The Voice of Sheila Chandra
by Kazim Ali
(Alice James Books, Oct. 2020)
Reviewed by AM Ringwalt
The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the latest collection of poems from the U.S.-based author Kazim Ali, concludes in question: “Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer.” In a book with form blown open by subtle and sustained interrogation, the relationship between audience and performer surpasses static binary. This final question functions as a verbal haunt: who is its intended recipient? In The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the reader must comb through the text’s intersecting questions and answers—spanning three expansive poems and four hymn-like interludes. Ali is consumed by his sonic influences, so much so that his documented acts of listening generate distinct performances on the page. These poems are mediums for his listening, his embodied mortality. He writes: “To hear is to make real.”
Ali relates to the beings invoked in his poetry—Corey Menafee, Sheila Chandra, Orpheus, to name a few—in such a way as to render his poetic voice unstable, subject to lyric infection from each respective invocation. Each of the three poems in The Voice of Sheila Chandra adapt to a form in expression of a particular musical resonance. Lines and stanzas fragment and distill across the span of the book to make way for each invocation’s sound. In “Hesperine for David Berger,” the sound of broken stained glass infects the page: “Music that do sound off strings into voice […] / Shattered the panes of the stained-glass window depicting enslaved workers bearing cotton along a road.” In “The Voice of Sheila Chandra,” the poetic form coheres in lyricism, mirroring the effect of Chandra’s hypnotic sound: “Who can in syllables like / Sheila Chandra moan us.” Finally, in “Phosphorus,” Ali seeks the “poem unspoken,” the “actual syllables Orpheus sang / to the dead,” in a glyph-like movement:
T O H A
V E T H
E C O U
R A G E
T O D I
G S O D
E E P .
As Ali moves, agile across the pages, we encounter his unmediated voice—with total aural reverie—in the hymn-like interlude poems punctuating the space between Corey Menafee, Sheila Chandra, Orpheus. These poems reveal the depths of Ali’s project:
I can’t bear to be
Unaided in hunt unhanded
To haunt when strewn sound
Who will be held in hand
Here, we see Ali’s loneliness: a haunting brought to song. In the concluding poem of The Voice of Sheila Chandra, the haunt distills: “I did not want / To be alone.” Perhaps the voices Ali moves with—Corey Menafee, Sheila Chandra, Orpheus—charge the poetry with the capacity to “dig so deep.” Perhaps, through this depth, the poet can find relief in the silence of the book’s close. Perhaps the close of the book is his site for remembering—one that opens to his reader, further complicating the relationship between audience and performer. “Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer,” he writes.
As Corey Menafee breaks the stained glass in the first few pages of The Voice of Sheila Chandra, “Hesperine for David Berger” unfolds in a fragmented collage. Ali listens to Menafee’s song as he breaks the racist stained-glass in a Yale cafeteria, the stanzas themselves a series of shards:
What Corey Menafee did is he climbed up on top of a table in the dining room
and with the long handle of his broom he
Sang in bits and pieces to god the road you knew which was the confusion
road the one made of all your wrong turns
Geometry of a building makes it stand math is mighty there are abstractions
in every letter their architecture makes sound possible
Ali hears that singing, that breaking. He claims that site of fracture—of Menafee’s exhaustion under racial capitalism—as site for song. He writes: “What sound breaks the circle of action and reaction.” This question, which I circled back to time and again after that final invitation—“Do you remember / Which question / Needs answer”—seems to answer itself throughout The Voice of Sheila Chandra. The sound that breaks the circle of action and reaction is the sound that sustains Ali’s project: past the “bullet punching through a body,” past the thankless labor, and in pursuit of a holier, post-capitalist site.
On the same page of Corey Menafee’s song, of Corey Menafee’s fracturing, Ali writes: “For each of you a practice Quran 5:48 says if God had willed He would have just made you one people.” Rather than performing a homogenizing oneness, Ali writes from a voice that locates itself with others. His voice performs this movement toward oneness—“a practice”—from points of fracturing. The reader is implicated by Ali’s practice-as-performance, by these songs that emerge from the space between shards. At the conclusion of “Hesperine for David Berger,” the book’s first expansive poem, he writes: “Can we sing over the noise […] can we move forward without breaking.” As the book continues, this “we” widens. This “we” envelops each person named in the pages. This “we” envelops the reader, draws me closer.
