Hungry, breathing: a review of Noor Naga’s Washes, Prays
Reviews Editors' Note: Noor Naga was the Fiction Editor at The Puritan when this review was published. She had no role in developing the review.
Noor Naga’s debut novel-in-verse, Washes, Prays, is the story of a 25-year-old Muslim woman in Toronto, Khadija (better known as Coocoo throughout the book), dealing with chronic loneliness and the complexities of faith. Coocoo and her best friend Nouf live and attend university, where Coocoo meets and falls in love with Muhammed, a married professor. The book is split into three sections: “washes,” “nouf,” and “prays.”
i. narrative & poetry, novel & body
Again and again in my life, teachers have tried to explain how a poem separates from prose. Where narrative is, where a poem lives, what a poem can do that only a poem can do. And all my life I have wondered why I could never grasp this separation, why the boundary between them never showed its flesh to me.
Dionne Brand argues, in her article “An Ars Poetica from the Blue Clerk,” that Narrative is “cluttered [with] frequencies of oppression and responses to oppression,” and that its language “compels us to answer in the same.”[1] Narrative requires world-building that cannot be outside this world’s entrenchment in racism, colonialism, imperialism, et cetera, whereas Poetry is the diacritical, “a ground from which a grammar might spring.”[2] Poetry is the place where an antithesis of Narrative's racist alphabet might be possible. It requires no exposition, does not rely on spectatorship. Poetry is “unavailable to the rules of character,” is “uninterested in the fixed raced definitions of modernity.”[3]
I have returned to this article again and again. After reading Naga’s novel—“a novel with all the weirdness left in,” as she calls it—I return with a different question. What happens when you create narrative out of poetry? What kind of body emerges? Where?
ii. the hungry body
(coocoo)
The hungry body emerges. In Naga’s novel, hunger is how the condition of loneliness is felt. Coocoo’s hunger sits in her belly, her body. Sometimes Coocoo walks into a room and the room walks out.[4] Sometimes there is a body in a bed but Coocoo is not inside it.[5] This hunger reminded me of two feminist texts: All About Love by bell hooks and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Both ask, in Naga’s words, “Who is to blame for a hungry body?”[6] Their answers overlap insofar as ritual practice, alienation, and lovelessness circle one another. Coocoo's need—which she tries to exorcise through prayer, through piety—is etched by this circling, by the lovelessness she experiences in her systematic alienation and dehumanization as a visibly Muslim woman.
Coocoo’s loneliness curdles in the space she is forced to occupy: unseen by God, unseen by other humans.
Coocoo’s hunger is twofold. It is a hunger to be wanted and held by another human being, as exemplified by her equation: “if you sleep on your / right side + wedge a pillow between your back and the wall + wrap / your right arm around your left ribs + fist your left hand between your / breasts – thoughts of where your body ends and another does not / begin = a self-made spoon.”[7] But it is also a hunger to be heard by God. God, as a character in this novel, is a kind of estranged friend. He is God the Giver, sentience the gift, but Coocoo is “the finger pointing / at the sky saying I deserve more than You’ve given me I am hungry / when I shouldn’t be.”[8] Coocoo feels abandoned and forgotten by God. This particular loneliness stems from a childhood devotion—"I said I want to be a prophet-man”—“I said God is my best friend He will come through for me”— that was left unsettled.[9] She never makes it “up / to where God sat cross-leggedly waiting for [her].”[10] Her heart is broken by the gendered conditions set upon religion. She turns the question back towards herself, her own body, asking simply, “Who is / to blame for a woman who is not a man?”[11] (I am reminded of Etaf Rum’s novel, A Woman is No Man.) Exacerbating Coocoo’s estrangement from God is the way she, a hijabi woman, is treated by other Muslims, especially Muslim men. They treat her “as though God / Himself did not have ears only a single tin can copper wire descending / straight from His brain to your tongue.”[12] Coocoo’s loneliness curdles in the space she is forced to occupy: unseen by God, unseen by other humans. “[H]a ha,” she jokes by the end of the same passage, “as though you were heard.”[13] In this expansive heartbreak, the hungry body is revealed to be hungry for more than earthly intimacy. The hungry body waits not only to be touched by another human but to be seen, to be heard, by God. To undo an ubiquitous invisibility. To resolve this doubled longing.
