Tarfia Faizullah
Bangladeshi American
Watch the Video
Tarfia Faizullah reads her poetry:
Tarfia Faizullah, “The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame” from Brooklyn Poets on Vimeo.
about the author
Bangladeshi American poet Tarfia Faizullah grew up in Midland, Texas. She earned an MFA from the Virginia Commonwealth University program in creative writing. Her first book, Seam (2014) explores the ethics of interviewing as well as the history of the birangona, Bangladeshi women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the Liberation War of 1971. Faizullah received a Fulbright award to travel to Bangladesh and interview the birangona. Faizullah’s honors and awards include an Associated Writers Program Intro Journals Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, a Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, a Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, and a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry. A Kundiman fellow, she lives in Detroit where she teaches at the University of Michigan. Her second book is Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018).
The Reading from the Author
Resources & Discussion
Use the following readings and prompts to inspire student writing.
Readings
Poem #1
What I Want is Simple
La terre est bleue comme un orange.
-for Craig
Begin with the fuchsia dress
I wore the night the scent
of storm threaded the brief
wind gusting away its hem
from my thighs—begin
with this orange, moldy
in its yellow bowl by the window.
Days it has rested there,
glossy as a child after a summer
spent outside. Days I have
looked past it—to crumbling
brick walls of other buildings,
smoke from a chimney, engraved
for a moment on gray sky.
It bewilders me to have looked
at this piece of fruit without
seeing it grow its own blue
shroud. Now you, too, are
gone. In that photo, I am
a waist towards which black
hair spills. You smile towards
someone or something I can’t
see. I want back that night you
pulled me into your lap, insisted
I stay there. I want the elegant
hinge of your wrist, the way you
were always both body & bird.
The way you were never & always
listening. You were wearing
a green sweater. There is
so little to take back, receive,
give. There is, somewhere, your
green sweater. What I want is
simple: you, alive, like the day
we bought an orange like the one
I lift now from its bowl to throw
out. How many times I have looked
at the world and turned away.
(From FOUR POEMS BY TARFIA FAIZULLAH March 25, 2014. This piece was submitted by Tarfia Faizullah as part of the 2014 PEN World Voices Online Anthology.)
Discussion Questions:
- Who is the speaker in this poem?
- Who is the person lost?
- How can you tell?
- What is the mood of the poem?
- What concrete items does the poet attach to the person?
- What specific physical features stand out?
Poem #2
Amulet
The day an autumn orphan, and we yank roots
from Texas earth: onions, then tomatoes split open
by sun, insect, rain. This is still the one
gift we have in common: desire for bone
below flesh: excavated hedges laid bare, recalling
the loam we spring from, return to. Battered by blue
wind, you bend and pull, your blanched blue
shirt sweat-soaked, fingers wizened as ginger root
as they curl around aortas of garlic: recollections
of you always here between cloud-pungent openings
of ash trees, the love between us hard bone.
These days, you’re easy with me like one
of your patients—another girl who will have won
you over with a smile, questions about the blue-
tubed stethoscope you press against her heart, not bone
but rhythmic and radiant flesh. You’ll be gentle, root
in your labcoat pocket for a sweet she’ll open
after it’s closed into her palm. I still recall
nights no sweetness passed between us, but recall
each twilight you taught me to knit a wide, white net, one
of the only hollows unfreighted by her ghost. You open
the door, speak to me. I’m here, standing against blue
midnight, and now you see me. I swear, the roots
between us are intact, basilic as a vein of coral vine. Bone-
pale: color of her corpse in its narrow casket: bone-
pale: wet marrow of poplars in rain: recollection
of your other daughter flung from car to sky, an uncut root
between us. You are the man walking alone with one
amulet to guide you: a Qur’an, pages thumbed blue.
I’m alone in your kitchen, palming a tomato, opening
drawers for the sharpest blade to slice its red flesh open.
You are bent over a prayer mat, the horizon a thin bone
disappearing into the backyards of other families. Branch-blue,
my uncut valve the night I walked out of me away from you. Recall
that I left with only the name you gave me: the one
amulet guiding me through and back to you, its roots
ravined below the poplar you taught me to tend. Some roots we don’t
need to see. Open your palm. Recall my name, the only one I have.
Hold it steady, like each bone I wish you would forgive yourself for breaking.
(From FOUR POEMS BY TARFIA FAIZULLAH March 25, 2014. This piece was submitted by Tarfia Faizullah as part of the 2014 PEN World Voices Online Anthology.)
Discussion Questions:
- Who is the speaker of this poem and where is she?
- What do they have in common? List. What do they bond over?
- What can you tell about the father?
- What can you tell about the speaker’s mother? How does this affect the relationship between the seeker and her father?
- What is the significance of the title?
- Describe the relationship past and present of the speaker and father.
Now You Try
An exercise for Poem #1:
Have you ever lost someone? A relative, friend, mentor? This person might have moved away. The relationship might have ended. Or the person might have died. The point is that you mourn not only the loss of the person but the simple things associated with that person.
You might brainstorm what you wore with that person or what the person wore when you were together. Were their any gifts exchanged? Any music attached to the person? Did you eat anything together? What other concrete things do you miss that you identify with the person?
Write poem about a person you have lost and the simple things you miss about that person and your relationship.
An exercise for Poem #2:
All relationships between a parent and child are complex. But they often evolve and change especially as the child grows into young adulthood. Write a poem about your relationship with one parent or the other. Consider using the past and the present. Consider/brainstorm what activities you have in common that bind you. Consider how your parent is different with children not their own. Are their other roots that bind you? Religious, tragic events or losses? Happy events? What does bind you?
Student Model
After the Funeral
By Darby
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