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Very early in my spiritual education, I was taught by my elders to be cautious about making claims. One reason for this caution—particularly when it comes to making claims about oneself—is that claims are often rooted in the ego. They betray the fact that so much of what we claim about ourselves can be better understood as a Divine endowment to us. So instead of being prideful, a more honest conception of self-knowledge is one that is grounded in gratitude, appreciation, and awareness of our own contingencies.
As the years have gone by, I’ve considered the wisdom behind this teaching in areas other than self-knowledge. One of the risks of prematurely making claims is that doing so can shut the door to curiosity. Coming out of the gates too quickly and pronouncing judgments about the world, and then placing those judgments into neat, definitive categories strips us of the chance to wade in matters that are ambivalent and ambiguous; to consider and then reconsider our ideas and conclusions; and to not just be receptive to change, but to acknowledge and welcome its inevitability.
I was again thinking about this resistance to easy categorization while reading Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut poetry collection, Theophanies. Capacious, layered, and tinged with the sublime, Ali’s poems weave together scripture, questions of lineage and inheritance, and the embodied experiences of being a South Asian Muslim woman. In doing so, she creates a collection that feels like a symphony: with each read through, different component parts of the orchestra reveal themselves with greater depth and insight. And as she grapples with questions of faith and womanhood on the page, and pushes the formal boundaries a poem can take, it’s tempting to view her collection as a critique or evaluation of the cultural and spiritual traditions she comes from. But that description, too, feels too narrow to capture the care and curiosity with which she writes. Rather than being positioned as either for or against traditions, Ali writes from within them. And in doing so, she pushes them forward to new heights.
I spoke with Ali this past December about Theophanies, and we discussed a range of topics, from embodiment, names and naming, to the limitations of language and more.
Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity
Farooq Chaudhry
Theophanies is a multilingual collection and you weave together Arabic, English, and Urdu in the poems. I’m very curious about what each of those languages means to you? And then what happens when you bring them all together on the page in a poem? Or what happens when you experience different permutations of those languages alongside each other?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
I’m a native Urdu speaker, my parents are Pakistani immigrants, and so Urdu is my first language and the language of my home. And then it’s also where I think I was first exposed to poetry in the form of ghazals because my dad just loves music, and I grew up listening to Urdu ghazals in the car. So Farida Khanum, for example, is a really big influence on some of the more musical elements in my work. And then Arabic, of course, is the language of my faith. And Qur’anic Arabic specifically has so much mystery imbued into it. I don’t think I would be a poet at all, if not for the Qur’an. And so I think that Urdu poetry feels so inaccessible to me in a certain way, because it’s like a whole different elevated language that I can admire and be in awe of, but not really access. But then Arabic, because I have a little bit of distance from it, because it’s not a language that I speak, it’s just one that I read, it’s something that I can only study, there’s more access to mystery for me there, because, you know, one Arabic word has like seven potential interpretations.
I think that different languages unlock different levels of mystery for me. Different languages give me access to different parts of my brain and parts of what poetry is, if that makes sense. And then bringing them all together on the page just feels like the truest version of who I am. English is the language that I navigate the world in most often, but it’s not the most musical or interesting language that I have to work with. And to write completely in English would be to neglect the more alive and rich languages that I have access to. But then to try to pretend that I can write poetic Urdu would just be embarrassing. And then to try to commit fully to Arabic as a non-Arabic speaker would also feel kind of artificial. And so I feel like the only option is to kind of try to weave all three together however best I can.
Farooq Chaudhry
Yeah, definitely. One thing that I’ve always found very fascinating is the language that we pray in. Like when you make dua, do you use English?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
No no, I do dua in Urdu.
Farooq Chaudhry
I find that so fascinating. My family is Punjabi, and one day I asked my dad what language he prays in and he told me that he makes dua in Punjabi. But he speaks to us in Urdu. And I have noticed it’s so much easier for me, too, to feel more connected in dua in Urdu. There’s something there—to the parts of ourselves that we can access through different languages.
