by Sarah Ghazal Ali

Brimming with birds, mirrors, and fig trees, Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut poetry collection Theophanies compels us to bear witness—both to the titular appearances of God and to language’s capacity to veil and unveil. With her shimmering words and careful attention to sonics, Ali’s poems traverse ancient Islamic histories, the violent events of the 1947 partition of India, and contemporary Muslim womanhood.

Ali’s exploration of matrilineage and motherhood is a prominent feature of this collection, as she interweaves female figures from the biblical and Qur’anic traditions like Hajar, Sarah, and Khadijah with her own ancestry. Images of menstruation, wombs, and birth recall a woman’s capacity to bring forth life, as well as how poetry itself acts as a vessel for ideas and sensations.  

“Matrilineage [Umbilicus],” a formally experimental poem with two columns of words rippling down the page, illustrates this rich constellation of meaning. Even after many readings, I keep returning to Ali’s ambiguous phrases:

an oculus               doomed to gape before a mirror

[…]

it appeared            I multiplied

from figment        I bore

witness:                 your body

Meaning proliferates as we are left to consider the prismatic images beaming through the mirror’s reflections. Identity appears and multiplies with the simultaneity of bearing witness and bearing bodies. 

A similar doubleness regarding childbirth and identity appears in the interconnected “Self-Portrait as Epiphany” and “Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of God.” The former declares, “From a clot / I’ll make men” and the latter, “I too was once congealed / blood, a mere clot.” Referring to the first revelation of the Qur’an, the speaker positions herself as both a creator of life and references her own embryonic development. With the visceral image of the clinging clot, the immanence of experience and God, “O closer than jugular” (“Ghazal on the Day of”), is inscribed on the page. 

Faith is something contained within the female body in Ali’s poems, rather than existing solely outside of the self. The speaker in “My Faith Gets Grime under Its Nails” directly connects her body with her faith: “My faith is feminine, breasted / and irregularly bleeding.” “The adhan trills from my arboreal center” the speaker says, the call to prayer beautifully emanating out from her body. We are made to take stock of our own physicality through these words, observing our body’s simultaneous “caress and jostle” that sings out “Like sirens. Like chimes” (“Theophanies”). 

Faith, lineage, and sound are all intertwined, just as in “Temporal,” which frames faith as “a legacy / of echoes,” and “Motherhood 1999,” where the poet tenderly describes, “my mother’s hand pressing hymns / against my back.” Sound and the body converge here, where maternal hands are able to transfer knowledge of hymns from her form to her daughter’s. 

Indeed, music’s connection to lineage is also evident in Ali’s repeated use of the ghazal. “Ghazal Ghazal,” a play on Ali’s middle name and the poetic form itself, begins, “My people are lovers of the sher, qasida, ghazal. / My people memorize the Qur’an & recite the ghazal.” However, the poet is conscious of her departure from formal conventions: “My father practiced english with me. I want to blame him. / My voice void of, my throat hostile to ghazals.” Although her ghazals lack the traditional musical setting and exact rhyme scheme, Ali’s musicality still emerges. 

Ali also presents a darker side to sound and lineage, like when she invokes the disastrous effects of Partition: “Partition / a moment un-begun, a dirge without end” (“Apotheosis”). The sounds of previous poems are transformed here into a funerary lament.

These historic struggles permeate throughout the collection, including judgement Muslim women face from wearing hijab, the pressure to adhere to the model image of femininity, and the brutal rape and murder of Nabra Hassanen in 2017. These poems continue to resonate at a time when Islamophobia runs rampant in the United States and around the world. However, while allowing space for reflection and pain, Ali does not leave the reader with a wholly pessimistic impression. By voicing these narratives, Ali insists that they are heard; we must bear witness. 

Ultimately, Theophanies incisively reveals the limits of language and its aesthetic ability to evoke sensation, leaving readers to revel in its mysteries. Ali’s “Fatal Music” says it best: “So much could lie beyond the lattice of this language that I finger but cannot unlatch.”