Registers of Illuminated Villages: Tarfia Faizullah

Registers of Illuminated Villages: Tarfia Faizullah 

Reflection by: Michelle Nicol 

I woke up early this morning 4.7.2019, I fell asleep after I finished Tarfia Faizullah’s book, not right after I was done reading but soon after.  I needed some reflection time, so I decided to journal, which I am grateful for now after having the poems creep into my dreams.  When I picked up the book, I was a bit mislead by the title I thought the book would be more of an origin story/ which actually now that this writing is being transcribed onto the computer a few weeks later. Reading of the grief from her sisters’ loss, spoke so directly to the grief and pain I still feel surrounding my mother’s death and now I enough time has passed where putting these thoughts on a page is actually something I have gained enough strength to do.  My heart burst wide open while I read through the words of the poems in this book, it has taken me some time to sew my heart back together. The string I used is still very thin and yet the expressions Tarfia Faizullah uses in her poems spoke to my pain immediately pulling out my insomniac tomorrows past thoughts and blended them with all of the yesterday’s future wishes. It was upheaving for me to read the lines on page 26, “… the night the wind blew backward, and exactly seven poppies grew from the mouth of her corpse I tried to cuddle. I then began to count the number of times my insomniac friend said the word tomorrow” “I was fat before, and fat after.” So much of this speaks to my sadness and sorrow, the constant despair which lives inside my bones and body which will never leave.  The poems that followed only continued to pull the safety blanket from off of my fat bodied skin. Within the words of 100 bells I yet again see me, all of me, I wanted to drift away with the night…my sister died. He raped me. They beat me. I fell until the doorknob went silent.

With the hundreds upon hundreds of cities and towns and villages lost how many souls get rebirthed into the roots of the tall standing trees I stare at the dirt wishing my past would sprout out and become visible again to the naked eye.  If only I knew where exactly I came from, the memories that I once had, that they once knew are gone far away somewhere off in the sky, blue.  Not even a second thought, the blacked-out pages and the dark ink bleed through the word that sit on the other side of the page. Soliloquies From The Village Of The Orphans And Widows, How do they go on from after such devastation? “ I was told I should say no and taught to say yes- so everyday its’s okay that jumps out of my throat” “ But there was no one but me at the gateway” (55) The black page from the next part of the book bleeds to the back side and the word which are describing these events, these realities, these emotions only just begin to scratch the surface of what lies within the darkness.  “What is meant by the word recovery” (64) you are still below the ground, an infinite autumn Your dresses still hang in the closet unworn and untouched. “I can’t help but speak for fear the voice I’ll hear is my own” (76). Maybe my eyes and my experiences are all that I can see through the words in her powerful work published on the pages in her book.  I was moved in ways I have trouble putting into an expression here on this page.  Tarfia Faizullah spoke to me in ways that only my emotions could hear, the courage and strength it must have taken her to create such amazing works of art truly make me humbled to have had the opportunity to have read.  This book by far stands out so meaningfully to me, emotions were accessed while reading that I would have preferred to have kept hidden away and instead here is my attempt to share them anyway.  

Grief was what got me writing from the very start so many years ago, after a while the parts of my heart that were in too much pain grew cold and got hidden away. Decompression and process time found themselves the morning after I read this book. I cried deeply on a 5am walk because my mind was restless, and parts of my pain were awakened after years and years of being pushed down and stuffed away. I am forever changed after reading this, Mother “I woke alone.  I had been dreaming of cat-sized blood ant’s in my blood’s homeland, of women who undrape wet and green fields from their torsos. Mother, it was cold. What used to be my arm ached…Mother: the napping tree in the village inside of me. You folded me back into fifths, lay me in my sweet acorn cradle. You wrapped my favorite blanket, a black leaf, around me.” (87) I do not remember my mother any more, 20 years in August is how long she has been gone, I have known her dead longer than I knew her alive.  When she died I lost huge parts of myself that I will never regain, or maybe I never lost any of that and the pain are just the blackened out dark pages of my life. The life that followed her death is my daughter, in her eyes the life I once knew fly’s higher each moment and every second of each and every day. She is my hidden register of astonishment, my very own shell garden.