A Home for Displaced Feelings: Review of Farzana Doctor's You Still Look the Same

Farzana Doctor, You Still Look the Same.
Freehand Books, 2022. $16.95.
Order a copy from Freehand Books.

Let me throw the prospect of neutrality out the window. Before I had even finished reading Farzana Doctor's first full-length collection of poetry, You Still Look the Same (Freehand Books, 2022), I queried editors regarding their interest for reviews, while fearing I would run out of bookmarks. A singularly unpretentious book, its clear, understated writing style is the perfect foil for its sharp insights. Its power to move you is contained in its straightforward nature, as the narrator engages in conversation with friends, lovers, relations, and themselves.

Written in four movements, the poems take you from emotional exhaustion through to journeys of recovery and reflection. The collection divides its time contemplating the loss of a mother, the anatomy of breakups, and the nature of middle age. Within these overarching themes is a narrator standing both within the experiences, as well as just off to the side, evaluating their meaning. Each movement is prefaced with a 'therapy homework' exercise that poses a question which receives a three-line response, terse and effective haikus in their own right, such as:

describe your world ending
in as few words as possible

One day we left home,
forgot to lock the front door,
terrible mistake. (1) 

As I am particularly interested in writing that explores the experiences of the children of immigrants, You Still Look the Same is a rich treasure that resonates. In the poems you will find lost objects, lost relationships, realities of menopause, and theories on tokenization. Women in their 40s will be comfortably situated in the collection's nostalgic landscape of 80s references including Duran Duran, The  Young and the Restless, and The 20 Minute Workout. These, however, are references made alongside attempts to conform to 'normalcy' in the face of the death of the narrator's mother. There is a sort of cultural longing that can be hard to fill for second-generation children, especially those who have experienced the loss of a parent. In "Blame it on childhood 2," Doctor presents grief at a breakneck pace:

Minutes after the news
of her death
your father hugs you
            we have to move on
which for him means
departing at dawn
returning after  sunset
daily marathons
to outrun grief
            try to keep up. (14)

The arc of the book makes excellent use of time shifts, with the narrator soon standing at the doorway of middle age. Literally standing at the top of a cliff over icy water with old friends, in "Stretch marks," the narrator notes:

This middle age,
skins marked
by births and ink,
sagging tits.
I wonder why stretch marks
don't make a body more supple. (20)

… 

Why does the cliff seem
higher now? Tami laughs.
And I think:
yes, we didn't used to be like this. (21)

“Stretch marks” appears towards the end of the first movement, just as we arrive at a central question of the collection: how does time change us? We are then quickly pulled again to a theme that will occupy the second movement of the book: what if it were possible to recapture lost time? In the devastating poem "Fall back," slyly named for Daylight Saving Time, the narrator contemplates:

            but what if
this hour          is a silver locket
holding every shiny wish?

…

I'd sit hip-to-hip
with mom on a park bench

 …

I'd ask her if it's true
she visits me in dreams

 …

I'd press her
for stories
her final forty minutes
the forty days after
and the forty years since. (22-23)

Doctor weaves a different scene of trying to fit in, in the poem "Ziyarat," about a pilgrimage to Raudat Tahera. Doctor continues to lay the groundwork for what makes a "good Bohra girl," which she delves into later in the collection. Though the narrator is trying to be discreet when referring to the disguise of a rida, she is spotted even here, and the ghost of her mother is ever present. Within the opulent weight of the cool tomb where "rubies spell Allah on marble walls" (29), we feel the inescapable longing for the lost mother in Doctor's touching and effective phrasing:

You look so much like her,
I am recognized
as my mother's daughter
motherless daughter

…

Immobile, a shard of religion
hits me,
penetrating through shroud
reaching for my chest
and in crypt's half light
my mother is with me again,
clutching my damp hand,
her rida brushing mine... (30) 

Moving back and forth through the collection, we find some of the wry work that is promised by the book's blurbs, such as in "Swipe Left," which posits the search for love as a research question: "A colleague suggests my sample is skewed, / that there are precisely twenty-one straight cis dudes / ruining dating apps for everyone” (35).

Similarly, in the poem "Forty-three," the narrator humourously depicts the much vaunted and prized moment in time where women no longer give a fuck about what others think of them. She is sartorially harangued by a too-small beret, casually picked up at Value Village, which whispers she should "shrink some more" (49) until the day she decides to take up all the space she deserves and it goes flying off (soon after her mortified date).

As someone who writes frequently about the loss of language, I was touched by Doctor's poem "Universal Apathy" about learning Arabic (followed later by the poem "Learning Lebanese"). The narrator contrasts the phrase "Chou badna n3amell?" (59) (Whatcha gonna do?) against Trump's time in office, saying, "I hear its echo everywhere, / words fluttering up from a million windpipes, / white seagulls circling Lebanon's turbulent seas" (59).

Contained within the third movement is "A Khatna Suite," which bears a note that khatna is a form of female genital cutting, a religious requirement for seven-year-old girls in the Dawoodi Bohra community, enforced by elder female relatives. I was absolutely knocked down by the poem “Grandmothers,” with the narrator's calm, unwavering insistence on speaking the truth. It is a shame to paraphrase this powerful poem, as I have done here:

In your granddaugher's whispers
            maybe in her dreams
to social workers
in courtrooms
inshallah
            in verse
you will be named

…

I get it, you wanted her
to be naik
because you felt dirty.
For inheriting violence
passing it down —
I'm sorry but
you will be named

…

You'll never go back
to when she buried her face
in your lap, rida and belly fat
her pillow.
No. (75)

You Still Look the Same is an elegant and mighty achievement. It is irresistibly relatable, juxtaposing everyday experiences against remarkable and painful moments. Reading this book, one feels that despite what the years have wrought on the body and soul, we can still strive to hold on to the relationships that have built us, while re-examining their impact and redefining their meaning to us as we age.

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Natalie Hanna is a queer, disabled, Ottawa born lawyer of Middle-Eastern descent. She runs battleaxe press, a small poetry press. Her work has appeared in print and online in Canada and the United States. Her first full length collection lisan al'asfour is forthcoming in the Fall of 2022 with ARP Books.