When the World Breaks Open

Reading When the World Breaks Open felt like going through a war.  It felt like I was reliving trauma, I definitely felt triggered reading about the depth of her emotions which were so bare on the page.  Seema Reza brings the reader into her trauma and her grief, making the reader feel so close to her and her experiences by writing from a place of credibility and reliability.  One of the ways she does this is by how she acknowledges her own failings.  She acknowledges the ways she has failed so brutally, in ways that most writers don’t want to acknowledge even to themselves.  

One poem that is a perfect example is “Prophet” on pages 118-120.  After I first read it, I had to take a break, and then re-read it several times.  It is lyrical and beautiful, but what stopped me what how brutal she is towards herself.  She stops to see herself through her sons’ eyes and what she sees isn’t pretty.  It was hard to read, knowing that the cruelty in it was directed at herself, feeling the self hatred and self disappointment.  Those emotions in the piece ran true to me, and I felt closer to her as a narrator, I trusted her more, because she laid bare the terrible emotions as well as the positive.  The end of the poem was particularly rough for me,

“You spend afternoons in

the dark deserted wing of a hospital

Protected by armed guards,

Packing artwork that frightens you

And represents her time away

And the people whose hands she holds

Instead of yours.

…

They act as if they know you, they have heard

So much about you, are so glad to meet you and

You wonder if they would recognize

The woman who

Narrows her eyes,

Loses her temper, screams

Like a shrew when she throws your cell phone

Across the room because you are defiant

Because you will not tell her

how you feel.

When your mother is a prophet she is frustrated

that you are not devoted,

that she can’t use her canned sorcery to get you to see

How much she is doing, how special she is.”

Sorry for the long passage, it was just very moving for me and I couldn’t bear to narrow it down more.  I feel like this passage also brings reliability and credibility to the narrator because it isn’t what most of the audience wants to hear.  It’s pushing back against the stereotype of the perfect mother and how every woman’s worth is defined by her ability to sacrifice herself for her children.  It’s pushing back against how in media, fathers are judged much less carefully as parents than women.  People are so eager to accuse characters as neglectful mothers or blame the mother for the child’s mistakes while the father is applauded for doing the bare minimum.  

Reza is pushing back against this by admitting that she is not a perfect mother.  She acknowledges how much that hurts her, but also it doesn’t hurt her enough to stop.  She is also saying what people don’t want to hear by admitting how her job takes a toll on her children.  These are discussions that people aren’t comfortable having, but she brings them to the light with her own personal experience.  This creates an aura of credibility because it takes a sacrifice to say what people would rather to go unsaid.  Also, I believe her in this passage and I trust her because I can see myself in it.  I don’t have sons to hurt by my behavior, but I do neglect my own family for my job, spending so much time care taking and then coming home full of stories about the residents that I care for that I don’t have the care left in me to care for my family with the same devotion that I have for my residents.  I see that in myself and I believe it when she says it about herself.  I admire her honesty for admitting it.

Overall, this was a hard story to read because Reza lays her trauma so bare.  One story that was particularly difficult for me to read was “Pity.”  One passage that particularly struck me was when her aborted baby is returned to her, “The bundle was light, like a nightmare in which your baby has disappeared.  But he was there, and when I pulled back the blanket to see his body, his inky purple intestines were spilling out of his right side and sticking to the cotton.  His entire body was the length of my forearm. … He could have been fed without a tube. … He had faint eyebrows and eyelashes.  His eyes would not open.  His hands were gummy and curled, his brow furrowed” (93).  The trauma is this passage is raw when you connect the previous passages.  In one poem, she comments on an abortion she should not have gotten, and then before this passage in “Pity,” she indicates that what convinced her to abort her child was being told that her child would have a cleft palate and would require being fed with a tube.  Her regret is laced through this story, including in the beginning when she lists all of the things she could have done differently when first becoming pregnant to try to help ensure a healthy baby.  Her regret for what she could have done differently in the first place and her regret for having aborted the baby is very rough to process.  I had a very hard time with it, it brought up a lot for me.  But that is the function of good literature, it makes you think.  This book took me a particularly long time to get through because I had to do so much outside processing and thinking.  Reza didn’t soften any of the blows from her writing and she doesn’t help her readers process her work.  She left us to do the work by telling us what happened, or presenting a powerful lyric section, and then not giving us any indication of how we should feel.  This is seen in how each story or poem could stand alone.  Each one has it’s own tiny world, giving us another window into the complete plot, but it doesn’t do any of the processing because instead of giving her own opinions on events, she immediately cuts off and begins narrating a different one in a different story or poem, not connecting the dots between them for us.  This story felt disjointed in the way that it was constantly cutting out and zooming in, but I also feel that it allowed the readers to come to their own conclusions, creating a more honest, reliable narrative.

-Anna Erice