Coocoo is left carrying all her need alone. But still she bargains: “if I am / grateful patient . . . / do all the good things You told me to do will You cure my loneliness?”[14] The hungry body begs. This is a grief that never changes. But as readers we realize the mythos of religious bodies that Coocoo is working from in “LOSING.” Coocoo’s God does not care about merit.[15] God’s Mercy is the only salvation available.[16] The body is the site of power and God creates the body: so prayer is a “weak salivary tea” in comparison.[17] The hungry body’s power is revealed when one fig is enough to undo a whole life of leeks.[18] These stories are key to understanding Coocoo’s hungry body. Their lessons are embedded into her own story.
Hunger is deciphered through questions of language. Metatheory and etymology frequently appear alongside questions of embodiment in the novel; language and body circle one another. An example from “ENDING” demonstrates this conjunction: the line “a javelin / hurtles through the ages with your name inscribed in its hollow wooden soul” accompanies “the word musiba from the root ‘a-s-b” is used most frequently in the Qur’an to describe calamity, meaning to hit a target correctly.[19] This language gives Coocoo a way to understand her disaster: the realization that Muhammed is already married. Language about language gives Coocoo a way to shape her hunger. “I used to be hungry but now I / am hunger,” she tells Nouf.[20] Language expands the body, opens its mouth wider. In this endlessness, there is no line between where the body ends and hunger begins. A thesis develops: there is no difference “between a volcano and a mosquito wing.”[21] “[P]erspective is a trick,” Coocoo says. “[A] skinless God / sees skinless people . . . their lungs caught like hopes . . . on stray doornails.”[22] Even God cannot escape perspective. Even God might be a hungry body.
Hunger swaps morality for distance. No good, no bad, “only. . .hysterical constellations of need.”[23] “[S]in is an orientation.”[24] Grief needs orientation and, if there is none, “the night will flood your skull your brain will float outside of / time like a deity.”[25] Hunger eats from morality. It feeds on confusion and desperation. “[Y]ou are a starving girl,” Muhammad says in “PINGING,” “when will you eat? all / your pores are open mouths.”[26] Coocoo struggles in so many ways against this injustice, this arrival of the one who could heal one half of her loneliness but only at the cost of the other. But she never attempts to hide. Not from her hunger or her anger. Coocoo has no room for self-pity. She mourns for a prescribed 40 days (a number significant for memorial in many traditions of Islam), then she wears her fate and her choices like an open wound.[27] What she grieves is the death of her hope that God was ever interested in helping her at all.
Remarkably, long before Muhammad’s ���rationing,” when he pulls away from their secret relationship, as the second half of the book crashes and burns, Naga foreshadows that the hungry body will remain hungry.[28] That whatever resolution exists for one hungry body does not exist inside another. After Coocoo “woke up in the very lungs of silence”—after she fell through the human holes in religious law—after she has sex with Muhammed for the first time, Coocoo returns home to Nouf and Nouf asks, “coocoo are you still hungry?”[29] Coocoo replies: “yes nouf yes I am.”[30]
(nouf)
Naga offers us a glimpse of another hungry body in Nouf’s section. This positions the hunger body not solely as a spectre but as a continuous thread between human experience. Nouf’s question for the hungry body is entirely different from Coocoo’s (or Arendt’s, or bell hook’s). When mansur b’ammar eats the paper with God’s name on it, the question is not why was he hungry or if it soothed his hunger.[31] The question is “how did God get out / in the first place.”[32] Nouf is curious about the chasm that hunger creates.
For Nouf, the whole world is a testament to the body. The patterns between the world and the body create a geomorphic God, a God glorified by every corner of every creature: the rivers, the veins, the trees, the teeth, the toes. The body emerges and reemerges around Nouf as the natural vehicle for glory, glorification as the purpose of prayer, of gratitude.“He speaks in patterns / my answer is the gasp,” Nouf says.[33]
Again, as with most questions asked in this book, the answer lies inside language: “He left with the wow”—the penultimate letter of the Arabic alphabet.[34] He left with language. He left us with language. Language to see each other and for Nouf to see Coocoo: “coocoo comes into the kitchen with / a seed on her sternum sweeter than a sucked mole.”[35] Nouf’s tenderness towards Coocoo and the world and even God—now the Gift instead of the Giver—is a testament.[36] It is what resolves her hunger, and shifts it towards praise, towards joy.[37] Nouf’s language is crafted out of wakefulness: it sings to the tendril of garlic, to the knitting spider, to the rain.[38] This is how she resists loneliness. This is the source of her patience. “[N]ouf you came in singing like you always do,” Coocoo says.[39] “Nouf is proof God does not want me to die.”[40] In the end, this is the closest the book gets to salvation. In the end, it is this love—companionship—that feeds the hungry body.
