I am reading your poems to my faithlessness: Review of Sarah Ghazal Ali's Theophanies
Sarah Ghazal Ali, Theophanies.
Alice James Books, 2024. $18.95 USD.
Order a copy from Alice James Books.
“I am reading your poems to my faithlessness,” I want to text my friend (and author) of Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024).
Sarah Ghazal Ali is what we call my internet friend. She is part of a constellations of friends who are in and out of orbit, passing through the waves of mutual interest and friendships formed at distance through what is colloquially known as Poetry Twitter. Embedded in this friendship and this review is our sense of kinship which reaches across sense, through screen or page, pinging hearts by way of glimpses of someone’s life so far away yet somehow so familiar and near.
This friendship-review begins also with Sarah’s message years ago, when my first book, My Grief, the Sun was coming out, about how affirming it was to seen Islam written about differently, neither condemning nor worshipping, but in an eternal gray space of genuine embrace. Flaws and all. I know, before I even open her first collection, that this sentiment will be returned and I’m right because the title of the first poem greets me, proving it. “My Faith Gets Grime Under its Nails.” I tell my faith it should do the same but my faith is invisible these days. Nail-less. Long, lonely, wandering around places I can’t see and I’m here, waiting. Hoping it will come back to me.
The texture of faith in Theophanies soothes me, as it understands faith as flawed, ruptured, unruly and riotous. The cover begins our understanding of this faith, present in titles. I understand Theophanies as the combined Greek theos from θεός • (theós), meaning “god” or “divine”, and φαίνω (phaínō), concerning manifestation and appearance. The ancient word for Divine here is a purposeful an access to a word which extends beyond the Abrahamic conceptions of God to inform it, to surround it, with time, with history. And -phanies elicits the ancient light of epiphany, of illumination which concerns prophets and poets alike. The cover art speaks further to this quality: “Ground” by Dan Hillier is immediately luminous. Depicting revelation in the same sense that Ali’s poems do: a consuming abundance, a flow towards the earth, a relation that requires a complete endurance and surrender.
I begin there, so deeply with the title, because I sense in Theophanies a deep involvement with naming. Ali herself has said that the book began with an poetic exercise concerning a sequence of poems on the origin of her name, and this origin lingers. In “Sarai”, she writes, “A name is no unlike a sexed body” (7). The earthly apprehending the given. “A name is a condition mean to last” (ibid). We understand, then, that naming is not so unlike coding, storying, aligning. A lineage of instances creating a pattern. “Lord, I parable my name,” Ali writes in the first poem (2). What does it mean to parable a name? To expand its hold on you, to understand its radical specificity, attached to body, just as much as you understand its timeless history, its alphabet like vast and unending horizon.
This naming is directly tied to devotion. To devote one’s self to one’s self, to devote one’s self to Allah. In “Eid Al Adha” Ali writes on the sacrifice of a goat, “That you sat holding its cooling body, / whispering ninety-nine names to soothe / until it stilled” (56). Names to soothe, names to apologize. “I like my name to apology,” she writes in “Ghazal on the Day of” (32). The quiet de-capitalization of “god” in the same poem is a subtle gesture, a fickle finesse. Ali’s grasp on naming is one of her most powerful skills as a poet and it attunes us the surface of every word.
Ultimately, I am enraptured by Theophanies’ ability to present a faith so uninterested in grace. A gritty faith that interlocks generations of legendary women, from Hajar to Sarah to Maryam, a faith that allowed those women to survive and allows the spirits of other women, like Nabra Hussanen of the poem “When Nabra Hassanen Wakes Up In Jannah,” written after Hussanen was murdered in Virginia in 2017 in an incident widely considered to be a hate crime, to rest. It is resonant with a feminism which reminds me of Noor Naga’s If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English and Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death: a politics of revolt and rebellion, revulsion and repugnance. A dereliction of beauty in favour of a piercing and calibrated look at reality and history. I am embalmed and enamoured with this recklessness, this almost savage insight which goes so against and so thoroughly through society’s perceived misconceptions of a pious woman. What remains are the honest tenures of piety as they sit side by side with blasphemy, the polarizing power of faith as to investigate, to interrogate, to tear apart and put us back together with scraps.
“It’s boring—"Ali writes in “Mother of Nations”, “watching faith peel” (44). A poem rife with riotous richly intelligent women, “plumed right in God’s face” (ibid). This is the dark humor blends seamlessly with a Quranic curiosity to create the Faustian faith of this novel collection. This is a poet confident in her ability to rifle through the wreckage and canon of the world’s most popular religious histories to uncover the songs of the living and the dead.
Sanna Wani is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi Press, 2022), the winner of the 2023 Trillium Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Toronto.