Theophanies

By Sarah Ghazal Ali

Moving between the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, these poems explore the complexities and spectacles of gender, faith, and family by unraveling the age-old idea that seeing is believing. Navigating both scripture and culture, the poems in Theophanies work to spin miracles from the mundanities of desire and violence.

Through art and music, Pakistani history, and scriptural stories, these poems struggle to envision a true self and speak back against time to the matriarchs of the larger Abrahamic faiths, the mothers at the heart of sacred history Stitched through these poems is longing—for mothers, angels, and signs from the divine. Theophanies asks: is seeing really believing, and is believing belonging? The speaker seeks to understand her own, bewildering “I,” to use it with reverence, and to mythologize herself and all mothers to ensure their survival in a male-dominated world hard at work erasing them

In the absence of matrilineal elders in her family, the speaker turns to the archetypal “mother of nations” for whom she is named, Sarah, and her sent-away “sister,” Hajar. What does it mean to have a woman’s body when that body has been hailed a vessel for the divine? Theophanies arises from the speaker’s tenuous grip on her own faith while navigating the colonial legacy of Partition and inherited patriarchal expectations of womanhood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Jan 17, 2024
• ISBN: 9781949944310

Book preview

Sarai

A name is not unlike

a sexed body. Like mine,

it carries.

Is remembered most

for what it fails

to yield. A name

is a condition meant to last,

to outlast, as should a daughter, her mother

tongue.

I am but do not have

a daughter.

When I look in the lake,

who looks back

is a sister

self: O, little i—I

carry you as you

carry who I am waiting to be.

Theophanies

A pair of apples blistering under the sun—

my eyes have been so saturated.

Before dreamdeep, I start awake, overstimulated

by the stacking of my bones, their caress and jostle.

My granted days I could live or leave. Each loaned

breath I can—do—waste or wield, straining

for the bell in belief. How an arrow flees limb to pierce.

How a pen bleeds to grant shape to speech.

In each instance of angels’ descent,

they soothe: Do not fear, O Hajar, Maryam,

vesseled thee. Or is it awe that clamors the flesh?

A raptor’s lean shadow for a flash

obliterating the high-noon sun: may it