dear reetika vazirani,

what works in these poems is the tangibility of your details, the theme of dichotomy of visibility and invisibility, showing the remnants of coloniality and life and consciousness within it, the presence of the body, and the ways you use language and place to dislocate the tongue.

the details are disorienting in their precision; the flowers come alive, embodying a woman’s separation from her homeland, dramatizing the work of mothering children along with the neighbor woman, the “wandering Jew she’d / rooted on her windowsill” (“Gardening: Hollywood Lane”, page 53). there is some pain in these objects, there is a resistance in the telling, a sense of weight and risk involved. the stories within the poetry is more believable for that heft.

the language is a sword with two edges, at once making objects and sentiments visible or shrouding them in subtlety. it is what isn’t said directly that makes the reader work to assemble the poems’ pieces — a woman in exile is written through her actions, rooting a “wandering Jew” where she can keep it close. the feeling of exile is relayed by the crowdedness of objects and by the woman’s busynesss.

“Nikos of Caravy Street” (page 89) is a one-on-one conversation between a speaker and Nikos. the intimacy expressed in this dialogue is awesome; there is a heightened sense of something being at stake. the speaker’s voice is naked, while the exact story is shrouded by the speaker’s tone of exasperation and authority. the body speaks an indirect language, the tongue of object and action and location.

funny, bright, unexpected juxtapositions in this book. Maria Callas and the goddess Radha inhabit “Emigration” (102) and leaving feels lighter than exile. you play with sound and silliness: “I meant to call but lost myself at the mall” (103). what are you doing here? these writings are an intervention into thinking, into quick judgments. there are multiple facets to the stories, each story a facet of the telling.

thank you,
tahminah zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

my dear sara suleri,

before i forget — i have begun to pick out shifts in your memories that show me what you have done. that is, given us your family. your love for each member is singular, yet strings together all the rememberings permitted the body. you inhabit your work as a steak or cornish game hen inhabits a plate. carnally. there are hundreds of metaphors here, wordy substitutions of one body of meaning for another. your project may have been simply to remember. triangular dialogue (you, second person in your story, then you again) gives me traces of the poeticism and banter by which your narrator measured the aliveness of the other speaker, the listener, the other. the lingering flames of the lost elder sister and mother are telling their own stories through the narrator, who shares the stage with the other characters. these personal stories reflect a sense of the narrator’s extremity of emotionalism in her relationships with her ‘intimates’ and with herself. the remembrance, ridden with the anxiety of needing to capture one sentiment in succession with many more, brings the flesh, the gestures, and the words of the dead into being. the fierce closeness between the narrator and your family members recalls the inevitability of loss, of death, of time’s racing and crawling by, of death. how to beautify the truth of death? you recall with laughter, by evoking those imprints of emotion that still sting — sweetly, perhaps, or not at all — that once stung. so it is joy and courage and the ability to autotransform that justify the telling of the dead’s stories, justify the inclusion of their voices; the women whose voices must have rung in your head since your conception. and it is your sense of humor, after all, that redeems the roller coaster of your grief — that process into the purification of love.

as memoir, you turned personal into universal. somehow the huge, tightly wound nerve that dictator’s the narrator’s train of sensory discourse radiated away outward, toward the reader. ifat’s face, a portrait refigured and revisited within the narrative, is positioned and presented as an eternal image in the psyche of the narrator, a reminder of loss, a testament to the reality of ifat’s (short) life.

another thing you gave was pakistan. karachi, lahore, sialkot. the overlap with India. Pakistan in both name and flesh, its politics raining down on your family, the war-torn brother-in-law ifat brought back before she died.

and the content and craft: there were long paragraphs incorporating dialogue, crowded and overflowing with metaphors streaming as consciousness does. the metaphors and analogies substitute objects for one another, underscoring their tangibility; that of people and emotions, too. each thought is translated into a self-contained paragraph, a vignette revealing the life and death of characters. remembrance is an effective theme, taking effect through a sense of carnality. you struggle to reconcile life and death. the personal logic you draw from that difficulty makes the emotion completely transparent, universal.