iii. body & breath on the page
The body emerges on the page. In Naga’s novel, everything is written in form. Form, in conjunction with dialogue, adds dimension to the protagonist’s voice. It is a chance for the character to emerge, distinct and full-bodied on the page. For Coocoo, the speaker of the book’s first and final sections, the poem is a constrained square interrupted internally by caesura. Each poem is a chapter, each chapter a single sentence. Each title is a verb, and each chapter-poem can be interpreted as a definition of the verb. Each title is entirely capitalized—“RIOTING,” “MEETING,” “SETTING”—but names and places are left uncapitalized, unheeded, a subtle refusal of grammar that reminded me of bell hooks again and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.
Caesura is deployed like breath. Gaps reorient clauses, stretch the verb of each title out, unravel and intensify the tensions between phrases. Moreover, caesura’s fluidity allows for a resonance between Coocoo’s thematic transformation and the shifting body on the page itself. The repetition of verbed titles (e.g.. “BEGINNING,” “BEGINNING [1],” “BEGINNING [2]”, etc) further nuances the character’s development as expansion and growth of her language. “BEGINNING”’s definition, for example, has three iterations: Coocoo’s birth and childhood, Coocoo’s life in Toronto, and finally Muhammed. However, this link between titles is broken up between Coocoo’s sections. When “PEELING” is used again in the final section, it is not written as “PEELING [2]” as done before. The chain of verb development breaks. This indicates that a chasmic shift has occurred between the sections.
The other voice in the book available to us as intimately is Nouf’s. Nouf’s section is made up of centred stanzas, broken up by small black diamonds (Nouf’s name means the highest point on a mountain; this is how I see those stars). Each stanza is a phrase ranging from a single phrase to nine enjambed lines. This section relies on enjambment within stanzas, between stanzas and between pages to produce breath and multiplicitous meaning. Take, for example, the two readings available in “coocoo laughs and her laugh is / [diamond] / the other thing holier than a question mark / is an exclamation point.”[41] This narrow, centred form, like a single thread pulled through pages or time, embodies Nouf and conceptually evokes the chain of transmission of hadith, isnad. (This is also deeply different from Coocoo’s representation of hadith: “a man said that a man said that a man said that a man said that.”[42].) In many ways, there is an incantatory religious tone in Nouf’s voice that is reiterated by her form: how she breaks out of and works around the moral dichotomy of religion that Coocoo’s sections still feel stuck inside of, cling to.
The verbs of the first and last sections fold together, title the book, as Coocoo and Nouf are brought together in one final act ...
Finally, Coocoo and Nouf's forms come together in “SUMMERING.” A large black diamond separates the very last chapter-poem from the rest of “prays.” This diamond is a quiet callback to Nouf’s section, a gentle thematic resonance. This diamond is a soft step out and then back into the story, a concrete representation of time, a hole on the page that we pass through. On the other side of time, Nouf is still there. Coocoo has healed. The verbs of the first and last sections fold together, title the book, as Coocoo and Nouf are brought together in one final act: where they “wash together and together pray.”[43]
iv. this book & other bodies
At the end of Brand’s article and her book, The Blue Clerk, the author is discussing her theory against Narrative when the clerk says, “I can think of hundreds of novels that contradict you.”[44] The author agrees; they continue to discuss. In the middle of their dialogue comes this: “A baby was born next door, the clerk continues, as if we are talking about the same subject. I’m thinking about making him my assistant.”[45] A quiet recovery. I have always read this part of the book and understood this baby as who Narrative could become, if reborn. Where a novel body, like Naga’s book, could emerge from in the theoretical field Brand constructs for us. This baby might be to Narrative as the clerk is to Poetry (“the keeper of the poet’s pages”) but they still need time to grow. This is how Brand acknowledges Narrative might grow differently, might not be mutually exclusive in its tasks from Poetry. Naga’s novel is an experiment in that growth and its malleability. Especially for those of us confused by what separates prose and poetry, both Naga’s book and Brand’s baby leave the hope that there is power to a story that works between and beyond genre.
