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Overview
The girls and women in these poems are not mere objects; they speak, labor, and gaze back, with difficulty and consequence. The tropes are familiar, but in their animation they question and move in unexpected ways. The female body—as a daughter, wife, worker, cultural mutineer—moves continually across this collection, fetching water, harvesting corn, raising children, sewing, migrating, and spurning designations.
Sewing is rendered subversive, the unsayable is weft into speech and those who are perhaps invisible in life reclaim their voice and leave evidence of their selves. As a consequence the body is rarely posed—it bleeds and scars; it ages; it resists and warns. The female gaze and subsequent voices suggest a different value system that grapples with the gendering of both physical and emotional labor, often through what is done, even and especially when this goes unnoticed or unappreciated.
A body of work that examines the nature of power and resistance, The Careless Seamstress shows both startling clarity of purpose and capaciousness of theme. Using gender and labor as their point of departure, these poems are indebted to Dema’s relationship to language, intertextuality, and narrative. It is both assured and inquiring, a quietly complex skein that takes advantage of poetry’s capacity for the polyphonic.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781496215307 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2019 |
| Series: | African Poetry Book |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 78 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Elegy of the Half-Done Quilt
Sisters, do you remember that painting of you with the camellias in your hair,
the one father painted then set alight on the patio to provoke our mother?
Killing time in the attic I find a canvas covered in a dusty quilt, the word Sor —
unfinished? Remember how she was always spinning?
Not for her the bright light of wanting, more the dull repetition of being grateful for each pin prick. A quiet reminder she was alive.
What do you see? There is a mother's shape in the dust settling in that garret.
There she is bent over the candlelight, prom dress draped over her knee.
She was a woman who knew what to do with her hands, how to stitch fabric,
to baste the zip in a new widow's mourning clothes.
More than once I saw her tack a tiny gown for some infant's christening then turn to make perfect the backstitch for a funeral pall.
Here is a woman who ripped her new stitches hurrying to place a button or batting on time, to pad three layers each for her daughters' wedding quilts.
Since we were never our mother who knew that a woman's beauty lies in her hands, most days her tongue worked to drag us up the stairs when
all we wanted to be was downstairs like our daddy. Anything but the thankless sitting and sitting and you two weeping I don't want to
while your boyfriends waited by the curb — I never said a word —
imagined she wanted us to be just like her. We never could have
done half the things she did. She is in there now, in the room the cloth makes for her three daughters to crawl under and finally say
We peddled in small betrayals Making a mockery of such love We are sorry we never said sorry
To clasp if not her hands then each other's. Remember her one milky eye steady as a surgeon's hand, her pursed mouth saying say sorry to your sister.
It's what you say to someone you love.
Apoptosis
It seems I have always sat here watching men like you.
— Rita Dove, "From the Sidelines"
Better than the telling was how nothing different happened.
I watched the men at dawn and at sunset they came in, voices hacking against the night.
None of them accepting the hot bath the women prepared,
they prepared it carefully anyway.
No thought for the early walk to fetch water,
nor the back's quiet ache after years of babies and a heavy bucket drooling on the head.
The tap a small stick in the horizon.
They were happy —
or so it seemed sometimes —
singing while they gathered motswere for fire in the woods.
Collecting dry cow dung to fashion mud bricks,
glad to do it while the men were gone doing god knows what.
Sometimes there was money and most times there was the women ploughing,
laying stooks heavy as their husbands by hand and before the reaping their spare figures —
cheap scarecrows — chasing Quelea in the light.
Arms collapsing after a day spent between the infant and what the infant or the bird would eat.
All that sweating for men who thought them gossips,
told on them while they lay between the legs of other wives.
Is it telling how a man will unzip his trousers barely turning to piss in front of young girls?
I tried to stand neatly in the hut's shadow but I'd seen the men be kind when they wanted to put their hands on something to suckle or chew on.
And I was always in trouble for gazing back,
never eating supper till the weekend when the men would never come home.
Not once I'd seen them gob at the fire
maybe their way of being clean,
as they opened their mouths raising ash and phlegm into the air.
Better the wood than your feet the women would say as though I should have tried harder.
Red
That first time,
not quite red, maybe brown,
a rusty bloom, its color inchoate through the morning sheet.
Knowing mother,
no sports now,
no fence jumping with the boys.
A chest bloating with knuckle-sized blossoms,
a waist shrunk else somewhere else has widened.
Your own body betrays you,
taut as itself aches a bloody ache,
coalesce and collapse, congeal, curdle a face all cheeks.
A constant blooming,
a forest of gnarled southern trees,
a change as clockwork,
the taste of rust and old iron in the air,
the mouth a strange thing.
It says one thing and opens to let another in.
Geography
In Darvaza a fire has been burning since 1971,
someone's math was off by about four decades and counting.
On that dresser is a photo,
in it I stand just outside the stave of light an old TV casts in a darkened room.
Next to me is a man who thought I might burn and stay.
