Registering the lives on the margins

Bangladeshi-American poet Tarfia Faizullah returns with a second, equally devastating collection of poems titled Registers of Illuminated Villages . Her first book, Seam , focussed on the Bangladeshi women raped by the Pakistani military in the 1971 war for independence.

Registers turns its gaze inwards towards Faizullah’s personal history as a daughter, a sister, an American Muslim, and a brown woman in America. She has been working on Registers for 15 years, with a number of these poems predating Seam . “I save all my old drafts,” Faizullah says, “and I am amazed when something I wrote years ago comes back to life and connects so seamlessly with something I wrote yesterday.”

The absence at the heart of these poems belongs to Faizullah’s sister, who passed away at a young age. The poems circle around the loss — examining it from several angles. But she avoids thinking of these poems “in terms of purely catharsis.” She explains, “It changed the course and direction of my life, and though I have always written, it is true that I began writing in earnest after her death.” In the beginning, she wrote these poems instinctually, but with time, she has written them with a larger set of tools at her disposal, and with greater consciousness. She clarifies, “I’m not writing to get something out of me as much as I am trying to name what is already inside me.” She finds it strange that as she gets older, her sister seems to be “frozen in time”. She says, “My grief has changed in both form and scale over the years, and the poems intend to reflect those shifting movements.”

One of the collection’s most powerful poems, ‘100 Bells’, begins with the lines, “My sister died. He raped me. They beat me. I fell/ to the floor. I didn’t. I knew children, / their smallness. Her corpse. My fingernails.” She wrote it right after reading Vievee Francis’s poem about witnessing violence, ‘Say It, Say It Anyway You Can’. “Francis’s poem,” Faizullah says, “is such a call to arms, I felt moved to say it any way I could. What “it” is is up to anyone.” She responded to Francis’s poem because “it filled me with the excitement of wanting to share, too, and finally feeling as though I could.”

Faizullah’s personal narratives are undercut with a hesitation about the stories she is allowed to tell. In the opening poem about the 397 Kurdish villages that were eliminated in Northern Iraq, she writes, “But I don’t have/ the right to count hours,/ girls, dowries — just the skinthin/ pages of the good book/ I once cut a hollow into,/ condoms I stored there,/ cigarettes.” This hesitation makes the reader recall Seam, whose eye falls on stories in a different place and time from the poet. Faizullah acknowledges that when she reads these lines now, she can “see they’re full of contradiction.” “Reading this, I want to argue with her. I am always arguing most actively with my own self,” she explains. She views the documenting she does in her poems as “a kind of metaphysical math — the act of counting and telling stories simultaneously is satisfying and reassuring.” Her collection is organised around this principle of counting and narrating, with the three sections in the book titled variations of ‘The Hidden Register Of…’ — beginning with ‘Hunger’, moving on to ‘Submission’, and ending with ‘Solace’.

Faizullah’s explorations of being Muslim and brown in a predominantly white and Christian country make room for the complexities within those identities and challenge the idea that there is only one right mode of occupying marginalities. She is defiant about assimilation in the poem ‘Acolyte’, where a young girl concludes her quiet prayer in a church with the lines, “I help stack the hymnals/ higher; I cup the candle/ away. I cry out, “Bismillah!”/ before I disrobe.” In ‘Self-Portrait As Mango’, she responds to a woman saying, “Your English is great! How long have you been in our country?” with “Suck on a mango, bitch, since that’s all you think I eat anyway.”

In a reverential poem about Qurbani Eid, she explores the act of watching the goat be slaughtered and the subsequent act of eating with an awareness of how one’s food reaches one’s plate. Faizullah explains that the poem intends to “capture the confusion of feeling pleasure and loss at the same time.” It is the narrator’s “first experience with death, and though she is conflicted by the feelings of loss as she watches another living creature die, it doesn’t stop the pleasure she experiences during the meal.” This is expressed in the lines, “Yes, / I savoured/ her more than/ once: first with rice, then with/ chutney.”

Her poem about the Flint water crisis captures the helplessness of water that has been poisoned in the same way that her other poems show how people in wars or other violent situations are not able to prevent what is done to them. She says, “We often cannot help our circumstances, but we can acknowledge them, and we can try to understand them. Water is a life-giving resource, but when poisoned, becomes a murderous villain.” She is in awe of how humans resemble water in that “we too are capable of great extremes and contrasts, and like water, we must learn to adapt and grow inside what feels like even the most helpless of situations.”

Urvashi Bahuguna is a writer based in New Delhi

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