This Ramadan, I too have been a hungry body. Under the current global circumstances, my loneliness is a beast I wrangle with everyday. Naga’s novel has helped ask new questions of my grief. A piece of art like this has not existed for me before this. It ushers me inside without explanation, pity or pretence. It allows me the flesh of our mess, our visceral and sometimes repugnant longing.
While reading this book, I read and reread two other texts. As I revolved around them, they began to circle each other. Sachiko Murakami’s poem “GOOD GOD / BAD GOD” from NewPoetry and Brand’s “Verso 55” from The Blue Clerk. Like Naga’s work, they are poems that undo genre, poems which offer us a portrayal of religiosity that is neither mocking nor unthinking. Murakami writes: “LOVE / Some young gods fit in the palm of your hand. Some have definite heft. All are cared for by someone else.”[46] Brand: “We went like pilgrims. You were pilgrims. We were pilgrims. This is the holiest we ever were.”[47] All three works share a generosity between the godly and the earthly, an open-handed intermingling. Murakami writes: “REDEMPTION / My dead god is waiting for me, near the pool.”[48] And Naga: “[N]ow all / the winter hermits are summer pilgrims . . . pointing home headfirst.”[49] Anyone who has lived in Toronto knows the transition between winter and spring blurs. Does April signal winter’s end or spring’s? Either way, summer is where we are most alive. Brand writes: “They felt happy for us, we were still alive. Yes, we are still alive, we said. And we had returned to thank them.”[50] By the end of Naga’s book, it really feels like we have arrived at a gesture of thanks, a patiently sought gratitude.
When I pray now, I can think to myself: “this is a practical religion.”[51] I can think gratitude, not faith, is the opposite of apostasy.[52] When I am tired of endless desire, I can turn towards something else. In God’s swing, I can hide.[53] I can remember prayer when I dice an onion, touch a doorknob.[54] I can remember that all this movement is muscle. In my bed alone at night, just before I get up for fajr, I can hear myself breathing. Air returning to the box of my chest.[55] My lungs, “caught like hope on stray doornails.”[56] My lungs, caught like hope.
ENDNOTES
[1] Dionne Brand, “An Ars Poetica From the Blue Clerk”, The Black Scholar 47, no. 1 (2017): 77, 60.
[2] ibid., 61.
[3] ibid., 63.
[4] Noor Naga, Washes, Prays (Toronto, Ontario: Mclelland & Stewart, 2020), 8.
[5] ibid., 16.
[6] ibid., 4.
[7] ibid.
[8] ibid., 2.
[9] ibid., 6.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid., 4.
[12] ibid., 7.
[13] ibid.
[14] ibid., 8.
[15] ibid., 18.
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] ibid.
[19] ibid., 16.
[20] ibid., 10.
[21] ibid., 45.
[22] ibid.
[23] ibid., 19.
[24] ibid., 18.
[25] ibid., 16.
[26] ibid., 17.
[27] ibid., 16.
[28] ibid., 48.
[29] ibid., 22, 23.
[30] ibid., 23.
[31] ibid., 27.
[32] ibid., 29.
[33] ibid., 33.
[34] ibid., 30.
[35] ibid., 33.
[36] ibid., 34.
[37] ibid., 35.
[38] ibid.
[39] ibid., 23.
[40] ibid., 5.
[41] ibid., 33.
[42] ibid., 4.
[43] ibid., 63.
[44] Brand, “Ars Poetica”, 73.
[45] ibid.
[46] Sachiko Murakami, “GOOD GOD / BAD GOD”, NewPoetry (2018), https://newpoetry.ca/2017/10/03/good-god-bad-god/
[47] Brand, “Ars Poetica”, 63.
[48] Murakami, ibid.
[49] Naga, Washes, Prays, 63.
[50] Brand, “Ars Poetica”, 64.
[51] Naga, Washes, Prays, 50.
[52] ibid., 2.
[53] ibid., 42.
[54] ibid., 49.
[55] ibid., 38.
[56] ibid., 45.
