“I had a sister until the accident, and a brother was willed after months of grief-graft. By then, I was already distant, a tumbleweed rubbing my thorns late into the night when those yesteryears slide near” (91).
I read the first half of this book a few weeks ago and came back to it yesterday. Part of me couldn’t remember what the book was about but then when I started reading it, it started to come back to me. In the lines and spaces you can feel the heaviness of Taria Faizullah’s grief and memories of her sister. Lines like “exactly seven yellow poppies grew from the mouth of her corpse” (29). She also discusses grief within her body that also intersects with her relationship to food and body image like “I was fat before the accident, and fat after” (29). These two lines are both from the same poem Before the accident and after, it’s not the longest poem but neither is it the shortest, the poem drips with so much personal thoughts on grief, body image, family and guilt. I relate to this poem in a way that Taria describes grief and guilt in the body and nostalgia of a sibling. I noticed Taria also has a good eye for memory and nostalgia whether it is her sister or land, “I ached for the chokecherry tree in the old village”(48). Or perhaps much of the land is her sister and all that she wishes and aches for I.e. love, family, peace. Much of her poems also talk about violence on the land, violence on the body and violence in the memory. An instance of violence on the body comes up in a couple of her poems like “My sister died, he raped me, they beat me”(30) and “Submit, on all fours press your forehead low…Now tie (absolution) the purple ribbons in your hair extra tight” (36). These lines are scary, it makes me scared for the writer and the memory of the writer, to fight through certain memories and put them on page.
Another topic that I was drawn to in much of Taria’s poems were sexuality, In self portrait as a mango, Faizullah talks about herself as if she were a mango like “Doesn’t this mango just win spelling bees and kiss white boys?” (13) this line seems kind of like she is lightly making fun of herself from past experiences. I love the second half of the poem where Taria says “ this “exotic” fruit won’t be cracked open to reveal witness to you,” the second half of this is Taria reclaiming her own sexuality and the skin that belongs to her without being seen as “the other” or “exotic.” The last two stanza’s are my favorite where she writes “I know I’m worth waiting for. Mango: my own sunset-skinned heart waiting to be held and peeled” (13) OOF! “My own sunset-skinned heart! That is such a gorgeous line in relation to fruit but also the sky and body.
This then leads to my last topic that I found myself highlighting much of which is Taria’s longing for love whether it’s a romantic love or self love . Lines like “Somewhere there is a man meant for me, or maybe just to fall asleep beside me” (39) and “I”m waiting to hear myself crystalize with revelation” (84).
You really touched upon some of the most painful and tender spots in the collection. Ones that touch on trauma, “My sister died, he raped me, they beat me”(30) and ones that touch on the deep human need for absolution of all those parts we deem damaged and undesirable within ourselves, “Submit, on all fours press your forehead low…Now tie (absolution) the purple ribbons in your hair extra tight” (36). It is uncomfortable and unsettling at times to read the starkness and honesty with which Faizullah lays herself down on the page in her poems. The raw pain of losing her sister laid out with the image of “exactly seven yellow poppies grew from the mouth of her corpse” (29); an excruciatingly stark image of a seven year old child lost in an "accident," the nature of which is never laid out for us. These poems about her sister were some of my favorites precisely for that reason. They left enough space for me to both feel my own losses and be a witness to hers.
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