Seam

by Tarfia Faizullah

The poems in this captivating collection weave beauty with violence, the personal with the historic as they recount the harrowing experiences of the two hundred thousand female victims of rape and torture at the hands of the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War. As the child of Bangladeshi immigrants, the poet in turn explores her own losses, as well as the complexities of bearing witness to the atrocities these war heroines endured.

Throughout the volume, the narrator endeavors to bridge generational and cultural gaps even as the victims recount the horror of grief and personal loss. As we read, we discover the profound yet fragile seam that unites the fields, rivers, and prisons of the 1971 war with the poet’s modern-day hotel, or the tragic death of a loved one with the holocaust of a nation.

Moving from West Texas to Dubai, from Virginia to remote villages in Bangladesh and back again, the narrator calls on the legacies of Willa Cather, César Vallejo, Tomas Tranströmer, and Paul Celan to give voice to the voiceless. Fierce yet loving, devastating and magical at once, Seam is a testament to the lingering potency of memory and the bravery of a nation’s victims.

Winner, Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, 2014
Winner, Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, 2015

Genres: Poetry, History, Bangladesh, War, Asia, Feminism, The United States Of America

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 6, 2014

About the author

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (SIU, 2014), winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, New England Review, Washington Square, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Copper Nickel Poetry Prize, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop and Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Detroit where she is a writer-in-residence for InsideOut and co-edits the Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press with Jamaal May. In Fall 2014, she will join the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry.

Reviews

[Liz Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

“They tossed—
me—river—me—you want the splayed heart
of another’s hand clasping yours, to know
if cruelty exists, or if it is only love’s threadbare
desperation—river—me—river—me—me—”

In 1971, the Bangladesh Liberation War occurred after Pakistani military committed war crimes against Bengali nationalist that wished to leave the then, East Pakistan. It was a horrendous time for people living in the area, thousands of innocents died, millions were internally displaced, millions fled to India, students were murdered, protesters silenced, people felt the aftermath of genocide, mass deportation, and genocidal rape. This collection is about the survivors of the rape committed by the Pakistani militias and army, across religious and racial barriers. This is also about her loss, dead friends and classmates. This was a sordid time, but it is important that we learn about it, because even as history has a knack to repeat itself, we must try to evade such things from occurring once more.

This she wrote after a classmate was murdered:
“Sordid
details flare out like sails
of a ship: mother trapped
in an asylum, father weeping,
his son’s warm corpse cradled
in his arms, the chicken bone
still lodged in his young throat.
To whom would this not be
an inelegant death—a caught
bone like one of our own?”

This are stories of people escaping grief and memory. Stories that haunt them after 40 years, and that will never leave them be free from them. Some things will never be clean of the bodies that once held them.

“Past another clothesline heavy
with saris: for hours they
will lift into the wind, hollow
of any bruised or broken body.”

We will never be able to understand them, never will we stand on their shoes and see the world from their perspective, but this collection, came as close as we will ever be to sympathizing with what those poor people endured.

“I admit that when the falling hour
Begins to husk the sky free of its
saffroning light, I reach for anyone

willing to wrap his good arm tight
around me for as long as the ribboned
darkness allows. Who wants, after all,

to be seen too clearly?”

[Sean Carman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Faizullah's poems about the birangona –– Bangladeshi women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War for the independence of Bangaldesh –– are as urgent as they are beautiful. The collection is organized around Faizullah's trip to Bangaldesh to interview the birangona, a choice that gives the collection the dramatic tension of a narrative and presents the interviews poems as the dark heart of Faizullah's journey. The poems are also written like palimpsests over the subtext of Faizullah's own investigations of her Bangaldeshi heritage and her West Texas childhood. So, I give it five stars.

Here is my interview with Tarfia for the Paris Review Daily: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...

[Edita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Look: the moon is an ivory
scythe gutting another pond across
which the reflection of a young girl’s

braid ripples.

