Last of the Letters
By Fatima Ijaz
Bottlecap Press
24pp.

Once billed as avenues to promote ‘street literature’, chapbooks have been lapped up by fine presses across the globe. Fuelled by the spirit of brevity, they now serve as launching pads for emerging authors and provide a space for underrepresented voices.

While they haven’t been viewed as the antidote to dwindling reading habits in an inherently digital world, chapbooks have become the site for considerable literary experimentation across the world. Within the scope of Pakistani Anglophone literature, chapbooks have become a popular avenue for poets to showcase their talent. 

In her new chapbook, Last of the Letters, poet Fatima Ijaz doesn’t just put her poetic skill on display, but also takes quiet, measured and tentative steps towards writing prose. Known for The Shade of Longing, a collection of poems about the stranglehold of memory on our consciousness, Ijaz was drawn towards the “intensity and defiance” of poems.

Be that as it may, she isn’t keen on becoming a prisoner to the form and is equally interested in writing short stories. In an interview for a local newspaper in 2022, she claimed she seeks “the dark creativity of poetry” in any longer prose pieces she reads.

Fatima Ijaz inhabits the skin of a poet, but borrows a leaf from the prose writer’s handbook in her sophomore book, a moving meditation on those lost to either life or death

In Last of the Letters, Ijaz inhabits the skin of a poet, but borrows a leaf from the prose writer’s handbook. As a result, her sophomore book can be viewed as an attempt to build a bridge between the two forms, possibly as a means of helping her step out of her creative ‘comfort zone.’

Featuring 16 unsent letters, written in the second-person perspective, Ijaz’s chapbook offers a moving meditation on the power of one-sided conversations with those we have lost to either life or death. Stripped of crucial details, such as the name of the sender or recipient, these letters carry a distinct aura of mystery. It is also unclear why the narrator has been separated from the recipient. 

This, in itself, shouldn’t be seen as a shortcoming. As the title suggests, these notes are the residue of conversations with the unnamed recipient and, therefore, contain a diverse range of unexpressed emotions. A storyteller’s skill is determined through his or her ability to develop a compelling plot, full-blooded characters and clear setting.

Ijaz’s narrator isn’t steered by these considerations and is more concerned with the emotional landscapes of the mind. The preoccupation with psychological realms lends a meditative quality to the letters. Each letter takes short dips into the realm of memories and extracts a story from it that is purely driven by emotion.

A poem has been interspersed with every letter. At first glance, the verses come through as a repetition of the text which appears in prose. While this technique may come across as a tad jarring, readers must understand that Ijaz is primarily a poet who is trying to locate her poetic voice within prose.

Unlike prose, poetry allows her words to be arranged on paper with carefully conceived line breaks and skilful use of punctuation. Interweaving a poem into these letters may, therefore, enable the author to view her ideas in a familiar form. Any repetition is, therefore, an unintended fallout of Ijaz’s creative choices and should be viewed as an attempt to liberate her work from restrictive literary categories.

The struggle between objectivity and subjectivity also runs deep in these letters. From the outset, Ijaz’s narrator is aware that s/he may be prone to melodramatic musings while penning these notes. In the first line of ‘Letter 1’, the narrator states that s/he spends “long hours” writing at a sun-kissed table and then refers to the activity as “momentary”.

This contradictory claim reveals how time is a relative concept, especially when we are grieving the loss of a person. In the same note, the narrator writes that s/he uses “the hallucinating sun” as her muse to write these letters. This may give readers the impression that the letters, too, suffer from a hallucinatory effect, which renders their narrator unreliable. Even so, the narrator seems to be conscious of the constraints of producing an emotional — rather than fact-driven — account in these letters.

This explains why the letters are succinct and mercifully devoid of excessive emotions. Although the letters deal with the interior landscape of the narrator’s meandering thoughts, they also tend to draw inspiration from exterior elements. Nature figures prominently in most of the letters. Apart from the sun, Ijaz’s narrator makes reference to “ominous blackbirds”, fireflies in dark forests, spider webs in caves and butterflies, to convey messages to the recipient of the notes. 

In one of the letters, the narrator speaks of growing accustomed to a “separation [from] the sea” — a metaphor for a separation from the recipient. Some readers might question if the unknown recipient is even the intended audience of these letters. As the narrator negotiates his/her complex emotions in these unsent notes, the recipient falls away and even stands the danger of becoming an unwanted presence. In either case, the narrator is driven by the desire to communicate her concerns with the recipient and is eager to obtain a response.

Steered by refreshing insights about memory, longing and loss, Last of the Letters offers a poetic glimpse at what remains unsaid in human interactions. At their core, the letters bid farewell to a relationship altered by the vicissitudes of time.

By fusing poetry with the epistolary form, Ijaz reclaims the emotional dimensions of this relationship, as a means of compensating for a lifetime of physical distance.

The reviewer is the author of Typically Tanya and co-editor of The Stained-Glass Window: Stories of the Pandemic from Pakistan. X: @TahaKehar

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 6th, 2024