How to Dissect a Female Body | Maryam Ala Amjadi

Now ask for consent, preferably from the reluctance or oblivion of other bodies who survive this one.

by Maryam Ala Amjadi

First, kill the body.

Preferably, before the exacting ache of a mirror that fogs the world’s shrewdly dormant eyes

Understand that a woman dies many deaths

Those exiled into the unearthliness of the looking glass, perish by the helium hands of the howling mass

Now ask for consent, preferably from the reluctance or oblivion of other bodies who survive this one

Soon you will trace the entitled fingerprints of those who never did

Wear a curious mask of conviction — woven out of the perennial pain of heroes and heroines whose legends fermented into lessons that decomposed into drowsy echoes -

to shield yourself from the stench of tightfisted fatherly, wrong-footed brotherly, tooth and law nearly husbanded “love” or lack thereof

Before anything, devein “honor” from the no longer unnerving vortex of the vagina

Acknowledge that often water is thicker than blood is thicker than semen is thicker, more solid than the boney sounding dance of one’s own flesh, one’s own blood

Next, take note of the dented tyranny of that underwired shame — crescented beneath the rise and fall of her dearly eyed barely backed breasts — particularly if the spiral of compulsory coyness was never nipped in the bud

Now pull out the longing dagger from the memory of her backbone (every body has one) and make a ‘why’ shaped incision that yawns deep from the ‘how’ of each shoulder across the ‘what’ of the chest running right to the ‘when’ of the womb

Spread open the accounts of all attempted flights of the heart from the rattle of the ribcage and examine fleshed in flesh, rib by rib, bone to bone those earth-woven celestial myths

Document the waking tales of warrior nerves of some inherited beginnings, the dissident veins of a few indispensable middles and the soldiering arteries of all barbed endings

Proceed accordingly until you master how that which is nowhere to be found is lost

Always remember, a mirror is the relentless embrace of shards that stand and die together.

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Maryam Ala Amjadi is an Iranian poet, translator and essayist who has spent the impressionable years of her childhood in India and writes poetry in English. She is the author of two poetry collections and the translator of a selection of poems by Raymond Carver. She received the ‘Young Generation Poet’ Award in the first International Poetry Festival in Yinchuan, China (Sept 2011) and was awarded Honorary Fellowship in Creative Writing by the International Writers Program (IWP) at University of Iowa, U.S.A. (Fall 2008). She was also the winner of the Silver Medal in the 14th National Persian Literature Olympiad (2001). Ala Amjadi has worked as a Farsi-to-English news translator at the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA) and was previously a writer for the Tehran Times Daily, where she founded and wrote a weekly page in English dedicated to Iranian culture and society. Presently, she is an editor at Hysteria, a periodical of critical feminisms and a PhD fellow in Text and Event in Early Modern Europe (TEEME) at the Universities of Kent and Porto. Ala Amjadi’s poems have been translated into Arabic, Albanian, Chinese, Hindi, Italian and Romanian.