A Review of Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra — May 2, 2021 by Sherif Abdelkarim
“Queer theology cannot be just a matter of cheering on or cheering up certain identities. It begins in the refusal to take identities as the basic units for a literal description. The sharpest protest we can make against the fictions of biopower is to deny again and again that a human life can ever be identified.” —Mark Jordan, “In Search of Queer Theology Lost”
Kazim Ali’s recent collection of poems, The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020),unspools then rethreads life-reels too coiled for their beauty or interconnected logic to show. In his poems, Ali holds out on the possibility that life orients toward some meaningful destination, even if he himself literally cannot convey to what or where. The longer of the seven poems, the even ones, piece together narrative fragments that resemble the shattered windowpane that wraps the book’s cover, treated to an inverted ekphrasis in “Hesperine for David Berger.” That poem takes interest in the infinitesimal spaces before and after life-altering events, the moments thoughts become voices, become actions in spacetime, say, Corey Menafee’s resolve to smash a window, or the earshot of Berger’s fatal detainment. Defamiliarized lines spanning dissonant lives find harmony in their shared relation to sound. Sound, that mysterious “bridge between general relativity and / quantum mechanics that no physicist has yet ascertained,” somehow rounds up all life, somehow particularizes the abstract. Creation writ large equals the sonic art of vocalization, of scanned instantiation; it makes memory and history and matter: “To hear is to make real.” And to speak, to speak!
Whether they create true or false histories and futures, felt pleasure or pain, sounds must be heard. Ali’s volume samples a great many, synaesthetically arrayed in one equation or another; this is how the late qawwal Amjad Sabri (d.2016) paints flowers with his voice, one of the collection’s many, for among Ali’s greatest merits is the homage he constantly pays to fellow artists, including God, the ultimate maestro. Read silently, these pieces, with their neatly pruned lines, blocks, and stanzas, suggest patterns but lack ready rhythms, rhymes, or meters. To fully plumb their depths, you must read the paintings aloud, or better yet listen as Ali recites in his deliberate, automatic tone. Listen here to a reading, then enjoy his ensuing interview with Sheila Chandra herself, whose voice Ali so carefully renders. Then hear her own voice: capacious as whales.
To verbalize personal experiences centered on themes of memory, mortality, and transcendent transgression, Ali enlists the vehicles of sound. These are no ordinary figures, for the range of vibrations described, from deafening silences (e.g., friendship estranged, love lost) to wracking crashes (artillery shells, a sea’s monstrous symphony), occasion musings on the nature of their existence—and ours amidst them. Thus, “The Voice of Sheila Chandra,” a sonnet sequence of 40, charts the trajectories of Ali and Chandra as artists: “Chandra / Lost her voice around the same / Time I found mine” (“#30”). As subjects, they negotiate a clamorous world. Here’s that noisy sea:
An hour or more of pulling oars Boat pitching up and down I sing Verses to save us what was it that Soothed me god’s words the rhythm And rhyme my own voice my memory Of my father’s voice or my mother’s Voice all of these none of these the sea Changes
(“#38”)
Why are we most psychologically honest with God, most desperately sincere with ourselves, when nearest the thresholds? What does this say about the masks we don ordinarily? Ali broods over this artifice/authenticity dialectic to reject the idea of time’s ordinariness. Instead, he labors to reconcile “false” arts of living with “true” forms piety, and thereby fashions immodest new modes of creating and recreating one’s relations in the world and beyond it. The poet’s claim that “[o]ne cannot manipulate expression” affirms the defining power of the word, and opens possibilities for an art of affirmation, of calling a wolf a wolf (#32). Imagination, traditionally feared for its conquest of the rational, isn’t so bad after all, and may even offer our serious affairs—politics, religion, sex—a bit of levity.
