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Poetry Review by Manahil Bandukwala

Irfan Ali, Accretion (London: Brick, 2020). Paperbound, 72 pp., $20.

With the famous Persian love story of Layla and Majnun as an anchor, Irfan Ali explores themes of loss, madness, and possession in his debut collection, Accretion. Ali intersects the folktale’s themes with issues of family, religion, and racism in contemporary Toronto.

In “Paki,” Ali weighs the titular racial slur against the epistemology of language. The poem’s first line continues from the title, creating a splintered yet seamless effect of “Paki / means pure.” As a Pakistani reader, I find that Ali captures the ache of tension that lies between the translation of Pakistan as being “land of the pure” and the way “paki” has been taken up as a slur. The violence of colonization and whiteness that Ali writes evokes a fury at the perpetrators: “left / as they cracked and cracked our nations open / to slake their thirsts.” Entwined within this anger is a guilt for the safety we enjoy as descendants: “Sent us to sanctuary / and in return / asked only to be remembered.” The poem poses a question at its close: “That I’d be so wounded by a single word?” Why do we claim ownership over memory that is not ours? With this poem, Ali settles me into a rhetoric I am familiar with, and then turns this familiarity into a questioning and awakening.

Paralleled poems “Layla” and “Majnun” introduce the second and third sections of the book, respectively. Both poems open with the line, “This is the story of two stars,” but both stars find themselves unable to intertwine as Ali fractures the mirroring in the rest of the poem. In “Layla,” Ali writes, “This is the imperceptible arc of fate. / The inevitability of attaining orbit.” This language reappears in “Majnun” as “the inevitable decay of their orbit.” The lines in “Majnun” are now familiar but slightly skewed from the memory of “Layla.” The two lovers find themselves in a chase that has no conclusion. Their age-old story might be immortalized, but at what cost? Ali concludes “Majnun” with the lines, “This is the willing dereliction of safety. / The wild chase towards absolution. / But pursuit is so often / a precursor to violence.” Immigration as a pursuit of the promise of a better future may materialize in some form of violence. Majnun’s descent into madness from his pursuit of Layla materializes today in the form of modern migration patterns—a quest for something that keeps eluding you, with the fault lying in perpetrators of violence.

Storytelling is an intergenerational act, but what happens when the ability to carry on these stories is taken away? Ali explores lost songs and stories in “What song do I sing her?” He writes, “All of the love songs that might fit / even my parents don’t remember, / only survive now as souvenirs / plundered for white minds.” To know there are songs out there but be unable to remember them is its own kind of ache. The violence of colonialism has ousted storytelling as something passed on through generations. But Ali closes this poem with a hopeful line: “I crane towards a start.” Find some semblance of a familiar story; the cycle might not break, but its unravelling can start here.

Within these difficult realities for immigrants and for formerly colonized people, Ali writes the beginnings of a resurgence. “Then for a moment / you will become a fire on the horizon, / beautiful / and impossible to ignore,” he writes in “Gravity”—a presence that knows its own beauty and worth, one that does not let itself stay invisible.

Ali writes the relationship between religion and culture across poems in Accretion. The Arabic origins of Layla and Majnun (a story first told well over a thousand years ago) already anchor the poems within this theme, but Ali makes it explicit throughout the collection. Opening with a stylized Qur’anic epigraph of “Bismillah hir-Rahman nir-Rahim (In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful)”
and closing with “Ameen.” enmeshes the story in an Islamic narrative that is beautiful and artistic. Piety comes up against the aesthetic beauty of Islam in “Apophenia” (this recently coined psychological term refers to a tendency to perceive patterns and meanings linking apparently unrelated phenomena). Ali takes the mosque, a place of worship, and infuses in elements of loss and memory. He writes, “your face unmistakable / in the mosaic patterns / on the walls of the masjid,” evoking longing and loneliness in this crowded space.

In “Lay your hands on me,” Ali goes back to the message that Hazrat Isa, known to Christians as Jesus, brought to his community: “Maybe the word for which / he became custodian was so plain it / hardly merited poetry.” Excavating the confusions and complications around scripture in this last section of the book, the speaker works through their own feelings of loss and madness, and emerges with a
sense of clarity.

One of the last poems in the collection, titled “Irfaan,” mimics the structure of “Paki” in the way the first line continues from the title. Twinned in form but not in emotion, the poem calms the rage of “Paki” into the patience of starting to blossom again with the line, “That seed in you / is just now starting to sprout.” These parallel structures link poems across the different sections of the book, creating a cohesive the matic narrative of emotional tumult in a postcolonial immigrant journey.

The migration of people means the movement of stories. In Accretion, Ali embeds the story of Layla and Majnun into the world of his Toronto. People might physically relocate, but the themes that dominate folktales have their way of keeping a hold on our lives.

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