Registers of Illuminated Villages - many selves, mangoes, Catholic School, and more

Tarfia Faizullah’s “Registers of Illuminated Villages” is a haunting and infinitely layered work that I know I will read over and over. The poems seem to build upon each other with increasing intensity as more and more is addressed, confided, and explored. The feeling I had while reading this work is best described using Faizullah’s words in the poem about her slinky-self; it’s like there is a  “momentum / of metal springs / descending down / and down” (37). I was completely sucked in, and felt like I was watching little clips of film, small scenes that might piece together to be a great tragedy or a victorious epic. At the same time it’s hard to say for sure how they all connect, if it’s all one story or a million different ones.

I have been thinking a lot lately of the many versions of ourselves we each have inside of us, our many stages of childhood, teenager-hood, I think they all linger inside us and we carry them all around with us. The poem “Poetry Recitation at St. Catherine’s School for Girls” illustrated this idea so beautifully. Faizullah writes, “The words psalm, blessing, lord, / rise in me like bees heavy with pollen, / and the teenager I once was unzips / herself from me” (62). Words like psalm, blessing, and lord, and all of the catholicism-drenched words in this poem hint at condemnation, at an unease and an attempt to blend in with the “pretty girls” with “arms pale and slim as the white birch”. The speaker looks at her classmates, compares herself (“heavy and slow in her / thick glasses”) and she feels condemned, unwelcome in heaven. The speaker is able to take her younger self beside her and shake her, tell her what she now knows. Whether the younger self hears her we do not know. But this moment conjures up the mix of pain and catharsis of looking back on your past with new found hindsight and wisdom. The poem ends hauntingly with, “Help me, Lord. / There are so many bodies inside this one”. This also paints a picture of a poet to me, someone who has so many stories to tell, so many people inside of her. It makes me think of the poem “Soliloquies from The Village of Orphans and Widows”, which paints so many anonymous portraits, windows into the lives of so many people.

Faizullah’s self-portrait poems reminded me of “Oceanic” in concept, but the portraits were all their own. I especially loved

“Self-Portrait as Mango”, where the speaker meets someone who tells her, “Your English is great! How long have you been in our country?” (13) - This reminded me of Fatimah Asghar’s poem “Micro-aggression Bingo”. The speaker tells her to suck on a mango, and I am glad we got to hear the retort. She writes, “Why use a mango / to beat her perplexed? Why not a coconut? Because this “exotic” fruit / won’t be cracked open to reveal whiteness to you” (13). There is so much packed into these lines, this whole poem. The frustration the speaker feels at being othered, exoticized, and fetishized. The pride in the “Gold-green bloodline” of the mango. The refusal to perform whiteness for the white people around her, the refusal to make others comfortable.

I know I need to read this many more times to really appreciate its fullness. There were many lines that caught my eye, many lines that shook me -“How to look / into the abyss without leaning forward?” (39)-, but that I know I need to revisit to understand.