I want to ask about your relationship to poetry in general. I imagine it was somewhat of an inheritance given your middle name. And so what has been your relationship to poetry over time? Was there like a formative point in which you made it your own, when it wasn’t just an inheritance? I don’t know if it ever felt like an obligation given your name, but when did it become your own? Or did it always feel like it was your own?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
So when I was younger, I really wanted to be a novelist. And I still have that deep, deeply buried, desire to, but I don’t know if I can do that.
Farooq Chaudhry
Insha’Allah.
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Insha’Allah insha’Allah. Sentences really scare me. But I think when I was younger, I did that thing that so many people do, where they just write their little emotional rhyming poems, in like fifth or sixth grade. I found so many of those at my parents’ house, and they’re horrible, but they’re so earnest. So I feel like initially, I had this sort of natural, childlike gravitation to poetry as a form of catharsis for all those angsty feelings that you have when you’re younger. But I didn’t actually think you could be a poet or pursue poetry. I really enjoyed reading poetry in middle school and high school where we were reading Sylvia Plath and E.E. Cummings and, you know, the standard American canon. And I have always really liked close reading. And so I think that kind of lent me this innate interest in poetry, where I feel like it’s less fun to analyze a novel for me and to try to break it down into all of its parts than it is to kind of sit and puzzle over the wonder that’s going on in a poem because it’s such a condensed, distilled thing.
I realized that I wanted to pursue poetry in college. I was a poli-sci major, and then I added an English double major, because I wanted to be a lawyer. So I took this constitutional law class and I was so into it. But then I was also taking a creative writing class at the same time and eventually I realized that I wasn’t interested in practicing law, per se, but I just wanted to pour over the language of the law, and think about like, oh, this particular phrase here means that, so the precedent for so-and-so is this, which means yada yada. And so the language puzzle of it was what’s really interesting to me and not actually its application in the world. And so then taking all those at the same time, and you realize, okay, so I definitely don’t want to do this. And I wanted to figure out what I can do with creative writing, so I took this summer memoir intensive class, and it was like a week-long thing for four hours a day.
My professor kind of really nicely explained to me that it’s great that you liked this class, and that you generated all this work, but if most of what you’re writing is poetry, and that’s what you’re reading, then you should probably think about doing that. So I stuck with poetry because that’s what came most naturally. Whenever I tried to write—like, I tried doing short stories, tried starting a novel, tried memoir, I tried so many different things—but I always gravitated back towards poetry. And I think it’s because I like how timeless a distilled poem can feel, how it’s like outside of time. You just really live in one particular moment. So yeah, I think poetry became the sort of natural gravitation for me in school. But for most of my life, I didn’t think it was possible to be a poet. And it feels like a lot of happy accidents that kind of led to where I am today, where I never really sat down and said, oh, I dream of being a poet.
Farooq Chaudhry
I wanted to ask you about names and just the idea of naming things. We come from a tradition in which the Divine Names play such an important role and have led to this great outpouring of theological and mystical literature, and then one of the things that makes Adam distinct is that God taught him the Names of All Things. So there’s this sense of naming things being so central to being alive and being human. So I’m curious what you think the role of naming things plays in your poetry, or the centrality of naming things to poetry?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
I could answer this like twelve different ways, so I’m going to ramble a little. On the one hand, I have this sense of strange nominative determinism, where I’m so interested in my own name that it kind of made me a poet because my middle name is ghazal and I’ve always been interested in ghazals. And I am someone who really struggles to actually be in the world and be present and aware of what’s going on around me. I feel like I’m very in my head all the time. And by naming things and calling them what they are, or what I see them to be, in my work is as much me trying to notice the world I’m in, and trying to notice who is in the world with me, or before me, or after me, as much as it is me declaring anything, if that makes sense.