*
[...] cicadas hummed the sky clean
*
Once, I wanted
to be the white wind shirred across any open

field.
*
I reach
for my mother’s
hand like a child. Here
hang the years. They sleep
with folded wings.
*
When I remember,
my being shatters,
*
It is possible to live without
memory Nietzsche said but
is it possible to live with it?
*
Sunlight
fades the open windows into white
dreams.
*
On a thin

lavender evening like this one,
we were each other’s world

entire: both the wood rose as well
as its tangled stem.
*
You
can’t blot away this utter, sooted
darkness.

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tarfia came to SLCC for an event. I heard her give a talk about researching and writing the poems in this collection. This collection has a strong narrative arc. Unlike many other collections I've read, I pretty much sat down and read the whole thing cover to cover.
The collection is quite compelling as it is about the systematic rape of women during war. She interviewed women and many of the poems are structured like interviews.
The collection is quite compelling, both on the level of the line, each individual poem, but also the way the poems work together.
Also, she's an amazing person!

[TJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would give this book a sixth star.

[Hazel · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO SO BEAUTIFUL!

[Amalie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read:

1971
En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith
Elegy with Her Red-Tipped Fingers
Instructions for the Interviewer
[Tell her what happened to you . . .]
Interview with a Birangona: 1. What were you doing when they came for you?
Interview with a Birangona: 2. Where did the Pakistani military take you, and were there others there?
Interviewer’s Note: i. [You walk past white high-rises]
Interview with a Birangona: 3. Would you consider yourself a survivor or a victim?
Interviewer’s Note: ii. [You listen to the percussion]
Interview with a Birangona: 4. Were there other women there? Did you get along with them?
The Interviewer Acknowledges Desire
Interview with a Birangona: 5. Who was in charge at this camp? What were your days like?
Reading Willa Cather in Bangladesh
Interviewer’s Note: iii. [If burnt, she said, I’ll turn to ash,]
Interview with a Birangona: 6. Many of the birangona had children by Pakistani soldiers. Did you have a child as well?
Interviewer’s Note: iv. [Today there is no drinking]
The Interviewer Acknowledges Shame
Interview with a Birangona: 7. Do you have siblings? Where were they?
Interviewer’s Note: v. [But wasn’t it the neat narrative]
The Interviewer Acknowledges Grief
Interview with a Birangona: 8. After the war was over, what did you do? Did you go back home?
Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum
[Many corpses are stacked, . . .]
Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito
[I struggled my way . . .]

[RH Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

It feels wrong to rate a book with disturbing subject like mass rape, but I read this book in one setting and what impressed me was the softness of the women, described so plainly in water and waiting and daughters and sisters, that the merest mention of violence was bruising. The violence of rejection from a grandfather as a woman smelled the pomade on his hair. This book opens your senses and makes you quiet and wonder.

[Kimberly · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.

Honestly, this collection is so raw and personal that it feels wrong to even give it a star rating. Faizullah has obviously been deeply affected by the trauma her mother and grandmother (and hundreds of thousands of other women) experienced during the war for liberation in Bangladesh in 1971. Some two hundred thousand women were raped by Pakistani soldiers, and over 3 million people died. I knew nothing about this--"American exceptionalism" strikes again--and I need to do more reading/research on it. Anyway, the generation trauma here is obviously acute, and Faizullah combines stylized interviews with survivors into this collection. It's deeply moving, and sad, and scary. There is also a thread running throughout about her sister (I think?) who possibly died in childhood. I am not sure how this ties in with the rest of the story and it was part of the reason I didn't give four stars. I might be missing something though.

Overall, a powerful collection, definitely worth checking out.

[Helie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will be revisiting this book again soon. I bought it after seeing the author at a reading where she discussed her upcoming book. I knew I needed to read Seam.

I was blown away by her use of imagery, and the connections between the different definitions of "seam."

She shows us how things that are definitively not fabric are nonetheless more like fabric than I suspected. She pulls in the images of long, flowing saris, and the various textures that she encounters.

She also focuses on the role of bodies of water on her subject matter. Bangladesh is essentially one large river delta, and the character of the water shapes the world she describes. A seam can be the point where two currents meet, but she also maps water on earth to the geography of the body, and the way our blood flows through our bodies much as a river does.

