Eschewing the Image: On Sarah Ghazal Ali’s Theophanies
The poetic image has long been a companion of the seeking, even in its guile. Itself a thing that lies between the immediate and the ineffable, the image lends its wielding to those who wander that gulf. Poets of the mystic, the spiritual, and the devotional have wielded the image to draw a powerful parallel between the art of imagination and the practice of faith. It is at this crux that the French phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard perches his observation: “The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche.”
What does a poet do with such sudden saliences? In 2022, Sarah Ghazal Ali was selected by Richie Hofmann as the winner of The Sewanee Review’s fifth annual poetry contest. Of her winning entry, “Pantoum with Ecclesiastes,” Ali wrote, “[M]y faith is one that eschews the image, but the image (divine, grotesque, human) is what my eye most deeply desires.” Ali described that winning entry as a “troubled little pantoum.”
Sarah Ghazal Ali’s debut collection Theophanies (Alice James Books, 2024) is a verb-charged, voice-laden lyric wherein belief is nothing so static that it could yield an image. With vignettes drawn from scripture and childhood fables alike, Theophanies is a navigation of faith and its unique solaces and strifes in family, gender, and desire. In Theophanies, the poetic image is fleeting. And a non-image lingers in the persistence of vision. From its opening lines, Ali wields form around the non-image, producing a sense of lyric aphantasia and calling into question the place of the image in devotional, spiritual, and mystic writing.
“I confess to sleeping coiled on my night-
blue prayer mat
more often than standing bent in rukū.”
The lines make toward image, but something catches in the bur of the enjambment and is spurred away. Image overwhelmed, the confession engulfs the night-blue prayer mat. Something tears its eyes away.
The eye roams this collection. At times turning plural or adjectival, the eye as a root word appears at least thirty-five times. Yet, the eye is a site of doubt. Upon whose eyes do we close our lids? In “Story of the Cranes,” “Through seeping eyes, lies appear / feathered with truth.” The titular “Cranes” are the al-Gharaniq, the speaker a child “full of eyes.” The poem chimes with devotion caught in the winds of disbelief and doubt. Its images turn—cranes with elongated necks come to flood vicious nightmares. The cuts and wounds of these brief images overwhelm any wonder granted to them: “In the mirror, the wrong eyes run down my face.”
What happens when a speaker who eschews the image stands gazing into a lake? This is a question concerning likeness. Ali writes toward her namesake in a poem titled “Sarai.”
“A name is not unlike
a sexed body. Like mine,
it carries.”
Sarai, in the scriptures of the Qur’an and the Bible, is a witness to the unfastening of name and self, of self and body. Sarai, moved to laughter—incredulity? Or was it perhaps exhilaration?—when an angel spoke of her motherhood, watches over this poem. Sarai, who was Sarai before God breathed the approximant /h/ into her name, becomes the child she births, becomes a mother. Becomes Sarah.
Ali achieves likeness through name, through language. The only image in the poem is the closing one, looking into the lake, drawing the reader to peer in. Then the poem in its reflection looks outward to where the reader stands and, precise as a Velázquez, casts another self in the mirror of the lake. Who looks back is a child, carried and beloved. A linguistic double, a self in its becoming: “a sister / self,” who is carried “as you / carry who I am waiting to be.”
The non-image is a record of seeking, and of the poetic impulse for an image in the tradition of seeking. It acts upon our eyes, trained to seek a reflection where the name of a lake has been spoken aloud. Images arise from somewhere that is not an image. Upon this the collection insists, and so honors genealogy. Theophanies is written “[f]or the mother line.” Do mothers save us from becoming images? Does being a mother selve the self? “Matrilineage [Umbilicus]” brims with tender amazement:
“from figment I bore
witness: your body”
“Matrilineage [Parthenogenesis]” traces a mother line, each name a witness. Does one trace the mother line forward or backward? Who witnesses the “thrashing of wings” in a matrilineage? And how best do we honor its fragile infinitude? The poet reaches toward Hawa for a foremother and in that seeking finds herself: “I — O eye — O eyed —” The eye, inherited and incurable in its strength for witness, is oriented in this poem. Guiding the eye away from the image, Ali invites us into a practice of faith-as-form.
Ali is not the first poet to twine the self about the spectacles of gender and faith in scripture. Ali’s “Magdalene” begins with a sense of clarity, a naming that eludes us at the end of H.D.’s “The Flowering of the Rod” in Trilogy. At the end of H.D.’s “Flowering of the Rod,” we stand abashed before Mary and her bundle of myrrh. Abashed at our mistaking. At our knowing. In Ali’s ringing voice, this mistaking is embodied. It has cause and effect. Has converged in the body, has implied lives. Where an Imagist like H.D. has treated this subject with transfers of iconography such as the bridal myrrh from the “Song of Songs” handed to the Virgin Mary, for instance, Ali notes that an image acts within and upon the body.
Ali’s ekphrastic poem on Magritte’s Le Viol holds the image as participation in the image: “I have watched crimes of looking blur / into taking.” This ekphrasis, an eye in its frail orbit of witness and watchfulness, forgoes the spectacle of the painting altogether.
What does one do with faith? The Imagists wrote, once, “We oppose the cosmic poet.”
Devoid of images, what can language do with its capacity for images? A long tradition of devotional writing, and spiritual and mystic, has lingered here. In “What Can Ancient Spiritual Poetry Teach Us about Living?,” Kaveh Akbar writes of language, “Imagine in your head a bladeless knife with no handle. Do you see how the image recedes from view the more language I add to it?” Speaking to a class, Akbar added, “This is the imagination with which we imagine God.” Sharply attentive to how acts of creation near a realm of divinity, Ali expends into language a space indistinguishable from itself.
Even Ali’s self-portraiture is a ringing recital of prayer. In “Self-Portrait as Mouthpiece of God,” a speaker embodies the self in “flesh immolated by the hot voice / of a calling angel.” And what should follow such forthright brightening of the self? The speaker says “congealed blood”; says “a mere clot”; says “clump of sinew.” Says: “[O]nce I’m a mother / paradise will beckon from beneath / my ordinary feet.” The sonic significance of these images, if they are images at all, allows no pause for visual narrative. This is a speaker immersed in recitation of the sūrat al-ḥajj. Repeating Quranic verse, the word of Allah as revealed to the Prophet Muhammad through the Angel Jibreel, Ali makes absolute prayer of the self. Even in its turn, the poem does not once stray. All creation is “a message worth hearing.”
Sarah Ghazal Ali (@caesarah_) is a poet, essayist, and editor. A Stadler Fellow and recipient of The Sewanee Review poetry prize, her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and other publications. She is the poetry editor for West Branch and lives in the Bay Area, California. Visit her online at sarahgali.com.
Amogha (@amocalypse) is a poet and lyric essayist. Her work has appeared in PRISM International, CV2, The Seventh Wave, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry. She lives and writes on the unceded land of the Lək̓wəŋən peoples.