Throughout Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024), Sarah Ghazal Ali’s beautifully calibrated full-length debut, divisions separating poetry and prayer reverberate with a steady frequency. Lyric in impulse, the collection’s formal restlessness proves generative as its elegies, litanies, pantoums, fragments, parables, personas, and self-portraits interrogate the tensions between recordkeeping and erasure. Although Theophanies clearly displays Ali’s intellectual rigor and ethos, her poems are equally intimate and deeply felt. “My faith is feminine, breasted / and irregularly bleeding //,” she declares in the second section of “My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nails,” “. . . unburies maybe-mothers / to suckle them sacred.”
Rather than some idealized notion of what constitutes the faithful, however, the populous of Theophanies is, at times, rebellious, vulnerable, imperfect. Declares the speaker of “Ghazal Ghazal”: “My father practiced his english with me. I want to blame him. / My voice void of, my throat hostile to ghazals.” And, in an entry in which a speaker describes a dream that borders on revelation, negotiates Ali: “. . . Every vision is redolent and terrible. / Every temporal sight either a miracle or mistake” (“Theophanies”).
Filling her stanzas with daughters and mothers, women unacknowledged and named, Ali remains steadfast in her testament to the refracting light of family and belief, religious doctrine and lived experience. As its poems labor to underscore bridges between Abrahamic faiths, Theophanies is likewise multilingual, incorporating Arabic and Urdu into predominantly English lines. What results is an exciting invention across traditions as the poet avoids the polemic and writes toward nuance, emphasizing the interplay between story and language. What’s received is oftentimes resisted or reinvented. “So I haven’t washed in days,” declares the speaker in “Magdalene Diptych,” “What do you know of a spectator’s plight?”
I read and admired Sarah Ghazal Ali’s poems in magazines before we briefly met during her tenure as a fellow at the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. We’re now remote colleagues: Ali is poetry editor of West Branch, a magazinewhere I’ve worked for a decade and a half and currently serve as creative nonfiction editor and editor-at-large. Although we began the following conversation via email in late September 2023, it seems fitting that Ali’s final answers arrived in my inbox during the Holy Month of Ramadan―a time of service, communal prayer, and spiritual introspection, or as she imagines in “Epistle: Hajar,” a period “. . . to cull want / from wait…”
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The Rumpus: The title of your extraordinary debut, Theophanies, suggests the visually intense appearance of God, i.e., a prophet’s ascension or the story of Moses and the burning bush. I can’t help but notice that “theophany” is threaded to “epiphany” both sonically and etymologically: the literal translation for the former being, “Manifestation of God”; the latter, “Manifestation from above.” What do you make of the epiphanic in lyric poetry? What kind of revelations most move you?
Sarah Ghazal Ali: I love the way you describe the theophanic as “visually intense.” It’s that intensity of apparition that I both read for and try to reach for in my work. The image—seen, conjured, constructed—as epiphany is what awakens my senses and brands a poem into my marrow. I tried to play with that idea of revelation in “Self Portrait as Epiphany,” a poem that unfolds in clipped, declarative statements. The heart of that poem, perhaps its lyric epiphany for me, is “a clot. From a clot” which then transforms in meaning to “From a clot / I’ll make men.” The way truth can shimmer between one act or image and another is what moves me most and propels my thinking, my writing.
I love the unexpected revelation—that which offers itself in a quiet moment, buried in the middle of the poem. I am moved by the revelation that comes but does not announce itself, as a powerful ending or climax might, but waits to be returned to and recognized.
Rumpus: Reading Theophanies, I thought immediately of A God in the House. Co-edited by Katherine Towler and Ilya Kaminsky, the anthology contemplates questions of wonder, suffering, doubt, nonexistence, and exile along the intersection of poetry and faith. Because Theophanies draws from Abrahamic narratives, I’m curious about how religious texts or notions of God informed or continues to inform your sense of language—rhythm, diction, pattern-making, metaphor, the refrain? Did you have a formal religious education as a child?
Ali: I was not raised in a particularly religious household, and as a child, my Islamic education had many starts and stops. My mother is Sunni and father is Shia, and my private attempts to negotiate between the two sects were often painful and rarely successful. I’m still feeling my way through that persisting in-betweenness. But spiritually, I’ve never felt alone a day in my life, never doubted a divine power or its omnipresence. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could stop myself from talking to and listening for the divine.
My mother keeps a page of the Haroof al-Muqatta’at, the Isolated Letters, taped to the fridge. These are letters from the Arabic alphabet that begin a number of chapters of the Qur’an but are to be read independently—as letters, not as part of a word. They’re often called the mysterious letters, because no scholars definitively know what they mean or represent—it’s like beginning a sentence confidently with “QSE, . . .” and providing no context. For much of my life, I have found uncertainty unbearable. But I find in these letters a reminder that there are limits to knowledge. There are things I’m just not meant to know. They’ve taught me to privilege bewilderment and humility. I wouldn’t be a poet or interested in language as a technology were it not for my relationship to these letters or to the rhythm and refrains throughout the Qur’an.
