Seam by Tarfia Faizullah (review)

From the opening lines of Tarfia Faizullah’s singular, eloquent collection Seam, chosen by Chad Davidson for the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, it is apparent she’s a poet who feels tremendous empathy and who takes risks to express it. “In West Texas, oil froths / luxurious from hard ground / while across Bangladesh, // bayoneted women stain / pond water blossom,” Faizullah begins, immediately letting readers know she dares to confront a horrific history in a lush and lyric voice.

Faizullah succeeds because, while her language is beautiful, she never prettifies the urgent story these poems tell about the mass rape of Bengali women during East Pakistan’s 1971 War of Independence. Also, she acknowledges the question that hangs over her enterprise: what justifies making art from horror. Seam begins with an epigraph by Paul Celan: “Everything is near and unforgotten.” Survivor of Nazi labor camps, Celan famously distanced himself from his best-known mournful and intensely musical poem “Death Fugue,” fearing he had poeticized the Holocaust. That Faizullah invokes Celan, both in the epigraph and again in a crown of sonnets called “Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum,” demonstrates how well she understands the ethical complexity of her work. She probes the lines between witness, appropriation, and exploitation.

Seam revolves around the campaign West Pakistan waged against civilians in East Pakistan, which seceded and fought to become Bangladesh. More than three million people were killed in this war according to Bangladeshi sources, Faizullah tells us, and two hundred thousand women raped. Two hundred thousand! After liberation, the government of Bangladesh proclaimed the women war heroines, or birangonas. Still, many remain stigmatized and ostracized, even by their families. These events occurred before Faizullah was born in Brooklyn and then raised in West Texas. Her parents emigrated from Bangladesh in 1978, and she portrays herself as an unobservant Muslim. Yet, the underreported story compelled her to travel to Dhaka to interview some of the birangonas and to make poetry from her experience and from theirs.

Eight poems, all of them titled “Interview with a Birangona,” form the central portion of the book, each a persona poem in which the woman speaks, each rendered in deceptively gentle couplets as if to slow them down and not overwhelm with their brutality. Here is the first:

I. What Were You Doing When They Came for You?

Gleaming water sweeps over Mother’s feet. Bayonets. Teeth.

My green and yellow Eid sari flaps damply between two palm

trees. Grandfather calls to me: mishti maya. Girl of sweetness.

Aashi, I call back. I finish braiding my hair, tie it tight. I twine a red string

around my thigh. That evening, a blade sliced through string, through

skin, red on red on red. Kutta, the man in khaki says. It is only later I realize

it is me he is calling dog. Dog. Dog.

Braided in and around these devastating poems are others in the voice of the interviewer, who also asks difficult questions of herself, including whether she’s morally justified when she urges the victims to relive their rapes. In “The Interviewer Acknowledges Grief,” Faizullah puts it directly: “Because you / can’t reassure me I have / the right to ask anything / of women whose bodies won’t / ever again be their own.” In a masterful poem titled “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame,” she describes how the interviewer—back in a hotel room after videotaping women “unlocking the desiccated coffins of their grief”—touches and sexually satisfies herself. “She doesn’t feel shame’s / dark-circled tightening after waking,” Faizullah writes, ending:

It’s later: when she arrives   back at a borrowed flat, begins to strip off travel-pungent clothes   and smells her own body’s resinous musk. It’s when she sits down naked   at the desk to rewind and fast-forward through all the pixelated footage of the women’s   kerosened lives. It’s when she begins to write about it in third person,   as though it was that simple to unnail myself from my own body.

What might be voyeurism...