Beauty and Nothingness: The poetry of Sophia Naz
Image courtesy: Yoda Press
In Sophia Naz’s fourth poetry collection Open Zero (2021), humanity is not on a pedestal, but only serves as one of smaller units that make up the flawed, beautiful ecosystem of the world.
In Sophia Naz’s work, the poet invites the reader to share—for brief, fleeting moments—the superpower of her very specific perspective. Through her words and verses, Naz has the ability to animate and inanimate her subject in the very same breath, to observe the world around her as standing still while also being in rabid motion, laded with both a static and a kinetic energy.
The poems in her latest collection Open Zero are dense with wordplay, multiple entendre, and musicality. But most of all, they leave the reader with this specific sense of duality, of being fulfilled, and yet being filled with more absences.
In the opening poem, “The Nothing Bird”, Naz writes:
Rain and No Rain, twin
wings of the nothing bird
torso a column of air
pause in space
key that ignites flight
She returns to a bird in “Arrive Slowly” later in the collection, in verses that shift perspective zooming from the largest to the smallest, from the humanistic to natural. Here, too, the bird sits in perched upon this unique duality,
atop the burned redwood, where limbs
fell away, leaving sole étude
point of trunk, reservoir
unspooling
Naz’s words have a dense weight in them, as if each turn of the phrase is a juicy sweet treat, bursting with flavour… The readers are brought within tactile distance to the sap of trees, the olfactory of octopuses, or the threads of a spider’s webs.
Published in January by Yoda Press, Open Zero is the author’s fourth poetry collection, one that sees her work mature to new directions, propelled by a playful command of language(s) and the ambitious scale of chartering the universal with the personal. A poet, author, editor, translator, and artist, Naz has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize; in 2016 for creative nonfiction and in 2018 for poetry.
In the introduction to this collection, she reflects on the California wildfires that burned her home to the ground, leaving behind an absence, which eventually, gave presence to her poetry.
She writes that the fire, “precipitated an unexpected side effect, an almost giddy feeling of lightness. For a brief period, I experienced the allure of shunyata or emptiness. Shunya, the Sanskrit word for zero, comes from the root śvi, meaning ‘hollow’. It was the ancient Indian idea to place a value on this void…”
In “After, Math”, she describes the experience in vivid, poetic detail:
Char
as far as the eye can roam
sinew of auburn manzanitas
burned and hacked to pieces
reel after reel you can’t unsee
the forest’s death, a silent movie
plays on, the orchestra a hollow
pump, fist of an organ, thumping
on and on you walk, to the top
Naz’s poetry find a confident voice for itself in the confluence of cultures and languages that influence her. The shunya in her introduction foreshadows many more multilingual concepts to come, as she mixes English with Urdu and Hindi/Sanskrit. The ‘foreign’ words aren’t just window-dressing in poems, but a part of its very essence. In the aptly-titled “Mother Tongues”, she weaves poetry in the gaps between these languages, imagining a “sactorum womb of wombs / mother tongues ferment”, and then: “Ma, mother of memory, heal me / unmake my prosaic days of bricks / troll bhooths, malware, endless phishes”. All the whole, a soft sense of musicality provides the backbone to Naz’s more ambitious swings:
mull, mull, glaze a homonym hymn
in Kabir’s cadence over an earthen p(l)ot
of amputated thumbs?
Warp and weft pour from the cleft
mandible as tomb, sanctum
Naz puts particular poetic effort in her puns, in words that are able to dissect and tackle language that is three-dimensional, multilingual and multicultural, suffered with double, triple entendre gently waving up from the page. Naz is so good at her wordplay that, often, it can get far too cheeky, as if the purpose behind the verse was the wordplay itself, rather than the poetry, like barq, buraq, and burqa in “Barq (Lightning)”, or in poems like “Bomb”, “Siren Song” (“vines of lines”) or “Sewage, seepage sea page” in “Sea Change”.
A similar sense of playful, soft musicality plays across “Point Blank”, where “(G)olden goose and gander come / to a head, an ovoid void” or “The Last Beekeeper”:
I blink the bleak milk back, lachrymose
to the core, at the thought of being
this ocular cave hole, last recourse
of Apis Mellifera, sweltering belly
to melting poles.
In “(G)host”, Naz extends the intersection of languages further to introduces an intersection of cultures, and specifically, of mythologies and fables across cultures.
I’m lying here, pinned to your story
gullible Gulliver
while Lilliput takes over
Is not sleep next of kin
to death? Sing me
a lullaby, Gods
Naz’s words have a dense weight in them, as if each turn of the phrase is a juicy sweet treat, bursting with flavour, like “The Ballad of Allah Miyan”, a poem filled with delicious imagery that pervades so much more of the collection. In other poems, the readers are brought within tactile distance to the sap of trees, the olfactory of octopuses, or the threads of a spider’s webs.
The reader’s accepted vantage points are disturbed; Naz has a unique ability to make us see the world from the eyes of nature, forcing us to consider being re-centred in our place in the world. Nature is in casual command, not as an authoritarian leader, but on its own course in time and space, unsympathetic to human motivations. “Seasoned Player” is a ghazal of the natural world, with couplets in rhyme that eventually call back to Naz herself in the final lines, as per the form’s traditional format. In “Sketching ‘Normal’” she writes:
At the pinnacle
of the forest path, a grove
burned trees, no birds
nest in leafless arms, only
the wind lays
an occasional limb
to rest
Nowhere do these themes come together with a greater crescendo than “Red Lines”, a poem written the full burst of Naz’s mesmerising intonation, taking the reader down a haunting descent into rouge-tinted horror, from the red eyes of Goddess Kali to the red of the Rooh Afza drink to the blood of a broken hymen.