I’m also very curious about where my attention goes and where it fails to go. So something that I’m really committed to is to try to name plants and name people and name things as concretely and specifically as I can. And I still don’t do it perfectly. It’s an ongoing endeavor. But that feels really important to me to remember that I’m alive now, and that I won’t be forever, and I should see what is around me while I am.
And then naming also feels really important as a project to me because I have a lot of anxiety around my name and also the concept of something being like a stated fact. I’m from a very mixed background where my father’s family is Shia and my mother’s family is Sunni. And so growing up, there was so much conflict around what tradition do you follow, and whose names are spoken where, and whose names should not be spoken where. And then I’m a Syed on my dad’s side as well, and all my other female cousins have Syeda in front of their name, but I don’t. And then my brothers have these really traditional names of the Imams but then I got a fits-in-the-western mouth name, Sarah (pronounced saw-rah) so people can call me Sarah (ser-ah). And so I’ve also always been very curious about how my parents named me and what kind of compromises were made and what lives in my name. I practice as a Sunni, but my last name is Ali, I’m Syed, I come from a very particular lineage. And then I’m Ansari on my mom’s side, but you wouldn’t know it because I don’t hold the Ansari last name. So yeah, I just feel like there’s so much history in a name that you have to parse out. And for me, it’s always been a very difficult thing to parse.
Also, because there’s like twelve parts to my answer, my aunt on my mother’s side sent this really detailed family tree of our family but she left all the women out to protect their ‘awrah. So it was just all of the men’s names, and there’s just these little blank spaces where the women’s names would be. And she later sent a version just to the women in the family, including all the women’s names as well, but that came days later. So when I first got this and was looking for my name—I was like 15, or 16—and I was just so devastated not to see myself there, and not to see my grandmother’s name on there, and my mother’s. And that kind of catalyzed this obsession with like, where do all the women go if we’re not writing down their names, and who actually takes care to preserve them or to archive them in a certain way? And so yeah, I just feel like even one name holds so much. And it’s not apparent until you talk to someone, you know. I’ve just been really stuck on my name and figuring out what to do with it and what it holds and what I want it to hold.
Farooq Chaudhry
In this collection, you write towards a lot of silences. There’s the silence of how we discuss and remember Partition—which is something I think we still haven’t really grappled with completely as a community. There are the silences that take the shape of privileging women in faith, like in the lineage of faith that you wrote, starting from Eve. There are also the silences of women’s perspectives in narratives around marriage, where men’s perspectives are often so dominant. I wanted to ask about that approach and whether it was a conscious thing where you would locate all these gaps in how we understand the world, and once you locate them, then you take to naming them, and then you take to just kind of filling in those silences?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Erasure is interesting, and also really troubling to me. And so coming to terms with that family tree was a big catalyst for me in kind of resisting erasure, resisting the erasure of a name or a lineage. I feel like when something is erased or not spoken of, it doesn’t necessarily go away. It just goes deeper into a dark place, and then manifests in a different way. And so what I’m thinking of is how, you know, there’s like generational trauma, and then what does that look like in South Asians? Like, in my family, there’s just so much anger, where I feel like because a lot of the men in my family could not talk about what they experienced as a result of Partition, and that silence just went somewhere else in their bodies, and then came out as anger.
But that’s still not something that I think is easy to point to or easy to identify. That’s a conclusion that I’m coming to as someone with a little bit of distance. That’s what I’ve noticed. I don’t want to say diagnosing, but it’s just what I’m noticing. And I can’t even say that with confidence, because I wouldn’t want someone to hear that or read that and then be upset. But that’s just what happened. So I think that the only thing I can do with all the silences that I’m sitting in between is to try to fill them in as best as I can in a more speculative or curiosity-driven way. I feel like with erasure and silence, a really tricky thing is accidentally writing over someone or writing over something. I don’t want to do that. And so the most respectful and appropriate thing for me to do in my poetry felt like just following my curiosity about who’s missing and whose stories I’m interested in, and wondering what they might have said, if that makes sense.