thank you,
T. Zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

sweat from direct light
blankets nude shoulders
thighs hairy like porcupine
and exposed

every time i say i don’t need you;

we shouldn’t have
come here;

i lost too much in the course of this migration

i wake up again to
this nakedness

a single sacrament
against
nostalgia

© 2008 tahminah zaman

two sets of veins

braided

threaded thru flesh

traveling vines;

one brown, one white

intertwined

two tongues weaving

one into the other

songs

written on the heart

strings;

one soup whose waters mix

two continents together

© 2008 tahminah zaman

i walk east on macarthur boulevard, retracing my steps over places i’ve been loved. embraced. made love to. the memories thick under the soles of my sneakers. the moments that made wrinkles in the concrete. remembering, being, loved.

i check the eyes of everyone i pass. is it you? comes the convulsive question from way in the back of my head, where the tears don’t reach. & sometimes i think i see a flash of him. lanky, leggy, slender light brown man in subtle plaid & white new balance shoes. his aging face, his many expressions. cockeyed. confused. concentrating. the hundreds of tones of his voice, gentle, angry. impatient. unsatisfied.

the confidence & urgency in his stride. his tall back & gemini elegance. the way he could talk anyone up or bring anyone down to a depressive state in a few sentences.

are you him? rings between my ears when a flicker of recognition arrives. a familiar stranger like a mirror. who are you? each brown, male face a citation of his bengali features. someone’s laughter the sound of one of his lighter moods. now that he’s pushing 70, his fugues of mania & depression are longer than a few months each, like when i was growing up; he’s had some mellower years. but he’s never been well. never been stable. never had a proper diagnosis. my father never took his prozac because as long as he lacked a diagnosis, he didn’t feel the problem was real.

i always wanted to diagnose him. i needed to name what made my family strange, because my friends’ fathers never acted like him. they went to work, cooked for their kids, happily chauffeured them everywhere. came to their advisory meetings with teachers & school counselors. my mother always did those things; my father did them sometimes, & begrudgingly. often he hadn’t showered for weeks & had spent all his time on the couch vegetating in front of a blue-shadowed TV. he couldn’t hold a job partly because of his depression, partly because of his field.

the most money my dad ever made was estimating the costs of earthquake damage in southern california. he swindled people out of money with his independent engineering projects. he would take me & my sister, amber, with him to negotiate contracts & pretend to oversee the contractors’ progress. my much-older sister, shampa, 15 years my senior, told me he had an honest, successful business once, in oklahoma, where amber was born, before the white man took him down. he thought the multiculturalness of california would be better to him. he was wrong.

bipolar disease. when i was a kid, they called it manic-depressive disorder. over the years, it became one of my names. his variant moods, fugues, cycles, swings of inexplicable behavior remained predictably chaotic throughout my childhood. he was controlling & impatient, a terrible math tutor who pecked & clucked over imperfection and loudly disapproved of my less than perfect understanding of algebraic operations.

he was also prone to flight & traveled overseas indefinitely at a moment’s notice for no reason. this wacky behavior made us financially unstable, too. when i was 15 he stole the rent money my mother had saved & boarded a plane to bangladesh, unemployed, to claim my mother’s inheritance. a few days later, my mother, my sister amber, & i moved to las vegas to live in shampa’s converted garage.

chemical imbalances, it was explained to me. over the first 19 years of my life, i was steeped in it, sickened by it. i was a depressed teen, only happy at school. i’d watch the commercials advertising depression meds, the ones that listed all the symptoms, & i’d panic. crying daily? feeling alone? occasional suicidal ideations? the depression synched up with my cycle & slowly became more predictable over the years. when the opportunity came at 20, i used the certainty of my father’s illness to catch & stop the erratic bouts of depression. i gulped prozac for a year, then decided on psychotherapy for life in an attempt to avoid becoming my father–or being with someone like him. my partner of 2 years had just knocked me out. i saw bright white stars when he hit me. clearly, something needed to change. “chemical imbalance” or not!

