Forty Names

Multilingualism is embedded throughout Parwana Fayyaz’s Forty Names, a collection of poems about women from the author’s home country of Afghanistan. Fayyaz skillfully interweaves words from Dari into English-language poems, at once defamiliarizing the known and revealing an intimacy in what seems to be foreign. We meet the outcast Adeela (“Just-Woman”); the speaker’s step-grandmother Neek Bakht, who teaches her the value of education; her mother Roqeeya, who encourages her to dream; and her aunt Sakina (“Quietude”), who was “free in speaking her mind” until her “girlhood was taken from her” before she turned thirteen, and who was “sent to Turkistan […] with a man / who was thought to have touched her hand.” 

In “The Flower in the Pear,” the mysterious figure of Just-Woman teaches the speaker, who was a child in a “school for refugee kids,” how to slice a pear:

One time Just-Woman showed me the flower that 
resides deep in the heart of a pear,
if sliced through just so.

When she hears people speak negatively about Just-Woman, the speaker wonders why the elegant woman with high cheekbones attracts such hatred. As she tries to make sense of the situation, the speaker recalls “how our Ethics teacher would caution us / about Just-Woman’s unacceptable choices,” and we are given to understand that Just-Woman either is or is perceived to be a prostitute. 

A gentle critique of tradition lies buried within the stories these poems relate. In “The Emerald Ring,” the speaker is gifted a green ring by her step-grandmother, and only later deduces the gift’s meaning: 

The ring was my grandmother’s way of telling me
I do not need to live the life of a traditional Afghan woman.

And everyday, when light catches my emerald ring,
I am reminded of both the joy and the responsibility of my
      good fortune.