Registers of Illuminated Villages

1. Tarfia Faizullah has laid out her poems in this collection like an atlas documenting the geography of her interiority. The poems, like maps, read the unknown topography of unfamiliar places so that we may locate ourselves within the landscape of meaning Faizullah is showing us. She even provides a "key" for us on page 95 titled "NOTES." 

   
   

   After reading some background on her, such as the loss of her sister at a young age, and where she grew up, I read the poems and was able to glean meaning from them. Her painfully beautiful use of language when talking about her sister was at times like a breathless whisper that was choking back uncried tears lost in the throat,

   
   

   "A child's handprints are smudged/on cream and green walls, the deaf cannot/know

   
   

   the sounds/of their own grief, sleep comes/or does not come./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-..." (67).

   
   

   and, 

   
   

   "...Sister, aborigine memory,/I stood beside your grave but did not/cry.../Still there are

   
   

   nightsI can't/sleep and hear only your elegant detache" (23).

   
   

   and

   
   

   "...You suckled

   
   

   from my throat the petals

   
   

   of her perfume's glass bottle

   
   

   I drank from to quench

   
   

   my anger's thirst. I still call to her

   
   

   with a mouthful of pollen.

   
   

   Watch her turn to me" (79).

   
   

   
   

   I was often so deeply absorbed in the language of her poems: made me suck in my breath and mouth a silent "wow" as my eyes widened with the impact of the words curled into meaning on the pages. However, not until I read the "NOTES" on page 95 did I begin to see the notes collectively as a key to this collection of poems, this atlas, this register, this naming of the impact the world has had on her, and the influences that have reached inside her to stir her hand to write. Through these notes she gives us a glimpse into the terrain inside her through sharing with us what touches her, what moves her to the page. Faizullah lets us know the weight of these influences by using the phrasing, "...wouldn't exist without..."

   I looked up poems by many of these that had that phrasing attached like, Lynda Hull, Jenny Boychuk and Laura Kasischke. Not only did I discover some really wonderful poets but it was like learning a secret Faizullah was sharing through works that had touched her. Like a friend sharing a treasured book. 

   
   

   One of the most important notes for me in reading and getting the most out of "Registers of Illuminated Villages," was the Frontline interview with Kanan Makiya in which he speaks of the "Register of Eliminated Villages," which is essentially a decorative, handwritten, beautifully bound record of genocide. Makiya says:

   
   

   "When I handled the paperwork of the Iraqi bureaucracy, as it has killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, I see evil. I look at the paperwork. I look at the squiggles of the line and I wonder about the person who wrote in his handwriting style."

   
   

   The villages that were "eliminated"are all recorded by their geographic names but we all know what makes up a village is people: none of whose names, histories, genealogies, loves, likes, dislikes or any other humanizing quality are recorded in this book. Interview included here:

   https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/faith/interviews/makiya.html

   
   

   Makiya goes on to talk about the intimacy of evil:

   "Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it's intimate. It's almost sensual. That is why people who have been tortured know it by instinct. They don't need to be told what it is, and they may have a very hard time putting it into words. ... That's the nature of the phenomenon. It's hard to put into words. But you have to have that intimacy with it, that kind of shoulder-to-shoulder rubbing."

   
   

   What Faizullah's accounting in this book of poetry, this register, does is put it into words for us. She first gives us meaning by changing eliminated to illuminated because she wants to bring light to what has been darkened by evil, to bring morning to midnight, and to bring our eyes to the page so that we cannot look away, cannot shield them from the illumination she is offering to us. We see this in titles like, "Searchlight Payar," "Dark Pairing," "West Texas Nocturne," and in lines like, "I turn on the porch light/so the insects will come" (84).

   
   

   Makiya goes on to talk about evil in the human condition:

   "In order for me to understand evil, to see something as evil, I have to be able to see myself in it somehow, and yet not be there. If I'm not able to do that, then it's just a phenomenon. It's just a thing -- terrible, bad, whatever -- [but] it's not got that intimacy. You have to be able to see yourself there. Otherwise, it runs this terrible danger of becoming something someone else is, and not you. When that happens, of course, awful consequences can unfold. ...

   Evil, while it is very definitely different from something that's "very bad" ... is a human thing. It's humanly explicable. But it is only so when we can touch it and see ourselves in its place."

   
   

   The danger of viewing evil as other creates a blindspot in the human condition and opens a trap that can create genocides and mass murders, and on smaller more subtle excusable ways, as in how we treat one another. That is why it is said that 'within us lies the potential to be a Hitler or a Mother Theresa.' Faizullah wants to remind us of this as her work touches on this in this collection and informs many of the poems like, "Soliloquies from the Village of Orphans and Widows," "Register of Eliminated Villages," in a very obvious way and in more subtle ways, as in "The Hidden Register of Submission," and "Your Own Country."

   
   

   I did of course, start my reading by looking up the word register so that I could hold in mind all of its meanings, both as noun and verb, just as Faizullah includes the definition of infection in her poem "IV and Make-up Homework," which I appreciated. This is a powerful collection with so much to unpack and so many layers of meaning to dive into and drench yourself in.

   
   

   reg·is·ter

   /ˈrejəstər/

   noun

   1. 1. 

      an official list or record, for example of births, marriages, and deaths, of shipping, or of historic places.

      synonyms:

      official list, listing, roll, roster, index, directory, catalog, schedule, inventory, tally, calendar
   2. 2. 

      a particular part of the range of a voice or instrument.

      "his voice moved up a register"

      synonyms:

      range, area, region, reaches, sweep

   verb

   1. 1. 

      enter or record on an official list or directory.

      "the vessel is registered as Liberian"

      synonyms:

      record, put on record, enter, file, lodge, post, set down, inscribe, write down, put in writing, submit, report, take down, note, minute, list, log, catalog
   2. 2. 

      (of an instrument) detect and show (a reading) automatically.

      "the electroscope was too insensitive to register the tiny changes"

      synonyms:

      indicate, read, record, show, display