voices for the first time, and running poetry workshops with high schoolers gives me the chance to revisit the magic of dog-eared poems.
Vievee Francis’s new poem in Poetry Magazine just blows me away with its splendor and audacity, and this week, I’ve been mesmerized with the spare precision of landays, a twenty syllable Afghan folk poem. Here’s an example of one that knocked the wind out of me with its terrifying reminder of our current moment, and how despite—or because of it—love flourishes. “Embrace me in a suicide vest/but don’t say I won’t give you a kiss.”
What is one thing that you desire to say as a poet, but haven’t said yet? What does the future hold for you, if you could hold it?
Forgive.
Sometimes the future holds on too much to the past. Sometimes the future holds itself and waits for me to get there.
I, too, admire Vievee Francis's poem in the new Poetry -- plus much else of what Tarfia Faizullah says and writes here. Thank you.
Posted by: DL | May 29, 2014 at 11:35 PM