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Scroll.in
12-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘The Missing Prayer': Personal tragedies in poems evoke painful histories of the Indian subcontinent
Ammar Aziz's debut book of poetry, The Missing Prayer, is a delightfully haunting original voice. While constantly turning the mundane into magical, this collection of poems offers an array of refreshingly impressionistic verses. With evocative, painterly language, Aziz delivers graphic details in totality: 'You pass by crushed houses / and hear them speak'. Be it Hoshiarpur 'with mango orchards/ where spring never died' or swaying sugarcane fields, 'in a soft breeze/ and men slowly sip tea/ squatting under the old banyan tree,' the stanzas resemble miniature paintings. An intimate territory of trauma With a deliberately deceptive simplicity, the words lie there – naked, inviting, waiting for the reader. One proceeds to touch these bare inked symbols only to realise their concealed mysterious contours metamorphosing into a very intimate territory of collective human tortures and traumas. Aziz tells us about a 'single mother' whom 'everyone wants thrown out/ of the neighbourhood.' The scenes are ordinary, at times inconsequential or even ugly; mere fragments of shockingly familiar sights and sounds fusing into a unified whole of philosophic ruminations that challenge the reader's refined sensibilities, allowing them to perceive the imperfections, jarring their view of the world as they know it. In 'How can I seduce you?' the poet naively summons us: 'I can take you to the Temple Road/ where there's no temple anymore.' We are seduced by the poet to come out of our comfort zones only to discover that we are being deftly dislocated and placed in front of a whole plethora of ancestral prose which is both present and absent in its unpublished state. In fact, the whole collection is a series of such absences waiting to be embraced and accepted. The backgrounds come alive, filled with a life of their own, they breathe with a Keatsian sensuousness in South Asian settings. 'Life', for example, comprehensively depicts a public hospital, 'wobbling with people ' where you see 'hues of decay', 'damp walls with fading texts' as well as hear the continuous beep of 'the discordant machines' while trying to ignore 'the pungent waft/ of disinfectant.' And amidst all this, a 'Grandmother struggles for each breath.' The images are kinaesthetic; they move as to melt into extended metaphors and similes, creating an unusual but well-defined perspective in the stanzas. In 'Night Before Fajr', the night is a grieving woman from the beginning until the end. The myths are personified with loaded candour and grace; contrastingly, the hegemony of certain socio–religious practices is stated nonchalantly: You were born in the mosque Grandpa wanted to construct Before he secretly gave up On god — from Elegy – for Ahmad Aziz Death not only pervades in 'Elegy' or 'December', rather the poet mourns the demise of a heritage because neither the 'wooden sticks' nor the Mughal Empire could stop the ice cream 'from taking over kulfi.' Short and direct, 'Kulfi' becomes a multi-layered compound icon of a dying culture, the termination of a tradition, the transition in power dynamics, a nation breathing her last – a cumulative, colossal death. Then again, the poem 'Ways to Mourn' inquires about the muted credibility of a single 'unknown death' (a common man's), contrary to 'the ballads of the severed heads' in Karbala. A celebration of Urdu Just as death for Aziz is multi-faceted, so is the fractured femininity. The entire 'Raagmala' section is a tribute to the innate motherly instincts of courage and protection. Feminine bodies expand into landscapes and seascapes. Sacred rituals are performed to keep the sanctity of the patriarchal society intact, until a few pages ahead we witness these nightingales with scars 'disappearing into the stars'. The fragility of the female position is further enhanced by the ever-present soothing figure of the grandmother holding 'wooden prayer beads'. The tenderness hits the rough peaks of masculinity when the father transforms into a 'bat' and later into a 'harmonium' with a metal heart. Although this masculinity remains helpless in 'Moobs', and once again, Aziz unravels his awareness of the burdened human beings, with the sensitivity of a sincere artist. Embossed on an archaic orient terrain, the personal tragedies of the speakers in the poems conjointly evoke the meta-structure imbibing polytrophic histories of the subcontinent, sometimes going beyond the borders, to raise questions of identity with subdued cynicism. 