I’m not trying to write a polemical thing where I’m like, “Oh, well, Bibi Maryam is the only woman named in the Qur’an and that’s bad, and everyone else should have been named, too.” That’s not what I’m interested in saying or doing at all. It’s more just, “Oh, okay, so we have a Bibi Maryam’s story here, and she’s named, and what wondrous thing. I wonder why she’s the only woman named, and who are the other women? And what are their stories?” without trying to project some sort of agenda or even trying to assume what they would want or who they were. It’s just me exploring a curiosity of like, what are the other stories? And who might those women have been? How might those women have felt? I think I’m really curious about their humanity before God.
Farooq Chaudhry
Your poems can be plausibly described as combining both the sacred and the profane. But I am somewhat skeptical of creating a dichotomy between the two. And so I want to ask you about that—is existence itself one large theophany, or do you believe in that distinction between the sacred and the profane? Or is everything sacred? Everything profane? How would you consider that?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
I don’t think that I agree with that dichotomy at all. I think that we do like to put these things in very separate boxes. And I think that people get very hung up on the concept of purity when they think about faith and spirituality. And especially with religion, I think people can get really polemical when they think that religion has some sort of purity-driven agenda, I suppose. And so that’s something that I do reject. I think that if we’re thinking of what’s profane, as what might be vulgar, or dirty, I feel like religion covers everything in such detail and specificity to the point that like, maybe you might get uncomfortable. Like, the whole point is that the religion is so vast and so applicable that, you know, everything is thought of, and there is an answer for everything. And that covers all the things that were culturally taught or shameful or dirty, or what have you. And so I feel like you can’t really separate the sacred and the profane.
And if we’re thinking that, you know, even the animals and the tree are doing dhikr, and are also turning towards God, and that and everything is angled towards God, I feel like that can’t exclude anything. I think everything is oriented toward the sacred. But I also don’t want to say anything with certainty. I feel like my work is very intentionally ambivalent because I’m not interested in the project of declaring something. Like, God already declared everything, I don’t need to declare anything. And then there was something that the poet Kaveh Akbar said once, that the only people who speak with certainty are tyrants and zealots. I feel like that really is branded on my heart.
Farooq Chaudhry
I want to ask you about embodiment. I think there’s two different ways I’ve noticed this plays out in your work. One is the body being both a site of exploration and meaning making, almost like an infusion. Your poem “My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nails” is a perfect example of the body being a site of meaning. And then the other way is embodying an Other, such as writing from the perspective of different voices, like Hajar (alayha-salaam) in your poem “Epistle: Hajar”. Let’s start with the first one there: what is the role of the body in your poetry, and the site of the body, and what does that do for you?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
So in a lot of ways, it feels like my body is all that I have to work with. It is my only tool in this world, like, that’s what I’ve borrowed from God, that’s what God gave me. I have this physical form, and it’s how I navigate everything. And it’s also the first site of experience, where everything that happens and everything that I experience, it starts with my body and it always has started with my body like from birth. And they even say, right, that the first time a baby cries, it’s because shaytaan (the devil) pokes the baby or something? I don’t know how true that is. But I’m like okay, from the get-go, your body is being touched in a certain way, and so the body is the first site of experience.
It’s also why I’m interested in form and formal poetry because I think of the way the poem looks as a body, so I feel like form and content get really married for me. If I’m seeing the world through my body, I feel like it’s only natural that I’m curious about what a body of work looks like, or what the shape of a poem looks like, and what it does, and where it speaks, and where certain things are inflected on it.
