{"id":3294,"date":"2017-10-03T23:44:26","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T18:44:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/?p=3294"},"modified":"2017-10-03T23:44:26","modified_gmt":"2017-10-03T18:44:26","slug":"review-sophia-naz-pointillism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/2017\/10\/review-sophia-naz-pointillism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poet as Memorialist: Reading Sophia Naz\u2019s Pointillism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Pointillism<\/em> (2017) felt like returning to Heaney. With Human Chain<\/em>, his last collection, the great Irish poet moved away from simple nostalgia to doing the Poet\u2019s work of memorialization. You and I remember, the Poet memorializes; she gives semblance of meaning to the lost and forgotten; for her poetry becomes a form of storytelling. For Naz, memory is the only currency she has (The United States of Amnesia<\/em>); she uses verse to navigate through the many histories and languages which claim her, the many stories which are hers and mine, the many inheritances which weigh us down. To be a South Asian, an exile, a woman\u2014Naz\u2019s project with Pointillism<\/em> is to articulate the liminality of identity, and what it means to inhabit the hyphen<\/a>. With Pointillism<\/em>, Naz attempts her own form of historical revisionism; she looks at South Asian culture as a shared heritage, a sacred ground where languages overlap and blur, where each wound leaves you with a brand, new mouth (Chappan Churri<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2026 but now, there are no masters, <\/em>ji.
\n<\/em>I choose all my lines, let language be
\n<\/em>lightning, bolt from the blue, unlatched<\/em><\/p>\n

(Bolt from the Blue<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\n

Sophia Naz traces the birthing and dying of languages, their continual borrowings, the sameness in their myriad differences.<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n

Preoccupied with myth and history, language and loss, home and homelessness, Pointillism<\/em> is at once a postcolonial paean as well as a Whitmanesque song about the diasporic identity, but more than anything else it is a deeply personal memorialization of a life lived across borders, a life too elusive for convenient identity-markers. Regarding the title of her collection, Naz writes in the foreword:<\/p>\n

pointillism refers to a mapping of disparate \u201cpoints\u201d which could be geographical, temporal or emotional markers. It speaks to the ability of language to create compelling cartographies from these seemingly unconnected dots.<\/em><\/p>\n

For Naz, therefore, the construction of personal cartographies out of the cacophony of nationalist narratives involves walking the tightrope of languages, of creating a personal lexicon which borrows from disparate cultural bloodlines. Her speaker therefore seems sometimes unrooted; a consciousness that has somehow escaped spatiotemporality, that has outgrown a national and cultural identity. She traces the birthing and dying of languages, their continual borrowings, the sameness in their myriad differences.<\/p>\n

Gullet is a concavity between two saw-teeth. Late Middle English from Old French <\/em>goulet, <\/em>from Latin <\/em>gula, from Proto-Indo-European<\/em> gala as in gullible. Somebody had swallowed. <\/em><\/p>\n

(Atomic Nuqta)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"pointillism-front-cover

Book cover courtesy Copper Coin, India.<\/p><\/div>\n

I once tried to self-teach myself Spanish, and found the Spanish word for shirt, camisa<\/em>, oddly sounding similar to the Urdu qameez<\/em>. Something about that discovery made me euphoric. In my mind, I traced myself back to a condemned witch in the midst of the Spanish Inquisition; I imagined a secret hidden ancestry of which only I knew; language became a way for circumambulating the graveyards of endless possibilities (Tap Routes<\/em>). Reading Pointillism<\/em>, I understand \u201cwhat it means to come \/\/ back take a bite out \/\/of your own lost history\u201d (The Gulabi Guavas of Allahabad<\/em>) or histories that give us the shape of our bones. Naz\u2019s speaker in Pointillism<\/em> comes from cultural, historical and linguistic intersections, and speaks, or rather yawps from the barbaric rooftops of its many worlds to the mess inside all of us.<\/p>\n

It therefore seems rather apt for Naz to use the prose poem which is the perfect form for her project of threading multiplicities and juxtapositions. Some of her longer pieces are written in the form of a dialogue with an imagined reader, an elusive and absent you<\/em>. Her verse imagines a community, or at least a solitary reader; it presumes and demands participation as it remembers an oral culture when poetry or the recitation of it was part of communal togetherness.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

We share a birthday, you and I
\n<\/em>and no doubt countless others
\n<\/em>on this divided subcontinent<\/em><\/p>\n

(Poem for a Missing Man)<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Developing a metalanguage\u00a0that\u00a0transcends divides is crucial to Naz\u2019s endeavor with\u00a0Pointillism<\/em>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n

This absent you<\/em> is also the one left behind during the partition of India and Pakistan. Several of her poems lament the tolling of the \u201cmartial music in the mindless key of jingoism\u201d (Poem for a Missing Man<\/em>).<\/p>\n

The only thing that separates us
\n<\/em>is a single syllable between <\/em>arraz, <\/em>& <\/em>arz\u2014
\n<\/em>earth, which unlike this envelope, can never hide
\n<\/em>the scar.<\/em><\/p>\n

(Bolt from the Blue<\/em>)<\/p>\n

And, thus, developing a metalanguage that\u00a0transcends divides is crucial to Naz\u2019s endeavor with Pointillism<\/em>. She sees \u201cpoetry as holding a magic power to both evoke and transcend linear time and perceived reality\u201d, as well as the monoliths of language and culture. To be a citizen of the world might entail a certain kind of homelessness, but it also brings with it a different kind of communal belonging, one which is larger, more diverse, more benevolent.<\/p>\n

W<\/em>hen I type
\n<\/em>churri, <\/em>autocorrect is also
\n<\/em>a stab at language
\n<\/em>giving me the option
\n<\/em>of cherry, char
\n<\/em>cheri, churn, churl,
\n<\/em>chi and occasionally, chai<\/em><\/p>\n

(Chappan Churri<\/em>)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve recognized myself in Naz\u2019s many poems, I recognize the cotton and pause which makes me too (Pecking Order<\/em>), I share her discontent over barriers and limitations, and the Joycean desire to fly past the many nets flung at me. Her work seems timely yet I recognize the Heaneyesque human chain which had always held us together, which had always been the subject of the Poet.<\/p>\n

my people my people I can\u2019t be lost
\n<\/em>when I see you my compass
\n<\/em>is brown & gold & blood<\/em><\/p>\n

(Fatimah Asghar\u2019s If They Should Come For Us<\/a><\/em>)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

*Papercuts<\/em> published two of Sophia Naz\u2019s poems<\/a> from Pointillism <\/em>in its Vol. 17 \u201cAppetite\u201d. Her book is out with Copper Coin India and can be ordered online from Amazon<\/a> and Copper Coin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

Momina Masood is a poetry editor for Papercuts magazine.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sophia Naz’s project with Pointillism (Copper Coin, 2017) is to articulate the liminality of identity and what it means to inhabit the hyphen, writes Momina Masood<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32,"featured_media":3299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[357,91],"tags":[793,61,792,791,725],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3294"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3294"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3303,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3294\/revisions\/3303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desiwriterslounge.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}