I have been touched by fire before,
my skin kindles when I think of it let's leave it there.
You cannot measure memory in distance,
what will that help the slow curl and blister of feeling hulled now?
I know what it's like to hold your breath until there is nothing left to hold you up.
Let's walk backward,
how we arrive here is through greed the quick bus of body and lust.
Everyone wanting more and more of the brightness of blood.
The doctor's fingers to my quiet breaths,
we measure what we can, he and I, and leave the rest to the man shape in the hospital door.
Smoke still rising from his darkened overalls.
In Darvaza someone set up a rig, see the photo —
this is where we surround it with a camp drill and drill and are surprised when a pocket of air collapses into a crater.
We were always uncertain what would do away with us, watch us dig where we begin to end.
We are prairie and kindling so someone sets a fire first.
Atropos
I have cut many cloths thumbed cheap Crimplene vicuna wool and eiderdown
I have dressed a corpse before as a child and again as a bride
I have cut cloth by the yard to hand stitch a whole skirt in minutes
I have searched for lost skeins fingers a flock of wild geese feeding on the studio's cement floor
I have wasted light chasing redress from parishioners and men of the cloth
I have sat right here with Leroy the tongue his one mistress and an angry wife
I have cut many cloths stabbed infants with glass head pins and patched a dress halfway to the prom
joints swollen I tacked a drunk groom's inseam moments before our wedding song
Taxonomy
No telling what it is, until I cannot lay my palm flat on breastbone.
What knows the shape of a body, better than a wrist and its fingers,
I don't have.
So I stand a hand sideways, thumb on what once was long sternum.
I mean it to fall, hand on heart, not on the plump hill of a breast!
Each morning my palm will look below, to the rough garden of hair.
Search for the old snake in its curly and unlikely watering hole.
But I am diviner now. I dowse for water with my own shaky hand.
I've seen what awaits me. Each month made a wet punishment.
Or a choice between breasts sore from unused milk or the child's sharp teeth, tight as the ache of fiber and tape set against ribs to de-form the breast.
My wife calls me by name, Tiresias! Only then am I fully afraid.
To be summoned in the world as a woman, is no small thing.
The Borderlands
I.
In this crowded marketplace how can there be desire to wet the body?
II.
The soldiers in their camouflage,
the one who says papers
and means what currency do you offer knows a young girl can try her tongue and fail but her body knows silence is a language any woman can learn to speak.
III.
Far away from here the first initiates' song says the widening of hips comes with such promise —
not one witness to whisper,
yet its only yield is anguish.
What are we who gawk at the thing caught in that nightmare?
IV.
For a song the soldier knows what she'll let him have,
when he says papers, his eyes barely search her hands.
In another life I knew the words to say to a man like this, but here, his eye is the wind it lifts up her skirt like a broken umbrella.
I turn to cover the children's eyes with my words.
My skin not opaque enough, her face made bright as a lamp.
V.
Across the border a small sun is rising.
As though the eye were a bridge and the body were meant to atlas awkwardly beneath the weight of its pull.
Ventriloquist
So this is what is left after the party heaves itself outside while the aunties mumble about vacations and returning in the family way. Before you do, I say
He won't be able to take much time off work
you see. In my rush to show I understand,
the long dress you insisted on grasps at something,
jerks me back. My little toe catches on rattan and your eyes say not again,
not sorry, and I come undone.
That one small tear spilling from my purse:
a narrow tube of lipstick, one tampon,
the dry cleaner's receipt, his sweaty currency
returned to me, the chemist's vial of antihistamine to stop me sneezing all over your rented trouser and jacket. To your impatient face I say sorry,
gather the fallen freesias as remnants of pride,
the one card with my old name still on it.
I stumble upright and feel as though I were the washing machine you thought too fat to fit in y/our new house. My father offers
a final gift, the bluebook you've coveted of all his cars. You show me your teeth,
your hand suddenly at my waist says let everything happen to you.
Even when the callers come to send us off,
their hands full of rice and good wishes,
I bargain for your affection. Smiling at everything I wonder what to say.
You in your black suit and I in my paper-
white dress am dreaming of a new family tree.
Your mouth twists with disdain. Even the office girl who does not like me much, eats my sorrow
when you make me say okay to the friend whose voice clatters down our hotel corridor.
Beckoning you to come out and play.
And you do. You do.