And also, I’m a woman, I’m a woman who wears a headscarf and ascribes to a certain sort of modesty, and a certain way of moving through the world. And I’m very conscious of that. I started hijab relatively recently. And because I started it in adulthood, I feel like I have this additional gaze of my own that I project back onto myself. So it’s like I’m watching myself walk through the world, in a really curious way. I think that I feel watched all the time, as a Muslim woman, a visibly Muslim woman, as a brown person in the US, you know, and even by my own phone. And so with this first book, I really—resent is a strong word—but I resist the assumption that a poet’s work is always autobiographical. And so I think that’s why, going into the second part of your question, I tried to turn towards persona a lot and bring in other voices. Because I don’t want someone to read a poem and think that they know me, or think that they know everything that is true about me, the writer, me, the woman.
Poems are places where I go to create other modes of thinking. The poem is the place where I do my thinking. It’s not where I am writing my memoir, it’s where I’m exploring something that’s interesting to me. And something that I’m interested in, perhaps about me, but in a creative, distant way. And so bringing other bodies to the page, bringing other voices to the page, and kind of trying on someone else’s voice becomes a really like generative space for me. I feel like we learn as children by mimicking and by observing others, and sometimes it feels like that’s what I’m doing in my work when I adopt a persona or think about other bodies. Because even my own body doesn’t feel like mine.
Farooq Chaudhry
To go back to the second part of that question, I’m very curious, what is that encounter like? When you are speaking as Hajar (alayha-salaam), in the poem “Epistle: Hajar.” There’s an “I” in that poem which is very striking. And then there’s also “Self Portrait as a Mouthpiece of God.” So when you’re writing from these perspectives, from the prospectus of prophets and these great women, for example, how did you build a relationship with them? Did you imagine yourself having conversations with them? Did you put yourself in their bodies? What were those encounters like?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I’m trying to fully inhabit them. But I feel really comfortable with my imagination and where it might go. I think imagination is a good, fruitful, alive thing that helps us think of better possibilities for our futures on this earth. I’m not troubled by where my imagination might take me. And I think where it starts for me is lots of research. I write from a very awestruck point of view where I’m just baffled by who these women were and what there is to know about them, so I do a lot of research into who they are. And that’s also why I bring in multiple texts because I’m also interested in multiple versions of a story. Like, I come from a mixed background where there’s a lot of disagreement about what the correct version of something is. And then Sarah in the Qur’an is one thing, and then Sarah in the Bible is something completely different, in the Old Testament especially, and even just the way that God is characterized in the Old Testament is wildly different from Islam. And so research for me looks like comparing different versions, too. And so because of that, I feel like I still have a lot of distance between me and who Bibi Sarah might have actually been. And so then, because it’s this amalgamation of he-said-she-said between these versions that we have, I’m curious about what that construction is as much as I’m curious about the actual person. So I’m in conversation with the various sources that we have, and so it’s like one step removed.
From there, the project becomes not even me stepping into a certain persona, but just exploring, what would an archetypal woman’s voice, stepping into the meeting point of all these different versions, look like? So it’s not really forming a person, but a figure or an archetype of sorts, and then exploring what that archetype might be. It is very much from a place of love, where it’s like, how can I, on the page, get closer to what you might have been? And persona feels like an imaginative way to do that without trying to appropriate or definitively say who anyone was.
Farooq Chaudhry
Going back to the subject of Partition, and womanhood, and the different wounds that exist, I was very curious and fascinated by the connection you make between the macroscopic and microscopic, like in your poem “Cicatrix.”
It kind of goes back to the question about embodiment. What role does that play in your poetic imagination to make these connections between the macroscopic and microscopic? Partition, for example, is such a beast of a topic where this connection between the two isn’t metaphorical in many ways.
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Yeah, Partition is a huge, unending thing that I feel like I barely scraped an inch off the surface of. I was also really weary of trying to write too far into that just because it’s such an uncomfortable presence, literally, in my current family, that it just still feels like a kind of taboo thing that I don’t have access to, or maybe I’m not supposed to have access to. But I think it’s that: because Partition in particular feels unending, and it’s ongoing in so many ways—so many really troubling, horrible ways—that time becomes a hinge. In order to look at one thing, you have to start from the microscopic. You start with one image or one moment or one body part or what have you. But that’s just a lens with which to consider these broader, ominous, horrible things that are much larger, that are kind of just circling all of our daily mundanities. And so the microscopic feels like a portal to the macroscopic.
