Naush Sabah

Litanies

Guillemot Press, £8.00

Naush Sabah’s debut pamphlet Litanies opens with a compelling account of the narrator’s renunciation of religious faith, an Islamic inheritance and its authority. ‘I dared’, she says,

– and made eternal life

blur into oblivion

taking my fears with it

Faced now ‘with fathomless black/ and no promises’, Sabah’s narrator articulates the challenges and shifting moods of her decision, the slow or sudden falling away of belief, and the long reverberation of its authority, where ‘disbelief is the heaviest element/ with the longest half-life’ ('Litany of Desolation'). Enduring the silence of God, the deceptions of self and family, the ‘remorse/ I can no longer muster’, Sabah’s narrator finds that religious monuments, too, have become a kind of shell, another long echo, where ‘the deities have died but these columns endure’ ('Of Monuments'). What has been lost is a world where ‘words bounced off her before causing doubt’ ('Of Yaqeen'), where yaqeen is certainty.

Ultimately it is words which shape and expand Sabah’s enquiry. Inventive and varied in their forms, her poems address litanies as a series of petitions to the absolute authority of the divine, but also as a series of increasingly meaningless repetitions of language and form, repetitions designed to shape the day, the whole life. The word ‘litany’ itself, with its Greek root in the idea of supplication, conjures a sense of prayer and appeal that runs strongly through the sequence. In the ‘Litany of Desolation’ the narrator recognises herself as the ‘seeker’, the ‘supplicant’ who

has asked for openings,

asked for unveiling,

for noor to descend.

Sabah shows that these are words and practices woven deep into the narrator’s very being, ‘the oft-repeated verses’, where God is the ‘longed-for salvation’, and the answering silence the ‘saddest story’, the ‘cruellest trick’. In the accomplished poem ‘Mercy’, she uses the specular form to expose the flexibility of language, aligned here to the north star of faith and religious authority to achieve the needed answer whatever the circumstance. Again, in the masterful ‘Sestina for Salah’, she dramatizes this process of alignment from birth: ‘Before Bebo can speak or stand/ the call to prayer is raised’. As the child becomes mother, she too ‘commits and bows’, but it is the sestina form itself that allows language to make the journey to a new possibility, where, in the final stanza, her own daughter, who now ‘prostrates and kneels’, leads Bebo to ask if she ‘might stand, might rise’.

In other moments confinement gives way to exhilaration, as in ‘Litany of the Shoreline’, where Sabah addresses the problematic consciousness of seeing and being seen. In this examination of nakedness and the veil, she explores the highly cultivated ‘art of looking away’ to work free of prohibitions which, imbibed from birth, have become inhibitions. The narrator’s headscarf billows at first ‘white as surf’, ‘a curtain/ or a flag’, but then, in a sudden and sinister shift of language, is ‘hanging like/ a noose a mask’. Expanding beyond the internalised authorities which watch her, the poem with its fluid form expresses a transformation of the narrator’s consciousness, moving through the sensuality of air, its touch, ‘the kiss of breeze’, to the shoreline

still shining

gold bare

bare

and the rising energy of a body ‘running running by the shoreline’, moving always towards a new imaginative possibility where even ‘the eye of the land is looking at me’, and ‘no veil covers me’.

This legacy of concealment is explored in poems about coming of age as a young woman within the patriarchal structure of Islamic faith, with its attendant taboos around sexuality. In ‘Questions of Faith’ the narrator expresses frustration with its apparent double standards and flaws of logic, where ‘there is no end to things Muslim men can be/ forgiven at home & punished for outside’, while elsewhere she notes that ‘hell is filled with bad women’ ('Litany of Dissolution'). In ‘Creation Story’ she portrays the young women who resist their tradition, ‘arriving in the cars of boys we don’t know’, visibly embracing the very thing that is feared in a kind of extravagant exhibitionism:

See them spread across the country and world

in search of sex and freedom.

Sabah’s language is also spare and shocking to enumerate the cost for girls who must ‘marry in secret and abort the contents of their wombs’, and the dramatic tension at the heart of lost faith is not only fuelled by the question of salvation, but the loss of cultural meaning and community, its coherence. ‘I’d been anchored,’ says the narrator, ‘saved by certainties’ ('Lament to the Lost Door'). Early in the sequence, ‘Litany of the Lake’ establishes the original dislocation, which drives the weight and force of history to a new geography. Its ‘old authorities’ are tenacious, surviving with their power to bestow, to withdraw, to honour, ‘to raise and hew’ in a new environment, where in the opening ‘Litany of Dissolution’ the supplicant can still implore:

some father forgive me

some shayk some patriarch

However, the formal space here creates silence, and ultimately the poet’s enquiry returns to the question of how an individual might find her own words, her own meaning, explore what can and can’t be done, what can and can’t be spoken, forgiven, for whom and with whom. This is a brave volume which explores the tensions encountered in the search for self-determination, culminating in the narrator’s complex realisation that

God always spoke

in the tongue

of other people,

needed me to be

someone other than me.

('Litany of Desolation')

Lesley Sharpe