Bifurcating the I

Abstract

My collection Bifurcating the I examines loss, lineage, inheritance, racial violence, and my Ophthalmologist father’s estrangement from his Muslim family through a sequence of poems that incorporates Snellen charts of distilled lyric. I am fascinated by the act of seeing and how that manifests in language and in poetry. What does it mean to see as a poet? The work of the poet is both archival and surgical, and this work of recovering is a profound act of love. My father, as a result of marrying my mother, who comes from a drastically different religious and cultural background, was disowned from his family, and as a result, dislodged from his heritage, as well as all of the traditions attached to his identity. Bifurcating the I investigates the ways in which we can become dislodged from ourselves, as well as the ways in which the accumulation of these dislodgings have contributed to my own identity. Considering the origins of my parents, my grandparents, and the rest of my ancestors that populate this collection, what pain do we inherit and hold within us?