the truth about his condition didn’t surface early. i was 23 years old when, during my mother’s last year of life, she told me that my father had been raped, molested as a child. he was born in rural bangladesh & staying with another family was his only chance at an education. so he did. that’s where it happened.

there were other details about my father in exile from his family. a dead man inexplicably hanging from a tree on his way to school. the combination of homelessness & ambition that drove him to the new world.

my mother married my dad to get revenge on her father, against my grandfather’s intuition. she was angry at him for remarrying after the early & unexpected death of her mother, the grandmother i never met.

immigration & my father got her hooked on nicotine. but the year my parents broke up–the year my father went to bangladesh & stayed away–my mother’s heart opened up. surgeons & scalpel & hammer performed a quadruple bypass that, along with medication, kept her alive for nine more years. four of those years were nicotine-free & quiet. then my parents decided to live together again. i was 19 & realized my mother wanted misery.

my father’s rape. it explained the dissociation between his various moods, his many faces, the extremity of his behavior. there had been a careful cover-up. a guarded secret & the secret cause of everything. the chaos & instability. it screamed of my family’s repression—our inability to communicate, to overcome difficulties together, to accept ourselves & one another. it explained the need for silence around my father’s mental illness.

my mother was the only one he ever told.

i don’t keep family secrets very well. i told shampa, who had no idea. who didn’t know what to do. she may not believe me. she didn’t want to hear that they were my mother’s own words. same thing with coming out to my crazy family. my sisters refuse to believe that my mother accepted me. which she did, privately.

i’m still seeking my father in the wood of my earrings, the metal of my cell phone. in the lines of hands & beneath the fingernails of the men i call lovers.

in the leaves of magnolias. the petals of garnet trees. between squares of dark chocolate. bags of tea stacked in tin. are you there? the echo. my voice stalking his. i recall a peal of his laughter. i see his mood brighten before me.

i still seek him. an insistence i can’t explain. a tugging desire. not quite nostalgia but the anxiety from which nostalgia springs. the psychotic space of separation from our origins. the dark path leading back to where i was born. to where the answers to all these questions are waiting.

i let myself be filled by this void. a place where the futility of words makes itself painfully known.

i am listening for my father’s voice in the sound of clock tower bells clanging against downtown oakland streets. in the sound of rain. naked in bed, beside a sleeping brown man who doesn’t love me, i measure my cinnamon limbs, tensed & exhausted, for sameness. check for my father’s lanky looseness. are you here?

© tahminah zaman 2008

                                          are prayers

                                          i’ve got to write

                                          before the ink & blood

                                          run out

                                          i’ve got to say one more thing

                                          before i die

it’s the distance the narrator takes that’s jarring. that he only speaks from “I” a few times in actual dialogue throughout the book.

he is speaking death. the concrete in between whose cracks life slips through. now & then. not every day. only the burden of vice is worth living for. coffee. sex. the occasional victory. the temporary evasion of death that is every living day in Beirut.

a militantly–but beautifully–oppositional narrative, darwish subverts every possible symbol that might tempt the reader to comfort herself with a thought of peace, justice, or escape. but this world is beyond (or below) any harmonious imagining even a reader most skilled in denial could construct around the events taking place in this story. darwish’s portrait of terror is bloodcurdling in its simplicity of language & demonstration of the workings of a sensitive & rational mind on the verge of psychosis–indeed, weaving in & out of altered states amid the chaos of “war” (genocide as usual). darwish shows us how a poet tells a story: line by line, strung like pearls on a chain of words.

                                the poet speaks death.

