Breaking the Jaws of Silence: Sixty American Poets Speak to the World

Fatwa

SHARON DOUBIAGO Fatwa “Writing itself is one of the great, free human activities.” —William Stafford I saw you in Café Roma the day after Thanksgiving writing in your notebook. You sat at the little table in the window among students at their laptops, your regal head lifted slightly as if above the burnt coffee aroma, your pen poised to the six-by-nine, wire-bound tablet for the next word which may take awhile. I was standing in the line weighted with revelations of my family newly discovered in my writing, stunned to see you, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, sentenced to death— the fatwa for fiction!—writing so visibly in this noisy public place, your assassin guaranteed his or her place in Heaven. I could see across the room the neatness of your lines, the deliberateness with which you set down each letter. I didn’t know the language you were writing but I know writers who won’t advance one word until they have the right one. Myself I could not release a single syllable if I called the guards to the gates first. I fly over to where I’m burning 94 ✦ SHARON DOUBIAGO come back later for the imprisoned. Opening to the self, allowing others however foreign to open to their selves, is the rule of writing. I was experiencing the immense privilege of seeing the trance the famous writer was in when your shining eyes flashed into mine. I turned away. A minute later I turned back. You were still staring at me. I was sorry to recognize you—recognized, you’re in danger —sorry to rob you of your meditation. I worked not to look again. The thought did cross my mind, but no way could you recognize me though conceivably you saw the writer, survivor too, her mind, her father always charged working overtime. Or maybe, your eyes beaming directly on me were not seeing me at all other than as one watches for an assassin in any crowd. Your clothes were rich beiges, golds and ivories, your vest and rolled-up sleeves, your gold sock onto the shining shoe crossed over the left leg the same as your goldstreaked , brown curly locks and glowing skin just from the sauna, your eyes over the gold rims staring at me in my rags. Behind you outside on the corner a homeless boy was selling his rag for a dollar. Suddenly borne across your left manicured shoulder your translator came out of the concert in Tokyo got in his VW and turned on the key SHARON DOUBIAGO ✦ 95 FATWA! Jesus was executed for blasphemy too. Joan of Arc for wearing men’s clothing. It’s issued at our birth to block all word of what goes on inside the castle walls. In our innocence we honor this. The sacred duty of the lover is to protect the privacy of the loved ones but I wrote a story from their dictation not realizing their lies. I vowed never again. Years I wouldn’t write, years their fear increased. They assassinated my character in case their fatwa failed so that whatever might appear would not be believed. They knew what they had silenced, a song about whales rising from another story my sister told me years ago, just a fragment in a small sweet poem, but now so rooted in me I breathe it in and out as fact, my flesh singing it on a stage in a new city so that a young man in the audience recognized the long-dead whale scholar who’d written the text, recognized her lover. Only then did I read it through the tyranny of her lies, did I ponder his wife and children. Not to write of my sister is not to write of myself. You or Earth. Not to write my self, my story is not to know it. Is not to live it. Is to live my life created by their lies, by order of the State that will not know the poet. 96 ✦ SHARON DOUBIAGO The condemned, but living, famous writer was still staring at me, your pen still stopped on the page, your mind overtime in the caffeine and car exhaust ozone. You had a wife a writer too who hid with you. The announcement of her leaving you screamed around the world. I hoped she was going out as counter and...