eastbaypoetics.com

08/08/09 Meatless Days

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