                                breathes not oxygen     but metaphor

he moves in a persona of madness. he has virtually no personality besides a half-joke he makes about women using makeup like coffee to wake up in the morning. reminiscent of the dry absence of the narrator in Camus’  L’Etranger, darwish uses madness as a weapon as well as to drive his words, jigging in spirals in the ears of the reader. the end comes wildly back to the first page, & the repetitions recalled their earlier iterations so strongly i thought i was trippin.

imagination replaces life. the poet repeats the images, asks questions unanswerable. does a bomb have grandchildren? US.

the poet speaks death. marks with Yemeni blood-rain the meeting of imagination, history, & poetry. he “shift[s] from martyr to spectator” (121) for “protection.” to protect himself, or the reader? his meta-narrative is haunting. it is as if a dead man writes this.

it’s certainly a possibility.

“darkness is white, pitch-white” (176)

life pushes through the cracks of the inevitable. “i am in the middle region between life & death” (181). “here, i didn’t die,” the narrator repeats as he surveys the city, the decade he spent there. the last pages come back to the first: “are you alive?”

in the final pages, darwish finally inserts himself by name (“Brother Mahmoud…”). perhaps his privacy is the code to this work. his spectatorship is so painfully detached that it is as if the shoes of Memory for Forgetfulness are empty of feet. the sardonic, tragic, mad, dizzying poetry lies in darwish’s many tones: absurd, prophetic, unconcerned. subtle. his detachment is, well, maddening.

while the character is absent, the poet is definitely there.

is reborn;                                        the eternal nature

                                                        of power & order             golden fleece

                     of the divine goat–that symbol

                                                        of leaping lust       spiral horns into ecstasy

the goddess medea’s brows

the archways unto heaven

                           the sky of a mother’s soles//

mother earth refuses

no human blood

                                          princess

                                          sorceress

                                          teacher

                                          mother

                                          healer

                                                         betrayed her people

                                                           to please her lover

                                                                               disoriented

                                                                                  orphaned

                                                                              began anew

                              in exile     meditated

                              waited & searched     the new earth

                   beneath   her   feet   for   meaning

                                               while making love

                                               kept her eyes   open

                                                exchanged wealth for ambition

                                                                        infinite & belonging

                                                                only to itself

the sacred, preserved

in its desecrated versions:

                                                           only reality remains

THE SIN WAS PITY

CONFUSED WITH LOVE:

                                                                    i wanted to wander

                                                                      to follow     to be guided

                                                                                              by lust     alone

                 i can no longer call

             on my ancient god; i am still who

             i was…bearing this

                                     burden

                           of knowledge

                                                           scorpion woman,

                                                           your poisons are hidden

                             cursed garments for eating royal flesh// are you not

                     magnificent;

                     immune to remorse,

                you wear purple & red, colors of flesh & victory                            

your words variant versions

                                           mimicking memory

                               reversed conversions:   light   to   dark

to the flames    of lust

                    broken by desire

                                                                loving you

                                                          is an early death

                                                               i walk to

                  O Mars,

           father of ecstasy

                    & war

                                                   raw honey of your skin

                                                                            my poison

                        rose dusk of lips

                     tongue teeth breath

                                i mark you with pomegranate rain;

                                                         claiming your flesh

                                                                  your chaos:

                                                                                     my own

one twilit moment, a young ram skittered down the slant & his horns, once symmetrical & beautiful, splintered from his handsome head, leaving him with 2 stubs of different lengths.

the ram was terribly vain. at the bottom of the crescent-shaped curve, he exploded with rage, his broken-off horns at his feet.