“From A Taxi Window” makes the decentring even more unsubtle, a poem for the crows where ‘you’—the reader perhaps; or maybe, the narrator herself—are not.
In “Wish Fulfilling Tree”, she turns the natural again into the personal and particularly feminine. The tree is described as the “motherload of shade”. Mythology and patriarchy are evoked through analogies that feel at once modern as they do timeless:
Lay the Wish Fulfilling Tree, alone, denuded
of drapes like Draupadi would be, were she not
wrapped in smug paternal, Azadirachta
Indica, what a sham(e). Since when
has a tree been free?
Naz floods the reader with images and ideas that form mesmerising whorls, spiralling from one dimension to the other with the ease of a short couplet. If an image is a thousand words, her words create thousands of images, a complete forest of colourful emotions, of smells and sounds and tiny pinpricks that puncture the reader softly, and yet make space for us between the line breaks. “Thumbnail” is one such woozy, layered journey through the macro and the micro, the biggest and the smallest things in the universe, through womanhood, through life and death.
Open Zero finds the poet excavating new growth of spring beauty in the English language, in each turn of phrase. She also shares immense comfort in blending the language seamlessly with words from South Asian cultures. By the end of the collection, there is even a glossary of non-English words/phrases or other concepts she has incorporated, including ‘bhooths’, ‘Miyan’, Rooh Afza (it’s entire history and recipe), a brief history of Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Valley Civilization, and more. The glossary feels unnecessary, for Naz’s verses are charmed with depth even if some of the concepts seem foreign to some of the readers.
In her introduction, Naz reveals that she was an undocumented immigrant in the U.S. for seven years before receiving political asylum in 1996. The poems in her later section, “Indian Rope Trick” are tinged with memories or dedications of the subcontinent and of later displacement, of darkness of oppression, of prayer and patriarchy. The verses find the tether between cultures in the subcontinent, and pull decades and centuries of history forward into our pressing present moment. The titular poem of this section literally leaves the reader hanging in haunting suspension, itching to return to the top to read and slip back down again.
This suspension, somewhere between vastness and nothingness, is the centre of gravity of this collection. “M/ark” is a monostich hung between the vastest and the most intimate. Naz returns to the concepts of zero and nothingness in “Alexander Meets a Gymnosophist on the Banks of the Indus”, “Bosa (Kiss)”, “B/orderlines”, and the “sifr [zero] cipher” of the poem “Point Blank”.
Image courtesy: Yoda Press
It is also from this suspended space that she writes of her response to the Twin Towers / World Trade Center in “Anatomy of a Hyphen”, a poem that ends with the lines: “a towering hiss, settling / dust in your ears.”
In “Descano for America”, Naz has her adopted country in her mind again, this time staring down a feeling of helplessness when facing the flood of the world’s tragedies. “A grandmother died last night because she could not board a plane. There is no poem which can undo this.” In the same poem, she wrestles with the complexities of this adoption, of the juxtaposition of strength and sorrow as cultural misfits. “Immigrant heart, efficient even in exile, expert in the economies of loss, the rites and rights of the obliterated.”
“Left and Right” addresses the 1971 war and creation of Bangladesh. Told through the physicality of a broken human body in conflict with itself, it is a sharp, heart-breaking probe at the fragmented subcontinent, of the breaking apart of the people that once shared a common land.
History, in this poem and others, strikes an intimate lash on individual bodies—particularly the bodies of women. One of the manifestoes of this individual identity is the poem “Nepenthe”: “history curdling the future, in sum / I am, aftermath of Partition”.
In her introduction, Naz discusses the wide range of themes that her poems intend to to evoke, from the trauma of women’s bodies—in stories of Partition, and beyond—as well as the environmental hazards ahead for the planet, “the egg that has hatched all life on our planet”. Nowhere do these themes come together with a greater crescendo than “Red Lines”, a poem written the full burst of Naz’s mesmerising intonation, taking the reader down a haunting descent into rouge-tinted horror, from the red eyes of Goddess Kali to the red of the Rooh Afza drink to blood of a broken hymen. Like much of her work, there is depth and trauma in the decentring of humanity. A “throated hummingbird” and the Afghani opium crops share the same platform of perspective as a bride’s dress and “Christ in veins”.
In Open Zero, humanity is not on a pedestal, but only serves as one of smaller units that make up the flawed, beautiful ecosystem of the world. There are tragic fires that devastate personal lives, the lives of narrator and reader and the world around us, but the agony of the heat is not felt by us alone. “The Fault of Light” encapsulates many of the themes stated above—the speaker’s relationship with her mother, loss, trauma, wordplay and rhymes, and double meanings—before a poetic turn that shifts the focus towards the natural world:
Buried in a bed of paper
after she had gone upriver
I shook the silence from their tales.
Who would not want to hear
the thoughts of a pressed flower?
But all I found was rambling
The poem concludes just when it should, with silence being shaken, in the stillness of a pressed flower, in the movement of a rambling, in the continuing duality of nothingness and revolution. The end of each poem—and the collection as a whole—leaves the reader with an absence, a zero-ness where our eyes are not always welcomed or required; and with each end, the hope of a new beginning.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose creative work has appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Bombay Review, The Lantern Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. His debut novel is forthcoming on the Aleph Book Company. You can find him on Twitter: @karanmadhok1 and Instagram: @karanmadhok.