'War on Terror' documents details of a day in an ordinary Pashtun's life. One marvels at the choice of a flat tone employed for the silent mockery of the established notions in 'When they spot a Muslim'. The poet expertly presents a panoramic field of vision, like a moving camera capturing modernity's prejudice against religious archetypes. Aziz's major contribution to the collection is his humble but confident celebration of the Urdu language. The way he establishes the edifice of Urdu, then simultaneously dismantles it to release its sweet nectar 'chaashni' on the pages, is refreshing. The lover's dilemma in the poem, 'Making Love in Urdu', is quite uniqu,e for he helplessly asks: 'You want me to talk dirty but how does one do that in Urdu?' For clarification, he declares without doubt that Urdu is the 'language of revered forms' which swims in 'the holy waters/ of syllables'. In the culinary terms, Aziz equals the said language to the 'milk delicacy' infused with exotic spices like saffron and cardamom while posing a question for the beloved, 'How well do you speak Urdu, my love? The juxtaposition of 'milk' in the beginning of the poem and blood is an intriguing premise in the concluding lines, as it jolts the reader out of their beauty sleep, demanding them to face a disturbing reality, the paths of which can only be traced through Urdu. The language breaks its barriers, suddenly swelling out of its allotted space, travelling across time zones, critically gauging the old and the new narratives. Urdu language is home to the very contemporary story of a mother and her son, where he cries in despair, 'My mother uses AI to write me a letter'. Again, Aziz's sage discernment and foreshadowing of the devastatingly sad as well as probable future consequences of the technological advancement deeply rooted in the displacement of mother tongue both by humans as well as the machines, is striking. The dirge for the dying language ends in lamentations: 'I feel unmoored, orphan without her Urdu, homeless without her typos.' Language goes beyond words – it is nurtured by the secret rebellion of 'the fragrant folded prayer mat' that belongs to a white haired Muslim whose beard is 'partially coloured/ by henna.' Language is perfected by these conquering silences of the suppressed. Language is the sacred marrying the profane: ' Andaam–e–nihaani, Uzu–e–tanasul Shed off their veils Yet don't seem naked.' Language is the long-lost pleasure of childhood in the lyrical reminiscence 'My white lover asks about my childhood games'. Language is the pain – transmitting the shared experience of our colonised collective past. Taking the lore of love making further, Aziz pays homage to the masters of the craft. He captures the glorious act of seduction in 'How can I seduce you?' in continuation of the traditional playfulness of the same subject matter in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnet, 'How Do I Love Thee?' Yet we find the contextual echelon quite South Asian, the voice of the speaker alluring the loved one by telling the tales of 'sadhus' and 'a dying peepal tree.' On the other hand, in the same section, 'Mortality', 'Lust', 'The shape of the Earth' and 'Hollow Earth' are echoes of Donne's love poems in which marks of Aziz's proficiency are unequivocal. He talks about the macrocosm spurring events of significant magnitude and then hastens to embrace the renowned custom of Urdu poets delineating details of the bewitching bodily features of the beloved, 'the galaxy within her eyes glistens/ yet seems so distant'. The book concludes with an epic journey of a brown man who is stalking 'the virgin', following her when she initiates her stroll, '…ignoring the drainpipes/ weeping sewage like suppurating skin'. In this longish poem, 'The brown man's ballad of the virgin', we find this virgin, an enigmatic entity encompassing all above and beyond. She is not a stereotypical woman but a deity of massive dimensions, always escaping, always a step ahead. She transforms into a formidable force whose silence is analogous to an 'oracle'. In each part of the poem, she manages to fascinate the speaker with her mystery. Her pregnancy, along with her blood-drenched legs, parallels the psychosis of a subjugated nation. She remains an elusive existence, successfully slipping out of the pages of history demonstrated by men. She refuses to be defined, thus, the speaker in the poem admits in an exasperated tone: 'How can you ever know/ who the virgin is?' In a terse, descriptive poem, 'When my dog writes a poem', Aziz catches us off guard, stating his dog's instinctive behaviour, battling against his own, and what remains behind is the age-old predicament, an artist's search for ever-evading perfection: 'When he chases the ball, his paws carve verses into mud, each imprint deep, certain, free of revision, while I spill ink, chasing what always escapes me.' Despite these bouts of self-doubt, Aziz has composed a collection of verses that work on multiple levels. He converses like a madman in a trance, coordinating odd bits and pieces of a lingua franca interlaced with the Pakistani idiom. It can safely be claimed that he is a faithful young offspring of Pakistan's pioneering English poets Taufiq Rafat and Daud Kamal. His poetry urges the mind to understand the curious disappearance of 'the green prayer mat/ with its embroidered mosque' that we all lost at some point in our lives. The Missing Prayer is a tell-tale rhythmic recital of the losses, the voids, the gaps and the simplest of the tiny things that we miss but then the poet himself avows, 'yet something remains' – perhaps to make the survival possible? The book is a beaded rosary of a rare kind; in each threaded bead, we see our broken blasphemous selves reflected, clinging to the gods we construe out of the chaos, as we keep holding this holy string of prayer beads in awe, in reverence. Mariya Anum works as an Assistant Professor of English Literature. She has a penchant for deconstructing and understanding unconventional English poetry, especially one that is written by the poets of the Indian subcontinent. The Missing Prayer, Ammar Aziz, Red River Press.
