Illuminated Villages and "good material"

I’ve had to sit a while with Tarfia Faizullah’s work this weekend, her writing I feel like reaches so much of what I experience, while also speaking to experiences that I can never know.

Two poems in their titles alone: Great Material, and You Ask Why Write About It Again, capture what writing about grief and conceptualizing loss have felt like to me. They appear back to back in the collection, and each one kind of poked me in different places: “What great material, the conference well-wisher said. Can’t wait to read that poem.”  Transforming pain into something consumable, digestible, entertaining, something even beautiful. That’s always how I’ve felt like I could address my own grief, whether I was confronting it myself or trying to articulate it to someone else, it was material and more importantly it was good material. Whatever I wrote with it, however I thought about it, I wanted it to be in these terms because it was less frightening. Faizullah did a much better job articulating this than I ever could: “Here it is now. The crinkle of your laughter. / The beetles pouring into your eyes as we toast you.” Juxtaposing the fond memory of her sisters laugh with the gruesome reality of her decomposing body confronts the struggle between celebrating life and facing the horrors of death.

I don’t have nearly as wide a readership as Faizullah does, obviously, so I’ve never been too concerned about other people consuming my work so much as I’ve been concerned with simply trying to digest my own emotions through the page. But Faizullah is widely read and well known, so she’s conscious of the way her work is being consumed by complete strangers, who lap it up like I do without understanding the things that actually happened to make the great material what it is. I read a “conference well-wisher” as a fan or colleague addressing her at a conference or at a reading, combined with a funeral attendee. The worst kind of funeral attendee also, one who you might get the sense is just there to smell the flowers. Here’s that great material you wanted, Faizullah says, specially cut just for you.

You Ask Why Write About It Again: “The hand / pressed hard against the pillow / does not want / to be the hand that lifts the pen again / to write the word sister, the word silence-- / the hand desires / blossoms, instead” Not all of Faizullah’s work is about death, but that seems to be what I’m focusing on theme-wise in this post. This poem articulated something kind of weird about having people you love die, and that is that it’s extremely hard to conceptualize the fact that they’re dead. What This Elegy Wants also articulates this: “This elegy is trying hard to understand how we all become / corpses, but I’m trying to understand permanence, because this elegy wants / to be the streetlamp above me that darkens as sudden as a child who, in death, remains / a child.”

 “Praise / the ailanthus moth spinning/ it’s coarse silk-- / it cannot stop, it must not.” Coarse silk: probably not going to make a very comfortable garment. But it’s the only silk the ailanthus moth has, so it makes garment after garment out of this material (material) because it can’t not. Is it a compulsion? Is it an obsession? Is it paying the bills? Why is it making another scratchy bolt of silk fabric? What’s the moth supposed to say? I like that Faizullah calls for the moth to be praised, not to be questioned. It’s using the silk it has, and that is all anyone can do. In every poem Faizullah writes about her sister, she reveals something different about how she’s been affected by her loss. Each time it’s like losing her again, and each time it’s glimpsing her again. It’s what she has left of her, and that’s important.