Ellen West
who wants to be fat not I nor the lady patiently twirling whose waist disappears whenever she faces away or leans over the loo I'm sure she does when no one is looking no one can eat and stay the same I have tried
falling off a horse
I kissed a child with scarlet fever
a woman died of cold I stood trying after a winter's bath
yet I am still here weighing sins putting on and not losing flesh
the girl next door had a child and lost the baby fat again I see the weight of men's eyes on her
I promise I'm eating again though the food sits like a stone
a meal is always on the horizon a skillfully missed lunch quickly becomes supper and when we wake there is the food again am I not one person my body asks and asks for then refuses food thin as skin I tell the doctor I've tried eating vegetables only less and yes my husband knows about the laxatives
how I've not bled for years the cost of one too many pills but I want a baby so I am eating again though eating is dying slowly why does no one else see it at ten I moved in the world as a child does at thirty-three my body is a scene of carnage it seems nothing will stop all this eating not even the heaviness of wanting to be thin
Ekphrasis
There is nothing to say except that she is not even singing anymore,
just cross-legged on the floor,
a run on each stocking,
tracks up and down her arms,
shaky cigarette held almost still between thin cylinder fingers,
and that face, my god!,
that too, everything here but gone:
smile, halo, everything in gray scale and rain dripping down a felt hat heavy with itself.
You can't imagine this place or how she's given away all her sitting to some long-ago boys and their goddamn vows,
and how is this the answer?
I do not know and I do not know if somewhere far away from here some boy has a chisel and hammer smashing softly into the tiles of some house he meant to build for someone like her.
Vesta
father used to place mother in a three-legged pot all day she would stew beneath its cast iron lid a turtle carrying the world at night he would free her and she would sweep and cook until he was clean and fed only then would she eat dampen the hearth and lie beneath the lid's black weight and soon another day began all day she stood singing and sewing and cleaning inside that pot once on the hottest day of the year while she was sleeping a child popped out of a pumpkin seed eventually father found out about the baby he didn't concern himself with children or cooking so long as the work went on as before and she thought I have to find a way out of this pot it's too small for two of us it was years before she could leave and by then you too had come along
the night she made father food put moselesele in his soup he spent hours squatting in the bush then fell asleep before closing the lid all we had was a bag of seeds and a way to make fire but we ran you tucked into mother's back like a small story in her sad scared mouth
Nostalgia
Johannesburg, 1994
My father who came here as a miner from Botswana Stayed for love of a life and love He hated Christmas in this old country The tin-house heat and sporadic rain Till the day he died of lung disease he complained The storm always came unannounced And I'd say not for the man who stands at the control tower Nor the woman whose scar itches before it rains or The swallows who sweep the sky in warning
What is left is only ever what is returned for Memory is mist you wade through toward A childhood friend whose name you no longer remember I promise myself this visit will be longer That every relative will call me old and tire of my face That we will stand hands in pockets in the same spot Our childish tongues licked ice pops and played "black mampatile" on This time in mulberry silk yelling nothing's changed
When the woman with the microphone turns to me I do not see her or her question coming I want to say how happy we were The girls' braids so tight they could not sleep How we sneaked outside to lean against the iron wall Its corrugated nudge warm rust against us But I suddenly know what she means to hear The way a mother's slap might rain down unannounced Or a man die for walking these streets without a pass
The Careless Seamstress
When she thinks of what is the one constant in her life, she thinks of the stitch.
— Virgil Suarez, "The Seamstress"
At first of course the bloody loop breaks again and I think my husband likes how I sit and sew,
then repeat myself,
fat thumb pressed to flat-tipped finger.
A steel vein carrying thread where it's needed,
needle to cloth and the sweeping out of wrinkles from fabric and sweaty face.
You are a good wife,
he would say,
not taking on man's work.
Comforted by my sense of place in staying at home to sew and sew,
a missing button here,
the torn pocket there,
to work without work
at labor's pew.
The first shirt I made for a stranger sent my husband into a frenzy,
he likened the minutiae of each stitch to the way a woman might give her body to a total stranger.
Men are saying your name in the marketplace,
like unrepentant lovers after a common whore.
I've kept a button for every unkind word;
Witch Careless Whore.
My vase is full with flats and studs and toggles,
with shanks and mismatched poppers,
I think of Joseph's coat — the one the preacher mentioned.
I am faithful as a nun and must forgive though he does not confess to anything.
A woman knows the way things puncture and hold.
It may be there are men who are strangers to mourning perhaps the woman too who comes to claim her dress and twirls and twirls in her matching scarf.
She loves to stop and chat while looking in the glass,
her tattle an old machine stinging my quiet,
blind to the constant fabric under my finger.
To the country of another's distress.
Excerpted from "The Careless Seamstress"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword, by Kwame Dawes Acknowledgments The Elegy of the Half-Done Quilt Apoptosis Red Geography Atropos Taxonomy The Borderlands Ventriloquist Ellen West Mothering Vesta Nostalgia The Careless Seamstress The Three-Body Problem Lent Not No Body Women Like You Dreams Ovaria Before the Wedding Lethe Mutineer You Who Have Forgotten Just Because At the Last Sound Winter Tortoise Domboshaba Self-Portrait with a Missing Tongue A Benediction for Climbing Boys Shibboleth Sea The Parable of the Tree Mama In the House of Mourning Fetching Batting Mourning at Night First Algebra The Other Stole (Chain of Sorrow) Lares Fish Camp Naomi White Noise On Saying There Is No God Homonym Notes