Tarfia Faizullah's Seam is an enthralling series of poems that blends charm with aggression, personal memories with historical events. The poems recount the harrowing memories of two thousand female rape and torture victims during the Pakistani army's Liberation War in 1971. Tarfia Faizullah, the daughter of a Bangladeshi refugee, discusses her losses and the complexities of witnessing the crimes committed against women during the war. Faizullah discusses her exposure to tragedy and her rights to tell the harrowing tales. Despite the distinctions between her American life experience privilege and the devastating experiences of her Bangladeshi female war survivors, Faizullah crafts a seam that unites the opposite ways of living into one articulate lyrical narration of women experiences in Bangladeshi (Faizullah 24). This was Tarfia Faizullah’s debut book.
The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony by Ladan Osman is a winner of the Sillerman First Book Prize for African poets. It is jointly published by the Amalion Press and the University of Nebraska Press. It is based on the Somali word ‘jiko muufo’, an insult word meaning ‘kitchen flatbread’ to criticize women who are obsessed with domestic work so much they watch bread rise with excitement. The collection of poems by Osman examine the various ways in which women navigate gender roles and examine the praise for women’s success in roles considered female-limited. The Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony provides momentum for speakers to question and give their testimonies. It is about love, longing, desire and divorce (Osman 32).
Growing up as a Woman in a Different Culture
Gender inequality and oppression are main themes in the Seam and the Kitchen-Dweller’s Testimony. Being born in 1980, Faizullah has not yet got a chance to have witnessed the war in 1971. Despite not taking an active part in, Faizullah feels the need to know and understand the history of her roots and hence digs into her ethnic identity by facing the statements of Birangona women, survivors from Bangladesh who were attacked and raped during the war time. The poems are in form of an interview where each is given a similar name ‘Interview with a Birangona’, and every poem begins with a posed question to the interviewee. Most of them voice the war experiences in lyrical or narrative forms; for instance, “the silence clotted thick /with a rotten smell, dense like pear/blossoms,” or “I twine a red string/around my thigh. That evening, /a blade sliced through the string.” Some interviewees beg the speaker asking her isn’t she aware that they made them watch heads of other victims falling, when others seemed to accept their situations quietly. Each poem presents a voice to most Birangona women creating a testimony united with a powerful voice entity. Even despite the sufferings of the Bangladeshi women, they started being shunned by the society for being ‘defiled.’ For instance, in the “Interviewers Note,” Faizullah writes that “there are words for every kind of woman, but a raped one”.
Osman opens her poem “The Pilgrims” with a striking metaphor that “something is pressing against the hymen of madness”. This metaphor holds to the implication of rape, deflowering, loss of innocence and regret, a reflection of the occurrences in Somalia. In her ‘Unsolicited Witness’ poem, Osman transforms from an observer and a witness to a strange and surprising participant. Osman’s syntax management is deft and controlled, where her sharp unsettling questions comfort and disquiet at the same time. The man in Unsolicited Witness is described as an ankle grabbing monster, but at the end of the piece, the audience is left concerned about the speaker. The biographical personage of Osman’s life is constructed and rooted on her experience of gender. There are danger shadows haunting in all Osman’s poems, taking a persona that is fully aware of women’s dangers, where girls are “tossed onto ravines and stuffed under bushes” (Twigs). While Osman’s persona is often in first person in her poetry, Faizullah seems to keep her own story and the Birangona stories in different spaces, and not imposing herself in what she has not experienced. However, she allows her own reaction to the concerns and events of the Bengali women to be present and active in the narrative. This allows the readers to say the way she relates to the Birangona women and how distanced she is.
Many of Faizullah’s poems have been excerpted from interviews, making an impression of a ‘call and response conversation’ between her and the Birangona. It is evidently seen in the Interview with a Birangona which commences with a question “Do you have siblings?” This is followed by the interviewee’s response that had lost a sibling “…you want/the darkness she stood against/to be the yards of violet velvet”. Faizullah had also lost a sister, which creates an unclear insight on the changeover between the sisters’ memories and the interview. Faizullah and the respondent discover a seam that unites their stories: the seam of tragedy.
Osman’s sentiment management is comparable to Faizullah’s in Seam. This is revealed when the two authors are dealing with difficult and emotionally tense subjects. In Osman’s poem where she describes her father’s diabetes condition discovery, the narrative is full of precise and evocative details with a well-trimmed dialogue full of symbolism and essentiality. Osman fully understands the art of complicating situations with emotions in addition to physical detail capacity full of cinematic sense and beyond.
Somalia and Bangladesh Culture
The Somalis have been referred to as a “Nation of Poets” or a “Nation of Bards” due to the passion and love for poetry. This is evident in the Kitchen’s Dweller Testimony, where writer is a Somali woman who has created beauty in words from a craft perspective. Somalis have a tradition of storytelling. They also have a rich music heritage that is based in the traditional folklore. With an artistic culture, the Somali people characterize their art with aniconism coupled with their Muslim beliefs and pre-Islamic mythology. The Cushitic tribes use the Somali language and are Muslims. Religion is the main source of cultural norms and laws such as the exclusion of women from male-dominated religious order (Lewis and Hussein).
The ‘Birangona’ is the Bangladeshi word for the brave war heroines of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Over 200,000 women were raped and tortured (ISLAM). The aesthetic representations of the war heroines can only be understood through literature, visual and testimonial forms.
Conclusion
The name Seam allows the reconciliation of seemingly unlikely and impossible connections, the privileged United States of America and the war-torn Bangladesh, the privileged woman in America and the abused, raped and exploited woman in Bangladesh. Throughout this book, the seam image makes a transformation and performs a diverse function: seams are a reflection of self, cultural identity and a sign of women’s being abandoned and defiled. The poems create recurring images of the Bengali fabric, with seems functioning on the literal and metaphorical aspects. Despite the differences between Faizullah’s notes and the women war survivors’ testimonies, these two have been perfectly seamed into one narration. Faizullah born in a latter generation in Texas, U.S., and a Birangona woman affected by the 1971 war make up one body. The reader is pursued by the women’s horrifying stories “don’t you know/they made us watch her head fall/from the rusted blade of the old?” Osman’s poetics in the Kitchen Dweller's Testimony also involve a distinctive willingness of the writer to allow non sequiturs and have the audience follow her through the complexity of women abuse.
Works Cited
Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Southern Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2014, 80.
ISLAM, KAJALIE SHEHREEN. "Breaking Down the Birangona Examining the (Divided) Media Discourse on the ." International Journal of Communication 6 (2012): 2131-2148.
Lewis, Toby and Khadija Hussein. "Somali Cultural Profile." 2017. EthnoMed.
Osman, Ladan. The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015, 108.
We will email this sample to you with pleasure!
Type your email