In “Know No Name,” too, we see Ali’s aural reverie at play. The hymn-like poem is drenched in assonance. Themes of loneliness and purpose alike resound through winding vowel sounds: “Who will be held in hand,” “Who’re you for.” Lines like the already-quoted “I can’t bear to be / Unaided in hunt” sear through the especially proliferating Os. After “Hesperine for David Berger,” after “Know No Name,” Sheila Chandra herself comes like a balm. She helps with the hunt.
Sheila Chandra, the centering figure of the book, is a British-Indian singer known for her fluid and droning voice. One of her most iconic songs, “Ever So Lonely,” was released in 1982 by Monsoon, a pop trio she remained a part of for years before beginning a solo career. The lo of her “lonely” gains emphasis in repetition; I think of Ali’s encrypted “to dig so deep.” In 2010, and in the height of her career, Sheila Chandra developed burning mouth syndrome. Rendered mute, the idea of Sheila Chandra’s voice binds Kazim Ali’s project together. Chandra, like David Berger, enters Ali’s poetry in a fracture:
Breaks is constant was like
The river light on the river
Riven that remained a rift
An old rill that sounded
She merged with the vibe
Ration of the drum a hum a
Home womb and um
She OM moaned in the loam
Dark earth come Sheila
Dame ocean dome this poem
Roam to tome tomb foam
Original fountain that fed
My mom Zam-zam when I
Was born
While the assonance here is as profuse as it is in “Know No Name,” the flood of water imagery moves as if to fill in the fractures left behind by “Hesperine for David Berger.” River over rift. Maternal sounds—“Home womb and um / She OM moaned in the loam” echo birth—lead to autobiography, the poet’s own mother fed by a fountain. Here is a kind of becoming through the voice of Sheila Chandra: “He reinvents manhood as a form of / The feminine texture of a voice breaks.”
In “The Voice of Sheila Chandra,” Ali locates himself outside of music and language, and near the breaking female voice:
I don’t know much about music and never
Knew enough words to explain myself
About anything in Latin Hindi and open
Sounds Sheila tells moon or night or sea oh
Here, again, that O sound resounds. That O, distilled devotion. Bearing this O, this prayer, Ali explores the relationship between “Separately French mot and mort”—word and death. If “Sheila Chandra sings without words,” as Ali writes, I begin to experience Ali’s hymn-like interludes—rich in vowels—as a movement toward something prelingual, something closer to birth and death. Increasingly, the poem narrates from Ali’s lived experiences: of shit, of sex, of winding boat rides toward Marseille.
In a book with frequent religious gestures—“Do you know what your body is do you know what god is”—Sheila Chandra leads Ali closer to the divine. With vowels as a force of echolocation, Ali is held not “in hand” but in sound. The “sea oh” echoes. The “sea oh” opens space for personal narrative:
Sheila’s voice always in the background
Always disappearing into the music
Of what surrounds it the way one loses
Oneself in sex or death or the moment
Of shitting
In this stanza, which ends with Kazim Ali wondering “will my family come to / My funeral,” the sea becomes a sieve for personal memory. Sheila Chandra’s voice transports Ali to these memories. I imagine Sheila Chandra’s voice in the waves. I imagine Sheila Chandra’s voice in Kazim Ali’s throat: “An hour or more of pulling oars / Boat pitching up and down I sing / Verses to save us.” While we cannot perceive the lyrics to Ali’s song, the remaining two stanzas move beyond narrative and to that prelingual, religious register. The “sea oh” links back to “Oh in the hows of Sheila Chandra […] / She, la Chandh-Ra’s voice that swells.” Against the “circle of action and reaction,” Ali reaches a messianic movement with birth and death. The “oh” sustains the lyric form and the poet’s narrative movement toward “the real.”
