The Book of Z, Rahat Kurd
Talonbooks, 2025
As the back cover of Vancouver poet, writer, editor and cultural critic Rahat Kurd’s The Book of Z writes: “For a thousand years the story of Zulaykha – ‘the wife of Aziz’ in the Qur’an – and her passion for Yusef has been celebrated in classical and contemporary Persian and Urdu poetry, in Muslim folk traditions, and in Persian and Mughal miniature painting. At the same time, as the Biblical ‘wife of Potiphar’ she has been just as indelibly cast as temptress in misogynistic cautionary tales and canonical Western art. Rahat Kurd writes in the vividly imagined voice of a Zulaykha who considers her Abrahamic lineage from its estranged and fragmented reality, asking what consolation human desire and divine longing might offer our shared present tense.” Zulaykha is a figure found depicted in both the Biblical Old Testament and the Qur’an, and, as Arizona-based Religious scholar Agnès Kefeli offers, “in the biblical and Qur’anic interpretations of Joseph’s story, Potiphar’s wife bears all the blame for sin and disappears quickly from the narrative.” Alternate versions of her narrative, whether through Turkish or Persian literature, aren’t nearly so harsh. Still, there is something compelling in the way Kurd seeks agency for Zulaykha through The Book of Z, furthering a lineage of literary works that seek to provide a perspective that counterpoints and contradicts the male gaze, whether Dominican-British author Jean Rhys lifting Mr. Rochester’s first wife, the Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway, from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) in her Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), or Montreal poet Susan Elmslie writing André Breton’s surrealist muse in her I, Nadja, and Other Poems (London ON: Brick Books, 2006). Through Kurd Zulaykha is finally provided, one might say, access to her own story. “As a girl I wished for a small space of my own. A perch above a vista; a safe enclosure. Jami says I was the daughter of a Maghribi king,” Kurd’s Zulaykha writes, in a letter to Yusef, “but I lacked royal inclinations: to gaze on meadows and mountain peaks and breathe, mine, all mine, to discern the glacial age in a sip of icy river water, to give my attendants the order, prepare the next expedition.” As part of her “Poetics Statement” posted at the poetry in canada website, composed during a period The Book of Z was still very much in-progress, Kurd wrote:
Reading poetry in the multiple South/Central Asian languages intersecting my family history has become vital sustenance for my writing practice. At first I felt determined to retrieve not only the fluencies my parents had each brought on their separate journeys to Canada in the 1960s but to reach back further, even before my grandparents’ time, to the Persian literary tradition that had informed so much of the Urdu, Kashmiri, Punjabi, and related poetics I wanted to study and absorb. I’ve given up the fantasy of reconstructing a formally perfect 17th century Kashmiri Persianate world in my head by now. My effort to hold onto multiple languages will likely remain as imperfect and unfinished as it is rewarding, lively, and frequently hilarious; what matters most is persistence. To grasp even one new word or turn of phrase at a time, to feel the gift of understanding what someone wrote five or seven centuries ago, continually energizes my writing in English: expanding its world-making scope and inclusivity, suffusing it with pleasure, and renewing my clarity of purpose.
“The sublime workings of physics, geologic time, planets aligned at my birth leave me indifferent,” Kurd writes, as part of the section-sequence “Zulaykha, Protagonist,” “but desire must have its way, push past unprepared reason, overwhelm the earthbound human body, force the contest between polite manners and mortality, demand comparisons to suns and oceans, strain the resources of poets and public treasuries and nuclear-disarmament collectives [.]” Across her second full-length collection, following her full-length debut, Cosmophilia (Talonbooks, 2015), and collaborative non-fiction exchange, The City That Is Leaving Forever: Kashmiri Letters (with Sumayya Syed; Talonbooks, 2021), Kurd articulates a lineage of Persian language and culture, one that moves across centuries of lyric thought, pulling her subject away from being so tarnished and quickly dismissed; allowing her Zulaykha her own thoughts, her own history, wants and desires. “And why would I give up the hard-won friendship with myself? Fall backward off time’s sheer cliff with no belay? The fantasy betrays every azizatu nafsiha – // No – I won’t be her again – that girl off her head in desire’s first throes,” Kurd writes, mid-way through the collection, “convinced she has plumbed depths – attained summits worthy of mortals – // She has waded into mere shallows [.]”
Composed through opening poem, “In the Subjunctive Mood for Love,” and sections held as sequence, suites or otherwise clusters of lyric, prose poem and the ghazal: “Zulaykha, Protagonist,” “Dear Yusuf,” “Zulaykha Addresses the Patriarchs,” “Ghalib Praises My Dream of Yusuf,” “Zulaykha Surveys Her Art History,” “Zulaykha Considers Her Options,” “Zulaykha Alone,” “Ashura,” “Akhlaq,” “Inheritance,” “Zulaykha Is Floored by Emily Dickinson’s Poem 1311,” “Emily Dickinson’s Work Ethic” and final poem, “Introspective Ghazal.” Exploring form as well as narrative, Kurd offers prose poem sequences, explorations through the lyric fragment, akin to Dickinson. She offers declarative passages and structures and patterns adapted into English patter, comparable to the German-language prose constructions that American poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop adapted into her English-language prose lyric. Kurd offers a rich and expansive blending of traditions and concerns through her engagement with Zulaykha, including her own homage to the ghazal, specifically referencing the classic Urdu poet of the form, Mirza Asadullah Beg Khan (1797–1869), commonly known as Mirza Ghalib. As she offers, as part of her “Introspective Ghazal”: “Could what passed between them be called a mere glance / if ex post facto legal jargon hid its a priori guarantee of sex? // I honour the poets and painters in whose mystic hearts / Zulaykha’s fidelity persists, exalting a spirituality of sex [.]” Or the opening poem itself, that reads, in full:
In the Subjunctive Mood for Love
For women let down by my
assigned anticlimax
I’d leave signs at every
saray
Warnings poet bros
For men in thrall to
saviour complex
I’d leave provocations:
I was the original lover in exile
I was first to tear my collar
I contained that universe – yes
my spine bore me up each of the hundred thousand times
I committed the sin of denying what I felt
I’d pelt stones for their
exaggerations
demand how they dared
claim the sun as their takhallus
For the ones who leave
their homes seeking Haqq, Rahman,
the Name that remains
unknown
I’d wish them riches the dry and stony path
For those who remain who
remain who remain
awaiting a wordless reality
that transcends all Names
my steadfast ones I’d offer my very jugular