Rumpus: In “Story of the Cranes,” we’re introduced to Baba, who can name the poem’s titular birds “in Farsi, Urdu.” When it comes to Arabic, however, his counterpart, “a young girl with a face full of eyes” must learn “on her own.” Language, it seems, like faith, is communal, cultural, personal, generational. Whether in “Matrilineage [Parthenogenesis],” “Matrilineage [Recovered],” or elsewhere, names, naming, namesakes, et cetera prove critical. Equally important is the withholding of names. How does this concern apply to Theophanies as a whole?
Ali: Women’s names are often excluded from Muslim family trees, as is the case for the version of my maternal family tree I first encountered as a teenager. Names are considered part of a woman’s aurah, her most intimate parts, and are so concealed from public view. I have little to no access to my own matrilineal history and no living grandmothers. In the absence of their names, their voices, I insist on naming all I can. This is most formally present in the three “Matrilineage” poems in the book, where I tried to conjure and name into being what and who has otherwise been lost to me.
There are so many things—language, elders, culture, faith—that it feels like I have to try to save for myself. No one else is going to do it for me, so the book became a place to name and document and cherish and remember. The 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan also haunts this book and charges the poems with that push and pull between naming and erasure. Much of my family history is unknown to me because it is too painful for family members to remember, to speak out loud. In the face of such withholding, I have to tread lightly and avoid recreating harm, and so Theophanies circles those absences and losses without trying to write over them without sensitivity. In many poems, brackets help maintain that boundary but create room for what might lay beyond them: brackets as windows, open and waiting.
Rumpus: I’m interested in the relationship between family trees, religious doctrine, and political records: the power of authorship runs through such texts, as does the formalization of thinking. As a writer, where do you fall in relationship to the making of such documents? What does Theophanies articulate about hidden lives or language that you’d like to be heard?
Ali: I touched on this earlier—the poem as a place I can write myself into, a knowing I can build brick by brick, word by word. Along with uncertainty, I’m anxious about loss and absence, especially the possibility of its permanence. It’s human nature to want to know, and touch, and through knowing and touching, control. But I can’t control what I have and haven’t inherited. Who blotted out the names of the women? Who drew the line down the map? Which letters, in what order? The person or power holding the pen controls the narrative, sure, but only that singular narrative. I think of a document as one tree in a forest that does not amount to wilderness, and a book as the shade cast by a few trees growing close to each other. It’s not everything, nor does it try to be. Theophanies as a book articulates a posture of rendering. Negotiating with inheritance, legacy, or archives is as much a process of transmuting silences into sound as it is about surrendering to silence.
Rumpus: We’ve spoken privately about the influence of Agha Shahid Ali both in terms of his own remarkable poetry, as well as his championing of the ghazal. Theophanies includes several poems written in the form, each of which are tonally distinct and surefooted in their emotional register. And, yet, I’ve read a lot of lackluster ghazals! What’s missing in those that seem to fizzle out?
Ali: Oh, we could talk about just this for hours. It comes down to the absence of music. Ghazals are fundamentally, inextricably musical. I’ve written elsewhere about how the ghazal is an auditory immersion, and there are very few ghazals I’ve encountered in English that commit to music and relinquish narrative. I’m not sure I consider any of the English ghazals I’ve encountered true ghazals. Maybe that’s a controversial thing to say. But I consider mine to be failures—not musical, not traditional, not layered—as well, so!
Rumpus: “Ghazal on the Day of” opens with the powerful declaration, “Like god, I’ll create my image.” To what extent is Theophanies about not only creation, but self-creation?
Ali: Thank you for your deep engagement with the book, Shara. Theophanies reckons with and remakes and revises what it means to live in a gendered body and to inherit an enduring colonial and patriarchal legacy. What are we to do with what we’ve been born into—our bodies, our burdens, our families? I’ve tried in these poems to make some kind of matrilineal archive. I’ve tried to center those stories that are traditionally not made central.
In one of the title poems, “Theophanies,” I note that I could waste my breaths or wield them. I’m trying in this book to use those breaths to discern a self from a legacy of stories and scripture, and then parable my way into understanding what it even means to be an individual, to have selfhood. I write, as many do, to figure what it is I’m thinking. The poems make women, and then make the speaker in the image and example of such women, and then examine and remake the project of womanhood altogether. They braid and unbraid, weave and pull apart, and try to avoid essentializing. My own sense of womanhood feels like a frayed quilt I keep adding to.
