When the World Breaks Open

“When he is gone,” Seema Reza writes of her father in When the World Breaks Open, “and I remember this, it will seem unbelievable.  That someone would carry me, knowing I don’t really need it, wanting nothing in return” (141).  I can think of no other time in the book, other than this instance as a child, when she allows herself be carried, that is, emotionally carried.  She is daughter, granddaughter, wife, and mother, and in each of these roles she supports and provides for others.  She kisses her father’s reeking dead body, telling us, “I couldn’t refuse, I had already made so many mistakes as a daughter” (160); she instinctively searches herself for blame when Karim is in a bad mood (25).  Even her profession is a continuation of caring for others, taking on some of the trauma of military veterans as she does writing and art therapy with them.  She is not able to step back, to shield herself from their wounds.  The pain of the people around her weighs heavily on her:  “I absorb it, grow heavy from it, sink to a depth where the pressure causes me to crumble” (49). 

Reza’s ingrained role as caregiver in her family spills over into the rest of her life.  In the first vignette, Stasis, we see Reza crying daily at the poverty in Dhaka.  “All horrors can be absorbed” (7), she writes.  Not can be come to terms with or forgotten, but absorbed.  Reza absorbs the world around her—her poems and stories include the suffering of people she hardly knows or doesn’t know at all.  She feels deeply moved to try to help wherever she can, buying stickers from child beggars on the streets and giving them biscuits.  Her poem While We Sleep alternates between a depiction of her son tangled up in bed beside her and a child who dies while playing in a trash heap containing a landmine “meant for men in boots” (47).  Because Reza loves and cares about her son, she loves and cares about this unnamed child and she wonders what his mother is going through. 

Throughout the book, Reza struggles with the question, “Am I a bad mother?”  At the end, in Notes, she addresses the question head-on.  It is as though she anticipates the reader’s judgement, just as her family members judge her, just as a voice in her head always judges her, questions her.  “Later, I can never remember what I said or did beforehand,” she says of a fight with Karim. “Maybe I even landed the first blow” (31).  This book is a critique of the role we assign women, especially within the family.  Reza shows how unhealthy it is to have to feel like a savior to all family members, to feel like a savior to the world—she is constantly overwhelmed with guilt, stays longer in an abusive relationship than she might otherwise, frets when she stays even a few minutes late at work for fear of losing time with her sons.  This is not healthy, she shows us.  We see how she becomes reckless, trying to reclaim herself. 

While she is not always consistent in the way she acts—sometimes she screams at her sons, sometimes she embraces them— her inner struggles are consistently framed, her system of beliefs consistent, which makes her writing credible.  When she is struggling to keep her pregnancy, she says, “I tried anything that was recommended.  Except for God.  If he existed, he was clearly overwhelmed” (84).  She even refuses to burden God with her deepest struggles.  She may self-medicate through alcohol and men, but she refuses to be carried. 

—Gina