 *the famous Bengal tiger is associated with this region. this tiger’s black stripes make this animal one of the most recognizable to humans.  the stripes are shaped similarly to the curvy roundness of the “claw-nail crescent moon.”**

**ancient Bengali goddess worship song:

claw-nail crescent moon

adorn my skin, too

that i shall be majestic as you

a cigarette dangles from his shapely lips. the top lip marked by two sharp points. somehow the lips of my lovers are always like this. unlike my round ones.

his eyes always seem to be laughing. i ask him if he’s laughing at me. i can’t say what makes me suspicious. insecure. the quiet masculinity, the gentleness about him. those muscled caramel limbs.

he takes pictures. he likes women. men. he chooses to keep silent the names connected to the bodies he enjoys. sometimes there is a photo to remember.

his favorite place to find them is on public transportation. it’s easy in san francisco, where beautiful, well-dressed, bright people filled the seats & aisles of MUNI & BART each morning, afternoon, & night–lonely people he talked to easily before discreetly passing a card with only his first name & number on one side.

ahmed. coconut brown all year round. how did he manage to always glow that way? his features are tragic, broad & dramatic. they take after his mother.

his eyes are too dark to read. but he doesn’t know that when i meet him–usually it’s on the sidewalks flanking mission street–i see how his eyes get soft. looking at me. staring at the concrete when i say his name.

we spent the night together once. after we went out dancing at Little Baobab. covered in one another’s sweat. he twirled me in the middle of the tiny dancefloor, the swirl of women & men moving around us. i laughed all night as he swang me around, my hips burning figure eights into the crowd. & his eyes. they just stared at my lips as his hands held me up by the small of my back. i leaned hard into them.

once under his covers, he turned to me. he dragged his lashes across mine, exhaling softly.  i felt knocked out.

he asked for a kiss & i said no, only to wait until he fell asleep to wake him up with my mouth on his. those lips, those lips like rosebud salve all over my body. he’s not exactly a gentleman. he likes to use his hands. he never apologizes for that.

old island songs were playing the night we danced. he crept up behind me, his chest bumping my back slightly. he didn’t ask. he just did it.

it wasn’t strange, exactly.

he was only supposed to be here a month. then back to tehran. but san francisco became a haven in ways he found difficult to leave. that cinnamon sex appeal made him a hit in the mission. the hipsters wanted to fuck him. the mexican girls, the chinese FTMs, the elder leather-clad women who worked at the local dungeon all wanted a taste of his farsi flavors.

they gave him a chance to practice his english, flirting wildly in public places, ducking into nearby bathrooms or hourly motels for a quick ride. his throaty accent & flawless skin, luminously dark, rare, smooth as agate, drew them in droves.

men presented an intriguing challenge. ahmed preferred the shy ones, the undecided ones, the heartbroken ones. i think he could have been heartbroken himself. he loved sex but said he never “fucked with love.”

“that’s fine,” i quipped. “you’re not exactly marriage material.” which was obvious. even though i didn’t want it to be true. despite the compulsive wedding fantasies i had between the moments i got to observe him. be near him.

“i’m just sampling. you know, before winter comes. i want to taste all the blossoms i can, man.” his laugh again, chiming against the gray mission district sky. his motorcycle keys dangling from a belt loop, another cigarette hanging out of his mouth. the backdrop of christmas lights & the bay bridge etch that night into forever memory.

“here, i can’t take this with me.” ahmed hands me a small plastic container half-full of chronic emeralds. my favorite strain. he was leaving for tehran in less than 10 hours. i don’t know why he wanted to say good-bye. i hadn’t seen him in weeks, had thought he’d forgotten me or left the city already.

he said he had just been busy. what with all the preparations. the new show. &…he had wanted me to decide i missed him. before he was actually gone. only a few hours left until a long flight through hong kong & on to iran, where his mother was waiting for him. a week after his touchdown in tehran, he would be married. to a stranger.

“spend my last night with me,” he whispered. & there were his hands again, finding the places behind my ear & along my waist where i hid the signs of my desire.

what i remember next comes back to me as a dream, divided into frames like the still images on his sublet bedroom walls. his fingers inside my skirt, my body against a gutter wall, witness to my silent consent.

when i open my eyes, i am alone.

© 2008 tahminah zaman/N.A.M.A.A.Z