ArtsBeat

"Always in the broken story there is more to tell," writes Kazim Ali in Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities, his ground shifting, genre-crossing, time reversing lyric memoir newly published by Wesleyan University Press.  Written in what he describes as an "accretion of sentences" with "a little autobiography littered on the surface" rather than paragraphs of conventional prose narrative,  Bright Felon consists of fifteen sections, each corresponding to a city Ali has lived in as "a poet, a Muslim, and [person] of a particular persuasion" in receding order from the present to his youth.
 
Ali--who teaches creative writing at Oberlin College and at the University of Southern Maine--was born in London, England to Indian parents of Muslim heritage, and spent a significant portion of his youth and teen years in the Buffalo area, where much of his family continues to reside.  Over the past decade, he has quietly emerged as one of the indispensable voices of our time.  No writer now working within the constraints of postmodern poetics is more adept at articulating a mystical, beatific spirituality equally rooted in his Islamic faith and the concreteness of the secular world.
 
In two previous collections of poems The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions) and The Far Mosque (Alice James Books), and his novel Quinn's Passage (BlazeVox),  Ali's deeply meditative, language-centered, and profoundly self-questioning work stands as an eloquent refutation to the simplistic misrepresentations of Islam in the mainstream media and affirmation of what it means to be a practicing Muslim in the contemporary world.  "What is my war?" he asks in this volume.  "Not the one you think."

"Who are we and when in time, bordered in amniotic grit..." he interjects in one of the asides that interrupts the pointillistic flow of his Proustian fragments.  "Did I learn the way breath moves into and out of a person, and that a body is only a place the soul coalesces./ Or is it the other way around, the body like an antenna.  The body the real thing pulling the soul-essence of the universe into its house."  
 
The fifteen "cities" Ali has lived in during his adult life range from storied ancient and modern metropolises--Cairo, Paris, Barcelona, New York City, Washington, D.C., even a brief residence on the island of Corsica--to decidedly less picturesque communities: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, and Clarence, New York.  The specificity of each locale is so grounded in the language of the senses, however, that each new experience evokes a memory of the past.  "The cities of the past--all built geographically on top of each other, but also historically, culturally, linguistically," he writes, "Every event so long after the other that history itself is hardly a chain but a conflation or a conflagration."
 
In Cairo, he notes "the people I see walking down the street exactly resemble the figures in the papyrus paintings, in the carvings."   That observation of a certain formal stiffness of gait triggers a memory:  "In Clarence [New York] once, at the height of winter, the snow two feet deep, seventeen wild turkeys picking their way through the yard, heading toward the house."
 
"Classical Islamic arts refract individuality through form," Ali writes, noting that in Egyptian myth when Osiris was torn to pieces by his brother Set, Isis traveled the world in search of the fragments to reassemble him.   Writing about Emily Dickinson, a poet Galway Kinnell insisted wrote out of "fury," Ali reminds us "that her books had been broken apart, that her poems even in their 'authentic' versions had been relineated/  So everything I knew [of her] had actually come through decades of editing and authorizing."
 
"So it was possible after all for a suppressed voice, a redirected voice, a suffocated or strangled one, still to speak," he concludes.  For Ali--whose first name Kazim means "patience" in Arabic--all the displacements of his life, the itinerant wanderings from city to city, all these fragments are reassembled in his own journey of immanence.

"There is a place where the flesh of the body--the mind being ensconced within its cells and chemical reactions--and the self of the "immortal spirit" do not reach each other; a place we do not connect and that, this lack, the earthly place we cannot get to be a metaphor for that, is a place of God," he writes.  "Faltering perhaps, fading for sure, though I mispronounce myself, I will speak." 
 
 
--R.D. Pohl