{"id":6416,"date":"2013-03-01T08:00:42","date_gmt":"2013-03-01T13:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=6416"},"modified":"2013-02-28T13:22:57","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T18:22:57","slug":"a-conversation-with-tarfia-faizullah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2013\/03\/01\/a-conversation-with-tarfia-faizullah\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation with Tarfia Faizullah"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Tarfia<\/a>
Tarfia Faizullah<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Tarfia Faizullah<\/strong> is the author of Seam<\/em><\/a> (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in Ploughshares<\/a>, The Missouri Review<\/a>, The Southern Review<\/a>, Massachusetts Review<\/a>, Ninth Letter<\/a><\/em>, and are anthologized in Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets <\/a><\/em>(Wipf & Stock, 2012). A Kundiman<\/a> fellow, she received her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University<\/a> where she served as associate editor of Blackbird<\/a><\/em>, and is the recipient of an AWP Intro Journals Project Award<\/a>, a Ploughshares Cohen Award<\/a>, a Fulbright Fellowship<\/a>, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize<\/a>, scholarships from Bread Loaf Writers\u2019 Conference<\/a>, Sewanee Writers\u2019 Conference<\/a>, the Kenyon Review Writers\u2019 Workshop<\/a>, and other honors. She lives in Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing and is an editor for Asian American Literary Review<\/a> and Organic Weapon Arts Chapbook Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> Can you share with us some of the decisions you made around structure and narrative when you were putting together Seam<\/em>?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> Seam<\/em> centers around a long sequence entitled \u201cInterview with a Birangona<\/a>,\u201d which imagines the process of a Bangladeshi-American female interviewer speaking with a birangona, a Bangladeshi woman raped by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War. The sequence is woven with and bookended by poems interrogating the interviewer\u2019s own heritage and personal losses.<\/p>\n

I began writing the first of the interview poems my second year of graduate school, and put them away until two years later when I received a Fulbright to Bangladesh to interview the birangona and conduct further research on the 1971 Liberation War.<\/p>\n

Seam<\/em> is a book that narratively and structurally relies on distance: between two continents and cultures as well as between the year of Bangladesh\u2019s independence and its modern moment. \u201c1971<\/a>,\u201d for example, the first poem of the book, imagines the Bangladeshi-American interviewer imagining her mother as a young girl watching her mother bathe in a pond during the war. When I returned from Bangladesh, I had a stack of six years’ worth of poems. Only then was I able to begin the work of shaping Seam into a collection that tries to both enact and traverse that distance.<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> How did your experience as a Fulbright scholar in Bangladesh influence the development of your manuscript?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> One of the main reasons I applied for a Fulbright to Bangladesh was because I had started to worry about the ethical consequences of \u201cInterview with a Birangona.\u201d So many of the women who were raped in 1971 are still alive in Bangladesh, and I began to question whether the project was appropriating the voices of the very women I was struggling to render and understand.<\/p>\n

Seam<\/em> could not have happened without my time in Bangladesh, where I spent a year researching the war and interviewing many birangona. My daily life also became part of the mosaic of my time in Bangladesh, and therefore part of Seam<\/em>.<\/p>\n

When I began to speak with the birangona, I realized how inadequate those early poems truly were. They could not encompass the full complexity of their lives nor mine. I spent a great deal of time with a family of sisters, each of whom had been raped during the war. At one point, while I was interviewing one sister, another sister came up behind me and gathered my hair in her hands. \u201cYou poor thing . . . you must have no one to comb your hair,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

I still have no words for how I felt about a woman enduring such horror feeling sorry for me. In this way, and so many others, my time in Bangladesh made me rethink culture, victimhood, violence, and empathy.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> When writing about historical events, particularly those involving war and human suffering, what are your thoughts on the responsibility to navigate, on the one hand, accuracy, and on the other, poetic license?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> I appreciate Susan Sontag\u2019s assertion in Regarding the Pain of Others<\/em><\/a> that \u201cAs objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, I don\u2019t believe that there is an art that can ever render something as unreasonable and as violent as human suffering. I tried to write a book that acknowledges the limitations of that rendering as much as it is helpless before those \u201cimages of the atrocious\u201d and the ways in which those images are forgotten even as they continue to haunt us.<\/p>\n

