Publisher: Weavers Press, San Francisco, 2023
ISBN 978-8-9872152-0-3
Being bi-lingual is like being an amphibian. It’s a state of being at ease (and unease) with the intermingling fluid realms of two different languages. Sophia Naz is unapologetically amphibian. She celebrates her anxieties even as she remains utterly self-conscious of her playfulness. Her English verses are sometimes written via Urdu diction, drenched – in a lack of a better term – South Asian sensibilities. On the one hand, her poetry is full of frolic that conjures an image of a community around the fire; on the other, it is serious, self-referential and solitary. With four collections of poetry to her credit, Sophia Naz is a prominent South Asian poetic voice. Bark Archipelago is her fifth volume of poems, and the first one to be published in the U.S. Bark Archipelago has about 51 poems of varying sizes and forms.
The first thing a reader may notice is the use of humour arising from puns and innuendoes that similar-sounding words produce in different languages. These linguistic jokes are usually a part of a close circle of familiarity. That is the sense when one reads Naz –if you put in the effort, she will let you in. You will be rewarded with a nuanced perspective that she brings in poems from her life, her language. You, a reader, better be desirous of getting her world through her riddles as it’s something delectable, as in “Broadside”:
my bride grooms
latitude in language
riding a riddle side s/addled
Water flows through and around her poems rendering many of her verses archipelagos of varying sizes, of economical verses and expansive prose poems. Water imagery is invoked repeatedly. The volume of water in the world is enumerated in, “All the Water in the World”, we are given a list of fluids she has swallowed in a graphical but evocative, “Things I have Swallowed”, and in many poems her water breaks.
The interactions between the human and the natural world affect her. In “Blow Whole”, she draws description of whaling from Peterhead in the North Sea. The torment of a whale being harpooned is interjected with her verses in italics. These interjections range from profound musings on language and violence, to seemingly frivolous references to etymology of Urdu/Hindi sounding English words. The dialectic between the serious and the trivial that runs in most of her poems is her tool of subversion.
A word made flesh makes its own world. What worlds does flesh made
into words dismantle? […]
Many years later I saw a bride, her nose pierced with a large gold
hoop. There was no blood anywhere. […]
The word whale comes from the Proto-Indo-European root: bhel,
to blow, swell.
A heart swollen with kindness floats, becomes bhalla, but bhalla is also
an ancient weapon, language a double meaning bow.
The constant wordplay not only indicates a humorous bent of mind, but also shows a contemporary South Asian literary proclivity towards undercutting established norms in language, form, and the given identity. Being a woman from South Asia, there is a specific nostalgia with a painful awareness of dark histories and anger about the systematic oppression of women. “Uses of Length of Fabric” enumerates with wry sarcasm, abuse that a woman in stages of her growth may encounter.
Nothing, like the fruit
of blackmail to grow
a pit in her stomach, goad
suicide by hanging
a twisted bedsheet from a ceiling fan
or her favorite mango tree.
As a domestic archivist, she records conversations of different generations of women in her family. She brings sparkle to the quotidian by springing dazzling surprises. In “Lubhan”, she remarkably conveys a misunderstanding where her mother, a child of 6, mishears Lubhan or frankincense, as Lubhna, the name of a girl.
Lubhan she said to my six-year-old mother, who tried
to wriggle herself between twin mountains.
Lubna she heard, looking for a girl
trapped inside the fragrance, unseen.
The domesticity of the house with the references to embroidery, quilting and fabric works frequently punctuates her work. In another account of her grandmother (Nani), something as familial as a length of muslin fabric evokes the pain and the bloodshed of the partition of India and Pakistan.
By the time a clumsy Molotov cocktail landed in the courtyard of their house in Allahabad, the flaming petrol soaked rag fortuitously fizzling out in the fountain, it was abundantly clear that another river, baying for blood, was nipping at their heels and would soon rise above their heads and there was no choice but to leave the land of their birth, there were only three yards left.
Nani measured a handspan, bringing the fabric from her outstretched index finger to the tip of her nose, made a small snip and tore off a yard in a final partitioning of the parent gauze.
(from “Nine Yard of Muslin”)
It is not surprising that motherhood is another recurring theme in Naz’s poetry volume. Her body becomes the liminal space between the past and the future and between matters. Miscarriage is documented in a few poems, as in “Sashiko”:
Clouds in the hospital parking lot back
drop to symmetry of sheared trees. Nothing fruits
I break, blood reverts
to untidy default. This building is uneven, store-
rooms in the sky are sirrocumulus
An island is a patch
dead child, soft-red
blooming in tactile pocket, beak
stunned by illusion of clear glass
Naz has an acute sense of sound as she has of the visual imagery. She uses the Ghazal form twice in the volume however, she uses elements of the form in other poems in the form of echoes and refrains. With control over her craft, Naz makes novel connections linguistically. Some poetry titles are charming and some may even seem outlandish: “Auntropomorphia”, a pun on aunt, “Rose Myrrh, a Key”, which sounds like the translation of Urdu for the phrase “the everyday”, “Scar/abs” a pun on scars and scarabs, “Gull”, the bird and the Urdu for conversation and so on. There is a self-consciousness about the verses as the poet allows for some barbs about language. Some of these, in my opinion, are the most enriching moments in this poetry collection. Naz’s meta-poetical bent is quite enjoyable in “Undocumented”, “Emergency Room” and “Battles with Autocorrect”.
Behind the measured playfulness, one can see that Naz is a meticulous poet working to deepen the form and expanse of poetry. The poems may be about the here and the now, but Naz has a gift of turning the ordinary into the unfamiliar. Rife with visual imagery, her works spread out richly on the page. Sometimes she inserts blank lines, encouraging interaction and sometimes borrows words, phrases, and, lines from other sources in the quilt of her poems. If I can be pardoned for my conclusive allusion, Sophia Naz’s poetry is reminiscent of abstract art. It takes the reader into surreal dimensions where instead of wanting to know one definitive meaning of her poem, the reader enjoys the immersive affective sensations.
Sophia Naz is a poet, translator and artist.
Shweta Rao Garg is a poet, visual artist, and academic based in Baltimore, US. Her poetry collection, Of Goddesses and Women, was published by Sahitya Akademi in 2021. Her poems have been published in Indian Literature, Coldnoon, Everyday Poems, Postcolonial Text, Transnational Literature, Muse India etc. She is the author of the graphic novel The Tales from Campus: A Misguide to College, to be published by Crossed Arrows, India. Her collaborative poetry collection Shakespeare Walis: Verses on the Bard will be published by Flower Song Press in 2023. Her work deals with her lived experiences as a woman. Mythology, popular culture, and love are recurring themes in her work. Her artwork can be found at www.shwetaraogarg.com