Spectator
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The road trip from hell: Elegy, Southwest, by Madeleine Watts, reviewed
Throughout her quietly compelling second novel, Elegy, Southwest, Madeleine Watts conjures a sense of trundling steadily towards disaster. The narrator, a young Australian woman called Eloise, is recounting a road trip that she and her husband Lewis took through the American Southwest in 2018 – while a deadly fire was sweeping through northern California. The trip was bookended by disasters you could describe as closer to home: before it, Lewis's mother died; after it, Lewis disappeared. By combing through their time in and out of the 'climate-controlled interior of the car', Eloise tries to figure out what happened. The journey is part business, part pleasure. Eloise is researching her dissertation on the Colorado River. Lewis, who works for a Las Vegas-based foundation that bankrolls art in the desert, has to check on a project being completed by the partner of a recently deceased artist. Eloise is preoccupied with the shifting landscape ('There's less water every year. It's like the Southwest is a paradise built on quicksand'), while Lewis is permanently thumbing his phone. Other warning signs include the fact that he's using more weed than usual, and Eloise doesn't tell him that she suspects she might be pregnant. Still, they're in love – 'the kind of love that makes you say marry me, even when you're already married'. Like Watts's The Inland Sea (2020), Elegy, Southwest is haunting and precise. Here is Eloise recalling being overcome with loneliness whenever she saw Lewis take out his vape pen and start to inhale: 'The feeling that in that intake of breath you were leaving me behind, closing the bedroom door of your attention and retreating to a place where I couldn't find you.'
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Madeleine Watts: ‘Climate change should be in everyone's writing right now'
There is a hole in the heart of Madeleine Watts' melancholic second novel Elegy, Southwest. 'A really big, and expensive, hole,' says Lewis, one half of the married couple whose desert road trip forms the novel's narrative arc. The hole, a land artwork in progress, is titled 'Negative Capability' after 'a quality that Keats believed the best artists possessed: the ability to stay open to doubt and uncertainty'. It's a quality Watts has in spades. 'My general personality is to go up close to the thing that makes me sad or frightened. I go up close and tinker around and it feels like I gain a modicum of control. It doesn't necessarily feel cathartic but I've done something,' the Australian author says. In Elegy, Southwest, the frightening and sad things include the death of a parent and a miscarriage, as well as disappearances: water, animals, people, love. It's a novel of apocalypses, imminent and historical, paused beside and sped past as the couple attempt to follow the elusive, overused Colorado River. 'I was so obsessed with this river that's so managed and contained, and allows this part of the world to exist but because of hubris and climate change, is threatened,' says Watts. 'Theoretically you should be able to follow the river all the way down but you can't. It doesn't meet the sea. It hasn't for years.' Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Watts lent her obsession to the novel's protagonist, Eloise, who researches her dissertation about the river while grieving multiple losses – past, present and future. Like Watts, Eloise is an Australian who moved to New York and experienced the same uncanny sense of being 'home and yet not at home' that Watts encountered when treading on gumnuts in California. The genesis of the novel lies in two road trips Watts took through the American south-west. The author felt drawn to the 'pernicious mythology' of the road and the west: 'It's the America you are singing about in all the songs. I was interested in exploring this Americana from an outsider perspective,' she says. Unsure what to make of the extensive notes from these trips, Watts sat on them through two crises: the 2019-2020 bushfire season – during which she experienced the frightening silence of the burned bush while visiting her mother in Sydney's Blue Mountains – and the Covid pandemic. Trapped during lockdowns in various locations that were neither Sydney nor her adopted home of New York, Watts felt 'physically stuck in places that were not where I was imaginatively.' She used Google maps to shape her notes into one fictional road trip taken during the 2018 California wildfires. Somewhere between LA and Phoenix, Eloise begins to suspect she's pregnant. Watts drafted what she refers to in Delilloesque terms as the novel's 'reproductive event' at the time Roe v Wade was overturned. She remembers riding the New York subway on the morning after the ruling. 'It was boiling hot, everyone was dripping and I saw so many women on the verge of tears or actually crying. There was no sense of community. Everybody was really afraid and everybody was mourning and everybody was on their own,' she says. 'My experience of reproductive events is that it's the most private thing you can experience.' As a woman in her 30s, Watts feels she's now at a flashpoint. 'I am a millennial thinking about reproduction and climate change,' she says. 'Thinking about having kids is a gesture toward hope in the future. You are invested in the world still being there.' Elegy, Southwest is Watts' second work of climate fiction after her 2020 debut The Inland Sea. At the time, she didn't think of that first book in those terms – 'It was billed as a 'millennial novel',' she says – but found herself often asked by interviewers to talk about writing into the climate crisis. 