By Vika Mujumdar
In Sahar Muradi’s OCTOBERS, war, motherhood, daughterhood, and exile all converge, united in the temporal location of October. Split into four sections each documenting an October in the poet’s life and its associated events—the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, Muradi’s father’s passing, a separation, and the birth of her daughter—OCTOBERS examines the ways Muradi understands and lives her role as daughter, mother, partner, and exile, lingering in the temporal dislocation caused by exile and how that makes a kind of perpetual loss of home. In this collection, Muradi builds on the work of her previous chapbook, writing into being an Afghan diasporic experience characterized, for her, by linguistic displacement that then reckons with what it means to be a daughter and a mother.
Opening the first poem (and the first section, “The Occupation, 2001,” which explores the 2001 U.S. occupation of Afghanistan), “The Picture Tin,” Muradi writes: “Father learned exile by television /And this was wartime.” Here, Muradi contextualizes her project—at the intersections of exile and war, Muradi’s project is deeply concerned with what it means to be a daughter to a man marked by loss, spatial and temporal, what it means to be a spectator to the aftermath of war and exile as it haunts and shapes her family, even geographically and temporally removed from the landscapes of Afghanistan. In the following poem, “Salaam Alaikum,” Muradi moves fluidly between languages as she opens each stanza with a line in either Dari or Bambara. Here, Muradi, through the fluctuation between language and the slippage between three languages at once shapes how we read the poem, writing: “Khudaa hafez / History was the first to leave / and without a trace.” Muradi is always aware of and always engaging with what it means to leave a place.
In the second section of the collection, “The Passing, 2016,” Muradi grapples with the aftermath of her father’s passing. The centerpiece of this section, and even the collection as a whole, is a poem titled “Facsimile,” which moves through language alternating between the associative leaps of a poem and the fluid logic of the lyric essay, in alternating verse and prose. In “Facsimile,” we see Muradi’s talents on full display—here, in vivid, lyrical images, Muradi examines her relationship to her father, shaped by the landscapes of Afghanistan and her and her father’s many exiles. She opens with the line: “My father was an idea from Afghanistan.” In declarative prose, Muradi captures her father’s larger-than-life selfhood, always rooted in the geography of the first home from which he has been displaced. Muradi writes: “His regrets coupled with romance the way exile courts imagination. What could have been.” Here, Muradi explores the tension of her father’s losses—the tensions of possibility in “what could have been” in relation to the limitations and boundedness of regrets of a space and time that is no longer malleable. Muradi continues, later in the same poem: “Beheld him weep on the plane passing into the airspace, touching the ground. The entire airplane of exiles, erupting into tears.” Exile is affective, as is the imagination, and for Muradi, there is a generosity of both the self and the other as she grapples with the way her father, even in his volatility and anger, becomes one with Afghanistan in all its joys and tensions.
In “The Separation, 2009,” the third section of the collection, Muradi documents the ending of a relationship. In the poem “Brink,” Muradi deftly shifts between a question-and-answer format and lyric verse as she attempts to examine the aftermath of a relationship in its intertwined knowledge and unknowability. Muradi writes on the right-hand side of the page, “Investigate your”, and to the right, lists: “Language of thanking / Ideas of causality / Ideals of spontaneity / The role of a long embrace[.]” Here, Muradi is deeply concerned with language as a vehicle for the person—the way it collapses time for the aftermath of this separation of self and other. With its precision and limited vocabulary, this section becomes a careful invitation to rethink the role of language in the interpersonal, and the narrative-building work of language in relation to time. The fluctuating role of form and white space Muradi uses throughout this poem, and through this collection, frames silence as central to this collection—the silence of death, of new motherhood, of war, of her separation. Silence is central to thinking through language for Muradi, and she converges and collapses both in this section in ways that force us to rethink how silence is weaponized, just as language is weaponized. Later in the same poem, Muradi writes: “A: Where were you? / B: “I became bilingual.” In these lines, building on the tensions of silence and language, Muradi theorizes space as directly linked to language—geography and language become one in bilingualism as response to the spatial questioning of “where.” Bilingualism becomes, therefore, a space for the speaker to theorize a belonging that is solely hers, where others cannot enter, only her many selves.
In the fourth section, “The Birth, 2018,” Muradi writes of her relationship to new motherhood, the new mother-self that comes to be shaped by these encounters of the self with language, various others, and war and imperialism. “You” now collapses into the speaker’s daughter, a self that is still becoming a self, shaped directly by her mother and the inherited histories Muradi herself carries. In the poem “night nursing,” Muradi writes: “my body at war still waits for her knock / my General.” Muradi reclaims here the language of war, central to the relationship between her motherland (or, perhaps more accurately here, fatherland, as she traces her ancestral geographies through her father) and her country of residence—Afghanistan and the US respectively—and reframes war as a space (and an embodied language) that is hers and her daughter’s. Building on the convergences of silence and language, further into the same poem, Muradi writes: “are we complicit in the quiet outside this prayer / we are not each others’ alone / we are alone[.]” Here as the line collapses into itself as it continues, Muradi directly addresses complicity and how to negotiate the self in relation to the world. For Muradi, there is complicity in silence, and language is a means to begin to escape that complicity, to begin to theorize a self beyond the global forces of war, violence, and imperialism, all inextricably tied up with displacements of the self.
In the same section, Muradi writes a set of poems that engage deeply with the languages she carries, and how they move from her to her daughter. In “Ghazal for Mothers & Tongues,” every couplet ends with a variation of the phrase “mother tongue”—for Muradi, language is malleable, able to be shifted and reframed in service of the future, for her daughter. Muradi writes: “Morning and night, I call maadar. / What’s the word for guilt, mother or tongue?” In the fluidity of language, as Muradi moves between “maadar” and “mother,” guilt cleaves “mother tongue,” severing the self from language. In the following poem, “A language entirely,” Muradi writes of her daughter: “Her economy is expansive. / The same single syllable for multitudes: / Maah for maadar jaan / Maah for mast / for Marmite / for cousin Mateen [.]” Muradi’s language too, like her daughters, is expansive in its economy, as she builds and theorizes entire selves and lives and histories through her economical language and white space.
In the final section, “After October,” Muradi brings these ideas to a close as she considers the intersections of language, motherhood, and exile as she imagines herself beyond these defining temporal moments, these four Octobers that have shaped her so significantly. In “counterparts,” Muradi writes: “imagine the future / as if your narrow divination could ever know[.]” Here, Muradi’s full project in this collection is economically summarized—to imagine the boundless and limitless possibility that awaits her daughter, that awaits her new mother-self, but a future that by virtue of the way it derives from Muradi’s own histories and geographies, it necessarily bounded and narrow. OCTOBERS is a testament to possibility, bearing witness to exile in its many forms as different selves and comings-of-age occur across the disparate yet linked geographies she encounters.
Vika Mujumdar was born in New Jersey and raised in Pune, India. She holds an MA in comparative literature from UMass Amherst, where she is currently an MFA student in fiction. Her work has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, the Chicago Review of Books, Girls on Tops READ ME, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. She edits Liminal Transit Review.