A seam can also be a scar, and her poems examine the effect scars can have on a person; physically, emotionally, and even culturally.

I'm excited to revisit this book and find even more to love about it.

[Maya Ungar · Rating 5 out of 5]

As soon as I finished Seam, I flipped back to the first page to begin again, reading it through twice in the first sitting. It’s that kind of book that feels both like a race and a repetition, you yearn to read the words again as soon as your eyes sweep past them, but your desire to see what lays ahead powers through (and necessitates a reread).

Seam is a collection of poetry borne from interviews with female rape survivors after the ‘71 independence war in Bangladesh, intertwined with the intimate stories of death, loss, desire, and identity from the author. It’s painful to read, as Faizullah’s masterful command of imagery forces you inside of the horrific scenes she portrays. It is both documentation and emotional reckoning (for the author with her own familial past and that of a country that she both does and does not claim as her own). I think it’s an important read, both as a way to understand the atrocities of ‘71 in Bangladesh, and as an intimate journey through the mind of Faizullah.

[Shaazia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned something new about history today. Faizullah catalogues violence with such beautiful words, I can hardly wrap my mind around it. Will forever have an impression of the struggles the birangona suffered at the hands of Pakistani soldiers.

[Seb · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wish I could make everyone in the world read this collection

[n · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Tell me what you know about the body, and I will tell you how it must turn against itself."

this is probably some of the most beautiful poetry i've ever read

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book really messed me up. I'm a huge Bhanu Kapil fan and Tarfia's work breaks me in similar ways. There is such a patience with the subject, imagery, complex interweaving of Tarfia’s identity and life, as she interviews the Birangona women who were raped and tortured by Pakistani soldiers in the 1971 war. These interviews come about slowly, each line carefully arranged with scene, smell, feeling. Tarfia gives these women a voice through interviews, and lets them speak their story, reclaiming the words. However, this is a book aware that words are never enough to speak about horror: “badgirl, goodgirl, / littlebeauty - in Bangla / there are words / for every kind of woman / but a raped one.”
The cover of the book suggests a red fruit, a pomegranate or perhaps a lychee so often mentioned in the poems. When the fruit appear, overripe, I noticed they are accents to scenes of brutality. As an interviewee is tied with rope and taken to a dark room, she recalls “a rotten smell, dense like pear / blossoms.” In ‘The Interviewer Acknowledges Desire’, “fruit, overripe, tossed / into rivulets of human / waste.” Another “mango / overripe” in the commander’s room. The rotten fruit symbolizes women’s bodies bruised, let out to be abandoned, the smell of “bad” bodies - “fruit: rot: spice: body.”
Tarfia grapples with her American Bangladeshi female identity, as her own sexual desire and need to masturbate feels shameful against her interview trip. In this book, imagery of young girls with pink blossoms cross the water. They represent repressed memory, for both the Birangona women and for Tarfia, thinking about her sister who has passed away tragically. Many times, sisters are called out for, sisters are holding each other, trying not to let go of each other. Couplets mimic the linked sisters, the seam. Clotheslines appear, trying so hard to clean the saris of the blood and rot. Although the purpose of this project is so heavy, the poems go and go with tenderness and care. How can these memories stay remembered, how do we share them, live with them? It feels so unsatisfying and unfair, how these important stories become “pressed like flowers in a book, thinning over time under the weight of new bodies.”But Tarfia knows it's not that simple. She ends the book describing a busy bus with men pulling arms, and in the "dust-polluted sky" the moon resembles "a ripe, unsheathed lychee." The fruit here is whole and not overripe, yet the light cannot create a clear vision to see.

[Izy Carney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantaaaaaastic. Personal memory in the context of a shared political trauma—so beautifully done. The way Faizullah weaves in and out of time is amazing, especially in the poem series framed by the interviews with survivors.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a poetry person. However, I decided to expand my reading. This is the first actual book of poetry that I have read in about five years. I liked it, I did not love it, some poems were haunting and sad, some I did not understand, but overall I am glad that I took the time to read them. Her poetry is written for the people/specifically the women of East Pakistan the Bengali civilians. In 1971 West Pakistan launched a military operation--this resulted in the succession of East Pakistan which is now Bangladesh. It is estimated that two hundred thousand women were raped, and over 3 million people were killed. This book of poetry is a response to that particular war and the impact it left on the people and women of Bangladesh.

