Desire & Pain & Time

We are presenting this week, so I don't want to let all the cats out of the bag.

But...

I do want to write about the way Faizullah treats time like clay. I haven't seen anything like it, and I believe her rendering it as a nonlinear, slippery thing, is precisely what allows her to intimately articulate desire and pain.

Grief knows no bounds. Pain has no respect for the clock. Faizullah captures this beautifully in "Register of Eliminated Villages", which wrecks and reinvents my concept of time.

A mother and a father lay next to each other together in a cold room, the mother offering "her hands to his spine" (picture this: they're spooning), and the speaker curls inside the woman's womb. All bodies are curved, in a way. This mirroring of physical action is literally an ancestral movement throughout the body. This bodily repetition launches what happened in the speaker's past -- what she couldn't even know about without being told by her parents: hey, we spooned -- into the present.

It keeps going.

(Still in the womb) The speaker startles awake and turns to "you." This you, this early on in the book, can be one of two things: 1. a twin, or 2. a lover. I Googled Faizullah at this point and no, she didn't have a twin. She did have a sister, whom she lost when they were children. This pain is at the forefront of nearly every poem.

Giant leaps of time create space for hope. To write this in the present tense of the past is to hope, heart breaking, that something will be different. I felt a surge of hope that this poem could crystallize that tender moment so it would never be lost.

But wait, it keeps going.

"But I don't have /the right to count hours... I held smoke /inside my mouth, released /whorls of it into the air." We're in past-tense now. The speaker is not in the womb, no longer safe and protected therein. The speaker is sitting on a curb smoking a cigarette at night -- almost as far from the safety of a womb as one could get.

This leap forward in time is painful. Something was lost in the years, in the leaping. All we feel is the tenderness of that curled embrace forcibly separating with that image: Familial cuddling gives way to the speaker bending over, hunched on the curb, smoking a cigarette.

The past is present tense, and the present is past tense. In the medium of this poem, Faizullah has rendered time a slippery thing.