But nowhere is the violence of contradictions more evident than in 100 Bells:
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.
The softness of my belly, how it could
double over. It was puckered, like children,
ugly when we cry. My sister died
and was revived. Her brain burst
into blood. Father was driving. He fell
asleep. They beat me. I didn't flinch. I did.
Reading aloud, the blunt, staccato sentences of this poem gutted me. Death next to rape, next to beating and falling. Children, next to smallness, next to corpses, next to the author's fingernails. Death next to revival, next to brain blood-bursting. Not flinching next to flinching.
Faizullah seems to be braiding together three different stories. Separate events but woven together by their violence. By death and re-birth. By the fact of the author's body.
The stranger
raped me on the fitted sheet.
I didn't scream. I did not know
better. I knew better. I did not
live. My father said, I will go to jail
tonight because I will kill you. I said,
She died.
Trauma is a state of contradictions. We can know better and not know better. We can die and survive. In other words, trauma is a kind of death, even when we survive. Consider that crucial, devastating linebreak from later on the poem: "I did not die. I did / not die."
What 100 Bells has helped to remind me is that trauma is almost always braided. It is so rarely a singular event, because we do not experience life as a series of singular events. We bring our history everywhere we go and the traumas that happen to us & the people we love press down on us like fossils.
We become fossilized many, many times over.
I love the way you look at contradictions in '100 Bells' and introduce the idea of trauma as braided. It made me think of life in terms of individual hairs all braided together. The strands of trauma are visible throughout the braid, permeating each aspect of ourselves again and again. the process of unbraiding and re-braiding hair and seeing as well as feeling the trauma each time. Faizullah braids her trauma throughout her poetry.
ReplyDeleteThe contradictions of trauma as well are very powerful. Juxtaposing the benign with the traumatic is what makes it so salient in these works. the death and rebirth that trauma's mark can be relived over and over through a lifetime, it's latent in the background, always ready to color our experiences.
Yes, 'gutted' is the right word to describe reading this. Each line punches and each contradiction wrenches. Thank you for this post, '100 Bells' is a painful but very evocative poem.