{"id":5671,"date":"2012-05-16T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2012-05-16T12:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5671"},"modified":"2012-05-14T22:16:32","modified_gmt":"2012-05-15T02:16:32","slug":"process-profile-tarfia-faizullah-discusses-at-zahras-salon-for-ladies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/16\/process-profile-tarfia-faizullah-discusses-at-zahras-salon-for-ladies\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Tarfia Faizullah Discusses “At Zahra’s Salon for Ladies”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tarfia<\/a>
Tarfia Faizullah (Photo by Amanda Abel)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tarfia Faizullah\u2019s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in <\/em>Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the associate editor of <\/em>Blackbird. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship, a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Peter Taylor Fellowship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she helps edit the<\/em> Asian American Literary Review and <\/em>Trans-Portal.<\/em><\/p>\n

For APIA Heritage Month 2012, we are revisiting our Process Profile series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their process for a single poem from inception to publication. As in the past, we\u2019ve asked several\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Lantern Review\u00a0<\/strong>contributors to discuss\u00a0<\/strong><\/em>their process for composing a poem of theirs that we\u2019ve published. In this installment, Tarfia Faizullah reflects upon her poem \u201cAt Zahra\u2019s Salon for Ladies<\/a>,\u201d which appeared in\u00a0<\/em><\/strong>Issue 4<\/a><\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It actually did begin at Zahra\u2019s Salon, with my head tilted back.<\/li>\n
  2. Auntie Neelam and I never spoke, though she has always been gentle with me and I have never gone to another stylist.<\/li>\n
  3. That day at the salon, Ghulam Ali\u2019s song Chupke, Chupke<\/em> began to play.<\/li>\n
  4. It had been many, many summers since I had last heard that song.<\/li>\n
  5. My younger self rose up.<\/li>\n
  6. I went home and began to try to affix the atmosphere of the salon, the deft, elegant movements of Auntie Neelam\u2019s fingers.<\/li>\n
  7. I listened to Chupke, Chupke<\/em> over and over again.<\/li>\n
  8. I called my mother, cradled the phone against my shoulder to take notes while she translated Chupke, Chupke<\/em> for me.<\/li>\n
  9. I began to remember that other, younger summer.<\/li>\n
  10. The summer I had started growing out of my swimsuit.<\/li>\n
  11. How bewildered I was, how frightened by all that dark hair shadowing across me.<\/li>\n
  12. \u00a0\u201cI can feel that other day running underneath this one,\u201d Anne Carson wrote, and similarly, I strongly felt the summer of my youth below that present one.<\/li>\n
  13. \u00a0As adults, we take for granted the agency we have to strip our bodies of their darkness.<\/li>\n
  14. The poem has always been in second person. It had to be so that I could clearly see both my younger and adult selves as I was addressing them.<\/li>\n
  15. \u201cAt Zahra\u2019s Salon\u201d took me two years to write.<\/li>\n
  16. I am interested in the possibilities of collage, of braiding together multiple elements.<\/li>\n
  17. I love David Shields\u2019s assertion of collage as \u201ca demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge on it.\u201d<\/li>\n
  18. It took two years to try to weave together the salon, the song, and those other summers while ensuring each element remained singular and intact.<\/li>\n
  19. One day, I asked Auntie Neelam about her life.<\/li>\n
  20. She was born and raised in India, and is married and has a child.<\/li>\n
  21. I think she was as startled as I was.<\/li>\n
  22. She started telling me about her wedding day.<\/li>\n
  23. I remembered my own wedding, the way my body was purified, decorated, posed.<\/li>\n
  24. She gave me a mishti. <\/em><\/li>\n
  25. I left the salon, my face smarting.<\/li>\n
  26. One of the red brick walls was covered in clematis vine.<\/li>\n
  27. The sky was so blue.<\/li>\n
  28. I wanted to write a poem that could dwell in nostalgia, that could dwell in those first feelings of hunger without fully leaving the present.<\/li>\n
  29. I wanted to write a poem that acknowledged the beauty and terror of solitude.<\/li>\n
  30. Don\u2019t we all long for a lifetime of sweetness?<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Tarfia Faizullah\u2019s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, New Ohio Review, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Crab Orchard Review, Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University, where she served as the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[318],"tags":[314,353,690,1051,850],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5671"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5688,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5671\/revisions\/5688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}