as if I am sculpted
by your hands
I become new
to myself

a fresh vision,
unfamiliar
mirror
or lens

you refract me
differently

show me my
light from a
sideways
horizon

“I’d like to draw
your eyes,” you said.

“I would love to be
painted.”

And you laughed.

I am a Picasso
but rarer,
the goddess Justice
but fairer,
in your eyes

I am better

purified by unseen waters
the way you look at me
stalls my departure
feeds me a flavor I haven’t
tasted
teaches me something I should
have known, or knew
but forgot. You remind me
that tomorrow is today

the details don’t exactly
matter

if

love that went wasted,
love that faded or waited
too long to speak,
love that disappointed,
that lied by not disclosing,
love that neglected our origins,
love that belittled and bruised,
love that was refused,
love that liberated
has recycled itself
at the very center of the earth

to give birth
to this

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

© 2011 Tahminah Zaman

words jump from page to page like migrants attempting to find their place. the body is here, too, the whole body’s force, manipulating their song, fingers exchanging, transforming, sliding their currency of meaning. a wealth of music, extravagant choreographies of thought and sound. soundtrack of death and living.

the expression itself becomes the retreat, reclusion into the flesh; feeling the blood, the bones, the sinew and heat of pain, resistance, release, power. there is no one alongside me, i am not isolated. only an invisible film around me, penetrated by all i allow myself to experience. walls are unnecessary now, natural boundaries suffice to regulate everything necessary. food, water, speech, thought, breath.

as the cells rebuild themselves, sleep eludes me. when i dream i am announcing myself to the world as if my voice is only now being heard. surrounded by reflections of my inspiration, artists in celebration. and in the background, my two enraged, subdued sisters watching from a distance, their eleven children scattered into the joyous crowd.

two sisters my elder and estranged, the loss that made these creative works vital, grief that could not be expressed except in the abstract, explosions of syllables and rhythmic exaggeration. my words are not angry but punish with truth. by the time i am done talking we are alone together, the three of us, without the disguises, without the other people we use to draw distance between ourselves. the silence is louder than everything that came before.

identities strung together by genetics, blood tangling history’s limbs, birthdays and personalities repeat to incise the inherited fear of self we mirror in one another. circles of time go incomplete, spiraling into uncrackable codes, unreachable meaning.

put one foot ahead, turned out at the toe. fly.

© 2011 tahminah zaman

wombs burst with babies
ovaries heavy
with duty
destiny
biology
pregnancy after pregnancy

barren of solitude and move-
ments unwatched
leaves topple like book pages
from branches, arms belabor
a hundred tasks, machinelike
inside four walls, the mind retreats,
compromises, bends to baby’s
demands

time shrinks to contain the smallness
of baby’s hands
a mother waters her seeds
deferring desire
stretching tomorrow for decades

girl is named mother
when she exits the womb,
the world expectant of
her offerings: distended
belly, years sold into
distraction, soul
delivered on the altars
of male gods

exit, entrance
vessel to house
and replenish war-
destroyed numbers

hands to build
more daughters
to work and
birth, sons
for worship and
battle

a body bearing so much fruit
pulls hard on her roots
cycling blood, death
dawn, flesh
fades

© 2010 tahminah zaman

to come, that which surpasses the realm of flesh. stone formed around principles, in time, cracks. bursts open hesitation.

lead lips to water, clear lungs of lead, shake the tree of being until her leaves fall away, expose her branches naked. the earth seeded and wet, there is nothing more to be done. the green will reveal itself, flowers arrive when due. not before. nature never tardy, the sky never dry, never cruel, without reason. remember, and wait.

© 2010 tahminah zaman

poems written and covered in leather
leaves bound in gold thread
high on laddered shelves

syllables cocoon around bodies
into a language of refuge

each new-soldered word
fighting the others for audience

whose history do these letters recall?
On whose grave does the tongue
of a speaker step?

What do beautiful words do?
Shelter us from outside view.

The key to any locked tower
is a word;
enclosed spaces promise privacy

if I learn your dialect
will you include me?

© 2010 tahminah zaman

my dear shani mootoo,

these stories are weird. “Out on Main Street” is the jewel of this collection, reflecting the complexity of the indians in the caribbean in a funny, smart, thorough manner. the queer factor is brilliant; the queer women’s culture that permeates the space of the indian sweetshop over the course of the text fully centers the women’s presence in a normative space peopled with first-generation married indian couples. the sweetshop is an illustration of crossing between multiple realms; gay and straight, first-generation indian immigrants to the west indies and the ones born and grown up there, female and male, normative and oppositional to the norm. the story is well paced, the timing measured to deliver the jokes throughout. there is much to learn and analyze here.

i asked myself why you exaggerated the characters, sketching them in black and white in some of the stories, especially “A Bright New Year’s Eve’s Night,” in which the man and woman characters are caricatures of a patriarchal, heteronormative world. at first they seemed less believable to me as a result of their over-the-top characterization and i saw too starkly the unforgiving lesbian lens that positions Tanya and Bobby in a diametric opposition of power—Tanya’s only agency is to kill Bobby to stop his physical and psychological abuse. after a few days of reflection, i remembered your background — west indian. these points are exaggerated in order to make the scene, the moral, the outcome of the story unmistakable. this, along with “Lemon Scent,” is a cautionary tale.

“Sushila’s Bhakti” isn’t deep enough. the painter loses her edge as a result of internalizing the orientalist criticism of her work. she loses herself and needs the labels of indian food coloring and basmati rice to make her feel authentic and free again? the narration is choppy, unintegrated, forced. the logic of this story depends too much on Sushila’s unquestioned sense of exile.

while your work could be described as somehow less conciliatory than jhumpa lahiri’s, for example, because you write through that lesbian-feminist lens, it still operates as a series of distortions in these writings. but the voice is there, and while i think you’re better suited to novels—Cereus Blooms at Night is among my favorite south asian diasporic novels—the short stories need more layers.

thank you,
Tahminah Zaman

© 2010 tahminah zaman

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

what about the nonverbal? how we spoke before words and sounds were formed, bengali syllables resounding of my roots, their many origins and places beneath chocolate soil. so much is unspoken; even the body silences itself, a pig plugged up with cool mud, unexpressed.

how far back into sound, into color, into flavor, will this tongue take me? how deeply are these roots enjoined in earth’s crust? there is a ball of blue light stuck in my throat; sound is absorbed there, disallowed exodus. i feel it spinning, tossing, bouncing against my vocal chords, rolling over all i was told not to say. like yarn, the unraveling is slow, unpredictable.

i take one end of the yarn, the one loose end i can find, pull it from my mouth and see its electric blue between my fingers. tie it to the base of an orange tree, walk away from the grove in which i was born, leaving a thread of cotton memory behind me.

© 2009 tahminah zaman