'I didn't have good answers,' she says. 'So as I was being asked those questions, I was basically forming ideas. In many ways this book is an answer to questions I was being asked about the first.' Since then she's taught courses on writing into nature and climate change at Columbia University, thinking through the implications of Mark Fisher and Daisy Hildyard's theories for writers who want to respond to the crisis. Some of these ideas made it into the novel, as did 'a sense of weariness, the feeling of being a bit tired of these things'. Perhaps then, this is where genres meet. At the complicated intersections of wildfire and weariness, hope, thrill, heartbreak and Negative Capability, all millennial novels are climate novels, too. 'I think that climate change should be in everyone's writing right now,' says Watts. 'It's there. It has to be – and if it's not, it's being ignored.' Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts is out now through Ultimo Press ($34.99)
The Guardian
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts review – powerful, poignant and suffused with millennial dread
Madeleine Watts' first novel, 2020's The Inland Sea, was an urban fever dream, an ambitious, sophisticated and slightly uneven creation. In it, intimations of climate breakdown, reflections on gendered violence and a rejection of the great Australian ugliness were grafted on to a narrative about a young woman adrift in the interregnum between the end of her university studies and a planned move abroad. Woven through it was a series of excerpts from the journals of the explorer John Oxley, detailing his search for Australia's mythical inland sea. Water – imagined and real – also plays a big part in Watts' enormously impressive second novel, Elegy, Southwest. Set in 2018, as the Camp Fire swept through northern California – destroying communities in Paradise, Concow and elsewhere, and blanketing much of the state in thick smoke – it follows young narrator Eloise and her partner, Lewis, as they take a road trip through California, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Eloise narrates these events from somewhere in the future, after an unnamed calamity has overtaken Lewis, leaving her raking over the events of those weeks for some clue to explain what happened. The trip they take is partly about work: Lewis is employed by a Las Vegas-based foundation for conceptual land art, much of which is 'built on a fantastical scale in remote corners of nearby deserts'. He has been tasked to check on the progress of a vast piece that is supposed to be being completed by the partner of a recently deceased artist. Meanwhile, Eloise is researching a dissertation which will give shape to her deep fascination with the Colorado River, 'its imminent loss', 'the miracle of it, and the tragedy'. The trip's purpose is not merely practical. Eloise hopes it will also serve as a circuit-breaker, a way of escaping the occluding pall of grief and depression in which Lewis has been mired since the death of his mother 10 months earlier. She suspects she may be pregnant too, a possibility freighted with complication and uncertainty. Against this backdrop the river, and water more generally, take on a powerful presence. Early in the novel Eloise cites Joan Didion's celebration of dams in her 1979 essay Holy Water: the way her desire to see water under control grew out of a fear not just of its destructive potential, but also of its disappearance, 'the terror of the tap running dry'. As in The Inland Sea, Watts recognises this desire for control as a kind of violence, the same gendered colonial impulse that fails to recognise the land for what it is, and instead dams and diverts rivers in order to 'make them useful' for people to whom they never belonged. The damming and destruction of the Colorado River offers a brutal lesson in the costs of this process, as does the Salton Sea – although Eloise and Lewis find beauty there, in its post-apocalyptic landscape of dead fish and skeletal birds. The combined effect of the ruination of the river, and the smoke from the fires, suffuse the novel with a millennial dread, its atmosphere full of portent as we witness the slow breakdown of Eloise and Lewis' relationship – depicted with precision and intimacy, and blanketed by her sense of incomprehension and loss. At one point Eloise visits a therapist who tells her to forget about the stages of grieving – but 'if there wasn't a narrative container', Eloise thinks, 'there may not be an actual end to your grief'. At another, she finds herself confronted by 'the utter poverty of language in the face of calamity'. Instead, the novel suggests, loss moves beneath everything, flowing and spreading like water within the Earth. This sense of life without resolution, of being suspended in-between, lends Elegy, Southwest real power. Watts captures something essential about the nature of grief as she blurs the boundaries between personal, bodily concerns and larger historical and environmental ones: just as Eloise's pregnancy creates the potential for future loss, the fires burning in the background prefigure a future in which the only certainty is catastrophe. Yet rather than give way to hopelessness, the novel suggests it is necessary to find a way to inhabit that space of unknowing. Or, as Eloise says at one point, 'that in itself … was a choice: to continue to live suspended in the amber of waiting, the caesura between the intake of breath and whatever came next'. Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts is out now in the US via Simon & Schuster. It will be released in Australia on 1 March through Ultimo press, and in the UK on 13 March via ONE
