A Lifetime is Not Enough for Zainab’s Story: Review of Zehra Naqvi's The Knot of My Tongue
Zehra Naqvi, The Knot of My Tongue
McClelland and Stewart, 2024. $22.50 CAD
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And I, a girl, stood wooden and true, drew myself in solidly, the memory of an ancient banyan
muscled flanks of wild horses, the bellies of great whales
I knew it was time to build what could carry, to find the high point
to name what I knew to be the world and carry it with me
— from “Nuh,” in The Knot of My Tongue
Zehra Naqvi’s debut collection The Knot of My Tongue explores personal and generational calamities: domestic violence, a family’s displacement during the Partition, the Battle of Karbala. Writing about or within unspeakable violence is no simple task for a poet. Naqvi thus begins her collection with the tender reminder, “Before you tell the story, you have to prepare the room for the story.”
This sentiment is brought to us from the majlis, a site of oral storytelling. It is at the majlis where storytellers share the Battle of Karbala, a story that shifts depending on who tells it and where, and individuals grieve this historical injustice in community. I am Sunni but my partner is Shia. He tells me of his childhood at the majlis: dimmed lights that let people weep with abandon, giggling with his cousins at the strangeness of the mawlana and other stoic adults whimpering, growing distress at the utter horror of the stories. These emotionally charged gatherings hold space for generations of injustice and pain. In Naqvi’s poem “I Have Never Seen my Daddammi Cry Except at the Majlis,” when the storyteller at the majlis evokes Zainab and Karbala, the story sweeps into the narrator’s daddammi, “her shoulders part, and she, like a river, pours and pours and pours.”
As I am writing this, Israel is pulverizing Gaza. A new article in The Lancet offers a conservative estimate that the true death toll exceeds 186,000. Palestinians continue to livestream their final moments to us. When such violence becomes a series of unending social media updates which can be refreshed with the click of a button, what does it mean to prepare a room for these stories? In the face of the shattering complicity of our political leaders, what do we lose when we fail to create spaces that can hold our pain and mounting fury? In “Tongue,” Naqvi’s narrator learns that “what happens to / my body is what happens to my tongue.” Naqvi’s collection illustrates the ways violence does not merely fragment our bodies, but our language.
Naqvi prepares us for her own story. At the outset of the collection, we find a girl in a windowless room, fist-sized holes in the walls. It is not immediately apparent what this image represents. It’s only when the collection unfurls that its import becomes clear: it’s the site of domestic violence. This calamitous moment bubbles up again throughout the text like debris in the aftermath of a flood (see “Lines,” where Naqvi writes, “The earth regurgitates, gives witness to all things birthed and buried”), weaved closely with stories about the legendary, lonely women of Islam: Hajar, Fatimah, Maryam and Zainab, each with their own struggles against speechlessness. It is through these stories that the narrator becomes able to tell her own.
In the aftermath of violence, one becomes fundamentally altered. You no longer see things in the same manner. In “Beneath the Dome,” Naqvi’s narrator thus seeks new language, new words: “ochre, green, the hollow base of a tree”. Part V of the text echoes this frustration when the narrator asks, “What is the language of water and air? How to speak in blank space and line breaks?”
Exploration of rupture is what poetry makes possible for Naqvi. It’s too simple to say that throughout the book, the narrator who has lost her voice eventually “finds” it. The assumption often goes that silence is the opposite of courage, of moral and political conviction. Some often ask: why don’t you just speak up? (a heavily racialized and gendered question when levelled against Muslim women, who are read as oppressed or submissive from the outset).
The narrator indeed laments against her voicelessness. In “Revelation,” “Lines” and “Garden,” she seeks self-assurance in her speech, demands to be heard: “listen, I want the roaring river, language that shouts—big type easy print” (from “Garden”). “Forgetting Urdu” explores the fragmentation that occurs following displacement and an immigrant father’s preoccupation with English grammar. In “Say,” the narrator dreams of a time when “our immigrant tongues become as verdant as soil.”
But what can blank spaces and line breaks hold? Silence is alive and dynamic in Naqvi’s text. In “Twig,” she writes: “a body pushed against the wall / is a place of first snowfall, the sound of / the heart pushing blood, a moonless / ocean swallowing the night”. “Becoming” rejects the victimhood that is read into one’s silence: “look how you earth / another kind of stillness / another kind of spring / not broken / but becoming” (this rejection is echoed in “Grocery Shopping,” where the narrator is harassed at a grocery store for wearing a hijab, and pity is the last thing she desires: “no one gets to have this, no one gets to make you into a body they think they know how to read”).
For Naqvi, language is a critical site of embodied knowledge. In “Dear Baba,” the narrator asks: “what is the world for des in english? nation? homeland? no, not quite. english cannot fully know its own erasure.” Instead, Naqvi searches for “a language that knows survival”.
Sometimes, this means writing despite the fragmentation. In “Forgetting Urdu,” the narrator promises, “I will write a ghazal when Urdu returns, colours me and carries me,” but the very next poem in the collection is a beautiful ghazal titled “Lucknow,” written entirely in English.
Naqvi also expands our sense of storytelling by reorienting it from an individualized form of self-expression to a tapestry that get richer with each intergenerational retelling. In “Lucknow,” the narrator delves into her own questions that arise from the stories her dadi shares with her. In “Prelude: The Story of Karbala,” Naqvi writes: “A lifetime is not enough for Zainab’s story […] it spills across generations and through centuries, taking on different colours and banners, offering words for gatherings of loss, of resistance, for those in need of a language that knows survival.” My partner notes that Muharram often becomes about the men who were massacred at Karbala, but without an exiled Zainab sharing her story, it would never have been passed down. Language that knows survival isn’t simply a native language, or a liberating literary form like poetry, but can also be language created intergenerationally. Naqvi herself, reading and learning from fearless Pakistani poets like Kishwar Naheed, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Agha Shahid Ali, builds on their language to explore what it means to really and truly witness violence and to write it.
Fatima Aamir is a writer who moves around a little too much to bother specifying. She is currently completing her master's at the University of Toronto's Centre for Comparative Literature. Catch her in her latest (dramatic/weepy/enraged) outburst on Twitter @fatimaaamir.