Ali brings this levity to an already familiar, mystical terrain, given to such roomy ruminations (from “Phosphorous”):
The subjects of a cosmic song, we small animals play multiple parts: sounding board, audience, instrument, conductor. Conventional mystical poetry operates on such metaphors, as it does the assumption that divine intimacy, however vividly described, nevertheless floats above the carnal realm. In Ali’s variation, culture and theology collapse to find God—often inexplicably lowercased—in profane spaces, far away from the purity of the temple, closer than ever to that farthest mosque within.
In art the sacred and profane intersect so errantly that it makes you wonder: what responsibility do artists have in representing or shaping culture? Are morals required in our media, “useless” by Wilde’s standards? The force with which these questions rush to mind will daze you, and Ali knows this. He reports:
Philippe came and he adored My body all afternoon licked my skin he buried His face in my armpits and breathed in deeply Held my feet to his lips caressed and kissed them and After we lay sweaty and talked about Duras about This hotel by the sea how it is like the places In her novels I said let me smell and lick your Body too because to shit and to fuck are Two main purposes of art
(“#23”)
But are they? The claim’s uncertainty underscores the project’s ambition: to transcribe what we avoid of the body’s echoes and evacuations. Indeed, the most stunning rub of Ali’s collection is its intricate study of unlikely elements: a materiality of sound and spirit; an airiness of matter; morning star as evening star; fluid time, tracked in erotography fit to make devils blush, fit to lend strange insights into Abī Tammām’s (d.850) paraphrase of the prophetic dictum, “If you feel no shame, do what you want.”
With questions of aesthetic judgment posed at the junctures of cleanness, deontological inquiries necessarily follow. I find Ali’s prescriptions more or less direct. His tones—sayings on saints, on the divine—parallel those of Emil Cioran (d.1995). Both interrogate God in enjoyment of a self-conscious, privileged access. The God of the volume’s overture, “Recite,” establishes an unlikely connection between creator and creature, both cast as misfits: “You don’t fit he don’t fit.” This difficult relationship haunts Ali across his poetic corpus. For example, in Inquisition (Wesleyan, 2018), he demands:
Thrust up from the dark of the earth only to wither, how are flowers in any way supposed to understand god? They are no better than a human body that seeds and sprouts and dies
(“The Astronomer”)
I don’t think Ali comes closer to answering this question, but if God is just riffing like Coltrane, as the poet now proposes, perhaps Ali invites us to feel God, not understand Him. I think he thinks we can’t do the latter. Take, for instance, Bright Felon’s (Wesleyan, 2009) Abrahamic query, “Father, where is the ram?” (“Home”). To this divine command, all he can say is “[i]n this story I am the ram” (“Phosphorus”). And what an offering.
All told, The Voice of Sheila Chandra samples sacrifice, tradeoff, not loss outright. Dissolvement. Sonnet “#33” of the eponymous sequence suggests so:
Sheila’s voice always in the background Always disappearing into the music Of what surrounds it the way one loses Oneself in sex or death of the moment Of shitting I got lost in Salman’s Music he said it was a surrender of Ego when he left me behind but really It was a surrender of my will words too Have god inside but for the prize of The body they do not compete can- Not hold the storm of time cannot Hold the line do I touch the ocean Inside will my family come to My funeral
This porosity among people and their art, the transferals that accompany dissolution—this amounts to the stuff of growth, of metamorphosis, not loss or grief. Art can still transcend perceived limitations, which Ali, if I hear him right, locates in any social apparatus—all stately—that would ill-treat him: an insidious homonationalism per Jasbir Puar, or what Andre Cavalcante calls the “anxious displacement” of queerness for some new normal.
Old or new, “normal” never seemed so illusive as it does here, and yet these irrepressible poems prove that acting on your eros, or, worse, simply not giving up on your desire, will not remedy deeper pains for love, transcendence, or permanence. Control. Eudaimonia. A greater sacrifice is intended. This travel-weary reader witnesses another—Kazim Ali—in search of appropriate provisions, and fitting companions, and the right star for the right journey, but he artfully fails to find any, though progress he must, kicking, screaming, singing: “I haven’t yet made the worst of my mistakes” (“Phosphorus”).