Seam<\/em>, in the end, is a deeply problematic and troubled book. It must be, because it attempts the impossible: to plumb the very thin line between witnessing and voyeurism.<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> How has translating Bengali poetry into English influenced your own work as a poet writing in English? Have you also written poetry in Bengali?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> I\u2019ve never written poetry in Bengali, though often I dream in it as a result of having grown up speaking it. It wasn\u2019t until I began translating that I realized how much I took for granted how deeply metaphorical and musical Bengali is until I began translating. \u201cAmar bukh fete jachche,\u201d for example, is a phrase that could loosely translate to \u201cI\u2019m sad,\u201d but literally means, \u201cmy chest is exploding.\u201d Translation has made me think about how poetry must do the dual work of being both specific and expansive. It has also keenly sharpened my awareness of language as both a tool for communication as well as a machine upon which the tiniest of cogs and screws are dependent. I\u2019ve acquired a deeper understanding of what Wittgenstein<\/a> might have meant when he wrote, \u201cLike everything metaphysical, the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.\u201d<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> If you were asked to create a syllabus for an introductory course to Bengali poetry, which poets would be on your reading list?<\/p>\n

TF:
\n<\/strong>Lalon Shah<\/a>
\nRabindranath Tagore<\/a>
\nNazrul Islam<\/a>
\nJasimuddin<\/a>
\nJibananda Das<\/a>
\nKusumkumari Das<\/a>
\nNabaneeta Dev Sen<\/a>
\nAnuradha Mahapatra<\/a><\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> When balancing your teaching and editing duties with your writing life, what does your typical writing schedule look like?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> Lately, I\u2019ve been drawing a distinction between drafting and writing. I\u2019m constantly immersed in viewing the world as a writer, even when I\u2019m not drafting poems. I carry poems around for entire years sometimes before drafting anything on the page. To be honest, sometimes when I\u2019m writing, it looks like I\u2019m napping (though sometimes I actually am just napping).<\/p>\n

I try to be practical about writing, but one of the things I love about writing is that it isn\u2019t so practical. On days I teach, I don\u2019t try to immediately write, because it takes time to transition into the kind of headspace writing requires. On days I work in a windowless cubicle, I try to write early in the morning before I\u2019ve checked email, made coffee, or even brushed my teeth. But truly, there\u2019s no real rhyme or reason. It is what I love to do more than anything in the world, so I make time for it.<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> Do you have a writing group or writing partners? How does working with other writers affect your writing process?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> I continue to sustain long-lasting individual conversations with a couple of other writers, and I participate from time to time in The Grind<\/a>, which emphasizes the disciplined and daily practice of writing over the course of a month. Any number of conversations with other writers, be it exchanging work, a discussion of craft, or sharing poems by our favorite poets, encourages me to take more risks and write harder and with more heart.<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> Can you tell us a bit about your relationship with Kundiman? How have the resources that Kundiman provides served you as a writer both in and outside of the retreat?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> I spent many years afraid of my own Asianness. I didn\u2019t want to be pigeonholed as a South Asian writer and avoided any organizations or anthologies or publications that presented themselves as Asian. Not too long after graduate school, though, I began to reconsider the limited ways I was viewing myself as distinct from any community: I\u2019ve always been afraid of my own vulnerabilities. Conversations with Cave Canem<\/a> fellow Jamaal May<\/a> and Kundiman fellow Matthew Olzmann<\/a> anchored my decision to apply. Kundiman continues to be a place where my own complicated histories as a South Asian and American simultaneously remain intact and fall away, and I continue to be moved by the difficult dialogues I sustain with fellows who have become loved ones I can\u2019t imagine my life without (y\u2019all know who y\u2019all are).<\/p>\n

LR:<\/strong> What new projects are you working on now?<\/p>\n

TF:<\/strong> In addition to translating a 19th century Bengali poet, I\u2019m at work on a second collection of poems and a memoir. I\u2019m also collaborating with composer Jacob Cooper<\/a> and photographer Elizabeth Herman<\/a>, respectively.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

For more by Tarfia Faizullah, see her poem “At Zahra’s Salon for Ladies<\/a>” in Issue 4 of <\/em>Lantern Review, as well as the accompanying post <\/a>on process that she wrote for our blog last spring.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), winner of the 2012 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, The Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, and are anthologized in Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (Wipf & Stock, 2012). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"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":[7],"tags":[948,950,949,850],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416"}],"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\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6416"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6426,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6416\/revisions\/6426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6416"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6416"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6416"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}