[Sara Sams · Rating 4 out of 5]

"How do I love/ as much as I say I do?"

[Wuttipol✨ · Rating 5 out of 5]

En Route to Bangladesh, Another Crisis of Faith

—at Dubai International Airport and ending with a line by César Vallejo

Because I must walk
through the eye-shaped
shadows cast by these
curved gold leaves thick
atop each constructed
palm tree, past displays
of silk scarves, lit
silhouettes of blue-bottled
perfume—because
I grip, as though for the first
time, a paper bag
of french fries from McDonald's,
and lick, from each fingertip,
the fat and salt as I stand alone
to the side of this moving
walkway gliding me past dark-
eyed men who do not look
away when I stare squarely
back—because standing
in line to the restroom I want
only to pluck from her
black sweater this one shimmering
blond hair clinging fast—
because I must rest the Coke, cold
in my hand, beside this
toilet seat warmed by her thighs,
her thighs, and hers.
Here, at the narrow mouth
of this long, humid
corridor leading to the plane,
I take my place among
this damp, dark horde of men
and women who look like me—
because I look like them—
because I am ashamed
of their bodies that reek so
unabashedly of body—
because I can—because I am
an American, a star
of blood on the surface of muscle.

[Mirabelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trigger warnings: this book often mentions child abuse, rape, dead bodies, genocide, murder, and trauma

First and foremost, the book was not written for people like me. I am extremely ignorant about this book’s contents, therefore, I am biased.

100% of these poems are about the Bangladesh genocide. This book is the first exposure I’ve ever had to the genocide. As someone whose family was not affected by it, I found it hard to understand the poems. But I understand that Seam is supposed to be melancholy. I can understand the trauma that comes with losing a close relative, rape, and growing up watching your mother suffer.

Faizullah’s style of prose didn’t resonate with me, but the poems hat stood out to me the most was Interview with a Birangona. Unlike the other poems, which were shown from the beginning to end, Interview with a Birangona was divided into many parts. Every couple of pages would be a continuation of that poem. It’s the only poem in Seam that’s written in the format of an interview.

I would like to thank Tarfia Faizullah for writing this book. While I don’t understand it and will never understand it from her point of view, I can tell this narrative needed to be published everywhere. I’m grateful for the few poems that begin with blurb detailing what was happening in her Faizullah’s life during the time she wrote her respective poetry.

[maisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was truly such a powerful yet harrowing read. This collection of poems by Tarfia Faizullah shares about the “Birangona”, translated from Bangla as “war heroines”, the women who were raped and tortured by the Pakistani army during the 1971 Liberation War.

Reading these testimonies in parallels to the poet’s own witnesses of losses and pain in their life as a daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, we can see the complexities that lie in exploring grief and how it transcends generations. The poems potently provide glimpses into how the desire to speak a language had invoked so much violence upon Bangladeshi women in this war and how rape was a major weapon of the oppressor. The poems touch on the painful history of Bangladesh’s liberation and reminds us of the country’s resiliency. Words of Bangla are woven throughout the poetry, an evidence of victory of this brutal war over the desire to practice a sweet language.

Beautifully painful writing on an essential matter as the genocide of Bangladeshis is neglected from most
historical discourse. This narrative exists, and it matters. The events of the 1971 Liberation War are far from a distant memory for many Bangladeshis and Bangladeshi immigrants of the Western world and it deserves to be remembered.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book focuses on the Bangladeshi war for independence, a conflict with which I was not previously familiar, and it particularly focuses on the horrors committed against Bangladeshi women by Pakistani soldiers. Memory is one of the collection's underlying themes, as the first-generation-American-child-of-Bangladeshi-parents poetic speaker interviews female survivors of sexual violence during the conflict.