Rumpus: Until I lived in Jordan, I hadn’t heard the Qur’anic story of Maryam (or Mary) mid-labor. The description of her crying in anguish beside the date palm deepened what I understood about Jesus’s mother from my Catholic upbringing. I love that Theophanies speaks across cultures, scripture, and time. When did you become interested in incorporating cross-narratives, particularly those that relate to mothers and daughters?
Ali: This goes back to that feeling of in-betweenness for me. Because I was raised on the margins of two sects, I tend to automatically look for alternative versions or accounts of a given story. Facts are increasingly uninteresting to me. Right versus wrong is uninteresting to me. I’m looking for the nodes of connection, where I can say, my story is sister to yours. The details in your story deepen those in mine. I’m fascinated by matrilineage and how each mother in my motherline has pivoted, ever so slightly, from the example that preceded her. Are mothers and daughters mirrors, or foils, or something else? The mothers in Abrahamic, sacred history are ancillary and acted upon. The only way to get a full picture of them as actors and agents for me is to collage details across faiths and narratives.
Rumpus: Speaking of full pictures, “The Ideal” features a woman who is practical, fertile, uncomplaining, faithful, selfless, and perfectly coiffed. And yet―thanks to the precision and inventiveness of your characterization via action and imagery―she remains dynamic and fully realized. Can you speak about the subtle ironies of this poem and how you came to conceive of its central figure? How is she different than other women in the book?
Ali: Thank you! This poem is one of a handful that hasn’t been published anywhere but feels important to the project of the book. The body of a Muslim woman has long been politicized, long been manipulated into a site of violence. I wrote this poem during my MFA, after a frustrating workshop in which a man introducing my work to the group dismissed my poems as requiring too much work from the reader. He flattened my poems, flattened me, flattened the women speakers in my work. So I began “The Ideal” from a place of anger right after workshop, a few lines emerging while taking the bus home. The woman in this poem is a more contemporary, gum-chewing sort of virgin mother, a twenty-first century Mary or Sarah. She is wholly obedient where other women speakers in the book are more questioning and defiant. On another note—my thesis advisor, Ocean Vuong, urged me often to bring the tangible and tactile into my poems. I hope this poem succeeds to that end.
Rumpus: “Temporal” opens with a scene in which a father teaches his young daughter about brain anatomy, although the poem soon turns to a miracle; that is, the pregnancy of Sarah—the speaker’s namesake—Abraham’s ninety-year-old wife. I’m fascinated by the tension between belief and disbelief, feeling and reason, all of which “Temporal” claims is “the brain’s / doing.” Can you speak a little bit about where faith resides in Theophanies? Why is the human body—wombs, hair, thighs, eyes, heads, throats, et cetera—so important to this collection?
Ali: Every poem in Theophanies tries to puzzle through this question of where faith resides, so thank you for this question. My speakers are all women upon whom the duty—spiritual, cultural, political—of childbearing is projected. The human body, and in particular what is regarded as a woman’s body, is the only apparatus available to me through which to make sense of that duty, burden, or function. I believe that the body is a borrowed vessel, one that is inhabited but not owned. I believe that each part will speak on my behalf, or against me, before God. My fingers will tell what I used them for, as will my tongue, my eyes. That belief saturates everything, and as a result I often consider the individual features that make up a whole. Where does faith perch, where does it stretch, where does it die? I’m still thinking through ownership and devotion and agency, and the body is where all of my anxieties and reveries converge.
Rumpus: “Spectacle” and “Daughter” complicate and resist what’s expected of the central figure in “The Ideal.” Elsewhere, “Cicatrix” alters a subtle refrain in which “a good womb” becomes “a good woman” and, later, a “good wound.” Given their formal similarity, I wonder if these poems were written in proximity? How do they speak to each other?
Ali: “Daughter” and “Cicatrix” were written in the same time frame, yes. I appreciate that you noticed that! “Spectacle” was written long before, though, and “The Ideal” emerged in response to an experience I mentioned earlier. At Community of Writers a few years ago, Ada Limón gave a craft talk about assembling a book. She suggested, as a generative prompt, writing poems as responses or refutations to earlier poems—a way of complicating or deepening your own assertions, obsessions. The poems you mention are ones where I attempt that deepening, burrowing into the question of a woman’s duty, her assigned roles of maker and watcher.
Rumpus: What are you reading these days, and what’s next?
Ali: I’m revisiting John Berger and living novel-to-novel at the moment. Right now, I’m reading Sula by Toni Morrison. Whatever is next in poetry has much to do with surveillance and the gaze—God’s, the state’s, man’s, and my own.I’m also beginning to stretch myself in nonfiction and trying my hand at the essay. New motherhood rendered me speechless for the first few months, but slowly language is working its way back into my brain. I’m scrambling to document the frustration of that near daily befuddlement and the simultaneous intensity and monotony of days spent caring for my infant daughter.
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Author photograph by Beowulf Sheehan