Catalyzed by “Tagaq Sutra”—its “Ought one turn to know”—the final expansive poem of The Voice of Sheila Chandra is also the most personal. We encounter the poet once again with the narrative he left behind in “The Voice of Sheila Chandra.” Here, he reflects on loss: “Forty days pass and what am I now / An account of old losses depends on the archive of flesh.” Ali’s archive is densely populated. Still, in a poetic space full of figures like the “long-missed lover” and the family left behind, Ali looks instead to the sea. He writes:
Carry me back to the French shore where my friend Eleanna
Took me in a kayak out onto the sea
For the man I thought I was going to be when I came here
For the changed and damaged one who is making his way home
He don’t know which is true and which is a lie
He wants to look back behind him at what’s dead
What does it mean to look back? At this point, the poem breaks. An asterisk divides space and leads into glyph-like configurations of words. These configurations demand a different kind of attention—as if the reader is tasked with learning a new language, with listening to something prelingual and making sense of the sound.
As “Phospherous” moves from narrative to glyphs and back again, a final figure emerges: Orpheus. Orpheus, symbol for the emotional currents in Ali’s poetry, mot and mort. Here, song and loss converge. Orpheus, bewildered by grief after the death of Eurydice, pleaded through song to rescue his love. His song compelled even Hades—Orpheus could walk with Eurydice out of the underworld, with Eurydice following behind, as long as Orpheus didn’t look back. After nearly two pages of glyph-like movement, Ali breaks back into verse:
Nobody really tells what it was Orpheus sung
To make even the dead freeze and groan
I imagine him lying facedown in the dirt
His arms stretched overhead
Singing verses down into the earth
After these lines, choreographic in their imagining, the verse yields literal song. Ali incorporates imagined lyrics for Orpheus into the text. The lyrics, set apart by asterisks and italicized font, come at the height of Ali’s listening—to Corey Menafee, to Sheila Chandra. Here, the poet presents himself as Orpheus, consumed by death and doubt.
Without any song to listen to—not knowing what it was Orpheus persuaded Hades with—Ali gains the freedom to present himself as the singer. His imagined song, sung with body pressed to dirt, allows him to possess Orpheus. The distinction between audience and performer reaches its most tenuous point:
Whether death or doubt— devote
yourself
down
smell
the earth
Be not afraid
of what can carry
you
Is Ali talking to himself, here, through Orpheus? With no answer—the song ends “he will not / know”—I find the need for my listening to the page heighten in urgency. Like an aria, this poem-song soars. Encompassing every possible point of view, this poem-song swirls around me. Who is being called for? Who is speaking? At the close of the song, already warned that the poet has not yet “made the worst of [his] mistakes,” “Phosphorous” breaks back into verse. “I don’t know what I / See here but I look back,” he writes. Here, he fully embodies Orpheus.
What, then, are the glyphs for? As they pour out past this “[looking] back,” they hit like specters, fragments of Orpheus’ original song. As they pour out—“W R O U / G H T S / A C R E / D”—I hear the hellish screams of looking back and the reverberations of loss. The poet returns to his question: “What I must know I must / Were the actual syllables Orpheus sang.” With stuttering repetition, language breaks apart in need: “the actual syllables.” After pages of glyphs, it’s clear that the poet remains bewildered, unknowing. Language, just a gesture, is the fallible shape of translated sound. Orpheus’ song, like Sheila Chandra’s vowel-laden vocals—like Sheila Chandra’s voice taken away—remains closer to birth and death. Kazim Ali’s The Voice of Sheila Chandra positions itself closely to sound and to others, as close as language can, while recognizing—in reverent ache—mortality: its pre- and postlingual modes, the nothingness that somehow connects us all.
AM Ringwalt is the author of The Wheel, published in 2021 by Spuyten Duyvil. Waiting Song, her most recent record, was described as “ghostly” by American Songwriter. She is an adjunct professor of creative writing at Belmont University.
Banner image: Mosaic depicting Orpheus playing the lyre encircled by animals, discovered 1934 in Trinquetaille (Arles), 3rd-4th century AD, Musée de l'Arles antique, Arles, France. CC BY-SA 2.0. Photo: Carole Raddato.