Seam is a heart-rending example of the difficulties (of incomplete recollections, of recounting trauma, of describing the difficult aftermath, etc., etc.) of unearthing historical trauma. Many of these poems demonstrate the indirect ways in which the women recount how they suffered sexual assaults from soldiers, as well as imprisonment and subsequent banishment from their families, how these awful things are confronted and lived with. Faizullah also deals with the guilt on the part of the ethnographer, who comes from a privileged place and dares to ask these people to unbind their wounds for her tape recorder or notebook.

It's tough to decide between a four-and five-star review, but this is undoubtedly an eye-catching debut from the author.

[C · Rating 4 out of 5]

1971
On March 26, 1971, West Pakistan launched a military operation in East Pakistan against Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, and armed personnel who were demanding separation of the East from the West. The war resulted in secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent nation of Bangladesh. According to Bangladeshi sources, two hundred thousand women were raped, and over 3 million people were killed.


Interview with a Birangona
All I knew was underground: bodies piled on bodies,
low moans, sweat, rot seeking out scratches on our thighs,

the makeshift tattoos he carved on our backs to mark us.
Over milk tea and butter biscuits, the commander asks

what it feels like to have dirty blood running through our
veins. There were days we wooed him, betrayed each other

for his attention—now he turns me over on burlap.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection covers very challenging subject matter as much of it relates to the Bangladesh Liberation War and the 1971 Bangladesh genocide. While I was somewhat familiar with the war, the genocide was a startling revelation (as unfortunately all too much of non-Western history is to me).

The imagery and the sounds of the words are very impactful, and often quite jarring. Due to the lack of exposure to modern poetry, some of the line phrasing was a bit difficult to me. I need to hear some of these poems read by the author to get a better sense of them. I liked the construction of other poems a lot, such as "Reading Celan at the Liberation War Museum" and how the last line of the movements were recycled into the opening lines of subsequent movements. This book did really capture my attention.

Recommended by a friend in a MFA writing program

[sameera · Rating 4 out of 5]

actual rating: 4.5.
‘Seam’ is a collection of poetry that recounts the traumatic experiences of women who were raped and/or tortured during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. While the Bangladeshi government attempted to honour these women by awarding them the title ‘Birangona’ (‘war heroine’), their lived experiences were entirely different as they were often subjected to neglect and ostracisation by their families and society. Tarfia Faizullah places these historically silenced voices at the centre of her collection— structuring the poems as interview sequences and conversations between herself and a group of Birangona women. Each poem reveals different experiences faced by the women, but all chronicle equally traumatic processes of grief, memory and loss. While the poems vividly capture the real experiences of women during the war, the collection features an abstract element as the poet weaves together imagery of the fragile ecology of Bangladesh with the human experience, representing the thin ‘seam’ between geography and body. 

[Matt Ely · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated the ability of the poet to balance multiple narratives that alternate and build on one another. Faizullah does what modern poets do best by indicting herself in unexpected ways in discussing the process of constructing her poetry, but that does not overwhelm the focus on seeking empathy with the crises of her family and communal heritage in Bangladesh. A lean, focused volume that builds on a core narrative without growing redundant through indefinite repetition of particular topic or form.

[Nuha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you read and wonder how many Bangladeshi women think about the same moments from 1971 as though the bloody memories was etched in our veins? The terror and rape of over 200,000 women by the Pakistani militia in one of the largest genocides of the 20th century paints Faizullah's work, as it does for many Bangladeshi authors. Her short, terse, tense pieces address the duality between her two worlds, America's oil fields and Bangladesh's rivers, the seam running between the country, the thread holding it and ultimately the author together.

[Brittney Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I obviously loved the individual poems, but I'm even more impressed with the book's structure as a whole. "Seam" shows up in various manifestations throughout. It follows a clear narrative arch. The poems build and comment on one another.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Faizullah is profound. I imagine her other books are full of life and energy. I like that this book essentially functions as an open forum for one very particular voice, and she delivers this voice exquisitely.

[Melissa Helton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very moving, like a poem version of what Even Ensler did in the Vagina Monologues when interviewing victims of the rape camps of a different conflict. The sense of the speaker really evolves with each interview's notes poem. Beautiful and difficult (emotionally) read.