News of Another Femicide, and: After the First Visit

Abstract

News of Another Femicide, and: After the First Visit Hera Naguib (bio) News of Another Femicide with phrases from Derek Walcott Here, in this glassy shop sneered at by rat piss and acedia,each flashing image on the TV newly animates a woman’s murder. How could a Christian refuse me?a man vacantly asks the camera, lifts cuffed wrists, stares on, rheum-eyedas a lychee. Down his collar, the vague glimmer of a chain spells Allah.The aunts with me pay less heed. They sip bottled Cokes and stroke rare silksthat the shop-boy waters across their laps, while the workers who stop to gawkamble past, their limbs leisurely twined. How we move here, habitual, indifferent,our lives fixed in the recumbent homogeneity of nationhood and religion,I do not understand. How easy to forget this faith for which he kills,bodies, too, were once broken for—women, Muslim, with breaths bated on chargingtrains that shredded the darkness between Agra and Lahore.How one aunt flicked her zikr behind a bhindi, the time for homecoming thinas the kirpan’s tip on her throat. The other named herself Karishma, miracle,like the epoch that crumbled in her hair. Easily, now, this escapes us, our once-othering.Now, darkness, soft as amnesia, furs the television screen & the bright bolts. [End Page 146] How pathetic this way I will thank my flight, rage poems in a language half the countrycannot understand. Outside, dyers lift doused clothes from steaming cauldrons,like tumbles of hair. The faces of dead lieutenants gaze on—these martyrswho do not bear witness, with whom each day we singtumhe watan ki hawaien salaam kerti hae, to you, the nation’s winds pay salaam— [End Page 147] After the First Visit It was a hot August night.We drove past the colonial boys’ school, its high brick wall.My sister, newly married, quiet, slumped in the passenger seat.Before the wedding, she had moved at night, zombie-like,through the kitchen, rummaging for bad carbs.Driving, her husband asked me if I was a “feminist,” his mouth crooked.Before I could answer, he went on about his wise auntwho says life is a series of peaks and troughs, you never knowwhat is coming next. It is best for a person to adapt.Euphemistically, this meant to not kick up a mess.He loved my sister all right—the breadwinnerfor whom he scoured dishes after dinner;asked are you happy? are you happy?This should have been redeeming for us upper-middle-classsuburban Pakistani women told to blend just right—not too stiflingly “traditional”; not too controversially “modern.”But he had spoken for our bodies—arrived, after all,like any other man, for those bodiesin which he has never lived. Between us, my sister and I,this pulled up like exhaustion itself—more ancient than we could understandor explain against his certainty,which, wherever it lived, I imagined,must have been a windowless place,though solid as a fact & boarded upagainst any heave and plunge of debate.Was this the marriage? I wondered, briefly.Was it this deflation? This lithetwist of her neck already turned away?This swift drop of compromise?But the car lurched to a sudden stop.Crossing the road, a turtle looked up & both laughed.I wanted to contend it all, the moment, which like any beginning,was gestational and fleeting,and begging me to take it for what it wasand begging me to let it go. [End Page 148] Hera Naguib Hera Naguib’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poets.org by the American Academy of Poets, the Cincinnati Review, Gulf Coast, and World Literature Today, among other publications. Find her at www.heranaguib.com. Copyright © 2021 Middlebury college