“Someone is singing on the steep”: Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun
The mountains closest to me, the peaks of the Olympic range across the Salish sea, don’t appear along the horizon every day, not even when I look for them past the cedar and the waves. Toward summer, the mountains linger, brightening my walks more often. We say in awe, look, the mountains came out today. Mountains, I would say, are celestial. No different from the moon. But a poem that reaches toward the shade of the Zabarwan mountains in Kashmir, a poem that is already there in their midst, insists, [t]he way the mountains touch the clouds makes the sky feel closer. Perhaps a day is a measure both of brightness and of wait. Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun is a friendship unfolding. It unfolds over the course of one bright mountainous day.
A bright mountainous day unfolds anywhere these poems ask of me, “What will we look for today?” We look into a closed eye reciting Rumi in “Relief.” We leap like belief over immense things, effortless over the chasms between the title and what follows to lure us away—“Crayfish Watch the Moon Fall” but we must leave them in their wonder lest we miss our own when the first line reads “a / few / million years / pass,” nothing to mark but the flourish of a comma. We tumble across all the words that make three striking storyboards in “Princess Mononoke (1997)” and now we are friends. I am certain because when I read “Bilabial,” I have a hand against my lips where the sound of a poem shapes my mouth.
Sanna Wani’s My Grief, the Sun is a friendship unfolding.
Each poem in My Grief, the Sun builds astonishment into the ones that precede it. I am careful not to unravel the daisy-chain and I begin with the second poem in the collection. “Masha’Allah” is “what God wills” is a “seal” is “How lightly we learn to hold each blessing.”
Our children have grown up to be so kind, masha’Allah.
Masha’Allah the birds are singing in the fields again.
Masha’Allah the rice is alive in the grove.
“Masha’Allah” is written after “Insha’Allah” by Danusha Laméris, close in the footsteps of its syntax and surrender. Where Laméris holds hope lightly, surrendering the future to “if God wills it,” Wani holds each blessing that has come to pass “as if it were the wind, trembling at an unlocked door.” “Masha’Allah” is written also after braids of voices, addresses, unmarked exclamations of gratitude. In “Masha’Allah,” I see gentle exhales attentive to the tumults of joy. I hear what the fields overhear and smile. What I hear when this collection opens with its back turned to me in the first visual poem “Dorsal” is only the gentlest wonder, leading me into further wonder.
What I hear when this collection opens with its back turned to me in the first visual poem “Dorsal” is only the gentlest wonder, leading me into further wonder.
Some notes on wonder: in “Tragedy,” Wani brings us to a moment of precipice, writing that “[s]omeone is singing on the steep.” Someone is singing on the steep. Does this not tell us already the nature of this song? Consider your education in wonder. Consider what compass it is that guides astonishment about your face. In his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke walks several paces away from his immense and terrible mountains to comprehend their beauty. Burke’s wonder, I learn in a theory class, occurs “at certain distances, and with certain modifications,” but we peer into daisies and gasp. Here is an entire such geography held close in “Memory is sleeping:” “In a daisy field. In a garden. In a graveyard, in the sun / its valley.” Wani wraps the mountains about herself, holds all the wonder at Burke’s horizon close and before her eyes. At the steep, she remarks in relief, “There you are, singing by the peak.” Wonder, after all, is warmth. Wonder is a place that never wears from your gait.
Wonder, after all, is warmth. Wonder is a place that never wears from your gait.
My Grief, the Sun does not weary of distances. Distances become seasons. A map for “spring” tells us that “[p]rayer is not obligatory for travellers because God knows they will do it anyway.” There are maps of prayers. And there are maps of the throat:
“This is where I write from.” I grab my throat. “Here. Here.”
Perhaps they are the same but I have surrendered my need for such geospatial specificity, as one does before a hand extended. “Reaching” is a visual poem tasked with introducing this section of the collection. The finality of reaching, its certainty, has been long overwhelmed. In “Between Spring Equinox and Summer Solstice, Tonight,” a poet reaches for a line from Agha Shahid Ali’s “Stationery,” and then for paper to write.
Tonight I have been.
Tonight I have enough paper
for three letters and no ink.
I think of Shahid reaching for his chest, when asked at an airport if he was carrying anything dangerous, to say, only my heart. I think of Wani reaching for enough, a word that has gathered the weight of “Masha’Allah we all have enough to eat.” Reaching introduces falter, looks back. Reaching introduces touch, if only to make sure you are still with me. Reaching introduces.
The dedication to My Grief, the Sun reads “for you” and each poem builds the striking sincerity of that invitation. The crisp air of the Zabarwan mountains, now wrapped about our shoulders even as I read alone in the library, is unfailingly gentle and the invitation is never rescinded. When Wani writes “[i]f you gather God from the length of your life, you’re lucky if you can put together one day,” I reach for the moments from a bright mountainous day that has not quite unfolded to its full length. All the poems from the section titled “Forming Glory,” Wani notes, are erasures of a lecture called “The Youthful God. Anthropomorphism in Early Islam” by the Orientalist scholar Josef van Ess in 1988. I reach also for a thin volume in the university library stacks, about twenty pages of a curious lecture bound and available to check out, but I choose wonder and return to gathering God. I understand this to mean gathering all the moments where there has been a presence of God in my life—“Allah lingers,” Wani writes elsewhere—but I am unclear on whether I count and subtract His marked absences. In “Forming Glory,” Wani erases the van Ess text the way a mountain erases a fault.
As promised, these intimate poems reach for immense things. Wani reaches for everything, but I would be remiss in not addressing her efforts at doors that do not open for poets or for witness. “Asifa” is written in mourning of the brutal abduction, rape, and murder of an eight-year-old Bakarwal child near Kathua, Jammu in 2018.
I want to knock on the door of the temple where they trapped you. I want to knock and
knock again and have no answer. I want to stand there until my knuckles are swollen.
Until my hands fall off. I want to call this penance.
Wani reaches for everything, but I would be remiss in not addressing her efforts at doors that do not open for poets or for witness.
“Asifa” is an address to that little girl. An address in nightmarish futility and a voice shaking with all that it does not want to know, but an address nevertheless. Where incomprehensible violence is written and wrought on the body of a child, there are no confidants. Wani takes a hammer to the desk, to the news articles and their neat, justified boxes reading the brutal gang rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in Indian-administered Kashmir has put the restive state on edge. All the sprawling land in the world is insufficient for a small grave. All the meandering slopes can echo but the scream only says, “It is not enough. What happened to you happened here.”
My Grief, the Sun asks questions of return. I return to this: In “We Don’t Want To Love People So Different From Us,” there is love and there is all the difference in the world lurking. “I want to eat fruit the same way you eat fruit,” Wani writes, watching, smiling at the smallest movement. There is difference, too, watching. Clearing its throat at the slightest bend towards a kiss. This, we do not name. The marked naming in this collection is a woven thing to catch me in my wonder. “Belief is touch.” Or “Joy is a promise we make with our body.” Yet, the final line in “Tragedy” asks, “What am I, then? The breach?” and on this precipice, I want to write back. Sanna, you are the mountain, in that you are witness, catching all of light.
