Registers of Illuminated Villages

When reading Registers of Illuminated Villages by Tarfia Faizullah, I was struck through out the entirety of this collection, so it is hard to find a place to start, as I feel myself still digesting. But one aspect of this poetry book that I loved clearly was the structure and how that carried the poems and I think about the collection of poems that seemed to follow each other, though they were not positioned next to each other. I thought about what registers are and they make me think of the human voice, and how the human voice differs and how many registers one human can have whether born with or trained to have and how registers in the voice can be lost due to circumstance. I think about registers of experience for marginalized folks, and how there are many social intersections that determine snap judgements.

In this collection Faizullah gave us three poems entitled registers of hunger, registers of submission and registers of solace. Each one, to me, stuck out like a flower amongst beautiful thorns. The way the poems are structured, with the parenthesis as titles to smaller vignettes yet still a part of the larger poem, is something that I think carried the words with even more ‘umph’. I am drawn to registers of hunger “(flesh)/ by whittling our false gods from stone” (Faizullah 12). I loved this last line, it was so poignant, but this vein seems to run through the blood of her collection. An attention to steer away from humans who we can make into gods but are just human. I believe I even see this vein when Faizullah speaks about the widowed village, structured in the collection between black inked pages. There is a truth telling in that section that hit me hard.

I was also most struck by the last of the three, registers of solace. What I loved about this poem was the attention to self in the love section. “(first love) and first, love, the moment you caught a glimpse of yourself standing in the long unending plane of a tinted window—then skin, skin, skin, torso, teeth, wrist, the birds of hair, pierced to heart (first beginnings) cannot be distinguished by the eye—” (Faizullah 72). There is so much magic in between these lines, I feel I need a few months to digest. I agree with Faizullah though, when we start something off right, barely can it be seen properly by those around us!

I don’t usually love the last poem in poetry collections, I think sometimes they can be extraneous, a poem that fits a little too off center from the scatter plot of the poems. But this last one was also wonderful. I felt like it was a call to worship the self, to right wrongs and make sense out of darkness using all of the voices you have ever been given. Faizullah writes “…I know a good one: a monster named joy-in-the-margins learns the nature of light by revising the dark into song with every register of her seven tongues. Ready? Let’s begin. Verse 0. Surah 1” Faizullah 92). This resonated with me because of the sound of its truth. With every register, with every voice inside of us, we will turn those dark spaces into light.