The best poetry in my opinion takes something so mundane and specific and small and tactile, and uses it as a portal into some universal thing that we see ourselves in or that I see myself in. I think that’s how I know something has succeeded for me. And that’s also where I feel like poetry becomes a good place to consider something that hurts you, or wounds you in a more peripheral, but still interesting way.
Farooq Chaudhry
In your poem “Fatal Music,” the last stanza begins with “iqra” (read / recite) and “qul” (say), and then the next word is “but.” And it made me wonder, what of faith, and what of life in general, lies beyond language?
Sarah Ghazal Ali
I want to say that language is like the threshold. That’s what you step through. That’s where you start. That’s where the first foot goes. We encounter faith through the Qur’an, you know, for us. But then that’s just the doorway. It’s like God trying to reach us at the lowest level where we are, right? And the way to do that is through words because that’s what we have. So I feel like beyond language is everything.
I’m also getting stuck on how language is a technology, and we use it to hurt other people. I think it was the poet M. NourbeSe Philip who said—and I might be misquoting—that language is the first sign of violence. Even right now with what’s happening in Palestine, you have Netanyahu calling Palestinians human animals, right? So it begins in language. You have to be able to dehumanize someone through words, and that’s the first step that leads to another form of violence, and then that leads to another, and that leads to a genocide. So it’s curious that language is the technology that we have to enact violence upon others and to kill other people, but then it’s also what we have to try to encounter the Divine in some way. Like it’s all we have.
I can’t even say that I think faith is entirely mediated through language. Like, yeah, you have the words, you have the Scripture, but it’s not even about how we receive it. It’s how we live with it, you know? And then we try to, I guess, see outside the window. I want to say all of faith is beyond language, and to limit it to just the language would be really dangerous in a way. We use it to step through that portal or that threshold and go beyond. God knows what’s there.
Farooq Chaudhry
My last question is about your poem “When Nabra Hassanen Wakes Up in Jannah.” The repetition of her name throughout the poem felt like a dhikr, and that was interwoven with more dhikr with translations of subhanAllah, Alhamdulilah, and Allahu Akbar. I’d love for you to talk about this poem. It was such a gift to the community for you to have paid homage to one of our sisters like that, and to keep her alive in that way. It felt like honoring a communal obligation we have to remember her. So I really just appreciated that and would love to hear you speak about that poem.
Sarah Ghazal Ali
Her death hit very close to home. Her masjid is one that some of my family members go to. And the violence and tragedy of her death unfortunately is not a unique thing—this has happened and continues to happen to so many women. Another poem in the collection alludes to Noor Mukadam who was murdered in Pakistan. That kind of loss and violence against women haunts me. I’m very preoccupied with how insidious it is, and how it’s everywhere. Life itself is so fragile, and we don’t remember people, we don’t keep people who are lost in our minds as much as I would like us to as a whole. Even now, attention around Palestine is already starting to dwindle. As a whole, we struggle with sustained attention.
And so repeating Nabra’s name over and over felt really important, and repetition became a way to honor and name and revive presence. Throughout the book, I look at mothers and at the women who preceded me, and then I consider women now, and women who are gone—but we can’t consider them to be completely gone because there is an after. And so, what might that after look like? It gave me some solace to think about that, to try and imagine what Nabra’s experience in jannah might be. There’s already so much despair and so much pain around this, and I didn’t want to amplify that further. Instead, the poem offers some sweetness. I think that’s something we owe our martyrs and our dead as well. If the poem is not for them, then it’s for those of us who are still living.
POETRY
Theophanies
By Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books
Published January 16, 2024
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