Tarfia Faizullah
On March 26, 1971, West Pakistan launched a military operation in East Pakistan against Bengali civilians, students, intelligentsia, and armed personnel who were demanding separation of the East from West Pakistan. The war resulted in the secession of East Pakistan, which became the independent nation of Bangladesh. According to Bangladeshi sources, 200,000 women were raped and over 3 million people were killed.
i.
In West Texas, oil froths
luxurious from hard ground
while across Bangladesh,
bayoneted women stain
pondwater blossom. Your
mother, age 8, follows
your grandmother down worn
stone steps to the old pond,
waits breathless for her
to finish untwining from
herself the simple cotton
sari & wade alone into green
water—the same color,
your mother thinks, as
a dress she'd like to twirl
the world in. She knows
the strange men joining
them daily for meals mean
her no harm—they look like
her brothers do nights they
jump back over the iron gate,
drenched in the scents of else-
where—only thinner. So thin—
in the distance, thunder,
though the sky reflected
in the water her mother
floats burns bright blue.
ii.
Gather these materials:
slivers of wet soap, hair
swirling pondwater, black
oil. Amar peet ta duye de na,
Grandmother says, so Mother
palms the pink soap, slides
it between her small hands
before arcing its jasmine-
scented froth across her
back. Gather these materials:
the afternoon's undrowned
ceremonies, the nattering
of cicadas—yes, yes, yes—
Mother watches Grandmother
disappear into water: light:
many-leafed, like bits of bomb-
shell gleaming like rose petals
upturned in wet grass, like
the long river in red twilight—O
mud mother lick me before I die—
iii.
1971: the entire world unraveling
like thread your mother pulls &
pulls away from the hem of her
dress. In America, the bodies
of men & women march forward
in protest, rage candling their
voices—in Vietnam, monks
light themselves on fire, learning
too late how easily the body burns—
soon, the men whose stomachs
flinch inward will struggle
the curved blades of their bayonets
into khaki-clad bodies, but for now
they lean against the cool stone
walls of your grandparents' house,
eyes closed as your mother watches
her mother twirl in the pond, longs
to encircle herself in ripples
of light her fingers might
arpeggio across green water—
she loves the small diamond
in her mother's nose, its sunlit
surface glittering like curled,
hot metal she knows falls from
the sky, though not before her eyes.
iv.
Why call any of it back? Easy
enough to descend with your
mother, down
& down hard
stone steps—how I loved,
she says, to watch her—
yes, reach
forward to touch
the sun-ambered softness
of the bright sari Grandmother
retwines around
her body—yes,
your eyes
dazzled by the diamond's
many-chambered light
—it shined
so, Mother says,
though it's not you
she's speaking to anymore,
caught as she is in this reeling
backward—1971
& a Bangladeshi
woman catches the gaze
of a Pakistani
soldier through rain-curved palm
trees—her sari torn
from her—
she bathed the same
way each time
—the torn woman curls
into green silence—first, she
would fold her sari,
then dive in—yes,
the earth green
with rain, the water,
green—then she would
wash her face
until her nosepin shined, oh,
how it shined
—his eyes, green—
then she would ask me to wash her back—
the torn woman a helix of blood
—then she would rub cream into her
beautiful skin—
the soldier buttoning
himself back
into khaki—yes, call it
back again—
v.
But tell me, Mother asks, couldn't
you research the war from here?
Two oceans between you, but
you can see her running a finger
along the granite counter in
the sun-spilled kitchen before
she drives past old West Texas
oil fields bright with bluebells.
Once, in the country of your birth,
you watched Grandmother bathe
while blood was bayoneted across
green pond, green field: women's
bodies were not their own—that
country, Mother, became the veined
geography inside me: another body
inside my own, you don't say. Gather
these materials, these undrowned
ceremonies: Mother pours milk tea,
sobs. I miss your grandmother so. Open
the door, step out onto the concrete
veranda. Look up: the moon is an ivory
scythe gutting green ponds across which
the reflection of a young girl's braid
ripples. Tell me, you say, about 1971.
Anything you remember. Anything true.